Operationalizing that digital strategy thing.
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Paul Walhus of Spring.net interviews me about SxSW 2008 and other subjects.
In an earlier post, I compared lead generation to dating. I said that many companies take to lead generation like they do the singles scene, except instead of buying drinks and saying hello to strangers, they go around the room asking anyone and everyone to marry them right off the bat. It’s a ridiculous way of doing things, and it hardly ever gets the kinds of results you want or need. Just like no guy/girl is going to accept a marriage proposal from a total stranger (and even if they did, what does that say about them?), no customer is going to get sucked into a complex B2B sale right off the bat.
At the other end of this extreme is what I call the Bachelor Syndrome. The Bachelor is a reality TV show in which the producers set up a guy to look like this prize catch and then parade a bunch of candidates in front of him to see if one of them can win his love. The guy is usually young, studly, and apparently wealthy and quite a catch. The women on these shows are the usual combination of beauty, brains, and what have you–from pretty much all walks of life (except for their inability to resist this kind of denigrating experience, apparently).
Just like companies can’t succeed by running around the room asking total strangers to marry them, they’re not going to succeed by putting on a Bachelor-type competition. If your customers feel like they’re on some kind of gameshow or contest to win your love, then it’s really not lead generation. I’m not sure what you call it, other than counterproductive, but it isn’t in the true spirit of providing valuable information to the marketplace to attract suspects and then nurturing those suspects into prospects and then transacting some business with them at a future time.
How do you know if your programs are more Bachelor game show than actual lead generation?
* If you have to keep reminding people that they need to make a buying decision now, you don’t have a lead generation program. You have a let’s-coerce-them-to-buy program. The analogy: if you tell your dates that you need some kind of next step in the process, then you’re just looking to score, not trying to be with that other person. If the person you’re with thinks you’re worth another date, then whatever it is you’re doing is working.
Try being a bit more subtle. Here’s where an automated lead nurturing program (like you find in Marketo or other tools) really helps. If they sign up for the white paper, invite them to the webinar. If they come to the webinar, invite them to the demo. At the demo, invite them to buy. If they don’t do these things, have different offers for them. Keep them in the loop, but if they don’t express immediate interest, don’t just keep asking them to buy with a louder voice.
* If the only reason you talk to people is to discuss money, a sale, or the status on a transaction or deal, then you don’t have a lead generation program. Listen, you have to spend a lot of time educating people. Giving them the power to make a good decision. We’re talking special reports, podcasts, demos, and the like.
If you’re in the jewelry business, then this won’t relate to you. People either buy or they don’t (at least, to my extremely limited knowledge about jewelry). Same goes for things like cars or groceries. Yes, people may want to research MPG or whether to buy organic or not, but the decision cycles pale in comparison to say, CRM software, where there may be hundreds if not thousands of decision points that need fleshing out.
Therefore….flesh them out! Don’t just hammer away at price or TCO. There’s lots more to talk about!
* If you’re not talking to the 95% of your database that hasn’t purchased yet, then you don’t have a lead generation program. The vast majority of your list will be people in wait and see mode. They’re trying you out. They’re examining your product or service from every angle. They’re talking to others who have bought from you. So why not give them a hand? Talk to them. Answer questions. It doesn’t take a glitzy approach. Just host a teleconference and answer questions. Or hold a workshop and take lots of questions.
Designers….learn it, use it, love it.
Grid systems bring visual structure and balance to site design. As a tool grids are useful for organizing and presenting information. Used properly, they can enhance the user experience by creating predictable patterns for users to follow. From designer’s point of view they allow for an organized methodology for planning systematic layouts.
After creating a well-structured and usable grid, consider allowing it to breath. A page without a grid is a usability nightmare. On the other hand, a grid that has creatively overlapping, escaping, or energizing columns leads to a more enjoyable user experience. Discovering or planning areas of the design that will have some freedom will lead to more interesting and appealing design solutions.
Article includes case studies and examples. I’ll certainly be using this idea more as it brings some sense of stability into front-end design considerations.
In the last seven years, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting with, talking to, and working alongside some really terrific people across a variety of companies. I’ve worked with solo entrepreneurs, startup companies, Fortune 500 giants with titanic budgets, and SMBs with tight pursestrings and big dreams.
Across all of these situations and environments, there’s one thing in common: about 9 times out of 10, when I ask about marketing, I usually end up having a conversation about “brochures” and “swag and tchotkes.” In other, guarded moments with people outside of marketing (say, in Sales, or IT), conversations about the marketers usually devolve into three things:
All of these statements (and many more like them) are patently unfair, of course–but let’s face it guys, marketing practitioners have always had a bit of a self-esteem problem. We know we’re among the first to get the axe once bad times roll around–but we’re not willing to do the hard work of establishing ourselves as grownups at the revenue table. We accept the fact that our activities cost money–but we don’t take credit when all of our communication efforts and follow-ups turn into a plausible lead in the pipeline (and later, a sale). We know that we’re not experts in all the technical things required to feed a Web 2.0 effort, but then again we don’t fight like crazy for the kind of headcount we need to stay competitive.
Why is that? I don’t know. But it’s got to end. Marketing is really the only way that companies stay alive. Yes, sales brings in the money, but if sales had to draw their attention away from selling to communicating (yeah, that really long tail of informing, educating, empowering and talking to the customer [in print, online, at events, via webinars, white papers, case studies, conference calls…..etc etc etc] way before and during and after the sale is made) then you would see sales plummet….and in fact, there would be other second-order effects because really, you hire a salesperson to sell, not to figure out messaging strategy or build web sites or write white papers. They would do these things so badly that they would not only be selling less, but screwing up the fewer sales they would get.
With that in mind, read a few blog posts below and assert yourself.
If you’re anything like me, you manage team members (employees, contractors, freelancers) and customers. Given enough people you interact with, you start having to process a lot of voice and email communication–and a lot of that stuff contains either status updates or action items. Unfortunately, a vast amount of that stuff is long and convoluted, each beginning with an explanation about what happened and finally meandering to a closing that summarizes the problem and maybe offering some kind of solution or way out of the problem.
Often times, you have to read the whole message in order to figure out if there’s a problem or an action item in there somewhere. It can get pretty frustrating, particularly if you’re in the heat of the moment and receiving 20-30 such emails every few hours. Such is life in the fast lane, right?
Not necessarily!
As my good friend Ian Stahl once said to me in the middle of the DotCom madness, “Stop coming to me with problems….bring me a problem and a solution.”
Here’s a nice little template for making status communications run smoother:
1. Punch line: The facts; no adjectives, adverbs or modifiers. “Milestone 4 wasn’t hit on time, and we didn’t start Task 8 as planned.” Or, “Received charter approval as planned.”
2. Current status: How the punch-line statement affects the project. “Because of the missed milestone, the critical path has been delayed five days.”
3. Next steps: The solution, if any. “I will be able to make up three days during the next two weeks but will still be behind by two days.”
4. Explanation: The reason behind the punch line. “Two of the five days’ delay is due to late discovery of a hardware interface problem, and the remaining three days’ delay is due to being called to help the customer support staff for a production problem.”
Notice that this template is in reverse order of how we normally get status information, but it is a heck of a lot more efficient for everyone involved because of the reversal.
You can read the whole story (and the story behind this blog post’s headline) at computerworld.com.
I gave a talk at TechBA (a program that’s part of the University of Texas–basically they nurture and grow tech companies from Mexico) a few weeks ago. Each slide in my Keynote presentation consisted of 1-2 words. I had two slides in there that featured diagrams that I built up with transitional effects, but that was it for complexity.
Each word was in like 96 point font on a plain black background. The topic of the talk was “Marketing 2.0″ and the focus was on the fact that Marketing 2.0 is really about getting back to the basics of Marketing, where marketing was before Advertising (and Advertising Agencies) turned marketing into an exercise in shouting at the top of your lungs over and over and over again until somebody purchased your stuff.
In any case, after reading Presentation Zen and Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 Powerpoint rule I’m happy to say that I’m finally on the cutting edge of something or other.
Listen, all of you who think that each slide should contain 6-7 bullet points (and each bullet point should feature 6-7 words)…there’s this thing called “cognitive overload.” If you present us with a ton of words on the screen and start talking about those words, we will only be able to focus on one or the other. When we figure out that you are simply reading from the slides, then we’ll just read the slides.
Guess what? We can read faster than you can talk. So there’s no point in your being up there, right? Just email us your word-packed presentation (or what some call “slide-umentation”) and be off with you.
My personal goal? That you can’t understand my slide presentation without my presence (or at least, my voice). I use 1-2 words per slide, or an arresting image, and use those words and images to bolster what it is I’m talking about. And I get a lot more engagement out of the audience. I used the word WTF on a slide behind me as I talk about “what your target market shouldn’t be thinking when they encounter your marketing.” Even a bunch of software guys from another culture got what I was saying–the titters and laughter said it all.
Am I saying that I’m the next Tony Robbins. Hell no. But at the very least I can make a presentation enjoyable and dynamic and try to erase some of the collective pain being inflicted on business audiences every day.
It’s been called a “train wreck” by journalists, attendees, and bloggers.
What am I talking about? Sarah Lacy’s keynote interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on Sunday.
Part of the problem was Sarah Lacy, or at least her reputation. It’s a bit troubling for a journalist to be well known for pulchritude as well as professional snaps (with one magazine breathlessly calling her “the hottest reporter in technology”).
Part of the problem was Mark Zuckerberg, who for all intents and purposes resembled a painfully shy 8th grader instead of a billionaire founder of the planet’s most successful social networking site. I don’t think any reporter could have gotten him to open up on anything of substance.
The biggest part of the problem was the audience, and most importantly, their unwillingness to continue consuming an irrelevant discussion.
There they all were, with all their technological prowess, many of them sending Tweets out about how boring and off-track the keynote was. Those tweets not only bounced around the Internet, but were of course consumed by many people in the room.
Others who were liveblogging the event as it happened, with their Macbooks perched on their laps, added to the pressure cooker. Soon you had a virtual echo chamber: all the tweets and liveblogs collided with everyone reading the tweets and blog posts, and pretty soon you had a bunch of people already frustrated by the presentation rise up in rebellion.
To the casual observer, it looked like there was one presentation happening on stage, but an audience paying attention to an entirely different event at the same time.
Okay, check that. That’s precisely what was happening. Of course, interviewer and interviewee were unplugged and had no idea what was happening, except for a dawning realization that something was off kilter.
Eventually, the room hit some kind of tipping point (and boy do I hate these squishy terms, but they seem appropriate) and the virtual wall was breached. People in the crowd started to grumble, and then one person shouted “Talk about something interesting!” to everyone’s laughter.
Then came time for Q&A. All that pent up hostility just came out. Sarah, perturbed by the antics, said “Well, send me an email if you think I’m doing such a bad job!” which prompted the guy at the microphone to say, “What’s your email address?”
More laughter. More heckling. It finally wound down with a whimper and we all moved on to other sessions, but I could see others continuing the conversation via cellphone, Twitter, and liveblogging.
All of this stuff was eventually picked up on Digg, and then someone at Wired blogged about it, and then the story crashed into the Technology Press at large.
The event had become a media firestorm (albeit in a small niche) in the time it took to walk 100 yards to the nearest restroom and back.
Not to put the fear of God in you, oh marketers, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is what the new generation out there is doing all the time.
They buy your stuff, talk about it, blog about it, tweet about it. Some of them aren’t even waiting to buy it. I’ve seen them tweet and moblog (mobile blog) about stuff while they’re in stores. Taking pictures with their cameraphones, uploading mobile video, liveblogging.
Whereas earlier Internet users planted a firewall between events and their online discussion of same, that era’s over. For this new group, it’s all one big hairball, with the virtual discussion often overshadowing the real world event they are covering.
Why is this so important to you? Imagine a world in which journalists from all spectrums of the media universe focused not on politics or the marketplace or human events, but on their reactions to the same.
Cogent coverage of the news item itself would diminish in favor of an ever-growing palimpsest of thoughts, feelings, echos, and tagents based on the news item. Clear thinking on any given subject would become a Gordian Knot of cultural dimensions that only the most savvy could interpret.
How do you as a marketer navigate this kind of world? RELEVANCE. That was the single biggest lesson of the Zuckerberg-Lacy fiasco. Lack of relevance caused a lot of rebellion.
These people had paid a lot of money to attend SxSW, and they wanted to hear Zuckerberg’s thoughts on privacy, tools, and social networking. And they were gravely disappointed.
Some might say (as I did right after the event occured) that these young ‘uns need to learn some manners–after all, not many of them would think to take a cell phone call in the middle of the event (okay, maybe some would). Nor would many of them have the guts to just walk out, or jump up on the stage and yell out “WTF! OMG, U R so l4m3″ or whatever the equivalent is.
But really, in the long run, the audience is right. They came expecting one thing, got something else, and didn’t lie down and just live with it. They knew they had an empowering technology at hand, and they wielded it to turn the tables on the whole power dynamic.
In sharp contrast to all this was the earlier session by Jared Spool. He spoke on using magic and illusion to help design great user experiences on the Web.
He peppered his talk with humor, some magic tricks, lots of great details, and a clean slide presentation that drove home important points. No 38 bullet points per slide. No kitschy backgrounds. No stupid transitions or zooming animations.
In the end, he tied the magic tricks in with the idea that web sites must have “delight generators” because that is what takes an experience over the top.
He got a standing ovation at the end, and about 100 people lined up to offer up their business cards so they could be signed up for his user experience newsletter.
Thus endeth the lesson.
Twitter, for the uninitiated, is this annoying little technology that asks the question, “What are you doing now?” Members of Twitter then answer that question (with “tweets”) throughout the day using 140 characters or less in each posting. Being sentient carbon-based lifeforms of varying intelligence and social acumen, these members answer the question within a spectrum of sophistication and from a multitude of platforms.
What this means, gentle reader, is that if you become a member of Twitter and start “following” people, you are apt to get all kinds of things, like “I just ate a burger” or (less frequently) “I just solved Fermat’s Theorem”. And you’ll open yourself to all this from people sitting in front of web browsers, IM interfaces, and even cell phones.
In other words, it’s just like IM, but 1000x worse. A few years ago, I told my employees that I would fire the next one I caught using IM on company time. Why? Because there’s no way to concentrate and get into flow when somebody is constantly yacking at them, asking questions, sending comments, or what have you. If it’s that important, pick up the phone! Or better yet, compile all your thoughts into *one* email and send it to me! Then wait for me to take a break (which will be in a few hours because I’m concentrating on my work) and I will answer you in complete sentences.
But Twitter is far, far worse than IM. See, instead of getting a personal message like you do on IM, what you’re seeing is a message that is being broadcast to 10, 20, 100, 1000 or more people. If you receive these on your cellphone, you experience severe disgruntlement. I’m of that generation that associates calls and messages sent to a cell phone as being more important than calls made to a land line. Getting a message on my cell phone means “this person tried me on a land line, couldn’t get me, and is now trying to get to me here–hence, important!”
To have that happen and then see that hoodoo2123 (who is a good friend, otherwise you wouldn’t be following him, right? right??) is now watching Starsky & Hutch reruns, then have it happen again (now yada54 is making cream of wheat) and then again (in which yoyobot is playing with her puppy) is really very very annoying. (Not to mention expensive, if your cell phone service charges extra to text messages.)
Some would argue that this is the kind of communication that bonds people together into a social network. Excuse me, but this is exactly the kind of thinking that people suffering from some social awkwardness syndrome really believe in. Good communication is about relevance and pragmatism. If you were at a social gathering (one in real life, I mean) and everyone just constantly spammed their immediate environment with stories and feelings and thoughts helter-skelter, it isn’t bonding. It’s annoying. Real communication is about finding out what the other person is interested in, and talking about that, and then picking up on subtle (and not-so-subtle) cues that it’s okay to keep talking about that topic or time to move on.
It reminds me of a very bright computer engineer I had the misfortune of meeting at a holiday gathering a few years ago. Very very smart. MIT smart. A few of us were talking about hiking and photography and what we’d been up to since the last time we saw each other. This guy kept interrupting our flow with random comments about things he was working on at work, none of which had any bearing on what the rest of us were talking about. We would process what he had said, ask a few questions, get more cryptic stuff, and then keep talking about our lives. He was just annoying enough that we didn’t try too hard to include him (I cop to that ) but HEY, that’s the point of social group dynamics. If I don’t want to talk to you, I don’t have to! And you don’t have to listen!
I guess from a Twitter perspective, his communication strategy made total sense–just keep talking about what it is you’re interested in, and I’ll do the same, and we’ll all go home and call that a conversation. Sheesh!
Here’s another chilling thought: using this technology as a true marketing platform. Amazon and others are already starting down this path. Reminds me of web pages crammed full of deals at airline ticket travel sites. Or the meaningless emails you get from places that list 500 rolex watches for sale.
The key here is not amplitude, it’s relevance. I want to take Hope on a trip to Scotland. I want to see airfares for Scotland. Not anything else. Sign me up for that, and I’ll be interested. Or, if I were to continue using Twitter, I’m interested in just seeing tweets on things that relate to a certain set of topics, and you can keep all the rest.
While you’re making out your holiday card list, don’t forget to send a card to a wounded American veteran. Here’s all you have to do:
Address your cards to:
A Recovering American Soldier
c/o Walter Reed Army Medical Center
6900 Georgia Avenue NW
Washington DC 20307-5001
If you are a nerd, please read and see yourself mirrored in the post. If you’re involved with a nerd, work for a nerd, work with a nerd, or manage a nerd, then read it. Learn to love the nerd.
And remember:
Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in his head.
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