Why Inbound Marketing is a Bad Idea for Leprechauns

Ciao for now!

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Courtesy of HubSpot's Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Let's Twitter: @WanderNot

In Plain English: Social Media for Business

This is a simple story of the forces that shape social media. 

Using the example of an ice cream maker, this brief and charming video succinctly explains the value proposition of social media for businesses.

Informative and tasty. 

This video gives you a sense of the primary differences between social media and legacy media: 

• People rely on the ratings and recommendations of their peers in making purchasing decisions.
• People who enjoy a product play a role in determining what is findable and popular.

It also demonstrates the benefits of social media both to companies and to their customers. It's easy to see how social media (inbound marketing) is a powerful influencer when combined with legacy media (outbound marketing).

Ciao for now!

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Produced by Sachi and Lee LeFever of Common Craft.

Let's Twitter: @WanderNot

Why Businesses Should Care About Social Media

This two-minute, in-your-face video by timetogetsocial gives ten reasons why social media should be on the corporate communications radar.

[Warning: Turn down the volume on your computer before clicking "play."]

To summarize:

#1:  Social media now beats porn and personal email as the #1 online activity. (Nielsen Wire)

#2:  Two-thirds of everyone who uses the Internet uses social media. (Nielsen)

#3:  Social networks now account for 10% of all Internet time. (Nielsen)

#4:  The Internet is the most influential source of information for purchasing decisions. (Weber Shandwick Inline Research)

#5:  Your customers are on the social Web. (Business Week)

#6:  The next 3 billion consumers will access the Internet from a mobile device, creating the "super-fresh" Web which will force brands to engage with their customers.

#7:  If Facebook were a country it would be bigger than the USA, indeed the third-largest in the world. It is on target for a half-billion users by December 2010.

#8:  Twitter is on track for one billion users by 2012.

#9:  One-way (outbound) marketing is over.

#10:  Social media is mostly free. All it costs is time.

Does this mean that your company should be using social media? Not necessarily. Many factors play into that decision, including your marketing goals, who your customers are, and what the rest of your communications plan looks like.

But it does mean that whether you love it or hate it, social media has permanently revolutionized the marketing paradigm. And it means that you're going to need to make deliberate, well-informed decisions about if—and how—to blend social media into the rest of your advertising and communications mix.

Ciao for now!

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Let's Twitter: @WanderNot

Beware of Experts

OK, this is a tricky thing since I am, myself, an expert in marketing communications. I understand the irony here. But it needs to be said, so I’m planting a flag—beware of experts.

Here’s why: Experts tend to be very attached to the past. Their very expertise lies in the tried-and-true. As such, experts are frequently the least capable of judging and implementing new ideas. They tend to be more comfortable making incremental changes to old ideas, rather than embracing a shifting paradigm. They also tend to explore new ideas in the context of entrenched assumptions, so they often "don't know what they don't know."

The only thing trickier than being an expert of the tried-and-true is being an expert of the untried-and-brand-new. Which brings us to newly minted “social media experts.”

There’s no such thing as a “social media expert.” It’s too new, too big, and changing too rapidly for anyone to know everything about all social media. The most knowledgeable people approach it with a “learner’s mind” every single day.

Even highly experienced people with specialized expertise in a specific medium—such as Facebook—work daily to stay on top of it. These people are rare, and if you make a strategic decision to be on Facebook, for example, you should definitely hire them to maximize your presence on Facebook. But don’t expect them to be equally expert in Twitter, Ning or LinkedIn.

And last, but not least:  No expert is a one-size-fits-all solution. No one—including me—is right for every project and every company. Expertise aside, there are many intangibles that make someone a good fit with your company’s culture and its goals. At the end of the day, your own instincts outweigh anyone else’s “expertise.”

 Ciao for now!

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Photo credit: “is Social Media Expert” by Martin Ringlein via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Let's Twitter: @WanderNot

Denny's: Half-Baked

In marketing, there are few things worse than almost getting it right.

If you’re a Denny’s denizen, you’ve probably ordered from a menu whose back cover invites you to “Join the conversation!” and directs you to its website, its Facebook page and its Twitter account. Impressive! Who knew Denny’s was so cutting edge?

Unfortunately, the Twitter address—twitter.com/dennys—belongs to a Taiwanese man named Dennys Hsieh. 

Filter Creative Group handles Denny’s social media initiatives, and they actually do a terrific job. Denny’s has a robust Facebook page with nearly 33,000 fans and two Twitter accounts: @DennysGrandSlam (for early birds) and @DennysAllnightr (for normal people). Both accounts have thousands of followers and do a good job of engagement, customer service and promotional marketing.

Mistakes happen. But it’s odd that such a “connected” company would ignore the error. The incorrect menus were distributed to 1,500 Denny’s locations last October and Matthew Petro called the error in November. Yet Denny’s hasn’t so much as put an explanatory note next to the Twitter link on their website.

It looks like their mistake might cost them. 

Twitter has a policy that after six months of inactivity an account may be deemed inactive and released to another party. Dennys Hsieh stopped posting updates last July and Denny’s has now petitioned Twitter to have the account reassigned to them. Dennys Hsieh then began posting again on February 19^th, including a link to CNET’s excellent report on the same date.

If only someone had fact-checked the menu. You don’t need your spidey senses to detect the brewing soap opera that’s bound to keep Twittizens entertained in coming weeks.

Ciao for now!

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Let's Twitter: @WanderNot

Google: Impress a French Girl

These days, when Google is starting to look a lot like Microsoft in its quest for total world domination—CNBC’s Inside the Mind of Google makes the search giant’s happy logo seem a bit disingenuous—this ad reconnects us to the beauty and purity of Google’s original value proposition.

So wonderful! (Was that a tear I saw in the corner of your eye?)

This is a great example of what can happen when you approach legacy media from a social media mindset. If you connect with what your customers really want from your company and your product, social media will take it viral.

And that’s the kind of reach and frequency that no amount of ad dollars can buy you.

Ciao for now!

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Let's Twitter: @WanderNot

It's Not Personal, It's Business

There's a marketing mindset that believes social media is a waste of time. These are the people who tend to say things like, “It’s not personal, it’s business.”

These are the same people who approach social media as an additional channel for their hard sell. You know the type: 

• They immediately DM you with a pitch for their product, their blog or their seminar as soon as you connect with them on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn — or anywhere else, really.

• They offer you a “free” white paper in exchange for your contact info, then bombard you with phone calls and emails demanding an appointment.

• They invite you to a “free” 1-hour webinar where they refer to their (wildly overpriced) ebook no fewer than 14 times, and then follow up with three emails in three hours pitching said ebook—which you ceased to care about after the third mention.

What they don’t get is that the hard sell never actually worked to begin with. When you live and die by your quarterly results, always focused on the next three months instead of on the long-term, then you’re moving your product in spite of yourself. You may meet your quarterly goals, but if you haven’t built a relationship with your customer then you’re starting all over again the next quarter.

The outbound, always-be-closing, hard-sell marketing style is a dying dinosaur. Social media isn’t a new marketing gimmick, nor is it a passing fad. “Relationships first, business second” is actually the tried-and-true inbound marketing formula of the old-fashioned mom-and-pop store on Main Street.

The only thing that’s new about social media are the tools.

Ciao for now!

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Photo credit: “The Salesman” by Pete Williamson via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Let's Twitter: @WanderNot

Why Connecting Matters

 "Only connect!"  — Howards End

We can still relate to the struggle of E.M. Forster’s pre-WWI Victorians to forge meaningful connections. Of course, we have it easier than they did. We’re living the delightful irony of an era in which we can enjoy a “personal” connection with someone on the other side of the world, yet never meet them in person. Connecting is easier than ever, yet simultaneously more remote.

Connecting is the “new” marketing and branding mindset, yet it’s actually been around forever. We all have a primal urge to connect with others.  It’s why we shop at the mom-and-pop instead of the big chain store whenever we can. It’s why we walk the extra block to the friendly drycleaner instead of using the one that’s closer. It’s why we buy our morning coffee here instead of there.

Inbound marketing is steadily replacing traditional outbound marketing because we’re all tired of being “sold to.” Tired of people and products we don’t care about clamoring for our money and our attention. Tired of brands trying to pick our pockets rather than trying to understand what we really need from their products—and from our relationship with them.

Yes, you and I are marketers and we’re professional communicators. We make our living finding channels for our products and outlets for our messages. But we’re all people first, and so are our customers and clients.

And remembering that simple fact is really all that social media is about: First we connect as people. Then we do business.

Ciao for now!

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Photo credit: “Oh the society! Oh the networking!!” by [busy] via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Let's Twitter: @WanderNot