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

Shouting in Powerpoint

I tried to improve on Guy Kawasaki's 10-20-30 rule for presentations by making my font sizes even bigger than 30. Bigger size, less text, more impact and more chance of the point being remembered was my reasoning.

The problem is that if the font is too big, the audience can feel as if they are being shouted at.

So my learning is that it is alright to have titles in fonts slightly larger than 30 but do not have fonts that are too large (unless you are presenting to 80 year olds

C2B Marketing: Yesterday's tomorrow

Whatever happened to C2B marketing? That is the marketing of individuals and their services to businesses, rather than the other way round. There was some debate on the subject a while ago (see the 2005 article http://c2b.typepad.com/c2b/2005/08/the_c2b_revolut.html or http://www.magicomm.biz/blog/is-“b-to-c”-direct-marketing-being-replaced-by-“c-to-b”-social-media-marketing from 2008) but it does not seem to have taken off.

The articles talk about various drivers for C2B
- social networking sites and their use by businesses
- technology available to consumers (especially for production of digital content)
- open source software
All of these are driving C2B, even if there has not been enough awareness of the topic to make this yet a well known phrase.

For example, in social networking, increasingly brands are communicating online with customers and prospects, using Facebook, Twitter and other sites to ask for comments, monitor feedback and reply to issues raised. Meanwhile, individuals are posting their videos to YouTube hoping to create viral hits and monetise them with advertising, while news stories from "citizen reporters" are being posted to sites like Citizenspace and the best ones sold to traditional media outlets (an area I am particularly interested in due to the work I do for the AIB,the Association for International Broadcasting). As for open source software, I have lost count of the number of utilities I have downloaded recently, and I have even donated money to the most useful of them.

But there is one other trend that I have not seen mentioned in this context and which I think is an important factor in driving the true marketing side of C2B. This is the increasing number of people who are freelancing, working for themselves or in small companies or loose associations and who need to sell their services to larger organisations. Current economic conditions are forcing this on many and no doubt there will be a significant return to salaried jobs once the economies of the world pick up. But there is a young generation coming up who have seen the pitfalls of corporate life with job cuts and pension reductions (and will soon see deep cuts in public service as well). These will fuel a continued increase in freelance working, which will match corporations increasing reluctance to grow headcount and to move outside their core business.

These are people who need to take advantage of the marketing techniques that are now so readily available and which are cheap, in terms of the monetary cost, to use. They need to sell their services and to convince companies to retain them rather than all their rivals. What most of them do not know how to manage, however, is how to manage their individual marketing, which can be extremely expensive in terms of time unless you have a proper strategy to use the tools available. The tools are either expensive because you put in a modest amount of time, but obtain no results by failing to stand out from the crowd; or you do manage to stand out, but only by huge amounts of work to constantly blog, Tweet, post and comment.

But it does not have to be like that. Successful C2B marketing requires only three things:
- an expertise: good experience in a particular niche which you can demonstrate and talk about. Never mind if it is a very narrow niche, the key is to be seen as a knowledgeable resource.
- finding the right places to talk about your expertise
- regular communication

C2B marketing is key for more and more people today and I will blog more about the keys to success shortly.

Quantity vs Quality

Thomas Power in the video to which the title of this blog links, talks about quantity as input and quality as output. So he advocates building up thousands of people in your network, for example having thousands of followers on Twitter. From these, a small number of people emerge with whom you can do business and an even smaller number who become trusted partners.

The problem this approach brings is that your network then includes every one you have ever met or come into vague contact with (virtually or physically) which is great for broadcasting your general messages as widely as possible, but a clumsy tool for nuturing the relationships that have potential to become important. It also has the danger that you are swamped by input from all the connections. You need to be very disciplined or have very good tools not to be distracted by all the possibilities that your connections provide.

I propose the alternative approach of filtering before allowing people onto your networks. Or, at least, for your most important networking tools, pre-select for quality. For example, on LinkedIn, connect with those with whom you have some relationship so you can build trust with them.

Use blogs, Twitter and some social media sites, to comment, interact, post and come up with new connections. But keep one or more networks for the inner network you are nuturing (and who are nurturing you).

Nowism

The latest monthly briefing from Trendwatching talks about the trend for everyone to want things in real time - information now, goods now. They call this "Nowism" (they love their buzzwords).

Wanting everything now is often driven by greed and the desire for self-gratification but the article interestingly points out that some of the drive for instant information and feedback may also be a conscious choice for social media and spending time on networking rather than on consumption of goods with all the underlying worry that too many goods are causing great ecological harm.

It may be only a tiny part of the reason, but social media to save the planet definitely has a future.

Five Ways to Generate Keywords from LyrisHQ

A useful article showing you how you might find useful keywords in the long tail and so reduce your cost per click.

It shows how to check for keywords currently being entered, how to look for other possible keywords already on different websites and how to generate possible new keywords.

Some of the techniques mentioned use Lyris software (at least to implement them more efficiently) but most are generalised.

Worthwhile summary

Overused words

David Meerman Scott, using Dow Jones Insight, has analysed 711,123 US press releases from 2008 for gobbledygook i.e. words and phrases that do not mean anything.

He found 51,390 instances of the word "innovative". Although he does not say how many releases this relates to, since some releases may use the word several times, it is fair to assume that tens of thousands of releases use "innovative" to describe new services, new products or even the company behind them.

But just because the use of the word does not make the release stand out, does that make "innovative" into goobledygook?

I would argue that it is perfectly reasonable to use the word "innovative", if it is true.

It is a perfectly good adjective to distinguish the subject from something that talks about price cuts, re-organisation, customer wins, and many other important aspects of business which are not necessarily innovative.

The crucial thing is for the press release to be able to describe what the innovation is in a clear way that convinces readers that it is something new, and just as importantly, something significant.

Significant, that is, to the reader. If it is only significant to the company issuing the release, then it is not worth mentioning.

Chief Social Officer? No Thanks

An article in Business Mirror Online Space today talks about the four challenges social media poses for business. One of these is integration, and the article suggests (but does not endorse) the idea of a chief social officer.

The idea of such a post misunderstands how businesses should be using social media. It has to be integrated into the way employees work, as a way of communicating with colleagues, customers, prospects or suppliers. It is a rich tool to enable quick communication and feedback so as to deepen the understanding and relationships between the different parties.

So just as you do not have a chief email officer or a chief telephone conversation officer, you do not need or want a chief social officer. Someone has to provide and control the infrastructure and tools for social media - the job of an up to date IT department - but then it is a matter of training employees to use these, as you would for other tools.

Not that the training should be treated lightly. Social media is incredibly powerful in allowing quick, unvetted messages which have the potential to be broadcaset widely. So it is vital that everyone in a business knows what they are trying to say and what standards and ethics apply when using social media.

If your company has a good culture, social media is a fantastic way to enhance your brand since you can have many ambassadors for the culture. The key is the production of individual communications, which convey the personality of the communicator rather than a faceless organisation's carefully prepared messages, while at the same time reflecting the organisation's underlying principles.

Benefits from using Web 2.0 - McKinsey report

Interesting article from McKinsey who have surveyed companies asking what Web 2.0 technologies they have used and what benefits they have gained.

The majority of those surveyed reported significant gains in at least one area, whether they were using the technologies internally or for external communication. But the reported gains were nearly all rounded (e.g. 15% or 20%) which suggests they were not accurately measured. The one area where precise measurements were recorded was in increasing the effectiveness of marketing (for awareness, consideration, conversion and loyalty) so the respondents seem to be making use of available measurement tools.

It is worth reading the report to note the development of leaders who are using several technologies effectively and also the way that India is alongside North America as the region making the most use.

Hero to Zero Unless You Review Each Message

The damage done to the Obama's administrations reputation for digital excellence by the careless (or deliberate) sending of emails about health reforms to those who did not want them, reminds all marketers of the need to consider the audience before sending mailings, especially mass mailings.

The questions to ask are simple
1. Who am I mailing?
2. What is their opinion of me / my firm / my brand currently (e.g. are they satisfied customers, interested prospects, uninterested, hostile)?
3. What is the value of my mail to them and are they likely to react?
Questions 2 and 3 have to be answered for each distinct group identified by question 1.

The questions are simple to ask, and often not too difficult to answer. The difficult part is the discipline of thinking from the recipient's point of view each time without fail.

The issue is discussed in an AdAge article and makes an interesting contrast to another article on the same date which indicates that viewers of ads unsubscribe less often if they are given more information on how to do so. The message seems to be clear - be open with people and give them the choice. They will be tolerant of listening to you. Push messages at them without choice and they will complain and turn away.

Of course, the fallout is worse than usual if you are dealing with a highly contentious issue like US health reform.

Useless networking

I used to be a fan of the Ecademy networking service. It provided an online service to find and meet people as well as local groups for offline meetings. But after my local offline group (which I helped organise) fizzled out, I did lose interest but kept a free membership and had occasional interesting online exchanges.

Recently I have begun to receive more and more "Ecademy Contact Request" messages which start "person's name Was sending invitations to join their network on Ecademy, discovered you were already here and requests that you add them as a contact.".

I do not know the person who is contacting me and the mail gives me no incentive as to why I might want to meet them. Why would I bother to add them as a contact. Yes, it adds to my number of contacts which is prominently displayed on the site, but if I want to find new contacts, it is much better to search for people with relevant interests or skills, using a keyword search (which is a good feature of Ecademy).

Just trying to build up a large number of contacts, followers, connections is the wrong way to do networking (except maybe for a few celebrities). The contacts will mean nothing unless you have something of value or interest to say to them.

For the vast majority, we need to build up the value of our posts, tweets, mails, blogs and other communications. Once we have that, we can, of course, try shameless publicity to become known to a much wider audience. But there needs to be the hook so that the messages are not ignored just as I ignore my "Ecademy Contact Requests"

Creative industry

I was listening to a podcast of BBC Radio 4's "The Bottom Line" recently where they talked about innovation and creativity. The panel (James Dyson, Martha Lane Fox and Adrian Ringrose) pointed out strongly that creativity did not just belong in what we know as the "creative industries" but can exist and should be a part of all businesses.

This set me thinking about creative marketing. Of course, marketing is often creative. Each new campaign needs to be created from scratch and we marketers are constantly on the look out for new ways to communicate.

But just as creativity can exist in all industries and in all roles, so in marketing we can be creative in all the elements. From trying a different planning process (involve someone new, change the format) to tailoring messages for the recession or even for "green shoots of recovery".

How can you adapt your marketing creatively to a wet summer, an England Ashes win, stock market rises, Microsoft and Yahoo's tie up or a birthday in your team? There is so much raw material that can drive our creativity.

2 Cheers for Microsoft

I am usually wary of Microsoft because they seem to have dominant power, but I do use their OS and Office apps and appreciate the functionality they give - 1 cheer.

Today I realised just how useful it was to have one company providing all my office apps - and in the place of an internationally defined standard for these apps, how valuable it is to have a de-facto standard.

I am going to the Media140 event today (microblogging and impact of Twitter on news) with my AIB (Association for International Broadcasting) hat on. As I wanted to sign up for their Flickr group, I used my Yahoo account. But I also use Google (for Maps, Mail, Blogger etc) and so I have to scratch my head and see if I want to link data from the different apps and if so how. Lack of standards means more work - and everytime I try out a new app which needs a new user name and password, often with different conventions, the confusion increases.

At least I never have to wonder how to transfer Excel data into Word, or Word into Powerpoint. So a second cheer for Microsoft.

If I think hard, I expect I could even find a reason for a third cheer.

I'm a confused meerkat

A few years ago I was amazed and amused by the number of different companies trying to build share in the directory enquiries market after it was opened up in the UK. They all advertised their different services focusing almost entirely on the number to call and trying to make it easy to remember. There was little or no attempt to differentiate their service in terms of features or benefits.

Now I am similarly bemused by the different websites offering to compare insurance prices for me. They do try to explain their advantages over the competition (more comparisons etc) but once again the key aim is to make their website name more memorable to the viewer, linking it with strong images.

Is it worth it? How much money was spent on the different directory enquiry number campaigns and what was the return? Indeed, how many of the services still survive?

But at least all the different directory enquiry adverts were reinforcing the whole directory enquiry market so that a competitor's ad might have a knock-on effect for you. Whereas the different comparison sites run the risk of pushing people back to phoning insurers directly. "I cannot work out what all these different comparison sites are doing. They are all confusing. I will phone a reliable known insurance brand instead". Based on the directory enquiry experience, how many of the comparison sites will survive?