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!

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, posted a blog a couple days ago “outing” the PR professionals that spam him. One PR guy on Chris’ shit list pleaded his case, explaining that he (the spammer) had rented an email list that happened to have Chris’ name on it.

From the thread:

I spent $10,000 this year on lists, email software, promotional cards etc. to promote my business and my work. You’re on a list of people who buy creative work that is sold to photographers every day. If you don’t really buy photography, why not just hit the unsubscribe button? Why give out your email?

A response to this person’s comment:

You just admitted to taking the lazy way out of everything and spam people. If you are spending that kind of money you should be checking to see if the list(s) you are getting is even of value and not have people like Chris on it.

First, no marketer ever reads all the names on the lists s/he buys; what would you look for? How would you know that, based on an email address, Chris wasn’t a good potential buyer? Second, “If you don’t really buy photography, why not just hit the unsubscribe button?” Um, right… ever considered that Chris, or most of us who get unsolicited email, didn’t opt-in to the list… to that specific list? While content providers should always ask for permission to give your name out, they don’t. Far from it. If you’re a subscriber to a magazine or a corresponding website, odds are that your email address is being sold by someone without your knowledge.

I have tried email marketing many, many times, and 99% of the time it does not work. I have purchased lists from various list brokers, experimented with HTML and text email, offered different incentives and came to one conclusion: it doesn’t work. And yet, and yet, it’s still a huge business.

People like the photographer in the first quote do it because it’s cheaper than direct mail. So-called “clean” lists contain “good” email addresses insofar as the email doesn’t bounce. But that’s all that’s good.

Unless someone opts in to receive your email, they don’t want it. Really. The chance of you sending them email when someone is (1) in the market to buy your product or service and (2) actually has time to read spam is low. Not impossible, but low.

(So, just to contradict myself, I did respond to a writer who emailed me a few days ago to let me know about his freelance business, but I’ve deleted 100+ emails before responding to this one)

Better alternatives (in a random order):

• Cold calling. As time intensive and difficult as it is, it’s better. Maybe because people are used to getting solicitations from sales reps, but it feels less intrusive to me. And provided that the sales person is courteous and aware of my time and not pushy, I don’t mind taking the call.
• Word-of-mouth marketing. There’s a whole friggn association set up around this, plus many bloggers writing about techniques.
• Google Adwords
• Advertise in other people’s newsletters. Very likely, Chris opts-in to newsletters that have ads in them. He’s much more likely to open a newsletter that he subscribed to than an email from a stranger.
• Blog. And optimize it so it can be found.
• Talk to bloggers. This is one of Chris’ main points, too. If the PR folks would simply have read his blog, learned about him, contacted him through his blog (while being nice and courteous) and asked him “who should I contact,” likely he would have responded in kind.

Today my company announced a new SharePoint Connector for Confluence. About 8 or 9 months ago, we started getting calls from our customers asking about SharePoint: how does Confluence work with it? Or does it compete? How do the products overlap? Being on the other end of the telephone, it was clear that Microsoft had started their launch for SharePoint 2007!

We couldn’t really say much at the time. We knew SharePoint was a big deal, and that Microsoft was touting SharePoint’s new “Web 2.0″ features like blogs and wikis, we had watched Scoble’s interview with SharePoint engineers. But what we didn’t know was what it was really going to be like.

The new Connector is an awesome answer. It’s a great answer for SharePoint users who want a full-time enterprise wiki, and for Confluence users who need to integrate these two collaboration solutions. It’s a big win for Atlassian (along with Newsgator) to be included in Microsoft’s inaugural announcement of SharePoint as a Web 2.0 platform.

Now, hopefully Jonathan, Brendan, Zach, Mike and everyone else working on the product and announcement can get some sleep.

Here are some blogs by other Atlassians on the topic:

• Mike
• Jeffrey
• Stewart

To all ye job seekers, we’ve posted a few new openings at Atlassian. I’m looking for some talented folks to help us expand the marketing team.

• Open Source Systems Administrator
• Media and Community Spokesperson
  

What am I looking for in the Open Source Systems Administrator position?

• You equally enjoy working with technology and people
• You have a track record that demonstrates your support of, participation in, and advocacy for open source
• Killer Linux skills, comfort with Java
• You’ve maintained high volume, high availability website and systems
• You don’t mind getting out of the office now and again to visit user communities to meet customers and talk about Atlassian

And the Media and Community Spokesperson?

The ideal candidate is…

• A PR misfit… one that sees blogs, conversational marketing, transparency , and community building as the new pillars of PR.
• You have superb writing and verbal communication skills. And even better, you communicate in plain English and manage to avoid what blogger and author David Meerman Scott calls the Gobblydegook.
• We love metrics at Atlassian. We want to know cause and effect of most initiatives. While I’d want this person to do a fair share of reporting, I’d much prefer to hire a heads-up instead of a heads-down type, someone that would rather be chatting with customers, analysts, journalists, and bloggers instead of doing metrics.
• Got a blog or other work that reflects your conversational style and some well-thought out opinions?

But wait, there’s more! You can get an idea for life at Atlassian and the things we look for in every employee.

Coming soon: an opening for Product Marketing Manager. We have heaps of other jobs in Sydney and San Francisco that you can read about here.

If you’re reading this and it sounds good, give me a shout or send your resume along to jobs@atlassian.com.

1. We admitted we were powerless over change—that spin was no longer in.
2. Came to believe that transparency in marketing could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the community.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of marketing budget.
5. Blogged publicly the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready respond to the community about all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked our customers to blog about their experiences—pro or con.
8. Made a list of all other marketers we had harmed because we trained them to spin the message, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made public amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through conversation and meditation to improve our conscious contact with the community as we understood it, actively seeking input while marketing.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to the blogosphere, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

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