The Quisenblog

When you publish 12 months of blog posts, some are going to stick out. As we bid adieu to 2011, we thought we’d use our final post of the year to revisit a handful of our favorite posts from the past year.

To succeed in Social Media, think like a B-to-B marketer.

To be a successful business-to-business marketer, you need to spend time building relationships with your potential customers. And guess what. That’s what social media can help you do.

The first janitor in space.

Does everyone in your organization—from the C-suite to the folks who mop floors at the end of the day—understand your company’s Brand Vision? Do they have permission to find their own special way to make it come to life?

Win by addressing customer pain points.

Often times, the marketer that wins in the marketplace is the one that does the best job anticipating and addressing customer “pain points.”

Five Steps to Reputation Management.

With so much being published about you and your company online, how do you go about managing it?

Who is your competition?

Used to be that was an obvious question. But with online search playing a more and more important role, you might have competition you never considered before.

It’s (Im)possible.

For all the “achievable” goals your organization might have in this next year, it pays to have at least one that, on the surface, might seem impossible. Here’s why.

Three words that will supercharge your Brand Vision.

Once you find a way to make yourself stand out in the marketplace, how do you ensure everyone gets it? These three words will take you a long way.

We hope you have a Happy and Prosperous New Year. And we look forward to sharing our thoughts, observations (as well as the occasional rant) with you in 2012. Peace out.

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Got room on your list for one more resolution for the upcoming year? If you’re a marketer, you won’t go wrong picking one of these:

1) Think mobile. Already, it is reported that more than 40% of smart phone owners have made a purchase by using their smart phone. In fact, about half of them made the purchase while in the store. The mobile phenomenon is just getting bigger. By 2014, it is predicted more people will access the Internet via smart phones and tablets than with all other computers combined. So if your web site isn’t mobile-friendly, you’ll miss a lot of web traffic.

Use 2012 to shore up your mobile interface. Optimize for the 4-inch screen. Make the experience rewarding for your visitors. Don’t make them scroll or endlessly click to open more pages. Forget Flash. Make your site clean, readable and well-organized.

2) Get serious about online video. Be honest. Would you rather plod through a bunch of IKEA assembly instructions, or watch a video of someone putting the piece together? It is this preference that has propelled YouTube into being the #2 search engine in the world (and the #3 most-visited site). People aren’t just going there for cat videos anymore. With more than 40 hours of video being uploaded EVERY MINUTE, there’s a staggering array of all types of content hosted on YouTube. Internet viewing is up over 35% this year (with mobile viewing up even more). The average American web user spends 7 hours a month on YouTube (stats from Pixability). Videos with key word-rich titles and descriptions work wonders with getting you found on Google and other search engines. And—going back to resolution #1—YouTube is already optimized for mobile, so your videos are available to a much wider market.

3) Plan ahead for the Election season from hell. This year, with the Citizen’s United ruling in the books, money will be pouring into political campaigns like never before. And probably 99.99% of it is going to be spent in the same mass media (TV primarily) that you’re planning to use to reach YOUR audience.

Chances are, Q-4 air time is going to be a scarce commodity. Darned expensive, too. So make 2012 the year to think tactically. Traditionally, it is thought you must make 12 mass media impressions on a subject to incite action. Challenge yourself to cut that number in half. Create edgier commercials. Reach your audience in unexpected ways. Make sure your online efforts complement what you are doing offline. Make sure the communications all grow from the same “brand narrative.” Speaking of which…

4) Integrate, integrate, integrate. Sounds obvious. Yet recent studies show only about 17% of businesses feel they do an “adequate” job of integrating their social media into their overall marketing mix (source: eMarketer.com). Understand how you can best use the platforms available to you. Don’t slide into the habit of “dumping” content on as many social media pages as you can. Have a content strategy for each platform, and stick to it.

5) Focus on what works. The last few years have been more than a little overwhelming when it comes to new opportunities in the way of engagement platforms (Google+ is but one of the latest examples). It’s easy to get the feeling that if you’re not on board with the latest and greatest, you’re falling behind.

In 2012, take a trip up to the 10,000 foot level and decide what’s really working for you. Forget the pundits. What works for YOU? Find the platforms that produce, and stick to them. Don’t be afraid to experiment, but also, be careful not to spread yourself too thin. If you’re going to invest your time and resources into a platform, do it right. Then make sure it delivers.

So go ahead, pick a resolution. And revisit it every month or so just to see how you’re doing. And with a little planning, you can count on a killer 2012.

Happy Holidays one and all, and thanks for reading in 2011!

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I’m talking about the soft drink marketers’ uses of Social Media here.

As you may recall, Pepsi was one of the first big-name marketers to aggressively go “all-in” in a Social Media sense, with its much talked-about “Pepsi Refresh Project.” This was a commitment from Pepsi to support worthwhile causes recommended and voted on by its customers and fans. Pepsi used Social Media (primarily Facebook) to elicit suggestions, to “crowd source” the causes (have fans and friends vote on them), and to report news developments.

What gathered a lot of media attention for Pepsi wasn’t so much the program itself, but the fact that Pepsi was pulling back in its traditional media spending in order to fund this program. As it turns out, the brand really didn’t need to cut back much, just the couple of spots it traditionally ran in the Super Bowl.

In the year following “Pepsi Refresh,” Pepsi’s flagship product slipped into third place in the soft drink category (behind Diet Coke). Many Social Media naysayers were quick to blame this slide on Pepsi’s move from mass media to Social Media. While I, for one, don’t think Pepsi’s descent in the cola wars was due to the fact that it didn’t run a couple of Super Bowl spots (more on that in this post), I do think the marketer dropped the ball when it came to defining and managing the “Pepsi Refresh” program. Specifically, I take Pepsi to task for three key reasons:

1. The focus was more on the “crowd sourcing” part of the program than in the good works themselves. Pepsi seemed to be more interested in social media for social media’s sake rather than dedicated to a specific cause and serving as a catalyst for building a community of fans who also supported it. Social Media is most effective when it is used to amplify a strategy, not become one.
2. The program didn’t have a clear mission. Instead of focusing on a clear, single goal (for example, fresh drinking water in third-world countries), suggestions from fans were all over the map. Many were geographically limited, so the Pepsi community as a whole would not benefit or see the results. If you’re going to start a movement (which is what Social Media at its best is capable of doing), you need to have a clear, succinct, non-compromising vision of what it is you will do and how specifically your audience can contribute and participate.
3. The program didn’t treat all community members fairly. The more active you were in Social Media, the more influence you had over the process. There were charges, in fact, of cheating on the part of some charitable entities in order to extort funds from Pepsi. This is not the kind of PR you want.

Contrast what Pepsi did more than a year ago to what Coke is doing now. Coke has teamed with the World Wildlife Fund to help preserve the habitat of the Arctic Polar Bear. Promoted by both mass media and Social Media, this program spells out exactly what the marketer intends to do (donate up to $2 million for Arctic habitat preservation over five years) and how the Coke community can help support (purchase cans and bottle of Coke with the polar bears on it). Simple. Elegant. Easy to understand. Easy to take part in. A cause that is hard to say “no” to. By partnering with WWF, Coke also aligned itself with a an organization which is beyond reproach, giving the program more legitimacy. What’s more, when you see someone drinking a Coke from a polar bear can, you immediately identify him as a fellow Arctic preservationist.

Of course, I do have some issues with this campaign as well. An annual donation of just $500,000 for an organization that has annual sales in the billions is less than a drop in the bucket. Chances are, Coke is spending at least 20 times that amount in paid media promoting this campaign alone. Hey Coke. Don’t be so chintzy. Increase your contributions ten fold.

In case you haven’t seen it, here is the spot Coke is running promoting its Save the Arctic efforts:

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Think back to some purchase you’ve made that entailed a decent degree of planning, research and preparation. Maybe it was for a new house, a new appliance, a new car or a well-deserved vacation. Now ask yourself: did you derive more “pleasure” from the house, vacation or car itself? Or from the planning and anticipation that preceded the purchase?

If you’re like most people, it’s likely the planning period before the purchase provided the greater high. Social Psychologists have shown in study after study that we get enormous amounts of pleasure from looking forward to good things in the future. (One example is Bryant, 2003.) There’s something about the combination of “anticipation and uncertainty” that precede an event or purchase we’re looking forward to that boosts our feelings of well-being.

On its face, that seems counter intuitive. It makes sense that we’d enjoy our purchases after they are made. In other words, the joy we get windsurfing in Maui would more than offset the high we get in anticipating it, planning it and seeing it in our minds. But this doesn’t seem to be the case. The pleasure people get from their anticipation proves to be stronger than from their reminiscences (Van Boven & Ashworth, 2007).

These findings turn the old marketing saw “Buy now, pay later” on it’s head. Based on what we know about how our subconscious works, we may get more enjoyment from our purchases by “Paying now, receiving later.”

What would this look like to a marketer? The idea is to design your customer experience so there’s something for the customer to “look forward to.” A few examples: selectively leak attributes of an as-yet-unreleased product or upgrade (as Apple does with its new iPhones). Or, require a lesson or training before a customer will be allowed to purchase a product. Or create a “lag time” between the purchase of a product and its delivery. Or require that in order for customers to buy Product D, they must first purchase Product A, B & C. All of these tactics build an “anticipation path” that helps customers “positively experience” your product or service, before they’ve even had the chance to use it.

We often talk about the possibility marketers have of “engineering” positive experiences for customers. Understanding and making use of “pre-purchase anticipation” could be a powerful component in designing such experiences.

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So which Social Media platforms are most worth your time?

That’s a question a lot of us in marketing have been asking for the past few years. There seems to be no shortage of ways for brands and marketers to get involved in Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogging, etc. Some require just a few minutes a day to keep up to speed. Others significantly more. But which platforms do users find most engaging, and which have the higher likelihood of leading to creating a new customer or sale?

We’re learning more and more about how people interact with Social Media all the time. And recently, the folks at Marketing Sherpa created a graph that took into consideration potential engagement versus the amount of time required to keep up.

The graph, show here, predictably shows that the easiest Social Media ventures to take part in (social buttons on your website or emails, for example) also drive the lowest engagement. And that those that require the most time (managing Search Engine Optimization and building relationships with noted bloggers) generally drive the most engagement.

The one platform that seems to give marketers the “most bang for the buck,” at least according to this study, is the practice of blogging. Weighing the time required to blog versus the potential payback seems to be time well spent.

Now before you jump over to Wordpress to set about creating your own blog, a word of caution. In our experience, it’s never as simple as saying “do this in Social Media and you’ll be a hit.” That’s because consumers don’t care about platforms. They care about content. Is what you’re putting out there for them (regardless of which platform you use) relevant, interesting and useful? If so, your content likely be found and passed around. If not, it doesn’t matter where the heck you put it.

Our experience has shown that the Social Media our clients are most comfortable with are usually the ones to drive engagement. For some, it’s a strong Facebook presence. For others, YouTube is the 800-lbs. gorilla. For me personally, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of Twitter and (of course) the Quisenblog. Just depends on what you’re most comfortable using.

While I’m thankful to Marketing Sherpa for taking time to plot this stuff, I myself take it with a grain of salt. For me, it’s not so simple as picking winners and losers. It’s about finding what works best for each marketer, then sticking with it.

If you’re interested in reading more about this study, here’s a link.

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“The problem isn’t that we set our goals too high and miss them. The problem is we set our goals too low and hit them.”

The above quote, attributed to the great Michelangelo, succinctly describes one of the biggest challenges we marketers face today.

Marketing has become about incremental change, about “small victories.” The language we use to describe what we do comes straight from the battlefield: campaign, tactics, challenger brand. So marketing becomes about “winning,” regardless of how small or significant that win is.

We add tactics. We “flesh out” campaigns. We celebrate little victories.

All this is well and good. But the road to Truly Amazing isn’t paved with little victories.

Yes, it is important for marketers to set achievable goals. But I submit it’s just as important to set at least one “unachievable” one.

What’s the one account you’d love to snare, but don’t feel it’s realistic? What “game changer” in your industry would flip the market upside down? What “surprise” could be added to your offerings, regardless of cost, that would propel your brand to top-of-mind?

Rather than treating this as a pie-in-the-sky goal, set is as a long-term one. Then ask yourself a couple of questions: Is what you’re doing now moving you towards that goal? And, who do you need to be in order to attain it?

Getting these answers correct puts you on the path to something big. Suddenly that seemingly “unachievable” goal is on your radar. Verbalize it. Share it with others, and let them figure out how they can contribute to attaining it.

Since his passing a few weeks ago, much has been written about Steve Jobs and his management style. What seems to be consistent with Jobs was that nothing he proposed to his product engineering team was considered “possible.” In virtually every case, engineers would complain that the technology didn’t exist, or the time frame too narrow, or something else made it impossible for what was in Steve’s brain to make it to market.

But Jobs rarely settled for incremental change. At a time when a “small victory” would have been developing a Walkman that played both sides of the tape, Apple engineers did the impossible, and gave us the iPod. Instead of giving us a Palm Pilot with more functionality, Apple did the impossible and gave us the iPhone.

Funny thing about “aiming high.” At some point, you just might hit it.

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There’s been a lot written in many corners about the need to tell a compelling “story” about your brand. At its heart, a unique, believable story provides a great way to make a brand more “human” and more relatable to people.

While many brands are taking this advice to heart, one thing that often sets them back is that they believe the story they are crafting needs to start with the brand, product or service. But in reality, any compelling story, whether you are writing a short story, screenplay or creating a narrative for a brand, starts with the audience you’re trying to persuade. We start with the audience’s needs, desires and experiences. Then truthfully communicate how our brand is an integral part of that story.

By way of example, I’d like to share this American Airlines ad from the 1960’s that sold the idea of First Class Business Travel. First class travel for business was (and is) a hard sell—tickets could be three or four times as much as ordinary coach travel. How could a company possibly justify paying such a premium for what most CFO’s would understandably view as a commodity?

American Airlines went about it by telling a story about the importance of “freeing the businessman from the usual annoyances” so he or she could concentrate on “winning the battle.” Reading the copy from this well-worn tear sheet (which I’ve been toting around for a few decades now) is next to impossible, so I’ve transcribed it here:

Was this ad successful? Truthfully, I have no idea. But I have to believe the story a business traveler gets from this ad would mean a heck of a lot more than a photo of the airline’s airport lounge or a claim that its seats are six inches wider than coach seats. He or she would get the idea that this airline respects what I do, and it actually delivers on ways to make my life easier.

In other words, when your create your brand story, don’t forget the main character.

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When Steve Jobs passed away last week, the world not only lost the visionary that gave us (in no particular order) the personal computer, the graphic user interface, the mouse, desktop publishing, the iPod, the online music store, the animation behind the “Toy Story” trilogy, tablet computers and smart phones.

It also lost one hell of an adman.

While I can’t attest to Jobs’ level of involvement in the creation of advertising for the Apple brand, from the stories I’ve heard, he was quite involved with the ad team at TBWA/ChiatDay. One thing I’ve learned in my many years in this business is that clients tend to end up with the advertising they deserve. Clients who settle for dreck usually end up with dreck. And clients who demand and champion great work will end up with great work.

Looking at the body of work for Apple, it’s easy to surmise Steve Jobs was a great client. Most likely not an easy one. Demanding to be sure. But great, in that he refused to settle for schlock.

My favorite Jobs story (as told by TBWA Creative Chief Lee Clow) was in regard to perhaps Apple’s most famous ad–the Ridley Scott directed “1984″ Super Bowl spot that launched MacIntosh. According to Clow, the week before the Super Bowl, Apple’s board refused to air the spot. “Under no circumstances will we pay for this to air,” they were said to say. At which point Jobs turned to his partner Steve Wozniak and said “I’ll pay for half if you’ll pay for half.” The very idea that a client felt so strongly about a concept that he would reach into his own pocket to pay for it is beyond inspiring. No wonder the folks at Chiat would walk over glass to work on the business.

For an all-to-quick summary of some of Apple’s best work under Jobs, Creativity released this “Top 5″ this week focusing strictly on Apple ads. I present it here for your enjoyment.

We’ll miss ya, Steve.

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“No. Matter. What.”

When Southwest Airlines dedicated themselves to being “THE low-fare airline,” they didn’t address it by saying “we’ll cut costs wherever it’s feasible.” They said they were THE low-fare airline—no matter what. So whenever someone from within the organization presented a business case that the airline could attract more business travelers by having wider seats, or by serving hot meals or by allowing business passengers to pre-board, instead of looking for a way to implement these initiatves cheaply, they dismissed these ideas all together. Because they got in the way of them being THE low-fare airline—no matter what.

When Nordstrom dedicated themselves to providing out-of-this-world customer service, they didn’t put a lot of “ifs” or “excepts” into it. Want to return something without a receipt? No problem. Want to return it after it’s obviously been worn a time or two? Still no problem. Want to return it, even though you don’t even know for sure it was bought there? Chances are they’ll take it. And do it with a smile. (There’s one urban legend that a man actually returned tire chains for a refund, even though Nordstroms never carried tire chains.)

Without a doubt, “No matter what” will cost you money. It may cost you some sales. It may cost you some customers. It may force you to eat some expenses. But if your brand vision is truly meaningful to your customers, and if you’re delivering it uniquely as no other organization can, that doesn’t matter. You just built and owned a valuable niche in your industry. And while others may try to copy your success, they will fail, because they’ll waffle on the “no matter what.”

One of the biggest challenges in implementing what could be a break-through Brand Vision is getting the whole organization, from the C-suite down to the street level, to buy into it and “live it” in their day-to-day transactions.

“No matter what” creates a narrative for your organization that everyone can relate to and re-tell. It eliminates wiggle room for interpreting your Brand Vision. It puts it on steroids, and eliminates the need for case-by-case interpretation. If I’m a sales clerk at Nordstroms, and I know my charge is to offer “uncompromised service, no matter what” I suddenly have permission to do whatever it takes to create a great customer story, without having to run it upstairs or refer to a policy manual.

Would your business look differently, or operate differently, if you added “no matter what” to the end of your brand vision?

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Remember when your grade school principal used to threaten you with the idea that your transgressions would go on your “permanent record?” As school kids, we all envisioned this “permanent record” as a granite slab that duly recorded every spit wad, hair pull and rubber band gun for all mankind to see.

Thanks to the Internet, there is another form of a “permanent record”: once something is said online, it’s being indexed by the major search engines. And when you Google search a company, an organization or an individual, what you get is a long list of relevant postings regarding that company or person.

The much ballyhooed permanent record.

The good news is, even though we may not be able to control all the online content out there that pertains to us, we still have an opportunity to “manage” it.

Here are five things you can do to manage your reputation online:

1) Accept that knowledge is power. If you don’t know what is being said, you won’t be able to address it. Make it a best practice to survey major social networks and blogs for comments about your company, products or competitors. Free tools such as Google Alerts and SocialMention.com can help you get started.

Too often, companies don’t like to even admit that negative things are being said about their brand. Their attitude seems to be, “If I ignore it, maybe everybody else will, too.” Reality check: they won’t.

2) Take steps to “organize the speech.” While you can’t control what people are saying about you, you can organize that speech by making sure your “good stuff” indexes high, that you add fresh, interesting content on a regular basis and that you correctly “claim” the listings (Google Places and Yelp! for example) that you are entitled to.

3) Don’t be shy about rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. And do it with an attitude of “helping.” By “respond,” we’re not talking about arguing, justifying or trying to bribe commentators into pacification. It is more of an acknowledgment that you’ve heard the person, and you are sincere in your attempt to help them work through their issues.

While it’s understandable to think of Social Media as a dialogue with many, actually, it is a one-on-one conversation that takes place in front of a very large audience. Once your community sees how you deal with comments—both positive and negative—they’ll have a fuller view of you. For a crash course in how NOT to do this, check out this experience Kathi Kruse wrote about regarding her experience with Hertz Rent-a-Car.

4) Reach out to the people and groups that love your brand. Getting others to talk about your brand, whether on your pages or elsewhere, is a terrific way to get positive comments indexed. Embrace the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word.

5) Check your Google results regularly, and regularly add new dynamic content to the mix. Google doesn’t index websites, it indexes “pages.” So whenever you add a new content page to your blog, you’re giving Google one more opportunity to help you show up in a positive light.

It pays to regularly to a “Google check” of your brand and other trademarks to see what’s out there. If you come across some less-than-flattering comments about some aspect of your organization or its services, indirectly answer them by writing a blog post that provides your point of view on the matter. There’s a pretty good chance your retort will show up in the same search as the original negative content.

The advantage of knowing what’s being said about you, good and bad, is that it gives you an opportunity to respond immediately. You have a lot invested in your good name. It’s worth taking a few pro-active measures to protect it.

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