Category Archives: Marketing

Messaging Bloggers: Doesn't Work

Posted on by David
Reply

Advertising Age has a great article on why marketers must really understand blogging before they engage in that space: Resist Corrupting Blogs With Messages. Those who start sending press releases to bloggers will only incite ridicule, if anything.

So, if marketers enter the blogosphere by messaging, they will stand out like an ad on a birthday cake. Messaging simply won’t work in the blogosphere because bloggers have gotten too used to the sound of honest talk with other customers. Worse, messagers will suffer perhaps irreparable harm to their reputations. Besides, blogs are much more interesting than marketing messages.

The opportunity is not for marketers to pick off the chickens one by one but for marketers to unlearn what they have spent so long teaching themselves. The blogosphere is a vibrant human conversation. If marketers can learn to enter that conversation as humans first, talking honestly about what they care about, identifying themselves and exposing themselves, then they will be welcome in the blogosphere. But, of course, that means they cannot enter it as marketers.

Purple Search

Posted on by David
Reply

Google has posted a video of a talk that Seth Godin, my favorite marketing guru these days, gave to Google employees recently. It is a synthesis of material from many of his books and is great stuff. Seth has been following up with several blogs posts, going into more depth on points he discussed in the video.

I spotted this via about 30 feeds I subscribe to. When something shows up multiple times in several feeds in a short time frame, you know there is something to it.

Usability and Branding: You Can Have Both

Posted on by David
2

Kevin Holland provides a thoughtful response to my critique of the Chiptole web site. Here is his summary:

David raised a very good point about the importance of making key functionality usable. I’m just saying it’s not the only point. The purpose of a website is not just to make it easy to find things. It’s representative of the whole experience offered by an organization or company. It is, in fact, your organization. As we are giving our organzation’s website a much-needed redesign, that point is very much on my mind.

I don’t disagree that the web can be an extension of your brand and/or experience for your customers. However, I think you can have both usability and brand consistency (whatever that may mean to you) with a little thoughtful design. Chipotle fails in this area, I still believe.

In fact, Kevin’s post actually contains the core of my rebuttal. He discusses the experience of going to Chipotle as part of their brand: simple, easily understood food selections; rapid service; and a tasty product. All in all, a highly ‘usable’ restaurant experience that is presented in a ‘hip’ way. Why can’t the site mimic this core part of their brand while being hip at the same time? Answer: It could without having to limit its usefulness by burying key features under gee-whiz flash animations.

See Apple’s web site for an example of a company that makes its big margins on the hipness of its highly usable products. No flying iPods, you’ll note.

In reality, this discussion is a bit of a shot in the dark, since we don’t know what Chipotle really wants their site to contribute to the organization. I do assume that selling burritos is in there somewhere, however.

It would be interesting to see a survey of their web site visitors, asking why they came to the site that day. I would bet a free burrito that the single biggest reason is to find a restaurant and/or place an online order, not to see what this hip burrito experience is about. I don’t see how an organization is doing itself any good if the branding gets in the way of providing core services.

Nielsen on the importance of converting search engine ad traffic

Posted on by David
2

Jakob Nielsen has posted a short article you should read about the importance of converting search engine advertising traffic: Search Engines as Leeches on the Web.

Search engines extract too much of the Web’s value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.

Worth a read if you are using advertising on search engines to drive traffic to your web site.

Rolling Support Forums Into Customer Support Escalation

Posted on by David
Reply

David Weinberger had an interesting experience with Logitech’s support forums:

I posted a question to the Logitech customer forum because my new MX1000 mouse seems to pull downward— I have trouble getting it to point precisely where I want it, so I’m doing a lot of mis-selecting. Today I received an auto-mail message from Logitech telling me that they’ve noticed that no one replied to my question, so they’re escalating it to a human Logitech support person.

What a wonderful idea. I always recommend to my clients that they have their staff engaged in any communities that they host (which derives directly from David’s writing in Cluetrain Manifesto). Auto escalating posts that have no response in x amount of time is a brilliant idea. It gives the community time to serve itself and then makes sure they get a response from staff if the community is unable or willing to address the question.

Very simple but it makes sure the person who posted the question feels like someone is listening, which is a very powerful experience (as is the opposite if no one replies).

Conference vs. Unconference

Posted on by David
16

I’ve been thinking lately about how an unconference style event for an association could work. I’ll be posting some ideas on that later on. I thought it would be good to start by comparing the characteristics of conferences and unconferences. So, in no particular or meaningful order, here is my initial list:

Conference Unconference
Attendees Participants
Exhibitors Participants
Recruiting speakers Recruiting participants
Content planning Content facilitation
Direct marketing Word of mouth marketing
Handouts Wikis
12 month planning cycle 12 week planning cycle
Sponsorships Donations
Once a year As often as needed and desired
Large budgets Shoe-string budgets
Maximize value for organizers Maximize value for participants
Best practices Innovation
Top down Bottom up
Wisdom of experts Wisdom of crowds
Magazine coverage 2 months later Live blogging/podcasting
Slides Stories
Panels Conversations
Best practices Practicing
Hierarchy Networks
Directive methods participatory methods
Participants Contributors/creators
Speakers Conversation starters
Sharing information Learning collaboratively
Instruction Discovery
Best learning in the hallway It’s all hallway!

I’m sure a lot more can be added to this but it’s a start.

I also just created a Wikipedia entry for unconference. I was surprised it didn’t exist yet.

Update: Added a couple more items suggested by Rich Westerfield. (I changed Powerpoint to Slides.)

Update 2: Added several more contributed in the comments by Nancy White and Jeff De Cagna. Thanks Nancy and Jeff!

On Marketing and New Conference Models

Posted on by David
1

Rich Westerfield posted recently about how you might use a pay what you feel model for meetings. He raises this point:

But we’re forgetting something:  cash flow.  We often need that early registration cash flow to fund the final mailings and pay for some of the onsite work.  For many small and some mid-sized events, B/E doesn’t happen until the final couple of weeks when 50% or so of registrations are in. 

I think this misses a point about some new models for meetings that are currently evolving: they don’t use traditional marketing. They can’t afford it. These new meeting models focus on word of mouth, attracting opinion setters as early registrants and using lots of social tech (blogs, wikis, etc.). I doubt that the BlogHer conference has done or ever will use a mass paper mailing to attract participants.

You can’t just blow-up one aspect of a meeting and expect to have the rest of it be business as usual. The entire enterprise has to be re-concieved.

Doc Searls has a good article on unconferences, which is a new way of holding meetings and letting the participants drive the content of the event.

I just did a presentation for the KCSAE yesterday and unconferencing was one of the topics I covered. I think there is a lot of potential in this model for associations and I’ll be writing more about it in the near future.

I’m not trying to pick on Rich with this post, he is a constant source of new ideas for meeting marketing. His post just triggered something for me that I wanted to write about. Thanks, Rich!

Using the Bottom of Your Page

Posted on by David
Reply

Derek Powazek had a nice post a while ago on how to reward visitors who read an entire page:

When you’re designing pages – specifically content pages – what is the best possible thing that could happen? I mean after the user has bought a computer, gotten internet connectivity, figured out how to use a browser, and somehow found their way to your site … what is the single best thing that they could do?

Read. That’s right, read. And read all the way to the bottom of the page. In this business, a user that actually reads all the way to the bottom of a page is like gold. They’re your best, most engaged, happiest users. You know, because they haven’t clicked away. They did the best possible thing they could do, and now they’re at the bottom of the page. And how do you reward them?

With a copyright statement. Maybe, if they’re lucky, some bland footer navigation.

If you ask me, that’s just rude.

Read the rest of the post for the ideas on to provide value at the bottom of your pages.

Kevin Holland on Email Marketing

Posted on by David
Reply

Kevin Holland shares his best tips in 5 Things I’ve Learned About Email Marketing for Associations:

This week, the 100th issue of our organization’s free e-newsletter will hit the streets. It’s very different from when it started because we didn’t know anything 100 issues ago! I probably still don’t, but having now generated hundreds of new members through email newsletters and sold tens of thousands of books, I think I’ve picked up a few things. (And yes, to the blog-faithful out there, I still am a huge proponent of email marketing, even over blogs.)

Great tips in that post, check it out! Pretty consistent with the article I posted last week.

New Article: Getting the Most from Your E-marketing Efforts

Posted on by David
Reply

Just added another article to the resources section of the site: Getting the Most from Your E-Marketing Efforts:

Do you need to improve your e-marketing results but don’t want to add to the torrential downpour of marketing messages that hit your members every day?

Then focus on improving your existing efforts rather than increasing the frequency of your messages.

This article was originally published in an ASAE newsletter.