tdog.blog

Back in April 1999 is when the Cluetrain Manifesto first declared that “markets are coversations.” Since then we’ve had an explosion of dialogue, and not all of it has been pointless blather about feline behavior.

So far, only a small percentage of the Fortune 500 (like 15% at my last count) is blogging. Another little chunk is exploring Twitter and YouTube. Still others are licking their wounds over Second Life. Yet most of their marketing dollars are poured into advertising and one-way promotional messaging.

It seems strange to me. In my world I zip through ads with a DVR. I get most of my news either through following breaking news on Twitter or via RSS. I used expert reviews from strangers to help me buy a flatscreen TV.

In other words, I’m part of that growing nightmare for Madison Avenue. I don’t sit passively. I engage and explore. I don’t need no stinking ads to make purchasing decisions. The last ads I viewed were on Super Bowl Sunday and even those have faded.

Mostly it seems like we’ve got two camps going in business: the rulers of the Lost World, lumbering around not knowing that you can’t repeal a paradigm shift (and some not aware that a paradigm has shifted); and a second group of much more agile businesses who will adapt to life in the post-cataclysmic age.

What cataclysm am I referring to? Well, like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 70 million years ago, the Web and the advent of blogging and social media has obliterated a whole bunch of business models. There are businesses out there that are walking around dead and who won’t know it for years.

Ten years ago the Cluetrain gave us the first warnings. Stop the corporate happytalk. Stop the endless soma shots. Just talk to us at our level. Come out and play where we’re at. Trust us to be a partner in your success.

We’ll see who heeds the call, and who survives in the new environment.

Now go read the damn thing. It’s available free on line.

Comments(0)

In the past, I’ve been a pretty strong advocate for setting up lead generation programs that require up front registration. What you end up with is numbers like this: for every 100 people you attract to a site, you get 3-5 who actually register for the fact sheet, webinar recording, or what-not, and 95-97 who go away, mostly to some other site.

This approach works just fine if you’ve got a huge list. I’m talking hundreds of thousands of people, real people (not just mickey mouse AT foobar DOT com or somesuch), to make the math work. You end up with 300,000 on the email blast list and then 15,000 at your landing page (if you’re a rock star), then maybe 400 who get your white paper. But surprise, 300 of them are interns doing research for their boss, a business analyst in phase 0.1 of their research (who doesn’t want to hear from you), or somebody in the media trying to figure out what the heck you’re saying.

Of the remaining 100, chances are that you’ll just have to keep hitting them with more and more things to keep them engaged, such as a webinar series, an e-newsletter, a Twitter feed, whatever, until they build enough trust in you to make some kind of move in your direction.

And that’s all fine and dandy if you can start with a big enough list and can keep hitting them with high-quality stuff in a high-integrity way.

If that’s working for you, okay, fine, sure.

If it isn’t, let’s turn the model on its head and try the opposite. That’s right. No registration form at all. Let them watch your video free, download your ebook for free, whatever. Always embed a way to get ahold of you. Try something low-risk and unobnoxious, like a Twitter feed. It’s much better than email for this kind of thing. (If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you know that I’ve been ruthlessly killing BACN in my inbox.)

Just say, on the first and last page of your ebook: “Here’s where you can find me: @myerman on Twitter.” (Of course, you’re free to point them at my tweetstream, but you might want to use yours instead!)

If you’re on Twitter, don’t be a jerk, okay? Don’t do the autoresponse with 100 different messages and options and links. Who wants that? If you do an autoresponse, say, simply, “Hey thanks” and give them a phone number or email address. Then keep up with the good tweets.

If they like you, they will message you, or figure out a way to get a hold of you. But start it off by giving away this interesting bit of content. Something human, something that will make them laugh or think or rethink something. Especially if they can give it away easily to 10 of their colleagues or friends.

Try it for a month. Watch what happens. I bet you get a whole lot more downloads that way. (And notice that you can still track downloads of PDFs using things like Google Analytics. Sounds like a topic for next time!)

Comments(0)

I was just interviewed by FreelanceSwitch, one of the premiere blogs targeting freelance writers, designers, and coders.  I was interviewed by them because they were interested in hearing about my new book From Geek to Peak, which targets freelance geeks in their first year of business.

The process was painless, but it wasn’t so much an interview as it was more like guest blogging (the interview was conducted over email, which required back and forth and more writing than talking…so it felt more like writing…if that makes any sense). The result has been rather remarkable from a traffic generation standpoint–way more effective to be mentioned on this one blog then just about any other source so far.

What kinds of results have I seen? For one thing, there was an immediate uptick in sales of my book. I also got various emails from folks who had purchased the print edition looking for an e-copy, which I funneled on to my publisher. I also saw quite a bit of traffic going to WritingMafia.com (which is mentioned in the article) — it got a 300% increase in page view and unique visitors in less than a day, and it looks like we’re getting quite a bit of folks coming back to the site today as well.

Speaking of Writing Mafia, I had posted a little story there called “Are you on Twitter?” back on February 20th. On the 23rd, I signed up for BusinessExchange (a social bookmarking site set up by BusinessWeek magazine). I posted a link to my story on Twitter there. The results? See for yourself in the graphic below.

(Click the image to get a more detailed view…)

Results of Business Exchange Listing

That article received 1457 visits in 16 days, most of it coming from the “most active” part of the site, which tells me that the topic caught fire. Incidentally, not only is this the most traffic that any article on that site has received, it’s also the most commented piece on the site. Furthermore, it’s driven a lot of traffic to my Twitter account @myerman, leading to more sign ups.

In the old days, we’d try to do all this with SEO or PPC ads. I think the shift has begun to social media (wikis, blogs, social networks of all kinds, twitter, etc) and that it will only continue to snowball.

Anyone else have any stories to tell that bolster or critique this position?

Comments(0)

If you’re going to be in the Internet marketing game (hell, any game at all) then you have to fall in love with your idea. Without falling in love, you won’t have much (if any) magic, no spring in your step, no desire to get up in the morning and keep pushing that rock until you’ve achieved your objectives.

But something else is also true, and this is something that’s hardly ever talked about by those glassy-eyed followers of the Big Idea.

You also gotta love your business model. And more to the point, the business model has to make sense. Loving the idea will get you through the first quarter or maybe year of a business, but after that, it’s all about doing the dishes, setting the sprinklers out, and dusting the furniture. You gotta be able to work with it, and no outside-the-box permutation is going to save  your business if the model (a) sucks or (b) you can’t stand to work within its framework.

The biggest mistakes I made during the past decade was coming up with a string of beautiful business ideas, most of which were untenable thanks to nonexistent business models. It’s a harsh thing to say about yourself, but hey, if I can be man enough to admit that about myself, and tell you that I’ve moved on to things that do make sense, then hopefully I can save you the time, energy, money, and heartache of hanging on to a business that doesn’t make sense.

So how can you tell if your business model doesn’t make sense? It truly is different for different people and businesses, but really, there are some giant clues. For instance, does it seem like you keep working with the “wrong” kind of people, all of whom have expectations you can’t meet? Is it impossible to raise your margins no matter how much you cut and cut? Are your returns on direct mail, emails, and other marketing so miniscule that you’re forced to build transactions in the tens of thousands for even the most trivial offer or call to action?

As a good man (Dan Kennedy) once said, there are some problems that marketing can’t fix. If you have complex outsourcing agreements that cause your quality to skydive, no amount of marketing will save  you when your product poisons or hurts someone. If your backoffice is such a mess that you can’t respond to customers in a timely fashion (or at all), no amount of Superbowl ads are going to make you look better. If your management is running scared of social media, don’t expect your customres to give up Facebook and Twitter just because of it.

Comments(0)

For those of you who are following such things, you know that the USAF (an organization that has kept its distance from the blogosphere in the past) has come out with a “Web Posting Response Assessment”–a stiff-lipped flowchart that nonetheless appeals to the systems analyst/information architect in me.

What do I like about this flowchart? It aims to give the man on the street (in this case, a USAF enlisted person or officer) some easy tools and processes for responding to items out there in the blogosphere. I really like the “no response” solution to trolls and ragers. It’s really easy to get baited by the mental midgets out there, which makes you an even bigger midget. (You know what I mean.)

I also like the transparency clause in the Response section. That’s another thing that’s easy to forget when you’re out there–and something that’s very hard to apologize for, because everyone will assume you were hiding your affiliation on purpose.

Lastly, I like how the process encourages a response with facts, using links to existing materials. Great way to bolster any position and build SEO at the same time. Something like this should be easily adaptable to your organization’s situation.

Comments(0)