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Jul 03 2010

10 for 10K – Or Thanking 10 (Groups Of) People For Helping Us Get to 10,000

We finally did it – after 2 plus years on Twitter, interacting, engaging, talking, getting into arguments, making friends, we are at the 10,000 follower threshold.

Twitter is about engagement, about conversations. And we’ve had such a great time with so many of you…so we want to single out 10 – people or groups of people – who have helped us along the way. In No Particular Order:

1. @unmarketing – I single out Scott Stratten for a couple reasons. Other than being uber-cool and all that, he happens to be the first person ever to send me a direct message on Twitter. It was an actual message, asking me how I was liking Twitter so far.

He’s worth a follow. He’s the real deal. And I get the feeling that, after he sells a zillion copies of his book, he’ll still be the real deal.

2. @ginidietrich. Whip-smart, opinionated, charming as heck. We’ve had some killer conversations on Twitter and elsewhere. She’s the CEO of Arment Dietrich.

3. @tweetmaker. Meet Jim Alexander. Solid citizen – solid enough that we’re working on a book together. Called Nichification. One of those people that, after you meet him IRL, you like him even more than you did on Twitter.

4. @garyunger. Creative Genius. Really.

5. @hgtv. We had the pleasure of being the “Tweet of the Week” on the Cable Channel HGTV earlier this year. So much fun – and they made a video of it. Learn more here: Tweet of the Week.

6. Some Real People: Like @LindsayMAllen, @ChicagoDiane, @mattplanet, @marksherrick, @harrisonpainter, @tmjackso @coffeyjulie, @chrisbrogan, @gilrogers, @mattdollinger, @rosshair, @rondavies, @waynemansfield, @ryanwynia,@toyotaequipment, @ceslsu, @ryan_manno. And a real dog, like @doggedpursuit.

7. Some Real Brands. Like @ms_elli, @liquorlandNZ, @SierraNevadaCA. I hope to visit y’all someday.

8. Wine people: @chwine (the folks at Cameron Hughes do some great work) and @rickbakas (we’ll meet IRL one of these days…). @cinderellawine is pretty darn cool, too. Oh, and that @garyvee guy – yes, he does all his own stunts.

9. Some dynamite women entrepreneurs. @barefoot_exec. @annevanston and @alexisneely. And don’t forget @jennifervides and @kellyolexa. Always smiling…Thanks for inspiring us all – and keeping us motivated.

10. @karioca – my lovely wife, Kari. You’re the best!

This Twitter thing is pretty cool – and if I’ve forgotten you, I apologize. Do let me know…and thanks for all the conversations!

May 31 2010

5 Tips for BP PR – How to avoid more loss of brand equity

Like everyone else, we’re watching BP and wondering if the oil spill will ever stop.

It may not. In the event that we’re still having this discussion in July 2011, here are three moves that BP can make right now to minimize loss of brand equity.

1. Cut prices at every one of your service stations by 25% effective immediately.

Why? You’re going to lose tons of business anyway.

For instance, heading out of town this weekend, I filled up on gas. I bypassed your station in Evanston, IL. Better to support the Marathon guy down the road. I made this decision simply because I didn’t want to give you more money than I already had to.

Then, on the Indiana Toll Road, my hands were tied. BP or nothing. Darnit. So I filled up at a BP station.

But there’s more to this, right? I mean, local dealers who sell BP have franchises and buy gas from you and all that stuff I don’t understand.

So it’s these guys that are gonna lose business. And lots of business.

Thus the 25% cut in prices. That will make me think twice. Right?

2. Buy an acre of Louisiana swamp land for every hour that the spill continues.

Pay market prices. Donate the land to the State of Louisiana. Call it a day.

3. Accept any Louisiana fishing claims without batting an eye.

If I have a shrimp boat in Louisiana, and I’m toast, I probably don’t have Environmental Insurance. Business Interruption Insurance. ANY INSURANCE. I’m not saying people can make crazy claims, but if a 40 year-old guy in the Bayou says he makes $75K a year fishing and will lose everything, cut him a check.

4. Know all that “Beyond Petroleum” stuff you have been doing? Do it again. And again. And again.

I want to see wind farms. I want to see soy biodiesel. I want you to revisit all those ads from a few years ago where you talk to people on the streets and they tell you what they want out of an oil company.

I want to see those ads and I want to see them now.

5. Get a YouTube Channel NOW.

See the ad up here? It has 200,000 hits.

Search for “BP” on YouTube and stuff like this comes up.

Not press conferences, updates from your executives, video of your own.

Get a channel and get it NOW.

Mar 28 2010

How to be Memorable with Your Marketing

Isn’t it interesting how some things stick out in your mind – and others, well, you either can’t (or don’t) remember?

This can be true with marketing. I’m talking all kinds of marketing: ad campaigns, direct mail pieces, social media marketing, outreach, events…gosh, the list goes on.

So…

How do you make your marketing “memorable?”

Here are five tips:

1. Have a point. This may seem trite, but so many people forget it with their marketing. For example, I was just on the website of a company that a friend of a friend suggested I check out. The most annoying thing about this site could have been its flash graphics (always a bad idea, IMHO). Or maybe the crappy color scheme. (They did that.) Bad design. (An overall valueless website.)

These were not the biggest failings — the biggest failing was the lack of a point. I read and re-read what it was they do and it had the feel of a website that was built by committee. With no point.

2. Distill your messages down to the WIIFM. To that end, every piece of marketing MUST be written as if you’re the target audience asking “What’s in it for me?” This gets back to benefit vs. feature. Feature: what the executives decide management should care about when launching the product.

Benefit: what the buyer will want to get FROM BUYING THE PRODUCT. How will I benefit? What’s in it for me?

3. Ask “why should I care?” Search has a mastermind person named Avinash Kaushik –Â @avinashkaushik — and he talks about the “3 layers of So What?” I love this because it takes the above “Benefit vs. Feature” question, the WIIFM concept, and ratchets it up big time.

To paraphrase Avinas: keep asking “so what?”

For example…”I’m launching a new service that delivers cufflinks to your door within 24 hours?” So What? “The cufflinks are handmade in Africa?” So What? “Every time you buy a pair for $35 we buy a cow for the villagers who made the cufflinks and they get 25% of every sale in cash.”

Editor’s note — this service, as far as I know, doesn’t exist yet.

4. Look for the niche within the niche. Fellow savvy marketer Jim Alexander and I have been working on a book whose code name is “Nichification.” This is a lot of work — interviews with people who have launched products and services and successfully sold and marketed them in various niche businesses.

One emerging theme in this book is the niche within the niche.

Put simply, take a subset of the population that would buy your niche product (if you use the above, try “cufflinks enthusiasts”). Then, take a subset of THAT population and cater your marketing to them. 75% of those who wear cufflinks are rich guys. The other 25% might be those who want to know that every cufflinks purchase helps support the global economy.

Write for those people.

5. Cut out unnecessary words and puffery. I find myself increasingly annoyed with marketing that is memorably BAD for its over-blown, long-winded, crap-o-rama.

We’ve all seen the web pages that go on and on and on, where you have to keep scrolling down to find out what they’re selling and how much it sells for.

I love Mark Twain’s line: “I am sorry I am writing a long letter, I didn’t have the time to write a short one.”

Get to the point with your words, marketers. We’ll thank you…

So, now that you’re ready to be memorable with your marketing…what tips do YOU have to share?

Mar 03 2010

Brand vs. Model, Benefits vs. Features – How to Learn from Ford

What’s it like to build a brand in this modern age?

Ford Logos

I often hearken back to days of old — when I was in an operating company of a large financial services conglomerate*. Often, we’d hear something from the field: “hey, we’ve created this product, we need to sell it” or “this is a service that we need to roll out.” All of this needed to happen within the confines of a large, prescribed, and sometimes unwieldy brand architecture.

But it became a lot simpler when we’d ask the following two questions for context:

Are talking about BRAND or MODEL?

Are we discussing BENEFITS or FEATURES?

Let’s start with Brand vs. Model. “Ford” is the brand. (One that happens to be kicking some major bottom these days — probably for going against the grain.) You can see from the above photo that brand, obviously, is more than just a logo. The cars and their features change over time, sometimes mistakes are made along the way, sometimes there are breakthrough successes.

But each MODEL must support the overall Ford BRAND. Ford might mean “All-American” to some, could be “economical” or “reliable” to others, or “supercharged sports car” to others.

Gonna launch the Ford Edge? Or the Fiesta? Those are MODELS — the guess here is that the team behind the Edge said “what could we build that says ‘crossover’ but still embodies the Ford BRAND?” (Can you tell that, with each passing day, I want a Ford Edge more and more?)

So, if you’re building a BRAND, are your MODELS supporting the overall BRAND? Is each one of your PRODUCTS or SERVICES a MODEL, underneath an overall BRAND ARCHITECTURE?

Note: these questions work well, VERY WELL, for on- and off-line brands. Trust me.

What about the “Benefits vs. Features” question? Thanks, again, to Ford for hitting us upside the head with the BENEFITS vs. FEATURES on the Ford Edge Official Site. Screenshot, please…

Thanks, Ford

Did you notice something? While Ford could have hit you over the head with MPGs, with government ratings on fuel efficiency, scores on 0-to-60, etc., they didn’t. They put themselves in your shoes (as a driver, consumer, future buyer) and said, simply “Drive Past Gas Stations Faster.”

That’s putting BENEFITS before FEATURES. That’s asking the question “How will the reader/prospect/future buyer BENEFIT from buying our product/reading our copy/visiting our site?”

People of Earth, I’ve been guilty of not asking these questions, too. Feature: my site can do x, y and z. Benefit: visit my site and you’ll end up happier, more refreshed. Whatever.

There’s a little bit of empathy marketing here. There’s a little bit of agile marketing here.

But there’s a ton to learn from Ford here, too.

And from the Financial Services concern I worked for, where we actually would get pushback on BRAND vs. MODEL. And on BENEFITS vs. FEATURES.

It was great pushback, made us all stronger.

Try pushing back yourselves.

[*That large financial services conglomerate should be pretty obvious if you’ve Googled me.]

Feb 09 2010

$100,000,000,000,000 worth of email newsletter advice

“You’re kidding me, right? This can’t be real currency, is it?”

Yes, this is a picture of a 100 Trillion Dollar Bill. From Zimbabwe. Issued a couple years ago.

Now worth nothing, as hyperinflation meant that 100,000,000,000,000 didn’t buy what it used to.

What does this have to do with your email newsletter?

Quite a bit. Follow along, please…

Does It Communicate VALUE?

It’s highly possible that everything in your email newsletter is valuable to you. That would be great if you were talking to yourself; talking to yourself is the opposite of what your email newsletter is supposed to do.

At some point, your customer/client/prospect/scraped email address WILL MIGHT read your newsletter. Communicating value to them means giving them something they may not have thought of, some information they wouldn’t have found out without you, or news that is timely (or a new twist on someone else’s news).

Does It Grab Attention?

Admit it – a One Hundred Trillion Dollar Bill is rather attention-grabbing. However, this doesn’t mean your newsletter must be inherently clever or creative to grab attention. Attention could very well be talking about THAT THING that the client/customer/prospect/scraped email address needs to know RIGHT NOW.

AVERAGE: “The latest news from XYZ Associates.” I have little interest, unless I know you or own shares in XYZ Associates.

BETTER: “8 tips for a stunning Valentine’s Day meal.” Now you’re talking – you have my attention with something timely (5 days left, gotta get something), helpful, valuable. Odds of getting your email opened: much better.

Do I even WANT your Newsletter?

Props to @unmarketing for raising this issue today, as well as to @jakrose and to anyone else I can namedrop with.

Jason started this, actually, with a simple tweet, RT’d by Scott:

“@jakrose When I give you my business card, that does not mean I want to be added to your your crappy email newsletter. Kthx”

The quid pro quo here is mis-interpreted WAY TOO OFTEN. This is why we use systems like aWeber to confirm that someone actually wants our crappy email newsletter.

If you take the approach that the exchange of business cards equals the agreement to share emails back and forth, START with a quick note that says “hey, I’d like to keep communicating with you through our email newsletter.” PLEASE.

Do I even want your Zimbabwean currency? I mean, can I do anything with it? Is there value there? Sure, you got my attention, but…

Final thought:

Those ads on the radio for certain email newsletter systems make it sound like signing up for the free 60-day trial will end up ramping your business up to success levels attained only by mere mortals. You need a strategy for your BUSINESS first. Then a communications strategy to go with.

Then, maybe, just maybe, a newsletter will fit into your strategy. Or maybe not.

Whaddya think?