Archive for the 'Business' category

Live at #BWE08, It’s Saturday Morning

Sep 20 2008 Published by under Bloggers, Business, Marketing, Technology, The Internet, Web 2.0

The opening keynote of the Blog World Expo is underway in Vegas. Richard Jalichandra of Technorati is walking the audience through highlights of their State of the Blogosphere survey work to be released starting Monday as a five part series.

If you’re interested in looking at the characteristics that separate the top tier bloggers from the lower tier it all comes down to hustle. That’s pretty mych true of any profession, but that hustle takes a different form for blogs.

The average top-tier blogger posts 10 or more times per day and utilize 5 or more web 2.0 apps.

Perhaps the most interesting facts for social marketers are the way bloggers interact with brands. 90% talk aout specific brands, and 80% talk about customer service experiences. That should be enough to make any company take blogs seriously. However, the more relevant stat is the fact that 61% of bloggers report they are influenced by other bloggers discussion of products, services, and customer experience.

In short, whether you are online talking about your company. product or brand or not, there is an active and vibrant discussion of it taking place. You need to decide whether or not you want to be part of it.

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How Not To Sell Volume 1

Apr 11 2008 Published by under Business, How Not To Sell, Marketing, Sales

I guess it is sales and marketing education day here at The Quip. No sooner did I complete my post about following your brand online that I get the e-mail below. This was the whole message:

Every Month, We Show 30 Million Cable Customers Why Cable TV Is a Great Educational Resource for Teachers, Students & Families of All Ages!

www.EducationConnection.tv

I guess the sender was under the mistaken impression I would be so impressed by his ability to write one coherent sentence that I’d feverishly click, Pavlov’s dog-like, on the link.

Talk about a stupid way to introduce yourself or make a pitch to someone via e-mail. There’s no mention of who he is, why he thinks I might be remotely interested in his product, or even a cursory explanation of why I should bother myself for 30 seconds out of a busy day to explore the url he sent.

Seriously, this is the equivalent of the following cold call:

Potential Customer: Hello?

Caller: We have a product. Want to buy it?

I’ve been on the receiving end of some incredibly bad sales pitches. In one, the salesman pulled a filthy, dirty, broken toy tug boat out of a box, placed it on our very expensive wooden coffee table and tried to make some point that included the pilfering of said toy from his kid’s sandbox. Honestly I don’t recall a thing he said after that nasty piece of crap hit the table.

In another, the salesman was so coked up he was almost unintelligible as he ran through what should have been a twenty minute pitch in about 45 seconds. He was talking so fast he raised my blood pressure and caused a nervous eye tick in a co-worker.

Both of those, however, stood a better chance of getting business from me than this ridiculous e-mail. There are ways to sell, and there are ways to convince me you’re a moron. This achieved the latter.

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Follow & Defend Your Brand Online

Apr 11 2008 Published by under Business, Marketing, Politics, Self-Promotion, The Internet

A colleague pointed me at this article on ereleases.com. The writer had been trying to book a vacation and was swayed toward a particular hotel because he found the manager posting comments on travel websites – apologizing to customers who posted complaints and thanking guests for their feedback. When he told the manager that at check in, he heard something a lot public relations folks are probably familiar with.

“A lot of our customers say that,” the manager told me. “It’s funny because I didn’t want to do it at first, but our public relations person made me.”

It’s amazing how often companies and institutions are reluctant to directly engage in the online community. They see the Internet as some wild frontier untamable by any but the most rugged of men. The fact is, your efforts to explain your position, defend your policies, and yes, actually acknowledge your mistakes and apologize to your customers actually build your brand, not damage it. As the PR Fuel article points out:

The irony is that PR people have complained that websites such as TripAdvisor.com hamper their ability to control the message when, in fact, it gives PR people a great opportunity to manage a brand and message. By actively participating in a community of consumers, PR people can defend themselves against whiners and complainers who have anomalous experiences with a product or service, or who are just the type of customer no one wants to deal with.

As one hotel employee said in response to a review from a complaining customer, “I’m sorry that this person had such an awful experience. We did our best to meet their demands, but some people are just jerks.”

This response actually caused other customers to come to the defense of the hotel in question.

Openness, honesty, and engagement are your friends online. There is little room for hiding behind a small set of talking points and hoping you can get by. To be sure, this approach requires more work. It takes a lot of effort to troll through message boards and community sites. Services like Google Alerts can help by sending you notifications when someone posts about your brand online. Sites like Technorati monitor blog posts so you can easily find references to your brand on someone’s journal.

At that point, it’s up to you to go online and take part in the discussion. You may not remember every detail of your interaction with a particular customer, and that’s ok. You can acknowledge their concerns/complaints and explain what you would do to address them. You can also tell your side of the story – just do so respectfully.

For those who practice marketing and PR in the political space, the PR Fuel article shares one more anecdote that is particularly salient to you.

I know from my friends in the business that running any kind of hospitality enterprise is difficult. What makes it more difficult is when the business is not proactive about public relations, which sometimes simply amounts to above-and-beyond customer service in the industry. Restaurants, hotels and other hospitality businesses strive to get good reviews from professional reviewers, but they too often ignore getting their message across to the actual customer.

Why is that particularly valuable for political people? Think about that last sentence. How much time do we spend trying to guarantee good coverage by the New York Times, Washington Post or some local paper? Now how much time do you spend trying to get good word of mouth press from actual voters? The media will rarely create good word of mouth for your efforts – that’s simply not their job.

The reviewer will mention any flaw they see, even in an otherwise glowing review. In the same way, the media is going to talk about something you’ve done well, but will also make an effort to be ‘balanced’ by pointing out your warts. Good constituent service, and effective communication with voters, doesn’t necessarily carry that same overhead.

The best thing you can typically expect from the media is a neutral, mediocre article. The best thing you can get out of interaction with voters is a champion who will carry your message to friends and family without feeling compelled to also highlight your flaws. Which is worth more?

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Cookie Magazine Crowdsources Its Seal of Approval

Apr 03 2008 Published by under Business, Marketing, Miscellany

Cookie Magazine's Word of Mom AwardsYou’re probably familiar with the “seal of approval” of such magazines as Consumer Reports. The basic concept of magazine publishers getting together to look at products and give them a thumbs up or down has been around for a while.

Well, a new magazine called Cookie is doing things a bit differently. They have launched Word of Mom a new community feature that lets readers vote on products and awards a seal of approval based on what the readers like.

[T]ell us what you’re obsessed with, whether it’s a miracle eye cream, a kid-friendly hotel, or a new double stroller that allows you to push and sip coffee at the same time. Each week we’ll list the top 10 products, so check back and see what other moms love. Come September, the finalists will be announced and readers will have the opportunity to vote for their favorites. The winning products will receive the Cookie Word of Mom Readers’ Choice Award, courtesy of moms everywhere.

I like the idea of crowdsourcing the products to which you award a seal of approval. If I know the community has rated a product highly, that means more to me than the word of an editor who may have only tested it in his office. For that matter, awards picked by an editor may not have even been tested, but merely given as a reward for continued advertising.

This is a good step in the evolution of community based ratings.

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The Essence of Online Communications

Mar 26 2008 Published by under Bloggers, Business, John McCain, News Media, Politics, Technology, The Internet

The Washington Post today has a (far too) long piece about Meghan McCain and her blog. The piece is fairly unremarkable in its writing, and the blog, from what I’ve seen is fairly unremarkable with the exception of the angle.

There is, however, one passage that jumped out at me as I was reading.

There’s a genius, too, to Meghan McCain’s style of saying so much without divulging anything truly intimate — a balancing act perfected by her dad on his Straight Talk Express. The more you talk, the more people start to feel as if they know you. The more you talk, the more you minimize the reverberations of any one thing you say.

The disdain the reporter has for McCain (both Meghan and her dad) is barely masked. Lines like the first one above are an example, as is the piece’s title – a take off on Credence Clearwater Revival’s famous song Fortunate Son. Given John McCain’s staunchly pro-war position, it’s obvious the writer is mocking Meghan’s similarity to the child in the song.

Some folks are born made to wave the flag,
Ooh, they’re red, white and blue.
And when the band plays hail to the chief,
Ooh, they point the cannon at you, lord,

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no senator’s son, son.
It ain’t me, it ain’t me; I ain’t no fortunate one, no,

Ignoring the subtle digs at her and her dad, the reporter did, in that brief passage above, capture one fascinating aspect of the Internet. It’s the piece that most politicians and corporate clients don’t get and it bears repeating.

The more you talk, the more people start to feel as if they know you. The more you talk, the more you minimize the reverberations of any one thing you say.

Communications types who do not spend a lot of time online fail to get this. They assume that every word you say is going to be twisted, distorted, and manipulated. They worry that some random blog post will send stock prices or poll standings plummeting downward.

Yet that statement is the essence of this new era of Internet communications. Allowing people to see you, and to understand you, actually protects you from the random out of context quote. As your comfort with exposure increases, and you open your dialog more and more, you will guard against the misstatement. Your allies will have more ammunition to protect your back and your enemies will have less of a vacuum to fill with an errant remark.

For anyone interested in communications, I would suggest you read the McCain article for two reasons. First, it’s a perfect example of the veiled hostility visited upon anyone Republican by the mainstream media. Second, it does illustrate someone taking the right approach to their online brand – be who you are and accept the fact that not everyone is going to like you.

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