Social Media Isn't the Answer

Posted on Michael D. Wentworth's blog


We were in a meeting with Envano an innovative social media marketing firm and the owner shared Joe Pulizzi's book Get Content. Get Customers. with us. Turns out one of their clients is featured in the book.

I am a big fan of Joe Pulizzi. Other than the fact that he is enormously articulate, he's right. Here's a summary of his take on content:

Content marketing is not easy because you actually have to listen to your customers and know what their challenges are. You cannot solve your marketing woes through buying advertising space. You must make a connection to your customers, and get new customers, by focusing on their true pain points and healing them with information.

There are millions of "social media experts" out there. Unfortunately, the majority are experts on tools, devices, and technology. Very few are experts on understanding the customer. Why? Because it's hard.

The recent Johnson & Johnson Motrin debacle is a great example.

Why Understanding the Customer is Hard.

Getting insights about the customer is not the challenge. A wealth of data is readily available. The real barrier is "surrendering control". I would argue that marketers know what their customers' want, but the marketers are unwilling to surrender control. Johnson & Johnson's ad agency tried to tell the customer who they are (or control brand perception) and it blew up in their face. Recently, we did a market study for an ad agency and gave them the unvarnished truth about the customer and the tools needed to engage them (lots of social media). They responded that they didn't want that. They either didn't know how to do what we recommended or didn't know how to make money doing it. They asked us to change the report to include tools they knew how to produce and could make money doing. WARNING! This is the norm not the exception.

Technology Isn't the Answer

Now the opposite of the example above is also true. Don't look to the new world of social media to solve the problem. It is not a solution. It is a wonderful tool to help marketers solve the problem. The problem is engaging the customer. The other problem is all the resources (vendors) available to help marketers don't care about engaging the customer, they only care about selling the services they offer.

Don't Try to Be the Smartest Person in the Room

The day's of Darren Stevens are over. Marketers don't need to be geniuses trying to create the next "big idea". They simply need to listen to their customers and give them what they want--not what marketers want to sell.

It's About Content.

As Joe Pulizzi points out, it is all about content; content that is meaningful and valuable to the customer. To do that, you must be willing to surrender control to the customer.

Keep up the good work Joe!

Word-of-Mouth At Lightspeed!

The story below illustrates the risk of marketers believing they can control or persuade their buyers. In the past, when an edgy campaign missed the mark, no one really knew other than the agency and the client. Today, the reaction is fast and aggressive and everyone knows.

From AdAge.com

How Twittering Critics Brought Down Motrin Mom Campaign

Bloggers Ignite Brush Fire Over Weekend, Forcing J&J to Pull Ads, Issue Apology

By Michael Learmonth and Rupal Parekh

Published: November 17, 2008

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Johnson & Johnson did manage to offend some mothers with an online and print campaign for Motrin that implied moms carry their babies as fashion accessories. But was it a genuine groundswell that felled the effort -- or an alliance of the few, empowered by microblogging service Twitter?

Two days after a new ad push for Motrin triggered an online backlash, J&J's McNeil Consumer Healthcare unit is pulling the campaign, from the New York office of independent shop Taxi, and begging a vocal mommy-blogging nation for forgiveness.

Read more >>

Target Marketing

Posted on Chris Brogan's blog November 6, 2008

Here are some things that are true: people don’t read. And when they pretend to read, they skim. Comprehension and context are at an all time low. We’re snackers, and it’s adding up. Where this hits us the worst is when communications professionals attempt to match their idea of me (and by me, I mean you) with their “target.”

It’s deeper than not reading. Part of it is not caring, because we can’t care. In sales, if you’re trying for a number, you have to scrap and scratch and push hard and do all those volume-based things that will drive a number or you’re on the street.

It’s deeper than not caring, because we don’t have enough hours in the day, so we can’t even find the TIME to care. How can we read and care and do all this other stuff when we’ve got products to sell and deadlines and goals?

It gets worse. Kind of.
Guess what? 2009 is just about here. Economically, the US is in for quite a shake, and all my friends from all over the world (because I do appreciate you being part of this conversation) are also in for a crapload of un-fun. Your customers are cutting back. They aren’t paying. They can’t meet their commitments.

You are in retention mode. Now, if you’ve treated me like a target all this time, do you think I have loyalty or any kind of need to keep on as your customer? If you don’t know anything about me, do you have the handles you’ll need to preserve your relationship with me as a customer?

Read more >>>

Businesses Failing to Adopt Social Media

Changing consumer behaviors and the current economic downturn is giving businesses a once in a lifetime opportunity to increase profits, decrease costs and trump competitors by adopting companywide Internet strategies using social media, online community, Web 2.0 and proven Internet strategies. Free eBook, Internet Dough at www.internetdough.net outlines how pizza shops to Fortune 500 companies can benefit.

Akron, OH (PRWEB) October 8, 2008 -- Changes in consumer behaviors are presenting new risks and opportunities for businesses as small as pizza shops and as large as Fortune 500 companies.

According to Philabaum business leaders are running out of time to react: "The traditional business is tiptoeing into the Internet when they should be reorganizing their business around the Internet. If you want your company to be a major player in the next 5 years, do what Bill Gates did in December of 1997 and bring your entire organization together to create a comprehensive companywide Internet strategy."

Even though the web offers tremendous opportunities for companies, non profits and organizations, research is showing business leaders and owners are dragging their feet and failing to adopt Internet tools and strategies. Why? According to Philabaum, "The Internet seems like a foreign language to most business professionals. They grew up on mass marketing techniques and frankly have not had the time to understand Social Media Marketing, Web 2.0, online communities like Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin and building online relationships with prospects and customers."

Click here to read more >>

Brands, Agencies Still Stumped By Local Online Advertising

by Tameka Kee, Wednesday, Oct 1, 2008 7:34 PM ET
From ONLINE MEDIA DAILY

Just over 40% of companies are spending at least a quarter of their online ad budgets on geotargeted campaigns, according to new research from Sterling Market Intelligence. But brands and their agencies are still stumped when it comes to figuring out how to use those local online advertising dollars most effectively.


Greg Sterling, founder of Sterling Market Intelligence, and Ed O'Keefe, vice president of performance marketplaces at Marchex, offered some best practices and case studies for how to capitalize on this growing trend during a webinar on Wednesday.

Marchex and Search Marketing Now (a division of Third Door Media), commissioned Sterling to survey more than 150 companies in verticals ranging from travel and transportation to personal care services. Participants, who were polled in September, included national and regional advertisers, with marketing budgets ranging from less than $1 million to more than $100 million annually.

Nearly half of the marketers said they knew at least a quarter of their in-store sales could be attributed to their online marketing efforts. But while companies understand the correlation between their online campaigns and in-store sales, they are having problems deciding which traffic sources to use, how to best track their efforts, and even which metrics they should be tracking.

For example, almost 60% of marketers are using core search engines for their local campaigns, while about half are tapping into business directories. Around 40% of respondents said they were using localized search engines (such as local.com) and city guides or local review sites like Yelp and Citysearch. Roughly a third said they were using Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs), and a quarter said they were geotargeting their ads across various ad networks.

According to O'Keefe, the smorgasbord of tactics is a good thing, because marketers should not send all of their local online ad dollars to one channel. "You have to diversify your traffic beyond paid search," he said. "Online campaigns are not just about search engines. There's about 40% more high-quality, lead-generating inventory out there, and you're missing out on it if you stick to just Google, Yahoo and MSN."

O'Keefe said that marketers in search of local online advertising success should shift a percentage of their budgets to on-site SEO efforts and submissions to local search services, directory assistance and even the increasingly available swath of mobile inventory. "You can reduce your media spend by double digits, and increase leads exponentially," he said.

In terms of gauging the success of those local campaigns, the primary metric is sales. Almost half of the respondents said they were using sales by location as an effectiveness barometer. But about 43% also said they were using visits to the corporate Web site as a success metric, and over a third of marketers said they were measuring calls to a local number, or visits to a local store. "Most companies are using a range of things to indicate whether or not a campaign is successful," Sterling said. "And in a sense, that's because there's no single best metric."

Marketers are also using a variety of ways to track those metrics, as roughly half of the respondents said they were using Web site analytics, call tracking or email programs. Meanwhile, a third of companies were using online forms or online appointments to track their online campaigns, and about 20% said they were using coupons.

"From traffic sources to metrics to tracking, companies are experimenting with a lot of things to see what works," Sterling said. "Strategies and tactics are all over the place, because there's a general absence of best practices."

To Postal Workers, No Mail Is ‘Junk’

With revenues falling, the post office owes its future to stuff we throw out.

By Caitlin McDevitt | NEWSWEEK
Published Sep 27, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Oct 6, 2008

These are tough times for the U.S. Postal Service. It's being pummeled by high fuel costs. The soft economy is crimping the overall volume of mail, which fell 5.5 percent in the past year. Its business is also falling as Americans opt for e-mail over birthday cards and thank-you notes. Now comes another threat: consumers like Colleen Plimpton of Bethel, Conn. Earlier this year Plimpton became tired of the credit-card offers, catalogs and advertising fliers that clogged her mailbox. So in February she paid $20 to GreenDimes, a firm that helps consumers reduce their inflow of "junk mail" by contacting businesses on their behalf. "[Junk mailers] are cutting down trees willy-nilly, and that has got to stop," says Plimpton.

Read more >>

Get Radical -- Radically Customer-Centric, That Is

by Ken Dec, Tuesday, Sep 30, 2008 5:00 AM ET
From MediaPost's Marketing Daily

Leading technology marketers -- faced with product offering parity/commoditization, intense global competition, and stagnant budgets -- are seeking every way possible to improve the performance of their marketing programs.

One strategic approach is the adoption of radically customer-centric marketing -- allocating significant resources toward developing the deepest possible understanding of customers' roles, responsibilities, communities, hopes, dreams and aspirations -- moving far beyond the "title targeting" that has defined technology marketing for decades.

Here's how.

Know Your Customers
Personae are hot - but they are not new. Direct marketers have been using attitudinal and behavioral segmentation for decades. What is new is that the web enables more efficient development of personae based on how prospects interact with brands online -- and the use of personae is more efficient due to the hyper-targeting capabilities of online message delivery.

Additionally, the best technology marketers have added role-based profiles to their segmentation strategies - building profiles of multiple IT decision makers, capturing and leveraging understanding of each person's role in the purchase process and varying messaging based on their role.

Effective personae and role-based profile development requires a combination of approaches including:

? Primary research - qualitative and ethnographic "day-in-the-life" research
? Data analytics - utilizing sales, campaign and engagement data to understand the actual behavior of customers and prospects
? Sales force engagement - talking with your best salespeople to understand "deal dynamics" and translate that knowledge into targeting and messaging

Combining research, data analytics and sales engagement is a proven approach to building actionable personae that informs hyper-targeting and hyper-messaging for optimal campaign results.

Corporate Brand Matters - More Than Ever
Decades of research continues to prove that companies "buy" companies first, then products and solutions.

The web can trigger the hyper-development or hyper-destruction of brands. So given how quickly digital technology is changing marketing dynamics, how quickly people learn about the differences between one brand and another, and how quickly word spreads, getting the positioning of your brand "right" has never been more important.

Additionally, in a transparent and sharable environment, there are more ways than ever before to find out what matters to your brand constituencies. The best marketers listen to what audiences think and feel about the brand's products and services.

Smart brands collect and use this learning to build brand promises that are both different from competitors and optimally relevant to the customers they want to attract.

Maximize The Mix
One of the most challenging tasks is identifying how to allocate finite resources (i.e., budget) into what increasingly feels like an infinite number of marketing channels.

A radically customer-centric approach helps identify the likely highest yielding channels through better understanding how customers collect information about competitive products and services.

Social media monitoring is increasingly playing a valuable role as peer recommendations remain among the most trusted sources of product information. Understanding where customers congregate and monitoring those conversations, is aiding in the development of more relevant channel plans.

Social media monitoring combined with traditional media consumption research and analytics is creating radically customer-centric, high performance media plans.

Drive Leads That Drive Sales
Still surprising are the number of organizations who value lead quantity over quality - unfortunately, they appear to remain the majority. Best of breed marketers view this differently.

The goal of any demand generation program should be generating the largest number of most highly qualified leads possible, generated at the lowest possible cost.

Optimally targeting high potential value customers is best achieved through applied data analytics of current customers to understand; what are the key characteristics of my best customers? What did they buy? When? How much are they worth?

Data analytics helps greatly narrow the population for promotion, but unless you combine this effort with customer-informed messaging your effort will be efficient but not optimally effective.

Which is the reason we need to get to the "why of buy". The best marketers understand why customers buy from you or from others. It's easier than ever to learn. Again, social media monitoring, complemented by qualitative and quantitative research intent on understanding why we buy, leads to radical customer-centricity that can more effectively and efficiently drive demand.

Measure, Optimize, Repeat
As companies execute radically customer-centric marketing programs it's easier than ever to learn more and more about customers and prospects with each campaign. Leaders are measuring three key metrics:

? Perception - how do customers and prospects "feel" about the brand?
? Performance - how are they responding to marketing campaigns? (campaign metrics)
? Value - what incremental revenue are your radically customer-centric marketing programs contributing to the company?

Get Radical - Today
The best technology marketers understand that radical customer-centricity results in more efficient, effective, revenue-generating marketing campaigns.

Taking the time and applying the resources necessary to deeply understand customers behaviorally, attitudinally and communally makes the results of their finite budgets infinitely successful.