How Coca-Cola's example can help end poverty

Today Melinda Gates was a key presenter at the TEDxChange event, "The Future We Make" and spent much of her presentation talking about how the campaign to achieve the Millenium Development Goals can learn from Coca-Cola. She had travelled around the world looking at development needs and visiting some of the poorest and most needy areas of the world - and everywhere she found Coca-Cola.

How had Coca-Cola managed to reach these areas and establish sales? Melinda identified three key activities

1. They ensured they had real time data and acted on it to adapt to local needs and what was happening on the ground. In contrast, too often development projects are only assessed at the end when it is too late to adjust course or even fine tune
   
2. They used local entrepreneurial talent, getting enthusiastic local people to act as distributors for them. Exactly the same point was made by Mechai Viravaidya later on when he described a campaign to make condoms available everywhere in Thailand, which shows that the same approach is sometimes applied in the field of development, although there is work to do to make it the norm.
   
3. They market Coke as an aspirational drink, whereas too often development goals and activities are presented in terms of things to be avoided or as necessities. This should be so easy to change, since people do aspire to be healthy, to be well-educated, to have jobs and to live in a safe, sustainable environment. We marketing people just have to do a better job of promoting the goals and putting them in terms that people are enthusiastic about.

I am not involved in marketing development activities but I am involved in the debate on climate change, through my work for the AIB (Association for International Broadcasting). The presentation made me realise how actions to limit climate change need to be marketed to those of us in developed countries in the same way - highlighting the ways we can create a healthy, sustainable, good environment for ourselves and more especially for our children and grandchildren, rather than thinking of the things we should give up.

Climate Change and Human Rights

This is a period when I am focusing a great deal on the interlinked subjects of Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) and climate change. The two are interlinked because climate change has a disproportionate effect on the poorest and those who have least resources to enable them to adapt (see a previous blog I wrote here) and so makes the achievement of the MDGs increasingly more difficult.

My previous post on this blog was about the MDGs arising out of my personal involvement with Save the Children but I am also heavily involved in climate change because of the professional work I am doing for the Association for International Broadcasting (AIB). They run annual awards for the best in international media. This year for the first time there is a People's Choice award, which I am running, where online viewers will vote for their favourite programme. The subject is "Best Coverage of Climate Change" and the short list has entries from the BBC, CNN International, Phoenix Satellite TV, Sky, the UN and VRT.

If like me, you are interested in climate change, you can be one of the first to see the short listed entries, vote for your favourite and share your choice with your friends and colleagues by signing up here.

You can also read my latest blog on theaibs.tv site on the subject of climate change and human rights here

Millenium Development Goals: Involving Different Constituencies

I attended a dinner hosted by Save the Children Fund UK on Thursday to discuss the Millenium Development Goals ahead of the UN summit later this month. I should note that the dinner was offered by a supporter of SCF and so did not cost the charity.

Attendees included those involved with SCF, politicians & journalists and the discussion covered progress to date on the MDG and what needs to be done to achieve the goals by 2015. Ten years since they were adopted, there has been signficant progress on the goals, more than most people expected, but on current trends most of the goals will be missed. What can be done to increase the momentum?

Different speakers talked of the challenge of involving more people who had not been touched or empowered by the process to date:

• business people investing in developing countries had an interest in educated, healthy workforces but did not relate to large government or inter-governmental programmes
• women could be a huge force for driving some of the required changes, but were too often seen as victims of underdevelopment rather than resources for change
• the faith communities, with their mixed record of sometimes providing enormous help but sometimes putting up barriers due to entrenched beliefs, had not been engaged enough in the underlining moral imperatives of the goals
• the younger generation, often idealistic and passionate about creating a fairer world and more sustainable lifestyles, were another group who felt little involvement with inter-governmental initiatives

At the same time, there were currently few charismatic leaders on the world stage who could drive through further change at governmental levels and the current economic climate made it seem unlikely that developed countries would substantially raise their actual giving (as opposed to their commitments) over the next few years. While a number of governments in developing nations had become committed to the MDGs, none of them seemed to have the position and authority to act as role models who would galvanise their neighbours.

It struck me that the slowing impetus at the governmental level together with the untapped potential of different non-governmental constituencies (businesses, youth, women, faith) calls for the MDGs to be pursued in different ways. They need to be made relevant to these constituencies and resources directed to empowering them to make changes. It is not changing the goals, but marketing them differently.

I make no apology for using the term marketing, since it is vital that the messages are put in terms that will galvanise each group and that all the different talents contribute in their own way to the overall aims.

IT as aid to being Carbon Neutral

Because of the work I am doing on promoting the AIB's People's Choice vote for the "Best Coverage of Climate Change" award, I have been looking at many articles and videos on the Internet that cover green and environmental issues.

I have just watched Mike Yourwerth from Meet The Boss TV being interviewed on Tesco's Green IT initiatives. He made two points I found particularly interesting for those of us involved in IT :

• green IT is not just about reducing the carbon impact of the IT itself but how IT can help the whole business to operate in an environmentally better way
• never forget the "I" in "IT". The technology is there as a tool to provide the information for whatever organisation it is serving, turning the raw data into usable, accessible, rapid answers to questions and information for decisions

All Consuming

I am in the middle of work to highlight the AIB's People's Choice award for "Best coverage of climate change". This is an international media award where entries from broadcasters all over the world are put on internet sites where they can freely be viewed - and then the viewers vote for their favourite.

The entries have now closed and lots of well known global organisations have entered. The shortlist is being prepared and will be announced shortly - you can to to theaibs.tv/peoples-choice to register for more information.

Currently I am working on the social media campaign to encourage voting among interested groups. For example, with UltraKnowledge (UKn) we are developing a climate change portal (climate.aib.org.uk) which automatically pulls in and indexes articles and blogs from all over the web.

The work is involving me following lots of websites and groups concerned with climate change and environmental issues. One of them is www.dothegreenthing.com. I really like the short video on their site illustrating the concept of "all consuming" i.e. not wasting things

Hope you enjoy it

Marketing Strategy: Two eyes, two lungs, one heart, one brain

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of "The Black Swan", argues for organising corporations more like the human body. The body has redundancy built in with two eyes, two ears, two lungs, two livers and so on. So corporations should have redundancy built in, especially today when their complexity and size increases the risk of failure and the world we live in is so complex that forecasts become more and more difficult.

This has made me consider how much redundancy needs to be built into marketing strategies for companies. We all know the dangers of reliance on one major customer: when things go well with this customer, your company can grow and prosper. But when the customer faces difficulties or suddenly a competitor threatens your relationship, you can risk losing so much business so quickly that your whole company might fail.

Now I work mainly with start ups and growth companies. Start ups begin by resembling single-cell organisms more than the human body; they do not have resources, either in time or in money, to build in redundancy; in fact they struggle to handle all the normal functions of a company.

But even they must think about what marketing channels to try and how to build out from the first customer. In fact, the necessity for them of trying things out and seeing what works gives them an experimental attitude which is ideal for identifying marketing and sales redundancy. It just requires that they do not stop when they found a suitable initial product set, marketing channel and first set of customers. They need to keep on experimenting to see if they can improve. Even if the pace of experimentation slows dramatically because of the need actually to service customers, they need to consider which of their early experiments were almost good enough and how they might improve them.

So for very small companies there may be less resources for building in redundancy, but a flexible approach and careful planning will mean that alternatives can quickly be put into practice if the main approach founders.

While building in or planning redundancy, it is worth noting that the human body has only one brain and one heart. Likewise companies need to have one core set of values and guidelines with one communication system to join the parts together.

Infographics

Yesterday I had a meeting with Andrew Lyons of Ultraknowledge. The main topics were the opportunities for making the archives of members of the AIB (Association for International Broadcasting, for whom I am currently working) more accessible and also the use of Twitter and other means of voting for the People's Choice award (best programme on climate change at the annual international media excellence awards run by the AIB).

But as usual with Andrew, the conversation whizzed off into lots of fascinating tangents with many interesting ideas popping up. Although I say they were tangents, they were nearly all relevant to the discussions but left us with a wealth of potential ways forward out of which we must pick the ones we have the resources to tackle.

One of the things I am very grateful to Andrew for introducing me to is infographics. I have been looking at informationisbeautiful, the work of Dave McCandless. Now I am a bit of a data geek (I remember numbers quite easily) but find that there is so much data about and it is hard to put into context. Consider just the financial world, with the sizes of government debts, annual budgets, savings, personal endebtedness and trade in bonds - the figures are often quoted but rarely do you see a good way of putting them into perspective.

It is not just figures that can benefit from more visual explanations, either. As people become more connected on the web and the social media tools become more powerful (they have been around for ages in various forms without being given the "social media" label until recently, but that is another story). so marketers need to understand the connections, who is saying what and who has influence. Infographics looks like being an important tool to help us.

Registering this blog with Technorati

In order for Technorati to note you as author of a blog, you have to go to their site and make a request to be registered as the blog author. Technorati then send you a claim token which you put into a post on your site.

In my case here is the token : J7CDZWYNXKZ4.

Now you go to http://technorati.com/account/ , login, go to your account and click on the Check Claim option. Technorati will then crawl the blog and respond by email confirming that they have found the token and will review the claim.

Building a website yourself

I have not blogged recently because I have been very busy building a new website for the AIB (Association for International Broadcasting) alongside defining and starting to implement an associated social media campaign. But I realise that I have a lot to say about my experiences of with website and social media tools.

The new website, www.theaibs.tv, is designed to highlight the AIB's international media excellence awards - The 2010 AIBs. The awards are for those in the broadcasting industry : content producers, broadcasting companies, transmission companies, technology providers and others in associated fields.

The idea for a separate website came about only just over a month ago and it needed to be in place for the launch of entries for the awards on the 12th April, so tools that allowed rapid development were vital. There were also limited resources and budget so it seemed an ideal opportunity to try out the seeemingly rich possibilities available with open source software.

I decided to use WordPress for the website, having played around with it a little beforehand. It may seem ironic to use WordPress which is a rival to Blogger, where this blog (currently) resides but WordPress has a few real advantages : firstly, althought it is a blogging platform by origin, it allows you to create a whole series of linked pages, including those without any comments (static pages), so that you can set up a proper website structure; secondly, it has a vibrant community of developers who offer thousands of plugins, widgets and other tools which add to the basic features a vast range of simple and sophisticated add-ons (including different visual appearances, SEO optimisation, links to social media to name just a few); and thirdly, WordPress can be run on your own website and is supported as standard by many hosting companies.

It took a lot of effort, but the site was up and running on time and is being constantly updated. Now I am reasonably technical (I used to do programming 30 years ago) but I think anyone with a modest technical capability could manage the same as I did. To start with, I bought the book WordPress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson. I did not read it all but as I started using WordPress, I dipped into it to understand particular concepts or for tips on how to make the best use of certain features. I still do use it and can recommend it.

A basic Wordpress site is easily recognised by the format of the pages (top title block, right or left hand column with list of entries, categories, favourite blogs, links etc). But there are thousands of "themes" available, which provide different visual identities that you can apply to your site. I chose the Sliding Doors theme by Wayne Connor because I really like the way the images expand to show the menu option chosen. Since installing it, I have found that I will need to do some more work to show sub-menu options in an attractive way. That is on my to-do list.

The last add-on that I want to talk about at the moment, is cForms II which is a powerful plugin that allows you to design forms for site visitors to fill in. It is very powerful but be aware that it takes some time to master. Currently I have a simple form on the website homepage for visitors to register for further news. But I plan to have more complicated forms for registration particularly for the People's Choice award and to gather feedback.

The People's Choice award will be decided by votes from those viewing online shortlisted programmes on the subject of Climate Change. Between now and September, the challenge is to build up an audience of tens of thousands who are interested and will vote. This is where the social media campaign is planned and starting to take effect. I will talk more about other WordPress tools and the social media ones in future posts.

USPs

We held a meeting last week of the Mayfield Business Forum (MBF). This is a networking group that I set up for people working in and around my village of Mayfield in East Sussex, UK. Many of us work from home for much or at least some of our time, so it is good to be able to meet up from time to time to share experiences and learn from each other. We have set up a small wiki for the group in case you want to find out more.

The main discussion topic last week was elevator pitches. Given that most of the members of the group work for themselves, this is an important skill given that they are the only people to can sell their products or services. I started with a small exercise where we wrote down what we knew of each other's businesses. Given that many of us had met several times and presented ourselves on each occasion, it was a salutory lesson how weak our understanding was of what other members did. It served to highlight how much a memorable elevator pitch could make us stand out from the crowd.

We had a useful discussion on the subject and a number of us tried out pitches on which the others gave feedback and suggestions for improvement. You can read more of the key points and the tips for a good pitch that were suggested on the Elevator Pitch page of our wiki.

But there is one element that I want to explore in more detail - USPs or "unique selling proposition". The idea is that every business should have one or more of these, which are the things that make your business unique and help them stand out from all the competitors who are in your field and seem to offer the same products and services as you do.

But companies often struggle to define their USPs and also to present them in a way that is meaningful to customers and prospects. I have seen many startups present business plans where the USP is either not unique (as proved by a little online research) or else some detailed technical design which does not make clear how it will help customers. For technology startups, defining the USP, especially when looking for funding, is difficult and requires more effort than is usually devoted to the task.

But individuals working from home have attributes that often make it easier to define a USP in presenting their elevator pitch : presence, locality and experience. The first of these two are normally used in reference to mobile phones but they apply here as well.

Firstly, presence which means simply that you are the person talking (and just as importantly, listening) to your audience, whether face to face or even on the phone. Most of your competitors are not there and you may even be the only person present with your skills (which is obviously true in the case when you are phoning to present yourself). It is the chance to pick up on new needs and priorities of your audience, by a short introduction and then listening to them talking about their business. New needs do not come about every day, so it is a matter of keeping in contact, which demonstrates your interest in them as well as reinforcing your pitch.

Secondly, being local may be an asset. This will not be true for people you contact online or by phone, but you will normally attend networking meetings that are in your local town or even, as in the case of Mayfield Business Forum, in your local village. Being able to say that you are easily accessible, easy to reach and even bumping into people at social occasions, can give you an advantage.

Thirdly, your experience defines your current capability. There may be others with 20 years experience in your industry, but you can tell stories that bring your skills to light. Stories are memorable and will stick in the minds of your listeners.

Two of the three attributes, presence and locality, vary from time to time and from presentation to presentation. They need to be adapted to the different audience, as do the stories you tell about your experience. So your USPs will change. But so they should. Elevator pitches are just hooks which encourage your audience to want to find out more. From them, you develop the conversations that lead to working together. After a short introduction, you should be listening and thinking about what part of your experience and skills can help match your audience's needs. This then tailors your conversation with them, just as hopefully you will tailor your product and service to their needs in selling to them.

Using Checklists in Marketing

I have just finished reading "The Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande and found it an inspiring read. My intereste was caught by the idea of how a surgeon used checklists to make significant improvements in the success of operations.

Checklists seem to be dull and constraining. Surely they do not apply to us, as professionals, who are constantly using our experience to find better and more innovative ways to tackle tasks? But if it can help surgeons, with all their skill and their environment of dealing with different complications with each patient, maybe it can apply to those of us in less life-critical occupations, such as marketing.

The book provides excellent examples and reasoning to show how checklists can be used in all types of work. Atul Gawande comes across the idea of checklists mainly from other industries, such as in procedures for airline pilots, and examines how they can be used in his particular field, surgery. He looks at examples in businesses ranging from building construction to restaurants.

One of the great things about the book is the precision with which the author determines why checklists work. There are a very different set of constraints for projects involving the construction of skyscrapers, which take years to complete, compared to aircraft takeoffs (and emergencies) which take seconds or minutes. But he finds a common set of rules for how to create checklists.

During the process, he struggles with producing a checklist for the World Health Organisation to use in improving surgery for all operations in all hospitals worldwide. The first attempt turns out to be completely useless, but he consults experts, such as Daniel Boorman from Boeing, who spends his life producing and improving checklists on which millions of airline passengers depend as a crucial component of flying safely. In the end he produces a checklist which is trialled in eight hospitals in totally different environments from Washington to rural Tanzania and improved results everywhere, on average by 36% - a stunning success.

Two keys to a good checklist are identified. Firstly, you have to choose the few vital steps to include which cover the silly omissions and obvious mistakes that can be made, but still make the user responsible for applying their knowledge and experience in the main tasks. Secondly, there have to be steps which ensure the involvement of everyone in the team and encourages communication of everyone's input.

These two steps seem really simple, and indeed many people dismiss checklists as unecessary because they cover what should be obvious points. But as Atul Gawande shows, without the discipline of checklists, things fall through the cracks - in fields such as surgery and building construction, this can be crucial to people's safety, while in general business it can lead to major errors and poor performance.

The book shows that checklists can be adapted to help in all types of work and I thoroughly recommend it as a business read, as well as one for personal interest.

Now comes the disciplined part : to apply it to marketing tasks. But not to replace our skill and experience in producing great and innovative solutions for our companies and customers, but to provide solid foundations for our work on which our creativity can flourish. Take the use of social media for example: a checklist can make sure we have checked for all the input about our company and communicated with all departments necessary to reply to customer ideas or concerns. Then we can use our skill to craft the messages to send and the campaigns to launch.

Visual marketing 101

The internet allows you to expand your contacts, to reach across geographic boundaries and to market yourself and/or your company and product to a target audience that can be in the millions or even billions.

But internet connections for networking or sales do not have the same richness of face to face meetings. There is no physical contact, such as maybe a handshake, and no visual clues as to how the other person is reacting. This puts much more emphasis on choosing the right words with which to communicate and being rigorous about asking for feedback.

But internet communications can be enriched by visual enhancements. Videos are becoming a tool that everyone can use.

But the first thing to do is always include a photo or avatar in your communications. Give the recipient a visual tag onto which to hang those word-borne messages you are trying to communicate