Warady's Riffs, Raves and Rants on Marketing

This past Saturday, two marketing pieces ended up on my kitchen table at home.

In the mail, an over-sized postcard arrived from American Express. With the headline stating "Nothing says thank you quite like free nights in paradise", the postcard suggests that the more friends that I refer to American Express, the more points I can earn. 

On the same day, placed on my front door from Comcast was a door hanger with the headline "Nothing says we want you back like $89.99!" They seem to want our business back after we switched to AT&T.

Nothing Says Thank You Quite Like Free Nights in Paradise

Nothing Says We Want You Back Like $89.99

Well, actually, there is something....

American Express, if you simply would have called me and said Thank-you for my 25 years of being a card member, that would go a long way. As well, you can apologize for reducing my credit line by $35,000 due to the "credit crunch" even though I have never once missed a payment, and have used my card to purchase over $1.2 million dollars of products, for which you have received ample fees.

Comcast, if you simply would have called to apologize for cheating us for all of the years that we paid you $163 per month, and offered to refund us the difference between that and the $89.99 you are now offering, we might consider coming back. All you have to do is say your sorry, that you realize how much you appreciate us as a customer now that we are gone and you wish you would have said thank-you sooner, and you feel badly that you screwed up.

When you have a marketing piece that starts with "Nothing says....", I bet something does say. I bet if you are willing to speak directly to your customer, whether by phone, by email, or using social media, I would suspect you will get a significantly better response than the 1 - 2% you can expect from a direct mail campaign.

Nothing says thank-you, better than saying...thank-you.

As you can imagine, I am constantly asked what the big deal is about Twitter, and why do people waste their time sending out meaningless messages. While I constantly find myself extolling the great virtues of Twitter, and defending its position within social media, to people who simply "don't want to get it", I find it difficult to find the right explanation to convert the non-believers into evangelists. That is, until I had an interesting experience occur the other day. Which leads me to this conclusion...

Twitter is like living in Mayberry....

Here's what happened. It was lunchtime in the city in which I have my office. Our offices are in Evanston, IL, home of Northwestern University, a town of about 75,000 people located just north of Chicago. I was walking down the street, and heard someone call out my name. When I turned, and saw someone walking towards me with an outstretched hand, to be honest, I simply could not place the face. While I meet a lot of people in my consulting work or my speaking, I'm usually good at remembering people. But this person did not look familiar to me.

When he reached me, he introduced himself, and said he recognized me from the photo on my Twitter page. He shared with me how much he enjoyed my Tweets, he gave me his business card, and he was on his way. While this has happened to me previously at business events, this was the first time it happened on a street corner during a random day. It was just like being in a small town, where everyone knows one another.

Like Mayberry, Twitter allows you to create a community of people who are interested in you, interested in what you have to say, and over time, you build a relationship with your community. While the relationship might start on-line, it easily can spill over to the offline world. Because Twitter allows you to interact in asynchronous time, and allows you to get to know one another through the relationship building based on trust, and level of interest, when you do meet face to face, the relationship is already in place. Twitter jump starts being social.

When my random Twitter follower walked up to me on the streets of Evanston, with a welcome hand, stating that he enjoyed what I had to say, I felt just like Sheriff Andy Taylor, walking the streets of Mayberry, saying hello to the town-folk, and providing a welcome "Howdy Stranger!" to the new visitor to his town.

Twitter builds trust, it builds interest in one another, it builds relationships, it builds community. It builds familiarity

It builds communities of Andys, Barneys & Floyds. It is our Mayberry.

Why do you think we, as humans, don’t listen better?

It’s interesting.

There are classes that teach reading.

There are classes that teach writing.

There are classes that teach speaking.

There are classes that teach better use of words.

There are classes that teach techniques of memory.

But as far as I am aware, there are not classes that teach us how to listen. Really listen.

Do we hear what people are telling us? Do we hear our customers, our employers, our colleagues, our friends, our children, our parents, our significant others?

Do we hear the marketplace?

They’re telling us what they want, but are we properly listening?

I’m not so sure…..

You've heard it from me before. If you want to rise above the clutter of all the other companies out there that are providing similar products or services such as those that you offer, you have to be different. You have to be unique.

Start with whip-yielding dominatrices. (Please don't ask me why I know what the plural form of dominatrix is.) Add slogans like "God Save the Cream". Place the retail store in one of the largest high-end retail locations in London, Selfridges. Finally, feature a male-targeted ice cream cocktail named The Sex Pistol, which is laden with Viagra and Absinthe ice cream, served in a pink water pistol that is ready to be... well, you get the picture, right? Welcome to the world of The ICECREAMISTS!

Yesterday I ran across a news report talking about the fact that the SEC (the college conference, not the Securities and Exchange Commission) wants to ban the use of all social media at their sporting events. It seems that they feel it is a violation of their profit generating network agreements if they were to allow fans to report on the events live via Twitter, post photos on Facebook, Flickr, or upload videos to YouTube.

Thus we have another example of people who simply don’t “get it.”

First off, and I talk about this a lot, so I apologize for repeating myself, but brand owners do not really own their brands. The consumers own the brands. If you have a brand, you can think it stands for whatever you want it to stand for, but the fact is, the consumer is going to determine the ultimate personality of the brand.

Therefore you are not really brand owners, but brand caretakers. You create the brand, you maintain the brand, you put the best product or service you can out in the marketplace, but then you have to allow the consumer to determine how the product is going to be used, where it will be used, and if they LOVE the product, the consumer will become a brand advocate and want to spread the word.

Which brings us back to the misguided bureaucrats at the SEC.

If the fans sitting in a football game are excited about what they see on the field, and want to send a Tweet to hundreds if not thousands of followers that they have on Twitter, or upload an exciting video via their iPhone, to their YouTube channel sharing the game experience, why in the heck would the SEC want to stop this? Why would they want to potentially quiet their brand ambassadors who desire to share their enthusiasm about the SEC brand with their friends? These people are influencers among their friends, and you should never want to muffle the voice of influencers. It makes absolutely no sense.

The fact is, the SEC has no control over what their fans can do via Twitter or any other social media network. And with this “ruling”, they have done more harm then good. They have tarnished their brand by trying to dictate how the brand experience can be shared.

Message to the SEC: People, the world has changed! Embrace it. Understand it. Use it to your advantage.

Good luck trying to police your fan’s use of social media. They, not you, own your brand.

When the economy is difficult, we all tend to run our businesses a bit differently.

Over the weekend, I went to see The Time Traveler's Wife. 

If time travel actually worked (and maybe it does, who's to say), and you could travel back in time, what would you do differently?

I love the mixed messages marketers send to kids.

Over the 50+ years of Barbie's existence, opponents to the Mattel product have always felt that it sent the wrong message to little girls who owned the doll. Their position has been that Barbie promoted the stereotype that if you had a killer body that was almost impossible to attain, with the smallest waist to breast proportions ever seen on a human, and you had California style blond hair with a slightly upturned perfect nose, you could get whatever you wanted in life. This includes a Ken-like man, with chiseled good lucks, saying absolutely nothing, with no male genitalia, who could make any woman happy.

I have a client meeting later today, and I've already been told that they want to know why they are not appearing higher on Google rankings. They want to discuss Search Engine Optimization, and how they can implement an SEO project to make certain that their company comes up on the first page of multiple keyword searches.

So I've been thinking about this over the last couple of days, and have watched a few speakers via the Internet to gain different perspectives, and here is what it I think it boils down to. 

If you want to improve your rankings on search engines, you need to do the following three things, and do them consistently:

1. Communicate - Never stop communicating with the marketplace. Keep talking. Every day.

2. Engage - When your customers are talking, either to your or amongst themselves, engage with them. Talk to them. Listen to them. Respond to them. Ask them questions. Answer their questions. Build trust.

3. Be Interesting - When you are communicating, when you are engaging, don't be boring. Don't speak corporate speak, talk to people like you were sitting next to them in your backyard, or as if you were having lunch with them. Have a conversation. Share your thoughts, your ideas, your fears, your challenges, your excitement, your passion, your love. Share yourself.

Do you think I'm over-simplifying things? Here's a test you can try to see if I might be right. Choose a search phrase that is meaningful to your business. Type it in to Google. I'll bet you that with 9 out of 10 search keywords, a blog, someone's blog, appears within the first two pages of results.

That's a blog where you should be posting comments.

That's a blog where you should be submitting products or information for review.

That's a blogger with whom you should be engaged.

That's a blogger with whom you should be building trust and communicating.

So you want to discuss SEO? Fine! But I am suggesting that we change the meaning of SEO from Search Engine Optimization to Significant Engagement Opportunities.

That's the type of SEO we all should be taking advantage of. Let me know what you think.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to be the 2nd day opening speaker in front of a great group of people. I was speaking at the National Association of Electrical Distributors' marketing conference. It's always great to be able to speak a group of marketers, because they really buy into the concepts that I like to share in my presentation.

My talk yesterday focused on the fact that the world is changing so rapidly, as is the way we market our businesses. While we all know that there are a plethora of Web 2.0 technologies that exist, my talk focused on how important it is to integrate these technologies into their own marketing plans at their respective companies.