The Marketing Plaza

Content is king, but too much content can be like too much e-mail- spam.  The key is to provide content of value and in enough quantity that it can be digested.

Recently I was at a newspaper conference where we evaluated how well various papers were engaging in the social media world. The irony is that no one has better or more content than newspapers – so much so that many tweets, Facebook posts and blogs take you to various newspaper stories around the country.   So what are newspapers doing wrong?

I think it comes down to two key things:

1. They provide too much content. A news stream is almost like a wire service firing off story after story until hundreds of stories are posted almost within the hour that the news has gone to press.  As a reader, I’d much prefer perhaps one story an hour, or the story of the day, or the story that’s the funkiest, or even a story from the food section, rather than every story being printed in the main section that day.

2. They are too automated.  Precisely because they have so much content, and because they won’t invest in staff or resources to enter the online arena, the newspapers I’ve seen have automated the process.  Too much of any good thing is too much, and the same is true of automation.

I follow social media sites to get the best ideas a business or marketing guru has to offer. I don’t want every line from every book, or every chapter capsulized.  I want a tidbit for the day that I can remember, think about and take with me on my own business travels.  I also follow a person because of the personal touch.

When the tweets put out by a paper are so highly automated that they have no humor, no irony, no personal touch—well, then I might as well be following CNN.  Even if the news is local, I want some sense that a person has decided to put this particular news item out on the internet because it’s special and not just one item out of a thousand for the day.

Social media is best done consistently and regularly, but is not better served by being over served.  Ironically as newspapers moan that their copy is being stolen for free by the Googles of the world, they have entered the social media arena without editing themselves.  And, editing is their strength!

Yes, give some content for free, but learn the art of the tease.  Stop flooding the market with all the news all the time.  Go back to the art of the headline and tell me what’s most important, most humorous, most worthwhile for today rather than flooding me with everything. It’s just too much information.

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Question: Our CEO was recently featured on a broadcast TV talk show to discuss his topic of expertise.  The show ended up on YouTube, so we can post a copy on our company web site, right?

Answer: Nothing is that simple.  Even if you are in the video as a featured guest, you don’t have rights to the segment.  The copyright is owned by the TV station.

On more than one occasion, after successfully getting a client placed as a guest expert on a broadcast or cable statione, we’ve asked on behalf of the client for rights to post interviews on a company web site. Almost 100% of the time, the answer has been “no.”  The TV stations will allow you to link to their site, but rarely will give rights to repost the interview even if abridged.

The reason is simple. The TV station is in the business of driving traffic to its own site and sells advertisers to the broadcast station as well as to the online page based on eyeballs – the documented number of people who view the segment.

Posting a video on YouTube muddies the waters a bit. Some fine print has suggested that you are giving up your rights to your own material when you upload to YouTube. It’s the reason some purists use other channels, even though YouTube is clearly the leader.  If you’re posting a video in hopes of being found, YouTube may be your clear choice. But, if you’re merely using the service as a way to get a video posted for use on your own web site, other services may be preferable.

As more and more small businesses go online with Facebook or work to make their web site more dynamic in the web 2.0 world, the issue of video posts is being questioned more often. It’s considered the competing rights of publicity versus the rights of privacy.  For a great, commonsense review of the topic, check out this short primer and accompanying video by intellectual property attorney Mark Rosenberg of Sills Cummis & Gross P.C.

Tip: If you still want a video interview of your CEO on your web site, there’s one easy way to make it happen without worrying about copyright.  Hire your own videographer, have him or her sign a work for hire agreement, use your marketing consultant or staff person as the interviewer and create your own online video show. You’ll own the rights, keep the questions to one the CEO can answer, and have some great multi-media additions to your online sites.

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Business and marketing always love acronyms. It’s the reason we have 3Ms, IBMs as brand names not to mention ROIs and KPIs in strategy discussions.*  Sometimes the names are used to mask an original identity, allowing a brand to move into a new era with a new persona. Other times acronyms are used as field jargon to make the presenter appear brilliant and in-the-know.  Other times, and less surreptitiously, the acronyms are just a quick shorthand for fast communications particularly in an increasing digital world limited by character counts. OMG, LOL!

Another use of acronyms is to help people remember things, particularly students studying for tests.  For middle schoolers trying to name the Great Lakes for a social studies test, the acronym HOMES helps them recall Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior. Not all acronyms work for everyone, but one acronym does suffice for all marketing endeavors.  It takes you back to basics on the ABCs of Marketing – for Always Be Communicating.

There are great debates in the marketing world about what media to use when, and the value return of a broadcast spot on The Daily Show versus a Tweet on Twitter. With aplogies to Marshall McLuhan, the ABCs of marketing remind us that the medium is not the message. The message is the message  and whatever medium allows you to communicate consistently to the right audience is the right medium for you.

If the cost-effectiveness of a blog allows you to communicate more than a broadcast commercial, then a blog is your better bet.  In contrast, if you don’t have the wherewithal to blog and do have the funds to produce a broadcast spot and air it consistently, then the spot hits the spot for your needs.

Marketing plans by definition admit that there is no one solution for everyone, which is why plans need to be carefully crafted based on time, budget, resources, needs, mission and skill sets. But any plan that doesn’t account for the ABCs and gives you great one-time hits, is not a marketing plan at all.  If you are not communicating, you are not marketing.  It’s as basic as it gets; as basic as the ABCs.

*For those who don’t remember or are intimidated by jargon:
3M originally stood for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company
IBM was International Business Machines
ROI is Return on Investment
KPI is Key Performance Indicator

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It’s a new year and a new decade.  No better time to take stock of your marketing commitments and make some serious resolutions. Here are 10 to consider for 2010.

1. Commit to some marketing.  Really, any marketing.  Doing no marketing is called “going black.”  Occasionally there are legitimate reasons to go black, but not now.  The goal for 2010 is to get into the “Black” on your balance sheet and income statement, and that doesn’t happen by going black in marketing.
2. Test something new. Same old, same old doesn’t work.  It’s time to break out and try a new marketing vehicle, be it Twitter or a billboard.  It doesn’t have to be a new fangled social media outlet, it just has to be something you haven’t tried before so you can test its effectiveness.
3. Re-test something old. If you stopped doing print ads because they stopped pulling for you, reconsider the medium with a changed message in a different publication. For instance, move from a trade magazine ad to a consumer newspaper ad, or stop a newspaper ad and move to a biz journal ad.  Don’t throw the baby out with bath water.  Print ads may still work, just in a different pub or with a different message or creative treatment.
4. Go social. Yes, it’s time to do something in the social media world. Create a personal Facebook page, create a Facebook business page, start a Twitter account on a topic of expertise, consider blogging.  Don’t do it all, just get a toe-hold so you’re in the game and can talk the talk.
5. Fish where the fish are. Take a fresh look at your intended audience or market.  Where do they congregate?  If your market is on Facebook, then that’s where you need to be, but if they are meeting regularly at a club hall or in the back of a restaurant every Tuesday, get old-fashioned and show your face at the real-live networking event.
6. Rethink your audience. If sales are flat, is there a new audience out there for your old product?  The classic example is Arm & Hammer’s baking soda being reintroduced as a refrigerator de-odorizer rather than just a baking ingredient.  Does your product have a new audience waiting to discover it for their own special needs?
7. Get back to benefits basics. Stop thinking about what your company or product does, and remember why it’s important to a customer.  What do you really provide? If it’s tires, are you providing reliable safety or wheels that define a personality, rather than just rubber that hits the road?  Remember Harley Davidson doesn’t sell motorcycles. They sell virility to men going through a mid-life crisis.
8. Get help. Marketing takes talent.  From writers to designers to media planners, don’t try to go it alone. You may need staff, but you likely just need an ongoing consultant, ad agency, or marketing service.  Get the help you need at the price you can afford. You can always trade up to full-time staff, or a more creative agency later. It’s more important to get started and learn what works and what doesn’t than wait for the perfect help to come your way, or for the day you can afford the fancy agency.
9. Start early. Marketing takes time. Brochures done on the spur of the moment rarely hit the mark. You want sustained sales not short-term sales. You don’t want to be a one-hit wonder.  Give yourself and your team time to get the message and tone right.  Start now, in January, but don’t look for results in February. Look for results by the half-year mark, year-end, and ever onward.
10. Stay on strategy. Marketing is like exercise. It only works if you continually work at it with a goal in mind and a strategy for getting there.  So don’t start marketing in January and quit by February.  Marketing is not a treadmill.  It ‘s a path to the future. You should never get off it.

If you want help with any step, feel free to call the strategists at Plaza Communications and Consulting Group (www.plazaconsultinggroup.com).  We’d love to help you start the year off right!  Happy New Year to all and Merry Marketing for a Prosperous New Year.

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Starbucks Five Ways of Being are a roadmap for
creating a great brochure in addition to a great coffee experience.

This week on The Blogger’s Bulletin, I wrote a piece on why the Starbucks Five Ways of Being are appropriate advice for bloggers. Here, I’m continuing the analogy with how we can take tips from our local baristas and learn how to improve our brochures and marketing material.  There’s more than coffee that you can take away from a Starbucks encounter.

In The Starbucks Experience (2007), author Joseph Michelli reviews what has made Starbucks not just a new product or service, but part of our current cultural experience. Starbucks has had some trips since then, but likely its strong corporate credos have allowed it to be flexible in better responding to market changes. At Starbucks, they are called the “Five Ways of Being.”

• Be welcoming
• Be genuine
• Be considerate
• Be knowledgeable
• Be involved

It’s a great map for great marketing, particularly a brochure.  Here’s how:

• Welcoming – I recently saw a brochure where the first page was solid type.  It wasn’t a letter or designed as part of the brochure.  It was intimidating to read, heavy on the eyes and not welcoming to the brochure. It made you want to close the piece rather than dig deeper — kind of like a huge Victorian novel with tiny type.  You likely won’t approach it unless it’s assigned reading. Make sure your opening brochure material is just that – open with welcoming content enticing your reader to enter and linger awhile.
• Genuine – Don’t use flamboyant language, make promises you can’t keep, or statements that don’t ring true. Advertising and marketing materials already have a bad rap for puffery.  Not everyone is the best, brightest, cheapest, highest quality.  The trick to real marketing is being real and finding your true unique selling proposition. If you don’t know it, don’t spend money on puff pieces.  The reader can see right through it.
• Considerate – Be conscious of your customers concerns and address those rather than your ego.  No one likes meeting people at parties who just talk about themselves and yet we think marketing is a business resume letting the reader in on all the wonderful things they need to know about us.  It’s not.  Marketing is your introduction. Tell the customer a little about yourself and a lot about themselves.  If they self-identify, they’ll know you’re the right match for them.
• Knowledgeable – Give some information away for free. You’ve already paid to send people the brochure, so give them some value. Read Chris Anderson’s Free, or link to my post about him and think about what you can already provide for free to give prospects a taste of what you have to offer.  Consider Anderson’s Jello example, where free recipes entices people to want to buy Jello as an ingredient.
• Involved – Show how you are up-to-date and involved with your area of expertise.  Is it a passion?  Why would we know?  Bring us into your story and show us how you evolved and are involved.  People like to work with people they feel they want to know.  Get involved with your customers and give them a behind the scenes look into who and what you are.

There they are – the five ways of being and how you can use them in your next brochure. So before you start your next marketing endeavor, slow down, get a cup of coffee and ponder how you want your brochure to come into being.

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The name of today’s marketing warfare game is Search and Be Found. It’s counter-intuitive to those of us brought up on the old game Battleship, where the goal was not to be found while you uncovered and destroyed your opponent’s ship. The game was based on the Cold War mentality that subterfuge keeps you alive; being open about where you are will get you sunk.

Fast forward to today’s world. Marketing Warfare is very different from Battlefield War Tactics.  Your primary guru should  no longer  be Sun Tzu, author of  The Art of War,  but perhaps Chris Anderson, Seth Godin, or even wine merchant Gary Vaynerchuk.  Google them.  Then, Google something about your company.  Can you be easily found?

In the military, camouflage is still an important and vital tactic.  In marketing, tactics have changed. It’s not about boldly going where no one has before — although that’s not bad.  It’s about bolding letting everyone know where you are from being found to being found frequently and being found whenever the consumer chooses to seek you out — not just during the hours you happen to be open. The web world no longer supplements, but leads all other marketing efforts. Find the new warfare gurus and learn from them … fast.

So why are so many companies so far behind in the web arena? Ironically, the more entrenched a company is either with a strong IT department, politically timid (meaning has a board of directors), or is from an industry that is trained to be close-lipped (read legal and health), the more likely it is behind the times in web marketing.

Here’s a case in point: This week an associate wrote me to to ask why a local newspaper never showed up on Google alerts about a famous and well-known local politician. Certainly the newspaper had more news items online about the politician than any other site except perhaps the politician’s own web site. The answer likely lies in many places – keywords, page branding, site mapping – but one place, for sure, is the IT (Information Technology) department.

Assumption: Many companies, newspapers included, still believe that everthing computer-related belongs with the IT department — web sites among them. Wrong.

Truth: Web sites belong with the marketing department.  Why?  For one reason — only marketing people care about Search and SEO.  And here’s the real conundrum – SEO is largely a programming function, but a function that even though technical should report to marketing.  It is not an operational concern, but a marketing issue. The website can run without it, and run well from an operational standpoint.  It’s just that no one will ever find it — failure from a marketing perspective.

IT people are trained to keep people out — from hackers to hucksters.  Marketing people and the web are geared to let people in.  If you want a web site that gets you listed, lets you get found, and is invites participation, think long and hard about who controls your website.  If it’s your IT department, you have a problem.

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One of the key P’s in the old 5Ps of Marketing was always People.  At some point, we started talking about audience, largely when discussing broadcast and audience delivery.  In sales, we like to talk about customers and clients, but lately with social media, the new buzzword is “community.”   It used to be that community was reserved for my neighborhood, and social media is pumping that your online neighborhood is your new “community,”  largely claiming that social media is, by definition, more intimate. Maybe. But, maybe not.  (This is, by the way, social media heresy).

There are many people connected to me through social media resources who are clearly business associates and resources.  Some of the resources are not yet intimates of mine. I know them by name or reputation only.  I rely on them for information and respect their views. I’m not sure they’re part of my “community.’ Others online are friends, who are not business associates. And, yes, I have business contacts through social media as well.

As much as things change in marketing, fundamentals stay the same.  I would argue that treating people as people, recognizing that people are the ones doing business with you, and that ultimately you are trying to connect with people is a fundamental business and marketing principle that should always be honored.  Here’s the thing about people — they generally know when they are not being treated as individuals, being regarded as a nameless audience, or are lumped in with a wider community rather than being recognized for their unique specialness to you.

In the spirit of “Funny Girl” Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice: “People, who need people are the luckiest people in the world.”  They are , in fact, marketing people!

Takeway:  When you’re next feeling socially modern and discussing “community,” stop and ask yourself which “people” are you, in fact, really talking about?

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Too much of marketing is stereotyped by our used car culture.  We’ve all grown up on  late night cable TV commercials of our local car dealers telling us why they are the most reliable, trustworthy, best resource for our next vehicle. They drag out the kids, grandmothers and cousins to show that they are a family-run business, implying that because they have a family they are the local “good guys.”

Here’s a revelation. Everyone has family. Even the bad guys. Bonnie & Clyde had grandmothers.

Another revelation. Being a family run business doesn’t mean you’re the best. It may only mean you’ve hired your idiot cousin because your mother made you. You may, in fact, not have the best service, just the best employed family.

Last revelation. Sometimes being a family-run business can be a plus, but only if you have a story based on tradition.

If I’m sounding a bit cynical about family businesses, keep in mind I’m a Jersey Girl. We’re the land of  hot cars and bad family aka The Soprano State and Jersey Boys.  Just this week, we had 44 arrests of politicians and rabbi’s in a Dirty Money laundering scandal.  Based on a long, sad political history, we don’t trust easily, and yet we have more Fortune 500 companies near us, receive more ads, and  have more family-owned used car commercials on our cable networks than anyone else!  Where’s the disconnect?

The disconnect is in the marketing.  We’ve lost the ability to discern the real story that needs to be told about why a company is great, what makes it different and why someone would love to do business with it.  Instead, most companies revert to ego-driven platitudes.  That’s the “we give great service” used car part. The owner seeing himself on late night commercials and suddenly feeling like a big shot feels his money was well spent because at least one person, likely his aunt, says she saw him on the TV.  This is not to knock TV ads.  I’ve used them. It is to knock ego-driven marketing be it on the small business used car level, or the corporate level.

In The Batrachian Chronicles, Amod Munga, a blogger and copywriter from S. Africa, talks about dropping the “best in breed” lingo from corporate speak.  He’s right.  It reads like sales copy and, particularly in the U.S., it’s overly prevalent as we, more than others, are completely driven by our car and sales culture — looking for the next great ride or sales at the end of the hour, or the day.

No one likes to be sold. We all like stories.  What’s yours?  Is it in your marketing? If not, your collateral is likely all sales promo material and you need to start thinking about marketing in addition to sales.

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