Looking Beyond Our Mentions

I'm exploring HootSuite right now as as replacement for TweetDeck. (For those of you who think I'm suddenly taking up bird watching, these are two different applications for managing your Twitter feeds and searches.) The differences are gratifying and at the same time difficult to manage. But there's one aspect of HootSuite that has poignantly reminded me why we need to stop focusing exclusively on our mentions and start focusing on our audience.

In both programs you can easily create pared-down lists of people to follow. But in TweetDeck the lists you create are private. So while I've frequently rotated individuals from the main stream in and out of pared-down lists, no one has really known that I was paying attention unless I specifically addressed one of their tweets. 

In HootSuite, however, the list function is directly tied to Twitter's own list API. This can be private as well, of course, but what's the point of that? So as I ramped up on my HootSuite test I started recreating my "tweetastic" list publicly for the first time. And the resulting appreciation totally floored me.

I've been a frequent critic of Twitter's list function, since following a list didn't result in any change to your stream. But with the way HootSuite implemented the API, suddenly I can follow lists and the lists I create have become useful to others.

But more importantly, the experience highlighted for me how important it is to let the people you follow know that you are paying attention. 

It's very easy in either HootSuite or TweetDeck to create enough columns that you push the general conversation of your follows out of sight. Many folks comment how they like the wider columns of HootSuite, but I immediately became aware that after just four columns my "Home Feed" — or the list with all the people I follow — was pushed completely off the screen of my computer. And in doing this, I became more focused on what people were saying about me or my brand. 

I think a lot of brands fall victim to this. Searching for brand mentions and responding isn't socializing. It's troll behavior. It's a defensive position, not active participation. And in many ways it negates the point of incorporating a social network into your marketing in the first place. 

From all I've learned about using social media in marketing efforts, it always comes back to cultivating relationships and advocacy. And responding with a thank you for a mention or a lame attempt at customer service after a problem is just scratching the surface of what relationship building is all about.

There's a reason I joke with folks on random topics and comment on cute pictures and support their own business efforts. It's because I actually care about people. And for brands to care, they need to stop thinking of Twitter, Facebook and the like as tactics and start realizing the real strategy is to embrace individuals with attention by whatever means necessary.

So whichever Twitter program I end up choosing, I will remember the lesson HootSuite has taught me: Customers (or in my case, listeners) want to be more than customers. So it's time to listen to everything they are saying.

Communicating At The Level Of Interaction

I'm a huge critic of cut and paste thank you letters and emails. They have to be done, I suppose, and it's good practice to thank your customers. But they rarely get read unless you're making some kind of offer (which really isn't a thank you letter at all, but a solicitation) and most of them are intolerably impersonal.

Then I got this email today:

Dear Our Most Valued Guest,

On behalf of our Team Hampton, we want to personally thank you for Recent stay with us at the Hampton Inn by Prime Outlet Mall , Ohio. We want All of our guests to be truly satisfied and have a comfortable stay. We strive to make all things right for our guest. We hope you will consider staying with us in the future. We appreciate your business Here at the Hampton Inn. We are working harder than ever to deliver Quality service to our guests. Thanks to Guest like you we know that we are on the right track.

Outstanding Team Hampton, By Prime Outlet Mall
740-948-9499

So alright, they lose points for that horrible salutation and the email came in a unreadable script font and yes, it's a stilted form letter. But all together it felt kind of good to me. This wasn't a faceless, corporate response to my credit card being processed across their books. This was a letter from the actual people I dealt with during my stay at a Hampton Inn.

Why did it affect me, when other emails from Hampton Inn regularly get ignored? For me, the answer was immediately obvious: The communication was at the level of my interaction with the company.

Too often big companies try to aggregate their communications for efficiencies in cost and management. But in doing so we lose touch with what the communication was intended to achieve. A thank you letter is something that people write to people, not what companies write to customers. So for a thank you letter to have optimal effectiveness, it needs to push down the chain and come from the sales associate, not the Vice President of Retail Operations. 

Thinking back to episode 108 of The BeanCast, this is why Edward Boches was so excited about Nordstrom. It wasn't because he was receiving communications from corporate, but rather because he was receiving personal tweets from a sales associate who was letting him know when new shirts arrived. Communications that are at the level of our interaction with a brand simply mean more. And the bigger a company is, the more important this becomes. It gives a face to the facelessness of big operations.

Yes, it's more complicated and yes you may have to give up a bit of centralized control. But in the end this unbranded, hacked together communication from a local manager is the only email from Hampton Inn (and I've received dozens because of my recent travels) that I haven't deleted immediately. There's some food for thought.

Sometimes They Just Want Toasters

Listener Marcus Fox brought up an interesting point in the BeanCast forum last week. 

After hearing our discussion about loyalty in episode 108 of The BeanCast, he reflected upon his father. He told a story about how his dad would drive out of his way to buy petrol from a certain brand, just because he could earn a set of drinking glasses for frequent purchasing. I invite you to read it for yourself.

Now the jury is out as to whether such behavior is "loyalty" or just "incentivized purchasing." But it did remind me of a story from my own marketing past.

It Was All A Joke

A bank my agency was helping back in the 90s (yes, I'm old) wanted what every bank wants: new checking customers. DDAs (demand deposit accounts) are the holy grail of banking. A checking customer is the most locked-in type of client. We switch banks for loans or credit cards without thinking, but moving our checking account is a hassle we rarely attempt unless we are moving to a new state where our bank doesn't do business. And that mythical place, my friends, becomes more rare with each bank merger. So when I say a bank wants a checking customer, it's kind of like a 15 year old with unfiltered Internet. Need I explain?

As is usual when a bank pursues new checking customers, this particular bank was willing to pony up some significant cash to sweeten the deal. A $50 bounty even back in the 90's was not a rare thing, so that's what we were given as an offer. We felt good about it, of course. It was competitive. It was desirable. And we felt like we could secure a fairly good response.

In fact, we felt so good about this offer that we felt compelled to poke a little fun at offers from the past. So the mail piece that was developed featured a choice of either a toaster (the ubiquitous joke of banking offers) or the cash. It was all tongue-in-cheek and designed to show just how much we wanted the customer, contrasting this lousy offer with the real one to make it look that much better.

Then the toaster orders started coming in. Not just one or two. Hundreds. 10 to 1 in favor of the toaster.

Mind you, this was a joke offer. We didn't even have more than a couple toasters on hand, purely to fulfill the inevitable pranksters. But the toaster offer clearly won the day. So off we went to the discount stores to secure as many toasters as we could get our hands on.

The Importance of Gifts

I've often wondered about this incident. I certainly still believe that the cash offer was solid and would pull better in most situations. But why did the toaster do well in this case? My only answer is that giving away an item is more than an incentive — it's like receiving a gift. And people like getting gifts. It makes them feel special. It makes them feel known. 

I think it all comes back to why you don't hand your wife cash for her birthday. (At least not in healthy marriages.) It may satisfy the minimum requirement of gift exchange, but it doesn't show that you care. And that's the real difference a "gift" offer can make.

Zappos could just spend lots of money on incentivizing purchases with discounts and promotions. But it means more when they send a free pair of shoes or refund on an item they don't even carry. It says more about their character than a sale ever could. It says they care.

It's why Gevalia still gives out coffee makers instead of discounts. A good coffee maker is the last mile for selling a lifetime of coffee through the mail, and it enhances the value of the real offer. It says, "We understand that what you really want from us is a good cup of coffee."

What "Free" Really Means

We talk about how "free" is the most powerful word in marketing and yet we forget why it works. It's not because people don't like to pay. It works because we take time to figure out what the customer really needs in that specific instance and we fulfill that need. It works because giving the right gift builds relationship. And if done right, it builds brand experience.

I think we've lost sight of this basic truth. We don't think of the word "free" as meaning a gift anymore. We now use the word to mean "give away the product" or use it describe a crippled demo version of our application. None of that is free. It's just another way of giving away $50 to incent the customer into spending money with us. It's another way of saying "discount."

We've exchanged "free," the most powerful word in marketing, for "cheap." Why? The answer is simple. It's easier.

When you discount you can still make your numbers for the quarter and drive sales. You can still create repeat purchase. And you don't have to waste time figuring out who your customer really is. All it takes is the knowledge that everybody wants to spend less. You don't need focus groups and research to know this. It's a given.

Some might argue that's enough. After all, response is all you need to justify a program. But I fear it's also a dangerous shortcut when overused. It's the road to commodity and reduced margins. And it doesn't build a brand identity or customer relationship. 

So why do toasters work better sometimes and cash offers work better at other times? Every customer audience is different. But it's worth answering the question for your own audience. Because even though we've become very sophisticated at capturing the sale, most of us are still terrible at capturing the heart. So maybe it's time to throw in your own version of a toaster offer and see what happens?

Does Viewership Equal Buyership

Over the last two shows we've talked a lot about the relevance of TV ads. And it always comes back to the fact that TV is still the dominant media and so it's still the most reliable way to reach the biggest audiences.

But in an email discussion with Mitch Joel after this past week's show, I started to wonder, "Does audience size even matter anymore?"

Think about it. Even though the recent Nielsen three-screen report shows that TV is still getting the most eyeballs and that co-viewing (surfing and viewing at the same time) is hot, does that mean that TV is still an effective way to reach folks? Some might argue that co-viewing says that less ads during the program and more ads online would be a smarter strategy, because that's where the audience is interacting.

Then there's the study by Xyte Research that we covered in episode 107. If we can believe the data, the disproportionate level of "word people" in advertising, coupled with the demands of messaging blocked into 30 second increments, makes it near impossible for ad professionals to communicate effectively to the bulk of our audience via TV ad units.

And of course there's also a point brought up by Eamon Boyle from The Martin Agency. In episode 61 (here's the specific clip from a Fast Takes episode), Eamon pointed out that his research was revealing that most of a typical media buy is completely wasted unless the ad unit is run at the beginning of a show. People just aren't paying attention to ads during the middle of a program.

There's only one conclusion I can draw from all of this: mass market TV advertising simply doesn't work as advertised.

The Flawed Promise

The promise of TV is that if you want your message to reach the widest possible audience, you need a national broadcast TV buy. And big brand successes are held up as proof that it works. Trouble is, these successes don't happen in a vacuum. Given that budgets are nearly limitless at this level, success is not being achieved via TV, but with ubiquity. The message of the biggest brands is everywhere, so of course the TV buy is "working." The name is already recognizable. The message and promise have already been communicated. The TV ad is just there to cement that recognition or expand that promise. But in most cases the ad unit itself is not achieving anything except providing an entertainment and providing a reminder.

But take away that scale of ubiquity and the TV ad does very little. Because the audience can't digest enough in those 30 seconds to truly understand that brand and make any decision worth making. So it doesn't matter how big your audience is. A brand-building ad in a vacuum is quickly forgotten. The challenger brand would do better to either be aggressive on offer and forget the brand (Denny's free breakfast, anyone?) or plow the money into much more targeted efforts like search marketing or beefing up more interactive experiences that encourage engagement with the brand online or in person.

We in advertising need to come to grips with the fact that people don't understand what we say — they understand what they experience. So the more we give them experiences with our brand, the more they will care about what we say. 

And let me be clear that this is not an anti-TV rant. But TV advertising's role needs to be re-imagined with an understanding of how brands are really built. They aren't built en masse. They are built one customer experience at a time.

We Are Not The Entertainment

I've always had one simple, guiding rule in evaluating creative effectiveness:

Make the idea about what you're selling.

You'd think that would be a given. We're in marketing, after all. We're selling stuff. But time and again I would get concepts on my desk that were highly creative, very much attention getting, but did not pay off the connection to the product or service until the last panel. 

As an art director friend of mine used to say, "That's a long way to go for a roast beef sandwich."

In advertising we are often victims of a common misconception: We think of ads as entertainment. And that's a problem, because almost no one else does.

Please take note that I didn't say, "We think ads can be entertaining." Nor did I say, "We think ads are funny." Ads can be entertaining and funny, and lots of people can like your TV spot or mail package or web site for its entertainment value. But where we can go wrong is when we start thinking of the ad as the entertainment itself.

Think how many marketing pieces or commercials you see or hear that are beautifully created, story-telling vehicles, yet have only the flimsiest connection to the products being sold. (I don't need to name names — if you're in the business, you know plenty of examples.) Sure, they can be captivating visually and the stories can be heartwarming, but as we talked about during episode 107 of The BeanCast, people generally aren't paying close enough attention anyway. So it's likely that no matter how interesting your ad is, if the idea isn't somehow centered around your product or core promise of your service, your audience isn't making a lasting memory connection between your ad and your product. 

I'm all for better, more entertaining ads, but this penchant for wanting to be the entertainment, rather than be the sponsor of the entertainment, is making too many ads lose focus. It may be more difficult to maintain entertainment value when making an ad's basic premise center around the product being sold, but ultimately it's a better stewardship of the client's dollar. 

It takes very talented people to write a sitcom on network TV. And I love people who can create fabulous works of art. I have the deepest respect for people who can generate entertaining or thought-provoking work like that. But advertising is a different animal and, in many ways, can be much more complicated. So please, let's agree to just stop settling on the ad with the funniest punchline. Let's at least try to work toward an ad that captivates people more toward your product than your idea.

And I totally expect that people will disagree on this, so I invite the debate. But please at least take time to think about this before you respond. I'm advocating for more creative ads, not less. I just think our creativity often needs to work a little harder for the brand it represents. I'd love your thoughts.

Why Wawa Gets It Right

Gottahava Wawa!

Before I start this, complete disclosure: I do not work with Wawa Food Markets

, but I am a HUGE devotee of their concept. I grew up in Philly during their rise, and to this day I can barely resist the urge to pass one by while driving. From the food, to the product offering to the in-store experience, they have always captured my heart.

So given all that, it's no surprise that I became a Facebook fan of the brand. What is a surprise, is to find out that this mid-Atlantic convenience store chain does social media every bit as enthusiastically and effectively as they deliver custom-built hoagies.

I could wax poetic on everything they are doing right, or pick holes in the places they are lacking, but really that wouldn't be very social of me. So instead, I encourage you to check out their Facebook page and see for yourself what's going on there.

Sure you'll find lots of posts and pictures from events, discount announcements and coupon offers, and a world of other activity from the brand. But ignore that. Look at the rest of the page. It is literally FILLED with user activity. People comment on almost every post. Folks share their own pictures from events. People offer suggestions and ideas. It's literally the holy grail of social media — it's a community. 

For a convenience store chain!

If anything proves that social media can be effect for just about any brand, Wawa's effort certainly makes a good case.

Now clearly there is more at play here than just a Facebook effort. The brand has created a promise that is carried out in everything they do, from products to store to advertising. They built loyalty before they ever dreamed of social media. But kudos to them for recognizing Facebook as an optimal way for them to interact with their customers and allow that devotion to be made public. 

And if the brand is listening, I would gladly accept a special delivery of a roast beef hoagie with white american, extra mayo, lettuce, tomato, oregano, salt and pepper, and banana peppers, with some TastyKake lemon pies for dessert.

Be Useful

What would happen if you people stopped cold calling and started being useful for a change?

I was sending an email to a prospect recently when it struck how different what I do is from what I receive in my inbox or get over my phone. You know the drill:

ME: Hello, this is Bob Knorpp

THEM: Hello? Is this Mr. Bob Krop.

ME: I already said this is Bob KNORPP

THEM: Oh, hello Mr. North. Do you have a few minutes to talk...

ME: *CLICK*

There's nothing quite like a cold call to say, "I have no interest in knowing anything about you until you say you're willing to spend money with me."

But how different that call becomes when it works like this:

ME: Hello, this is Bob Knorpp

THEM: Hi, Mr. Knorpp, this Tim Dunst. I'm so glad I reached you. I do a lot of competitive research on the digital space, since my company sells email analytics. And I came across a story that has a lot to do with podcasting's role in marketing. Not sure you'd be interested, but I'd love to pass along the link.

ME: I'm not really in the market for email analytics at the moment.

THEM: That's okay. I figure if I can help you now, maybe when you do need something you'll call. But seriously, there's nothing attached to this. Just thought you'd be interested.

ME: Okay then, sure. I'll take a look at the link. Here's my email.

I don't need to point out all the advantages here, do I? Research on me, interest creation, relationship building — this approach does it all. And no, he didn't get the sale. But how many cold calls are immediate sales? What he got was almost as good. He planted the seeds of relationship and moved me quickly out of the cold call wasteland into the qualified prospect arena.

Which all brings me to my real question: Why doesn't marketing do more of this across the board?

We have the ability to get that granular with our targeting if we want to. Not always, but we can at least incorporate it somewhere in the plan. And we have the ability to message individuals more personally — at the very least we can bucket them in groups and make the message relevant to their psychographics in equal proportion to their demographics. And we have the creativity to make our offers on long-lead sales more about usefulness to needs today, rather than just pushing for a signed contract.

I've said it many times before — go for the little "Yes." Give them something they can say yes to today and then keep them on the yes trail. That's how marketing delivers better leads to sales and how sales delivers signed contracts to accounting. It all starts with how useful you are to me today.

Creativity Vs. Formula

I've been stewing on a question Ben Kunz posed on Twitter last week: If advertising works, why don't marketers simply replay old media plans and ad creative?

As would be expected, the question generated some lively debate about the role of creativity and the need for "freshness" in advertising. Many great points were made about how the mind needs to be "surprised" to pay attention and that new and unexpected communications are required to shock the audience into embracing your message.

I agree with much of what was said. Running the same plan and the same targeting and the same creative year in and year out is bound to generate diminishing returns over time for most businesses. That's why adjectives like "nimble" and "agile" are always being applied to business today. You need to respond to a constantly changing market with messaging and placement that is meeting your customer's needs.

But is this always true?

The Roto-Rooter Factor

As we were debating all this, suddenly a jingle came into my head:

Roto-Rooter, that's the name,
And away go troubles down the drain.
Roto-Rooter!

If you played the link, it's absolutely clear that they've been running a version of the same jingle for 50 years. The plan is simple too. It's usually an ad buy that runs during weekend or late-night programming. Nothing changes here. And presumably it's been very effective.

The point is that change and freshness in our marketing is not always appreciated by the consumer, nor is it always necessary. Using Roto-Rooter as an example, we see a service that you may use (hopefully) not more than once or twice in a lifetime. There's no need to "shock" a customer into paying attention so you're top of mind the next time they go to the store. You don't need to come up with fancy promotions and funny ads that they can mentally reference when they see your beer in the display case. What you need is that jingle, so ingrained in the minds of individuals, that when the one time in a customer's life rolls around where hair balls have backed up the main drain from the house they will think of nothing but that song and call a Roto-Rooter plumber.

A Balancing Act

Agencies and their clients tend to evaluate their stature and effectiveness by the level of creativity they bring to the table. It's all about the "next big idea" and forward thinking rules the day. But the best agencies know that behind the scenes there is a constant balancing act between what must stay consistent and what needs to be refreshed. A solid brand requires some things remain familiar. Whether it's a logo, a tone of voice, a tagline or a cute character, a brand depends on this equity being built over time. 

Where some agencies and their clients get off track, however, is when the pressure to be "new" outweighs the need to establish consistency. Some products and service simply demand endless repetition. Think of all the different ad campaigns churned out in the pest control space over the last few years. They've had robots and superheros and talking walls. Now try to match the ads to the brands. I don't know about you, but the only name that comes to mind is Terminix, because their name says, "Terminates" and "Termites." I can't tell you which ad is theirs for certain. 

Now some might say that my lack of differentiation is because the ads in this space aren't good. I would disagree, though. The ads have all be excellent. It's the audience attention that is lacking. We simply don't like to think about pests until we need help with getting rid of pests. So no matter how creative the ad is, we simply aren't paying that much attention to the message.

So looping back, this is a perfect example where repetition would serve better. Sure, it gets old and boring and will probably be mocked. It certainly won't win awards or secure that next marketing post at a bigger brand. But it would work. Because repetition here would solidify a name in the customer's mind so that the next time they need you, they will think of you first. 

And this doesn't just apply to small, local market services like plumbers and exterminators. This is also why car spots always end on a shot of the face plate or why McDonald's always has the golden arches on a field of red. It all comes down to finding that right balance between the "new" and the "familiar."

So my question for you today: Have you found the right balance in your marketing? If not, then it's time to re-evaluate and make sure your message is not sacrificing brand equity for a white washing of creative self-satisfaction.

The Simple SEO Tricks We Forget

I know I'm supposed to ask for inbound links. I know that it's important to search engine optimization to have lots of inbound links. And I've been pretty good about asking for inbound links. But while attending Lee Odden's session at theMarketingProfs B2B Forum, I was reminded that there's something else we all could be doing.

Are you getting anchor text juice along with your link?

This is why I am not an SEO expert. It's also why I value them and recommend them to my clientele. I've been simply asking for links, when I could be:

• Making it easier on folks by giving full code that just needs to be dropped into a post
• Providing specific keywords in that code that could make the inbound relevant
• Double the benefit to my site with each inbound
  

Here's what we're talking about. Instead of asking for just a link, like !"http://beancast.us"!, consider providing the following:

!<a href="http://beancast.us">The BeanCast | The Best Marketing Podcast Anywhere</a>!

By doing this, you get both the link and the anchor text you are trying to optimize so that the search engines sees you not only getting an inbound link, but also someone specifically linking with reference to your keywords. Brilliantly simple and I feel foolish for not remembering to do this.

And that's just the half of it. It also makes for a great way to enhance links to useful content you provide on third-party sites like YouTube. Say you're offering a typical YouTube embedding code. The video would get the view, but your actual site gains no benefit. But now you add a link and anchor text to it and suddenly everything changes.

For example:

!<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/EnBoltbzQns&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/EnBoltbzQns&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br><a href="http://beancast.us">For more content from The BeanCast Marketing Podcast, click here.</a>!

You'll notice I tacked on a link and anchor text below the YouTube embedding code. Now that video they embed will also include a link back to me as the creator of that video and be optimized with keywords.

It's always the simple things, isn't it. Thanks, Lee, for the reminder. Now I will go wash the egg off my face.

What Are We Measuring?

There's been a push recently to "hold social marketing's feet to the fire," and in many ways I agree. It's time for the discipline to grow up and start being guided by clear objectives and definable results. However, as we do this I think it's important that we develop metrics that are suitable to the medium.

I've been telling a story recently that I heard while at the Russ Reid Food Bank Development Conference. One of their clients (I won't say who) was continually irritated at their NPR buy. By all measures it was a catastrophe. There was next to no response and it cost a fortune. By every metric she had at her disposal, the program simply didn't work. But every time she killed the buy, EVERY OTHER PROGRAM WENT DOWN. 

I agree that social marketing needs to be accountable, but I often worry about us destroying it with old-school tactics and evaluating it with old-school measurement. 

We need to look not just at the sales social can directly bring us, but also how it enhances sales on a 
secondary basis. 

We need to be doing more than measuring the program. We need to be measuring the path a customer takes throughout his or her life cycle. Otherwise, just like the NPR example, we could be killing the one thing that makes people pay attention to our real selling efforts down the road.

My thanks to Elizabeth A. McCaffrey for bringing up this discussion over on Linked In. You can find the thread here.