Marketer's Lab

Get Over Yourself - Connect and Listen

Welcome to my blog, hey great, enough about you let's talk about me.  Here's what I think about politics, here's what that good-for-nothing uncle of mine is doing, and here are some shameless plugs for my friends blogs where they'll be happy to tell you all about themselves, their jobs, their politics, that jerk in the cube across the aisle and why their favorite band is so much cooler than your favorite band.  If you're lucky, they twitter, so if the blogs about them aren't enough, you can stay up to date on what they're thinking while they wait in line at Starbucks, sit stuck in traffic or decide to provide some snarky commentary about their boss while sitting in a meeting.  Excited about spending a huge chunk of each day reading and participating in all this?  Boy, I sure am!  End sarcastic vanity blog riff...

Virtually every blog is a vanity blog to some extent, so I certainly cop to my own participation in all this.  The blogs that make me nuts are what I call the "top 10 things I love about myself" blogs.  You know what I'm talking about, I can't stand to read these self-indulgent blogs, but there's a massive number of them out there.   

"So Chris, nice to know about your annoyance with these types of blogs, but what does this have to do with marketing?"  Thanks for asking, here are a couple thoughts/things to think about:

- Blogs, Twitter and the whole family of social media technologies empower all of us to share our lives, perspectives and ideas in a way never before possible.  This is an amazing and very good thing.

- Like it or not, vanity/ego, like sex, is a marketing cornerstone. 

- Good marketing is building a relationship, and in any good relationship listening, not talking, is often the more important thing to do.

- Real, human connection - My wife's blog is a great example of this.  How likely is it that a stay-at-home mom in Utah would establish connections with Punk Rock Dad, a photographer in the Netherlands, a writer in Seattle and a variety of other interesting and engaging people around the world?

There are many funny, entertaining, enlightening blogs out there.  If you blog, try to keep the self-indulgent content in check.  For marketers, see social media for what it is, and what it isn't, and adapt your approach to this untamable, but incredibly exciting medium.

Timesuck 2.0

It seems like not that long ago there we were all drowning in email.  There were stories about declaring email bankruptcy and lots of suggestions for how to deal with the massive onslaught of messages.  I don't hear anyone boasting about how their inbox volume has disappeared so going out on a limb that email volumes haven't decreased.  Apparently the deluge of email wasn't enough, now we have this whole "Social Media" thing to find time for. 

To be honest, I find myself a little schizo when it comes to social media.  Me The Curmudgeon says its a giant waste of time, adding to the cognitive noise and time management stresses of each day.  Don't even get me started on Twitter.  Me The Social Media Evangelist believes in the power of connections, communities of interest, "micro-marketing" and the richness of the information and interactive fabric that is called social media.  I like to think I'm not alone in my conflicting attitudes, I sense a lot of marketers are underground with their doubts for fear they'll be characterized as old school (Marketing 1.0).

Curmudgeon or evangelist, social media "value" is based on how it improves our use of time.  Does it allow you to interact with a community around a specific topic faster than other alternatives?  Does it allow you to gather market, product or other insights more quickly?  Do you have the time to contribute to the collective in a meaningful way?  To benefit from much of what social media has to offer requires an intellectual contribution to the whole.   

"Begin with the end in mind" is one of my favorite expressions, not sure if its attributed to Yoda, Confucius or an old Franklin Covey Seminar, but good counsel in any case.  Your company has a blog, great.  Now what?  You've taken the plunge and started using a feed reader, great.  Is it doing a better job of gathering up more information you'll never read?  You're on facebook, what to do with all those new friends?  Before you jump into any social media effort, have very clearly defined objectives.

What we are talking about with social media is a set of engagement tools.  Used wisely, these tools represent an incredibly effective means of learning, sharing and collaborating with audiences large and small.  Used without setting clear goals or with unrealistic expectations on the need to contribute, they can do substantial damage and become a giant resource drain.   Be focused, be purposeful, contribute content of value and remember its all about time.

Test Your Web Site, No Homework Required

If you're not familiar with HubSpot's Website Grader, its a very smart tool that provides a quick assessment of how well your web site is performing on overall marketing effectiveness.  They use an algorithm that includes over 50 different variables to kick out a "grade" for your site.  The whole process is as simple as plugging in your URL, letting the tool do its magic and waiting to receive your site's score on a 1-100 scale. 

Along with the score you receive a nice little profile outlining how your site fared in a number of areas. Included are assessments of Metadata, heading summaries, image summaries, interior page analysis, readability level and even several off-page criteria like domain information, Google PageRank and indexing, inbound links, directory entries and a review of several social media dimensions.   (See a sample report).  If your site does particularly well and you want to brag about it, you can proudly display a website grader badge on your site like the one on the right in this post. 

One of the other features I found to be super useful was the ability to define a handful of competitors and see how well they ranked for keywords, traffic, inbound links and a few other measures.  They also store your report at a personalized URL if you'd like to access the report at a later date. 

Take the test, its quick, easy and provides real value that you can immediately put into action.   

Behold Upshot Institute

After months of hard work, rework, and plenty of late nights, Upshot Institute has gone from a great idea, to pseudo pre-launch to now a full-fledged, honest to goodness killer marketing resource.  If you're a marketing professional looking to stay sharp on marketing technology, Upshot Institute is for you. 

Behind the scenes at Upshot Institute are yours truly, my business partner Steve Gollob and a handful of free agent types working with us on development/production/etc.  The common bond is a commitment to providing marketers practical insights on what we consider to be the new tools of the trade. 

Upshot Institute is the result of one of those ideas that just wouldn't go away coming together with an opportunity to work with Steve, who shares both my passion for geeky, marketing technology stuff and the desire to build an organization that provides something truly unique and valuable. 

What does Upshot Institute provide for marketers?  A resource center that includes a huge vendor directory and hundreds of white papers, an ongoing series of podcasts and webcasts, and Upshot Institute research reports that address the marketing technology topics top of mind for most marketers. 

Head on over to Upshot Institute, explore a little and please let us know what you think. 

 

Social Media is For Closers

In the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, you might remember the scene where Alec Baldwin, the sleazy sales boss, tells his struggling sales team that the highly coveted Glengarry sales leads are only "for closers".  His character (Blake) is by most measures pretty ruthless, focused on closing deals at any cost.  While his approach is extreme, he touches on a principle most marketers are missing in our approach to social media impact. 

The kinds of social media measurements we tend to focus on are similar to what one might measure if managing the activity of a salesperson.  How many calls are made?  How many meetings are set up?  How many opportunities are in their pipeline?  Are they establishing rapport with the prospect?  Are they maintaining the relationship with the prospect?  All totally legitimate questions, but if you had a salesperson who was doing all those things well for a long period of time and never made a sale, would you consider them successful?  Probably not.

We tend to talk about performance measurement in terms we're familiar with; impressions, CPC, CPA,  click-thru, visits, conversions, etc.  We also talk about things like engagement, influence and authority as indicators of social media success.  At what point do we ask people to actually buy something?  Asking for the sale (via marketing) is not some shameful task only left to salespeople, its an organic element of the sales process that seems more awkward to omit than include.  So much of the current social media approach feels to me like rewarding the salesperson for building rapport, but never closing the sale.

Flashback to the dot-com days when sites were all about "eyeballs" as the measure of success, but most had a hard time paying the bills with eyeballs.  A great deal of the discussion and thinking around social media feels eerily similar to me but replace eyeballs with "influence", "conversation", "dialogue", "community", (insert social media buzzword of choice here).

Sales results are truly the ultimate ROI measurement for marketing, so ask yourself if you want the Cadillac, the steak knives or the other alternative? (This will make absolutely no sense to you if you aren't familiar with the movie, so watch the trailer link for this piece).