The world needs fixed-price web podiatrists.
Podiatrists, not doctors.
Doctors do surgery and prescribe expensive drugs and stuff. Podiatrists can just make it easier to get around.
So, a pretty smart web-savvy person could have a checklist of fifty items and work her way through a corporate website. She could come back with a simple, easy to execute list of things worth changing:
–put USA above Afghanistan on your country pull down list
–make it so clicking on your logo takes me back to your home page
–the font is too small on this page and it’s hard to read
etc.
Low hanging fruit, stuff that doesn’t need approval from the CEO to fix. Maddening idiosyncracies, worth the few minutes it takes to fix them.
Second gig: Web analytics pro. Someone who can, for a generous hourly fee, set up analytics for a website and do weekly reports (by email) that are actually useful and actionable.
$200 an hour is totally reasonable for work like this. It’s worth ten times that when it’s done right. We’re talking about optimizing an AdWords campaign that returns millions of dollars in profit.
Of course there are people who already know how to do this. The question is: can it be marketed as an easy thing, a simple sale, a matter of course…
Neither will make you rich. Either might open doors for your next step in life.
July 4, 2008
Scoble has a great post about a 14 year old kid with 45 million viewers on YouTube.
45 million! He wins. You lose. You won’t have more traffic than he will. Ever.
And what about your ads? Are you busy sponsoring sites that have less traffic than he does? Sure you are. Why? I thought it was all about reaching the masses…
Well, since you’re over that now, since you realize that "how many" is not nearly as valuable as "who", why not put that into practice?
Just because something is easy to measure doesn’t mean it’s important.
July 3, 2008
There aren’t so many statesmen. People who speak truth to power. Leaders who describe what they see, whether or not it serves their short-term interests. They say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done, as long as it serves the long-term needs of their constituents. No wonder we like them so much.
Lawyers are sworn to be advocates. It’s their duty. They take a side and they argue it. They’re not supposed to tell the truth, they’re supposed to argue a point of view.
Guess who has a better reputation?
Which leads us to marketers. Have you noticed that most of us act like lawyers?
Perhaps, just perhaps, someone would be better off with a competitor’s product instead of yours. Or perhaps the world doesn’t really need what your factory just rolled out. If you’re a lobbyist, it’s hard to act like a statesman and keep your job. Or if you’re a pharmaceutical sales rep. Or a PR firm. Or a brand manager at a software company.
Marketing culture has become a culture of lawyers. Apparently, marketers are now advocates sworn to argue on behalf of a client.
This attitude leads to spam (hey, it’s not against the law and it helps my client) and to dicey product claims and to awful side effects like obesity, shoddy products and massive debt. If your job is to represent a product and ensure its short-term sales, that’s exactly what you’re sworn to do.
I believe that anyone, regardless of situation, deserves the best possible lawyer. Our advocacy-based justice system depends on it. But does every product, service and organization deserve the best possible marketer?
What happens when marketers stop arguing on behalf of their corporate or organizational client and start arguing on behalf of the customer instead? What happens when marketers become statesmen?
This is a very practical hypothetical question I’m asking.
When a sales rep says, "You know, after hearing your situation, I think you’d be a lot better off with my competitor’s product instead, here’s her number," it actually creates positive word of mouth and long-term growth. When a brand manager says to the product development people, "I’m not proud of this design, we’re not going to market it, so you better make something else," it actually creates market share growth. And when a CEO says to Congress, "Our industry relies on chemical X and we’re going to keep using it as long as our competitors do, so please ban it," she creates a long-term path to stability and growth.
The lawyer works with constituents who fully expect him to be an advocate. The judge, the clients and the jury (hopefully) understand that he is making a case, not telling the truth.
Marketers work in a different world. As marketing has transformed from a specialized subset of business to a ubiquitous element of society, marketers still have the chance to be believed. But trust belongs to statesmen, not lawyers. People don’t say, "I trust her, she’s the lawyer for the other side."
The real question, I guess, is this: who’s your client?
July 2, 2008
I sent in a t-shirt order to customink a few weeks ago.
Three days later, I got a note from someone named Lori that said,
"Hi Seth,
I noticed that you have designed shirts that appear to be for a charity event. If that’s the case, CustomInk would love to make a small donation to your team or to the charity itself on your behalf.
Please let me know if your order is for one of these events. If you would like us to pitch in and support your cause, please include information about your charity event, a link if you have one or the organization’s name if there is no link to a team web page."
That’s it. No policy, no standard operating procedure, no promise in advance. Just plain generosity.
It turns out that customink does this as a matter of course, regardless of whether the customer has a blog or not. They don’t do it as an inducement, they just do it.
Formula: The value of a perk is inversely related to the expectation of that perk.
July 1, 2008
At every turn, Pixar messed up the marketing of their new movie. It has a hard to spell name, no furry characters, not nearly enough dialogue (the first 45 minutes is almost silent), no nasty (but ultimately ridiculous) bad guy, hardly any violence and very little slapstick. Wall-e didn’t get a huge Hollywood PR campaign or even a lot of promotion, it doesn’t feature any hot stars and as far as I can tell, the merchandising options are quite limited.
Can you imagine the meetings?
Can you imagine the yelling?
Pixar, recently purchased by Disney, could crank out multi-billion dollar confections. They know all the moves, they have the chops to create merchandising powerhouses. And with just one movie a year, they certainly must have been under huge pressure to do just that.
And yet, instead, they make a great movie. A movie for the ages. A film, not 90 minutes of commerce.
The irony, of course, is that they’ll make plenty of money. Bravery often pays off, even if paying off is not your goal. Especially if that’s not your goal.
Marketing isn’t always about pandering to the masses and shooting for the quick payoff. Often, the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing at all.
June 30, 2008
Imagine that half the cars in the US get 10 miles per gallon. And half get 40 miles per gallon. Further stipulate that all cars are driven the same number of miles per year.
Now, you get one wish. You can give every low-mileage car a new set of spark plugs that will increase fuel efficiency by 5 mpg, up to 15. Or you can replace every 40 mpg car with a car that gets 75 mpg, an increase of 35 miles for every gallon driven.
Which is better?
It turns out that the 5 mpg increase is far better for overall mileage than the 35 mpg increase, even though it’s smaller both as a percentage and absolutely. That’s because the 10 mpg hogs use up so much gas. They’re the low-hanging fruit, not just easy to fix, but worth fixing.
As marketers, we’re tempted to tweak the already tweaked, to turn the 100 to 101, to optimize for the peak performances. That long tail is very long, though, and if there’s a way you can raise the floor (instead of just focusing on the ceiling) you may be surprised to discover that it can have a huge impact.
Simple example: It’s way more profitable to encourage each of your existing customers to spend $3 than it is to get a stranger to spend $300. It’s also more effective to get the 80% of your customer service people that are average to be a little better than it is to get the amazing ones to be better still.
June 29, 2008
One more post about conferences. (Except it’s really about any meeting).
Easily overlooked, but incredibly important: the way you arrange the room where people speak.
The venue owner (hotel/convention center) wants something easy. Your boss wants something cheap. You want something tried and true so you don’t get blamed. The end result?
Mediocrity. Boring sameness. What a wasted opportunity.
In the scheme of things, a great room at a conference is a bargain. Spending what it takes to make it work has a huge payoff. That said, here are some thoughts:
“What does this remind me of?”
That’s the subliminal question that people ask themselves as soon as they walk into a room. If it reminds us of a high school cafeteria, we know how to act. If it’s a bunch of round tables set for a chicken dinner, we know how to act. And if there are row upon row of hotel-type chairs in straight lines, we know how to sit and act glazed.
If it’s a place where we’re used to saying ‘no’, we’re likely to say no. If it’s a place where we’re used to good news or important news or just paying attention, we’ll do that.
You can use this Pavlovian reaction to your advantage, or you can be a victim of it. A non-traditional arrangement can make people sit up and take notice. A rock concert feel is going to raise the energy level of even the skeptics. A circle with no tables makes people feel naked. These are tools, and you get to choose.
If you have to serve lunch, serve lunch. Big round tables, lots of talking. Then have people stand up and go hear the speaker. In a different room, with a different setting, one that works. No one ever heard a speech that changed their lives when sitting around a round table having just eaten a lousy lunch. Mixing the settings serves no purpose, wastes time in the long run and saves very little money.
Do you see that this is just more marketing? You tell a story with where you put the chairs.
If you could do one thing, make one choice, it should be this: make the room too small. Standing room only. People hanging into the hall. Watch what happens to your energy level.
If you’re speaking TO people as opposed to encouraging a wide ranging discourse, put the stage along the narrow wall of the room. (in a 30 by 80 room, that means the 30 side). Making the room narrow and long is far better than wide, because it puts the audience in the plane of the speaker.
This also makes it far easier for the audience to see the speaker and the slides/screens at the same time. This is critical. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched people stare at the screen and avoid the speaker, or find themselves bouncing back and forth.
iMag: That’s the projection of the speaker on the screen. This is pretty expensive, but for groups over 500, it’s almost mandatory in our 1984-esque world. If you want to get far more bang for your buck, hire a second cameraman, with a hand held camera. When you switch from one view to the other, you add enormous action to the event.
Screens: Big screens are a lot more reasonable than they used to be. Get the absolute biggest and brightest you can afford. Bigger! Big screens, near the speaker. Really close to the speaker. That’s a big help for the audience and for your energy.
VGA cables: Have more than one. Switchers are cheap. Nothing worse than having speakers stumbling around swapping laptops. And put the cables and the laptops up front, not in back to be controlled by a tech guy who doesn’t care quite as much as you (or the speaker) does.
Music: Every time you introduce a speaker, play loud and inspiring pop music. Not for long, but enough to cue people to remember the way they feel at the Oscars and stuff. After all, those memes are there waiting for you to leverage them.
Marching bands: Yes, they’re cheap. No, people don’t like them particularly. I’ve seen this done a number of times, and people are more amazed and aghast than impressed.
Aisles: Watch a room fill up. People always sit on the aisle, don’t they? Don’t do rows of 40 or 50 chairs with no aisle. Have lots of aisles. Every ten chairs or so. Why not? Makes it faster to get in and to get out, and doesn’t hurt your density so much.
Lights: Make it dark in the audience. Make it light on stage. This works every time. Practice the lighting in advance, even for a smaller group.
Q&A: For large groups, don’t do Q&A. It sucks all the energy out of the room and stilts the end, “Well, if there are no more questions…” Instead, solicit questions from key people in advance, write them on index cards and have someone raring and ready to go with a microphone and a finite list of questions, bang, bang, bang. It’s not a press conference, it’s a speech.
Small groups: Even groups of two–don’t go along with a lousy setting just because that’s what is offered to you. Why would you pitch yourself or your project in a noisy restaurant, seated on a banquette, with one person on your left and two on your right? Don’t do it.
If you are using a laptop for a small group, get one with a big screen. Get a simple USB remote. Don’t use live web access if at all possible. And make sure that the right person sees the screen (and you) at the same time. If you can’t do these things, don’t use the laptop.
If you’re willing to travel to meet with someone, put in the extra effort to do it in a setting that works. Befriend the admin, befriend the maitre d, even from 1,000 miles away. Both you and the person you’re meeting with benefit when you create a room that works.
June 27, 2008
You really don’t understand a concept until you know what it’s made of. The taxonomy of marketing (filled with a bazillion tactics) is murky at best. The tactics are so numerous, expensive and sometimes emotional that we easily focus on the urgent instead of the important. Perhaps we could try a different approach:
Never mind the "P"s. Marketing has five elements:
Data
Stories
Products (services)
Interactions
Connection
DATA is observational. What do people actually do? Wal-Mart uses data to decide if an end cap is working. Google Adwords advertisers use data to decide which copy delivers clicks and sales. The library can use data to decide which books to buy (and not to buy). Paco Underhill uses data to turbo charge retail. Data is powerful, overlooked and sometimes mistaken for boring. You don’t have to understand the why, you merely need to know the what.
STORIES define everything you say and do. The product has a myth, the service has a legend. Marketing applies to every person, every job, every service and every organization. That’s because all we can work with as humans is stories. I want to argue that data and stories are the two key building blocks of marketing–the other three are built on these two.
PRODUCTS (and services) are physical manifestations of the story. If your story is that you are cutting edge and faster/newer/better, then your products better be. Average products for average people is a common story, but not one that spreads. When in doubt, re-imagine the product. Push it to be the story, to live the story, to create a myth.
INTERACTIONS are all the tactics the marketer uses to actually touch the prospect or customer. Interactions range from spam to billboards, from the way you answer the phone to the approach you take to an overdue bill. Interactions are the hero of marketing, because there are so many and most of them are cheap. Unfortunately, all lazy marketers can do is buy ads or spam people. Which creates an interaction that belies your story, right?
CONNECTION is the highest level of enlightenment, the end goal. Connection between you and the customer, surely, but mostly connection between customers. Great marketers create bands of brothers, tribes of people who wish each other well and want to belong. Get the first four steps right and you may get a shot at this one.
Some questions marketers must ask: Does this interaction lead to connections? Do our products support our story? Is the story pulling in numbers that demonstrate that it’s working?
In that light, what are you working on? If it’s not one of these five, not going to seriously change the dynamic of your marketing, why exactly are you bothering?
My guess is that your organization spends almost all of its time on the interactions. Once you see the world through the prism of the five pieces, you can get in balance. Or, you could be Jack.
June 25, 2008
I’m moving this week (new mailing address: Box 305, Irvington, NY 10533).
That meant a grueling marathon with the single worst voice routing VR system the world has ever known: Verizon.
Rants online can be good for the soul, but it’s way more interesting as a marketer to learn from what’s not working.
Most often, a frustrating situation is frustrating not because the tactics were broken, but because the strategy is fundamentally flawed. In this case, Verizon is acting like a monopoly (they’re not, at least not any more) and they are viewing customer interactions as an expense, not an investment.
If you view calls from paying customers as expensive, then your goal will be to cut the cost of these interactions. That means fewer hours, more voice recognition and more wasted time by your customers. Once you’ve gone down that road, everything else seems like a soft-hearted, expensive compromise.
So, I start by flipping this on its head. Verizon spends a fortune on advertising and outbound marketing. How much of that budget would they have to allocate/invest in order to turn their customer service into a discussion-worthy best in the world? Or at least enough to keep people from switching in disgust? Not much, it turns out.
This leads quite easily to the first conceptual breakthrough: waste your time, not mine! Be open 24 hours a day, because, after all, the amount of customer service you need to do doesn’t decrease if you work fewer hours. In other words, spread your people around so they can talk when your customers want to talk.
Wait, you say, we can’t afford to have our trained engineers working at night, or they won’t work those hours.
No problem. Instead of using a VR system, just route the calls to a different time zone, to alert, kind, English-speaking folks who will carefully enter every detail into a database, including the return contact info and the best time to call back.
Now, when I call, I spend less than a minute or two with you. The phone is answered on the first ring. Someone sympathetic gets every single detail. Magically, using the best technologies of telemarketing, my cell phone rings at the appointed hour and the right person with the right expertise and the right file in front of them is sitting at the other end, just waiting to talk with me! Instead of wasting my energy with six (yes, I had six, and that was just today) people who couldn’t help me, I get to talk to one who can. In fact, this process actually saves Verizon money.
Wait, there’s more.
We need deadend safeguards, too. That means after someone has been on hold for more than xx minutes, the call automatically gets escalated to a more powerful person who can take action right then, right there. (Can you agree that this should happen after 4 hours? What about 40 minutes?)
It means that you don’t ask me to type in my phone number or account number, but if you insist, then at the very least you make sure that the person who eventually gets my call doesn’t ask me for my number again! Getting this wrong for three years in a row is not an error. It’s arrogance.
If you have to put me on hold, don’t play bad 1980s music. Play me Bill Cosby or Steven Wright. Or why not give me a choice of 100 songs/audiobooks to choose from?
Here’s the big lesson, I think: The person calling in is a person, a customer, potentially a blogger, potentially the CEO of a company you might want to sell to tomorrow, and yes, the person you’ve spent all that time and money marketing to.
It’s not about technology. A small firm could accomplish all this with a decent Radio Shack answering machine and a better attitude.
June 24, 2008
It’s not very often you hear people use the word "fell" without the obligatory "swoop", but the combination is common enough that we all know what it means.
Except it rarely happens.
We expect that a big marketing campaign can fix our market share problems in one fell swoop.
Or that a consultant can reorganize our operation and get it working again in one fell swoop.
Or that a new product launch is only a swoop away from setting things right.
Of course, that’s not what happens. It’s more like 35 semi-fell swoops that do the trick. And deep down, we realize that.
But, now that we’ve said it out loud, now that you acknowledge that you’re going to need 35 web visits or permission-based emails or 35 different conference appearances or 35 blog posts or whatever, drip, drip, drip… if you know that you need 35, not one, how would write/appear/act differently?
A foop is different than a bang.
June 23, 2008
