Blog Bites Man

Hadn’t intend to write a sequel to this push v pull post, but a few very concrete tactical ideas were taking up space in my brain….

Making “pull” happen means putting few to zero resources in “push” things like a direct sales force, outbound emails, and telemarketing. In my previous post, I focused on high-level concepts, but more practically, here are some thoughts of where to spend your marketing dollars:

Creating a great website first, SEO second: Write useful, informative content your audience — be they customers, journalists, or consumers — wants to read without stuffing search engines with keywords. If you know the audience you’re writing for, the content of your site will get a decent ranking from the search engines. Then, you can optimize the site with the header tags, linking, alt tags, add your company’s name to the Yahoo! directory, work on your linking strategy, and all the other things that the SEO experts talk about.

Word of mouth and creating evangelists: Do you trust your friends’ recommendations or what some marketer tells you? Studies confirm that what you’re thinking: friends of course. Word of mouth is the most powerful way to market your products.Risk-free offers, trial evaluations, open or closed beta testing are ways to get people to try your stuff and, by extension, create some evangelists. There are ways, too, to systematically encourage word of mouth. For example, tell-a-friend programs. Working Assets gives their customers a free pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream for 12-months if their their friends signed up to use the phone carrier’s service.

Perhaps the simplest way to encourage word of mouth is by shocking your customers with a product or level of customer service that knocks their socks off.

Advertise: Start with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and/or specialty engine ad networks and search ads first. They’re targeted. Experiment with other types of advertising such as banner ads.Scoble may say that newspapers are dead (and by extension, I assume he means print publications because they’re disappearing, consolidating, and crumbling too) but more pragmatic folks believe, and I agree, that print publications work perfectly well for some audiences. It’s just way more expensive than a lot of online marketing and it’s hard, if not downright impossible, to measure its impact. But the bottom line is that you have to go where your customers are, online or off.

PR: Hiring agencies is another surefire way of spending a lot of money. These days, it’s often equally effective to start a conversational marketing PR strategy. Talk with customers, bloggers, and influences in your space. And listen. Those conversations will turn up online and in print. It’s a slow process, but it ultimately turns into coverage for your company and products, and it doesn’t cost a dime. I think agencies are better suited to some industries than others, but you need to keep a close eye on your spending.

Conferences: Still one of the best ways to brand a company and get your name out, but they are expensive and very time consuming.

Channel marketing: Get someone else to push for you!

In response to Martin Varsavsky’s blog — yes, social networks and other ad networks should give users the ability to do this. It’s not only less annoying for users to have relevant ads served to them, but better for advertisers. Relevance = better click-through and conversion. I’m willing to pay more for ads that are well-targeted.

It’s not a question of should but rather how. I know MSN is planning (or maybe already has?) to provide this kind of personalization. Months ago, I saw a speaker from Microsoft talk about personalizing advertising through Microsoft’s ad network. What I thought was most fascinating was the idea of including some element of randomness into the ads; while 9/10 ads would be highly targeted to what the user has asked for, 1/10 would be something unexpected (I’m making up the percentages, maybe it’s only 1/20, but you get the idea).

Why? Because we often don’t know what we want until we see it. You may have indicated an interest in energy-saving home appliances, but didn’t think you’d want ads about cars… until an ad is served up about a new hybrid or hydrogen-powered car.

Are Google and Yahoo planning to follow suit? Speaking as a Google Adwords advertiser, I hope so. Why stop with only online advertising? Would people still skim their Tivo-recorded programs if ads were spot on?

While there were many good presentations and conversations at FMCM today, for me none matched Steve Hayden, Vice Chair, Ogilvy Worldwide, who opened his keynote with a movie clip from The Hucksters, a 1947 Clark Gable movie, to illustrate what advertising used to be. It was a scene of an ad exec — who looked more like a Southern plantation owner stereotype than a slick marketing stereotype — reminding his would-be client (Gable) that successful advertising is about repetition and annoyance. Repetition and annoyance. Repetition and annoyance.

Repetition and annoyance.

Then he put up the title slide for his presentation: “Marketing in the post-apocalyptic, converged, fragmented, and blogrific world.” I may be missing a word; he flipped to the next slide quickly.

According to Hayden, while the rule of thumb is that money follows eyeballs, there’s a 19% gap in media spend and consumer behavior. Consumers have moved online, but advertisers aren’t there yet.

Next slide: “Mind the gap”

I think he then next talked about the influence of the blogosphere by showing Matthew Hurst’s diagram. (Hayden’s awesome description of the blogosphere: the blogosphere is savage, violent, and vast.)

He then showed some videos by Peter Hirshberg on Blogging, Big Media and the Shoe Shine Man. If the Shoe Shine guy gets it, shouldn’t everyone?

Okay, then he talked about some other things (Conversationalmedia.org, the iPhone price reduction debacle, word of mouth marketing, suggested that companies should start hiring Chief Listening Officers, said Sun was an example of a company doing a good job of listening to their customers…), but what interested me most was his discussion of ideas versus ideals.

All PR and ad firms have a philosophy. “Obliquity,” which Hayden defined to mean you make more when you mean more, seems to be Ogilvy’s.

ideas = share of mind
ideals = share of culture

The exercise they do is to fill in the blanks on this sentence: “NAME believes the world would be a better place if_______”

Some examples he cited are:

Apple: “if people had tools to unleash their potential”
Coke: “if we saw the glass as half full, not half empty”
J&J: “if people took care of each other”
Dove: “if women were allowed to feel good about themselves.”

And then a humorous example:
Lynx (makers of a deodorant that is marketed to 14-year-old boys): “if men could have sex, very, very easily.”

What big ideals teach us:

1. Do unto others as if you were the others
2. Play nice and share (the example he cited: when working with other agencies, as they often have to do these days, they get into a room with the other agencies and “tear up their business cards” because they have to put their egos and companies aside to focus on the ideal)
3. Focus on making a difference

A big ideal can keep your long tail from falling off. A big ideal gives you the prefect entry point into the conversation.

He’s exactly right. Marketers cannot hide behind hype or “stay on message” anymore and hope that that alone will sell product. That was Huckster marketing. Today, it’s about the conversation. If the company is focused on an ideal that is bigger than themselves, their message will be amplified by consumers.

And that’s a huge shift.

Later that day, Carla Hendra, Co-CEO, Ogilvy North America, did a presentation about the Dove campaign for real beauty to illustrate this concept, and I think it hooked everyone in the room. The evolution video was just fascinating.

Every marketing organization is resource-constrained when it comes to IT. The cool thing about using wikis for marketing is that they don’t require help from an IT person or web manager to maintain. Set it up, start collaborating online. Here are some ways that I’m using our wiki, and there are probably a dozen other items I’ve left off the list.

1. Create a style guide
2. As a way to distribute your vector artwork
3. An extranet for your ad agency to exchange content, share comps, and final deliverables
4. Collaborate on website content with peers
5. Create a press page
6. Write press releases collaboratively
7. Document your processes (how do you upload a press release, write a blog, where is your booth property stored, where are your promotion codes?)
8. Plan an event: all the details such as time, location, staffing, shipping, URLs, contact information, etc.
9. Report the results of your ad campaigns
10. Document every iteration you make on your Google Adwords campaigns so you can go back to them later and reverse your changes or understand why your campaign performed how it did
11. Create a reseller partner wiki
12. Jot down your ideas, collect your thoughts, write up a brilliant marketing strategy
13. Share information about your competitors, their pricing, URLs, their strengths and weaknesses
14. Distribute marketing materials to your sales team (we don’t actually have a field sales team, but if we did… this would be a good one!)
15. Review, comment on, and contribute to your co-workers’ work on the wiki