Virgin America and Klout did an influencer campaign in Toronto to promote Virgin’s new Toronto to San Francisco route.  Klout is a tool that measures how “influential” a person is on Twitter.  Influential Twitter users were offered a free flight to California and invited to a party to be attended by Sir Richard Branson himself.  I was selected as one of those lucky folks.  At first I thought the campaign was a stroke of marketing genius.  Do something really remarkable for a bunch of noisy people and you can pretty much guarantee that we will tell everybody we know about it.  Oh, if only life were so simple.  That’s the dirty secret of marketing – ideas are easy, it’s the execution that’s tricky.

As you might expect, folks not offered free flights complained about the selection criteria, the tool, and that Klout was “buying Tweets”.  More invitations were issued and word spread that complaining about not getting invited might actually get you invited, spawning an additional wave of complaining.  Influencers who did not register for the party within a 1.5 hour window were un-invited.  More complaining. At the pre-party meetup, Klout employees didn’t seem to know any of the chosen influencers and a distracted Klout employee walked away from guests mid-conversation.  Complaining.  The launch party invite email had errors.  Complaining.  Influencers were not VIP enough to enter the VIP area at the party.  Complaining.  Each misstep was very minor but taken together, a campaign that had started out with great buzz devolved into a Twittter complain-a-palooza.  I last saw the Klout folks huddled together at the launch party and none of them made a move to talk to the group of influencers a few steps away.  Given we were likely to complain about that as well, I couldn’t blame them.

It Sucks Dealing with Cranky-Pants Influencers (but you still have to do it)

In fact, I felt badly for them.  They DID do a lot of things right.  They were open about how they selected people and published a blog post on it.  They directly communicated that accepting the gift did not mean you were obliged to talk about it and they advised people to disclose that they had received the gift if they wrote about it.  Their tool in my opinion, is by far the best way of measuring true reach and interaction on Twitter and they are pretty explicit on their site about what they are measuring and why.  It might not be perfect but this is a startup we’re talking about here, not IBM research labs and in this case I don’t think perfection is possible.  The tool is blazing a trail in uncharted territory which, for those of you that have never done that, is really, really hard.  The tool is also improving at a remarkably rapid rate from what I’ve seen.

But as my father would say “you can’t sell if you can’t deal with the public” and this particular brand of public is famous for being critical of companies that do not appear to understand or value their community.  Trying to influence any group of people is hard work.  If that group happens to be heavy social media users, I would argue it’s harder still.  But it isn’t impossible.  Here are a few examples (featuring folks that would make my Toronto “influential” list):

1/  Working with a Community

I witnessed Erin Bury, community manager for Sprouter, work her magic at the blogger lounge at SxSW this year.  Within an hour she had met everyone in the room and when I say “met”, I don’t mean forking over a business card.   She asked smart questions,  listened, and probed for ways she or her company could help people. She Tweeted thank-you’s to folks for taking the time to talk and later Sprouter featured some of those people in their newsletter and blog.  Erin doesn’t have free flights to give away but she wins people over by giving her time, her help and her respect.

2/  Running an Influencer Event

I attended a Rogers blogger event organized by Dave Fleet and the folks at Thornley Fallis (disclosure: I don’t work for TF but I have freeloaded office space from them).  I was greeted when I arrived and people I hadn’t met yet knew who I was. Everyone working the event spoke to me and asked questions.  The event was well-staffed and we all got a chance to spend as much time as we wanted with Rogers people. We were given a Twitter hashtag and Tweeted like mad.  Loads of time was set aside to let us ask questions and the Rogers folks seemed open to feedback.  On the way out everyone thanked me for coming.  Nobody complained and they made it look easy.  You try running a blogger event for a phone company and not have anyone complain.  It’s not easy.

3/  Dealing with Criticism

If you’re on Twitter you likely follow @unmarketing.  Scott Stratten is a speaker and consultant with a book on the way.  He’s a one-man Twitter university for folks trying to figure it out and he teaches with wit and humility.  He’s famous and like all famous people, he’s got detractors. People have gone so far as to create anonymous Twitter accounts for the sole purpose of picking on him.  So what does Scott do? He tries to understand and where there is nothing he can do, he sucks it up.  He’s nice to everyone and engages with everyone, even people who don’t return the favor, but if folks cross the line or are immovably anti-@unmarketing, he’ll directly and openly tell them to scram and ignore them.  He maintains the difficult balance between being open to feedback and “feeding the trolls.”   He does remarkably little complaining about @unmarketing haters while he continues to do his (clearly working) thing.

So for you marketers thinking about running influencer campaigns, consider yourselves warned.  It’s harder than it looks.  As for Klout I’m sure they will iron out the kinks and learn from the experience like all good startups.  I’m a big fan of the tool and I’d like them to be successful. And maybe the next time they visit Toronto we will be less cranky.  Maybe. Yeah, probably not.  Influencers suck.

Oh and if any of you readers are in San Francisco July 25th to 28th, let me know, I’d love to have coffee

Hey, you made it all the way to the end! You should subscribe!  You can sign up for email updates, subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. 3 Signs Your Market Segmentation Might Suck
2. Twitter: Is Marketing Doing it Wrong?
3. Beta Applies to Messaging Too: Rogers On Demand Online

Why? Because Lead Development is Happening Without You

Traditional lead development is a process where prospects are ushered along a path where they are fed increasingly detailed information about a company’s offering until they are ready to make a purchase, at which point they are handed over to sales. The problem with this process however is that people don’t like to be sold to and traditional lead development looks an awful lot like selling. So prospects avoid coming to vendors for information as much as they can, and today, getting the information they need (from forums, blogs, through online networks of their peers, independent review sites, etc.) is easier than it’s ever been.  In many cases, prospects are entering the lead flow process far more sales ready than they’ve ever been, which begs the question – how many opportunities for lead development are companies missing altogether?

The Trusted Advisor Approach and Content Marketing

How do you do hands-off or low-touch lead development?  The same way sales has been doing it through becoming trusted advisors.  Rather than selling to prospects, you help them.

Prospects have problems to solve.  They are looking for information that helps them understand what their options are.  They need to learn the different approaches to solving the problem.  they will need to understand industry terms and possibly some technology that they aren’t familiar with.  They will research best practices and look at how other companies like theirs have solved the problem in the past.  they want to understand how things can go wrong and how to avoid that.

Great content can provide all of the above.  Through blog posts, webinars, e-books, video, customer testimonials and a host of other types of content, marketing can provide truly helpful information that prospects actually want.  This content helps to give you permission to interact with prospects who would otherwise try hard to avoid you until later in the buying process.

This is Not About Products or Thought Leadership

This is not about providing product information.  Like the trusted advisor sales approach, the goal is to first establish credibility by sharing your knowledge and experience.  Once you have proved that you can help a prospect solve their problems, they are much more likely to ask for you help on problems that your products/services can solve and you then have permission to “sell” to them.

This is also not about “thought leadership”.  Thought leadership (in my mind anyway) is more about having an opinion and point of view on what’s happening in the industry that gives people an indication of where it’s headed.  Thought leaders aren’t necessarily “helpful” per se because they don’t generally give you information you can act on today.  For example I would consider Seth Godin to be a marketing thought leader but his books, although exceptionally thought-provoking, don’t give you a roadmap of how to get from where you are to where he thinks things are going.  On the other hand, if you needed a VC pitch template and I gave you one, you likely wouldn’t call me a thought leader but you’d probably find me helpful (and you might come back and ask me for more advice on how to pitch a potential investor).  Thought leadership content is important to demonstrate vision but I don’t believe it’s enough to develop trust with a potential client.

Hey, you made it all the way to the end! You should subscribe!  You can sign up for email updates, subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. Is Your Marketing Content Worth Receiving?
2. 6 Steps to Better Content Marketing
3. Selling vs. Buying: A Marketing Wake-up Call

The Short Answer: Yes you do.

The Longer Answer: You do because:

A/  Marketing execution is much harder than theory. Social media isn’t much different from a lot of other classic product marketing skills – the theory isn’t all that tricky, it’s the execution that’s hard.  If you wanted to hire someone to launch a new product into market, you’d talk to people who have done it before.  Taking the course or reading the book doesn’t count for that much.  Practical experience in product marketing counts for a lot.  I read an awful lot of press releases before I started writing them and I was still lousy at it until I’d done it a few times.  My first couple of integrated marketing campaigns were, ah, shall we say, less than perfect.

Social Media isn’t any different.  I thought blogging was pretty easy until after my first (largely failed) attempt at running a group blog for a previous employer.  I’m a better blogger now than I was even a year ago (I’m not saying I’m great, wise-apples, just better than last year).  I don’t think I would have wanted to follow me when I first started using Twitter.  I understood Facebook much better after my first attempt to do a company fan page and many of the things that in theory should have worked, didn’t and vice versa.  It’s hard to know how you are going to react to a Troll online until you’ve been attacked by one.  Experience counts for a lot.  If you’re hiring a person to blog, use Twitter, do things on Facebook, participate in forums, etc. you’d be best to go with a candidate that has done than stuff, rather than a person who’s just watching from the sidelines.

B/ You Can’t Fake Passion. I had a boss that asked candidates in interviews to “sell” him whatever electronic gadget they had on them (cell phone, music player, laptop).  What he was looking for was passion for technology.  His quote was “If they aren’t excited about a piece of technology that they bought themselves then they won’t ever be able to get people excited about our stuff.” People that are passionate about social media aren’t participating because their boss told them to, they’re doing it because they think it’s really interesting and fun.  If your candidates aren’t at least fooling around with this technology by now, I would question whether they will ever really get excited about it.

Hey, you made it all the way to the end! You should subscribe!  You can sign up for email updates, subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. Trafcom News Podcast: Product Management and Social Media
2. Your Company Can Ignore Social Media but You Can’t
3. Social Media: Just Another Marketing Channel?

1/ Focusing on followers instead of engagement – Social Media folks have been saying “it’s about the conversation” over and over for years now but this is still a stumbling block for a large number of marketers.  There are plenty of tools out there that for a fee, will follow people based on keywords, unfollow those that don’t return the favor and follow some more until you have thousands of followers.  That’s great, right?  It is if your only goal is to try to impress people (who know nothing about Twitter) with the number of followers you have.  If your goal however is to drive some awareness or action, 15,000 followers could well be the same as 100 if none of your 15,000 ever talks to you or shares your stuff.  There are some interesting tools coming to market to judge how “influential” a Twitter user actually is.  Klout seems to be the most sophisticated out there, creating a score that takes into account how often people respond to you or share things you’ve posted and how influential those people are.  Topsy (the folks that power the retweet button on this blog) is also measuring how influential folks are by tracking how often they are cited in other people’s Tweets.  People should stop bragging about the number of followers they have – it’s easy to buy followers therefore the number is meaningless.

2/ Broadcasting instead of interacting – I’m not saying you can’t share your own stuff on Twitter, you can.  I never post a blog post without Tweeting about it a couple of times because frankly, if I cared enough to spend the time writing it down, I generally care enough to share it.  Where this doesn’t work however, is when that’s ALL you are doing.  It becomes like advertising, and by that I mean boring and really easy to ignore.  Yeah, I get that this works for Mashable but chances are, you and your company are nothing like Mashable.  You are going to have to do a whole lot more listening and talking to be taken seriously within a community and that means interacting and being helpful instead of just pitching and selling.

3/ Ignoring people that are trying to talk to you – Sure you might get away with this if you are Ashton but what amazes me is when regular old tech folks, or worse, people representing companies ignore people.  I’ve had this happen to me more than a few times and every time it does, I’m perplexed and annoyed.  Why don’t they want to talk to people?  Do they think we won’t notice that we are being ignored and be mad about that?  I can see missing a few messages (it happens to me) but I’ve seen many users that only interact with a small group and pretend the rest of us don’t exist. I do exist.  I exist and not only will I unfollow you, I will mock you and your lousy social skills over drinks for the next 6 months.  If you’re Ashton, that might not matter.  If you are a regular person like the rest of us, (even a somewhat well-known one) it might not kill your brand but at a minimum you are missing out on an opportunity to expand your community.

Hey, you made it all the way to the end! You should subscribe!  You can sign up for emailupdates, subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. Lessons Learned from a Twitter Meltdown
2. Guy Kawasaki, Alltop and Why Twitter Makes me Cooler than You
3. 5 Not Obvious Reasons Product Marketers Should Twitter

The categories of marketing we’ve used traditionally have been very focused on “selling”.  The big 4 marketing groups-Branding, PR, Communications, and Product Marketing, reflect this inside-out, sales-oriented thinking.  Even at startups traditionally “marketing” has meant communications.  PR was outsourced to an agency and product marketing was assigned to product management where it was generally ignored.  Helping customers buy has not been a major focus for marketing.

The world has changed a lot, particularly around how customers discover and evaluate products.  The result is a big shift in control of the sales process toward prospects and away from companies. For this reason marketing now has to shift from selling toward helping customers buy.  Here’s what’s changed:

• We don’t believe advertising (in fact we don’t believe much of anything companies tell us)- There was a time when if a company said they the best at something, we believed it.  But those claims weren’t always true so now we don’t believe what companies tell us anymore.
• Customers can broadcast to the world – They might be happy, they might be upset but they now have a way to broadcast their stories without going through any media gate-keepers.
• Prospects can easily communicate with each other – Before, during and after the sales cycle, potential customers can ask each other questions and learn about your offerings and your company in a way they never could before.
• Information about products is easy to get (without having to talk to the company directly) – Old media might be suffering but if you are looking for product information, there are more sources than there have ever been.  There have been an explosion of niche blogs and review sites covering products.  Everyone from consultants to resellers and service providers is a potential source of information that can be accessed anywhere anytime.  Gone are the days when your first step to getting information about a product was to contact the company.  For many prospects, that is now the last step.

So what does this mean for marketing?  What changes when we are helping customers buy rather then selling them stuff?  A lot, including:

1. Messaging – Your messages need to be understandable and clear. They need to be free of vague or unsubstantiated claims.  They need to help prospects answer the question “Is this offering a good fit for me?” (rather than trying to convince people it’s a good fit for everyone) and it needs to be able to answer that question in a matter of seconds.
2. Content – Customers are looking for materials that can educate them and help them determine what they should buy.  Prospects are looking for information that helps them understand different options for solving a problem and what the benefits and risks are to those options.  They are looking for best practices and knowledge to help them do their jobs better.  They are looking for the benefit of your expertise.  Your offering is only one piece of that – your content is another, very important piece.  Stated simply – your content needs to be helpful to be effective.
3. Customer Relationships and Retention – In a world where the customer is highly in control of the buying process, customer relationships become more critical than ever.   Existing customers have given you permission to interact with them (something you don’t have with folks that are still just prospects), which is a huge opportunity build trust and loyalty.
4. Visibility – In a world where customers don’t want to hear from companies, companies have to rely on other people to carry their stories and in some cases, sell for them.  How do you make it easy for non-users to see that others are customers?  How can you encourage people to share your content or invite their friends/network to become customers?  How can you demonstrate to prospects the benefits that other people/companies just like them have seen from the solution?

None of these is handled well within the traditional divisions of marketing.  In my opinion, in the next year we will see a rethinking of how a typical marketing department is structured so that these functions will have more clearly defined ownership within marketing.

Hey, you made it all the way to the end! You should subscribe!  You can sign up for email updates, subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. Content Marketing and “Trusted Advisors”
2. Is Your Marketing Content Worth Receiving?
3. How to Establish a Solid Marketing Foundation

1. Regular Communication with Customized Content and Special Offers – This is the cornerstone of any good customer retention program and careful attention should be paid here.  Most companies have some sort of newsletter to communicate with existing customers but fewer are actively making offers to their current install base that are customized according to what is already known about the customer.  This can be as simple as offering an upgrade at a special price to tiered discounts or preferred access to support or other resources.
2. Customer service – Poor customer service accounts for 70% of customer loss.  Marketing should take that number very seriously and work with the support team to deliver content that can help service folks do their job.  In my experience many thorny customer service issues stem from a mismatch between the offering functionality and customer expectations.  Marketing can create content that can set customer expectations for functionality and performance to make sure there is a good match between the product and what the customer is trying to do.
3. Listen (and then talk) – The overwhelming majority of unhappy customers will never communicate their dissatisfaction with you.  Regularly checking in on customers will help you to see signs of an impending departure while there’s still time to fix problems.  Regular customer contact through customer advisory boards or other less structured customer calls will often alert you to bigger problems before they’re reflected in your metrics.  You can learn a lot by eavesdropping on customers on blogs, Twitter and forums.  Just remember that if you are going to engage with customers in this way you need to be prepared to act on the issues they are complaining about
4. Loyalty programs, appreciation awards and customer referral rewards – rewarding customers for referring you new business or for repeat buys is always a good idea.  Even in markets where that isn’t appropriate (I’ve never seen a rewards program for enterprise infrastructure software for example) you can still give customers an award to recognize them (and give them something to brag about).
5. Bring Your Customers Together – at the larger companies I worked at our annual user conference was one of the most successful marketing tactics we did.  Companies with smaller user bases and budgets are doing similar things by creating online spaces (in the form of forums, custom social networks, facebook or LinkedIn groups, etc) where customers can connect, share their experiences and learn from each other.

Hey, you made it all the way to the end! You should subscribe!  You can sign up for email updates, subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter.

XEE66X8UP9VX

Related posts:

1. A Zero Budget Customer Advisory Board
2. 7 Startup Customer Discovery Questions
3. 8 Reasons to Run a Customer Advisory Council

We had a lively conversation about the issue (and there’s no way I’m getting into it on this blog thank you very much), and I couldn’t help but make the comment that I didn’t really understand what all the fuss was over someone dropping the f-bomb in public.  My quote was something like this:

“I work with tech. startups and we use the f word like a comma in a sentence.  I was a bit surprised that a senator using the word, especially when she didn’t know she was being recorded, was front page news.”

The reaction from the moderator was:

“Trust me, for the rest of us, it was very shocking!”

That difference in perspective between “us” and “the rest of us” is something as marketers we can easily forget.

I’ve spent my whole career in marketing so I have a lot of respect for the power of language.  I’m also very happy to be a marketer in a time where increasingly, companies are thinking about how to communicate in ways that are more human and real.  The trick for those of us marketing to broad audiences is to strike a balance where our words sound real to both the folks in the crowd that don’t think twice about telling their friends to STFU in public and others that think that any form of slang has no place in public communication.

I’m not against using slang or cursing, depending on who the audience is.  I’m sure the folks on my TV panel this week would would have had a heart attack if I showed them Dave McClure’s blog but the reality is that for many of us working in startups, his language isn’t shocking at all.  In a way, it serves to drive home his point that he’s “one of us.”  We can trust what he says in part because he talks like we talk.  Corporate communications people these days call this “authenticity.”

The problem of course comes when your audience is broader and more diverse.  What one group considers to be authentic and cool, another thinks is uneducated or offensive.  Like everything else in marketing, your segmentation really matters and it pays to know your audience.  The other issue is that, much like how the coverage of the senator’s remarks became more about the cursing than the issue, extreme language can become a story that overshadows the actual message you are trying to communicate.  Last week I heard someone refer to McClure as “that funny guy that swears all the time” and I wondered if the person had really managed to digest any of what Dave really has to say.

As for myself, I’ve had friends tell me “You blog just like you talk.”  No, I don’t.  When I speak there is a whole lot more cursing going on.

Hey, you made it all the way to the end! You should subscribe!  You can sign up for email updates, subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. Value Propositions 101
2. A Skeptic’s Guide to Social Media Press Releases
3. Will PR own Customer Relationships?

Why Facebook Matters

The growth in the Facebook user base is staggering:

• 400 million active users
• More than 5 billion pieces of content shared each week
• Over 60 million status updates posted each day
• 100 million users of Facebook Connect (a way for external websites to integrate with Facebook, the precursor to Open Graph)

The scale and reach of Facebook is astonishing and their growth shows no signs of slowing.

What is Open Graph?

Today Facebook keeps track of connections between people.  The goal of Open Graph is to extend that to include connections between people and interests including music, food, brands, places and websites.  Facebook will now allow applications and websites to share this information.  The key to how this will work is the new “Like” button.  So let’s say you’re surfing on IMDB and you click the Like button to show that you liked a particular movie.  This information gets posted in your movies section of your profile along with specific information that IMDB passes to Facebook (the title of the movie, the director, etc.).  Inside Facebook, clicking on a movie that a friend has liked on IMDB will take the user directly back to the site.  Outside of Facebook, when users visit a website built with Open Graph, they will be able to see their friends’ activity directly on the site, without having to go back to Facebook.  For example, visitors to CNN can see what stories their friends have liked.

So What Does that Have to Do with Google?

Open Graph makes it very easy for me to discover things (websites, products, brands, restaurants, movies, music) by watching what my friends are doing.  Much in the same way that Twitter has become a news feed for many of us, Facebook can become a sort of interest feed that reaches out and exists across the entire internet. If I’m looking for a movie to watch or new music to listen to or a contractor to fix my roof, a Google search can only take me so far.  The actions and interests of my friends is much more trusted, relevant and helpful to me.  This method of discovering things is a replacement for search as surely as my Twitter feed has become a replacement for my RSS reader.  Not only does Open Graph make it easier for people to discover things on the web, it also provides a huge amount of information about people to web sites which can then deliver highly targeted advertising.  So Facebook becomes a platform for search and advertising – sound like anyone we know?

“The open graph puts people at the center of the web.” Zuckerberg stated in his talk.  And where there are people, there’s Facebook.

Hey, you made it all the way to the end! You should subscribe!  Sign up for email updates, subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. Is Facebook’s Zuckerberg Right? Sometimes Listening to Your Customers is “Stupid.”
2. Android and Google and Branding
3. Google Chrome OS: Dissecting A Great Marketing Announcement

1.  Decide Who and Why Before What – Why are you writing the release?  Who do you want to reach?  What would the perfect response be? We used to write releases for journalists who then wrote articles about them.  Today releases go directly to news sites, bloggers and customers in addition to journalists.  The press release needs to stand on it’s own and tell a story.  Once you’ve decided who your audience is, define what you want them to do once they’ve finished the story.  Do you want them to write their own story, click for more information, download something, or make a purchase?

2.  Write A Great Headline – Most people never get past the headline.  If there is one part of the press release that you really need to nail, this is it.  Great headlines are short and grab people’s attention.  The headline should be easy to share – ideally it should be short enough to Tweet (I’d keep it under 60 characters if you can because a Tweet will also include at lease one ID and a short url) or put in a Facebook status message.

3.  Keep it Brief – Get to the point as quickly as you can and stop.  Provide some links to deeper content for those that are interested but don’t try to say everything in one release.  Take out everything that doesn’t add to the story, including quotes from an executive that don’t say anything more than “We’re Great!”

4.  Provide Valuable Content – What sort of value can you provide beyond the company news?  For example, can you provide guides or templates related to the topic you are covering?  Think about the audience you are writing for.  What can you give them that makes the release valuable?

5.  Include Sharable Content – In my opinion the day of the text-only press release is over.  Can you include a downloadable logo, pictures, video?  People will share content if you give them something to share.

6.  Make it Search Engine Friendly (but don’t go crazy) – I generally dislike content that is written specifically for SEO but paying SOME attention to this is important.  The title should be short and contain your keywords if you can, just remember that having a title that people want to click on trumps having a title that contains your keywords.  Your keywords should come earlier in the release, rather than later and include links.

7.  Make it Worth Talking about – Again, think of your press release as a story (rather than the thing reporters write stories about).  What makes that story interesting right now? How does it relate to what people are already talking about?  The press releases I’ve done that have gotten the greatest traction have been either explicitly tied to a current trend or timed such that I knew they would be part of a larger conversation that was taking place.  If you can’t imagine people talking about your release over lunch then it still needs some work.

I wrote earlier about my experiences with newer-style Press Releases in my post A Skeptics Guide to Social Media Releases.

First time reader?  Why not subscribe or follow me on Twitter?

Related posts:

1. 8 Steps for doing Social Media Press Releases – A Marketing Sherpa Case Study
2. A Skeptic’s Guide to Social Media Press Releases
3. Press Releases, Launches and Seth Godin

Click here and have a listen.

Subscribe to this blog or follow me on Twitter or Friendfeed

Related posts:

1. Trafcom News Podcast: Product Management and Social Media
2. Startup Marketing Podcast
3. I Know Nothing About Product Naming (But That Doesn’t Stop Me from Doing It)