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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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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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 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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Brian and many others who silently think along these same lines use undocumented generalities, personal anecdotes and a form of tortured logic to back up their theses.

They really owe it to themselves and their readers to take the time to review the research that’s been done to quantify effectiveness of mass media advertising. For example, in his article, Brian supports his claim that television advertising is no longer effective because, “…a lot of (DVR) customers fast forward through your expensive commercial.” Knowing that 44% of homes now have a DVR present, it’s easy to imagine Brian’s on to something when he portrays TV as a dying ad medium. Unfortunately, the facts don’t back him up. Recent studies by Nielsen, for example, show that 90% of TV viewing is still done live, and fewer than 1/2 (44%) of DVR users ever fast forward through commercials. Furthermore, whatever viewers have been lost via DVR and online views have been more than made up for by the fact that real-time TV viewership is UP 7% year/year.

Brian goes after other traditional forms of advertising too, and the facts don’t help him there, either. Radio listenership is impressively up. And while Direct Mail response has always been low, for most advertisers, response rates in the expected 1 – 2% range are the norm.

Overall, ad recall scores across all mass media are basically unchanged over 20 years.

But the new media types’ broadest generalization about advertising (that no one pays enough attention to it to remember it) was shot down by research done last year by Melanie Dempsey (Ryerson University) and Andrew A. Mitchell (University of Toronto). In essence, their study found that even when the consumer was unable to recall brand claims or even the brand name itself from advertising, he/she could very well been left with a subconscious positive feeling about the brand or product. One which he or she may not even be aware of, that often manifests itself in the form of product purchase. When Dempsey’s and Mitchell’s subjects were asked why they purchased brands they were unknowingly exposed to via advertising, the general response was “I like it, but can’t tell you why.” Follow this link to a summary of Dempsey’s and Mitchell’s study.

I’m sure the intentions of Brian and the multitude of others out there sounding the death knell of mass media advertising are pure. I don’t think they have an axe to grind. I think they truly believe that the Brave New World of Social Media is THE place to build a brand at the current time. If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ve no doubt figured out that I, too, am a fan of Social Media. Not to build a brand, but to amplify your strategy. To touch your customers where they spend their time. Where you can hear what they are saying and contribute to them in real time.

But trying to build a brand with Social Media without the reach and emotional appeals of mass media? That would be like trying to boil water with a flashlight.

It’s great that writers like Brian are willing to stir up a little controversy by “poking the snake.” But it would be nice if they did their critically-thinking readers a favor and relied on more than what they hear in the Social Media echo chamber.

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People’s relationships with their smart phones is one example of how the “always on” culture of contemporary life is affecting us. Where once we had the ability to be “in touch” 24/7, now we’re expected to be. What used to be considered “down times” are now opportunities to check in or catch up.

One side affect of the “always on” society is an affliction some social psychologists have dubbed the “Fear Of Missing Out” (FOMO). This refers to the blend of anxiety, guilt and irritation we may experience while checking email, clicking through to links from our Twitter stream or seeing who’s checked in around us on Foursquare.

Deep down, we know that at some point, the technology that keeps us connected ends up serving as more of a distraction. We feel the pangs of wanting to disconnect. But then we think, what if I miss something?

How’s this for irony: the very technology that connects us with so much has us fearing we’re not connected enough. In this short video from Fast Company, author Scott Belsky refers to this as “Reactive Workflow.” Reactive Workflow comes about because of effort it takes to deal with all the stimulation that comes to us, primarily via new technologies.

One of the things that happens in our reliance on technology is we cease to be creators and instead become responders. We may be linked to our world 24/7, but is our work getting any better?

What ever happened to thinking time? To the ebb and flow of life? To the idea of self-reflection? Traditionally this “down time” gave thoughts and perspectives time to gestate. It was a powerful ingredient in the problem solving recipe.

Most of what we do via today’s new communications platforms is a reaction to something else. We might be checking our email ten times an hour, but we’re not creating nearly as much as we used to. Or as we should.

As marketers, there are two edges to the Fear-Of-Missing-Out sword. First, the realization that we can easily succumb to it, and spend our precious time in reactive mode as opposed to creative mode. And secondly, that the people we’re trying to reach with our communications are struggling with the same issues.

The best way I can think of to approach this from a communications standpoint is to keep things simple. Messaging. Products. Promises. Don’t ask customers to jump through a lot of hoops. Be relevant. And be authentically helpful.

Most importantly, we can keep ourselves from falling into the FOMO trap. Don’t be afraid to power down from time to time just to give yourself some space. If you didn’t look at your email until 10 a.m., would the world really come to a screeching halt?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m feeling the need to check my email.

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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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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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Once upon a time, naming your competition was pretty simple. Your competitors were the businesses in your market area that sold the same sort of products or services as you. But thanks to the Internet (more specifically Google), all that’s changed.

Now your competition isn’t so much who you say it is. It’s who Google says it is.

When your key word search terms are entered, who shows up? Is it the “usual suspects” you’ve been going toe-to-toe with for quite some time? Or are there new “competitors” (online or offline) that show up in the search?

Whichever is the case, before you can figure out how to take on your competition, you first have to know who they are.

For the sake of simplicity, here are four different types of competitors it pays to consider:

1. Brick-and-Mortar Competition
These are the competitors you have a pretty good handle on. They’re the ones you compete with on a fairly regular basis. If you’re Staples, your brick-and-mortar competitors are mom-and-pop stationery stores, as well as chains such as OfficeMax and OfficeDepot. Chances are you know these guys pretty well, and you’ve gotten quite adept at competing head-to-head.

2. Competition That Ranks For Your Keywords
Thanks to the Internet, it’s not just local companies you need to worry about. You also have to be aware of your search competitors – the businesses that are stealing customers by ranking for the keywords you want to be found for. The Internet doesn’t care if Jenny’s Book Emporium is run out of her parent’s basement in Nogales, AZ. If Jenny’s ranking higher on the page for your search terms than you are, tough luck. There’s a pretty good shot she’s going to steal some business that under other circumstances would likely come your way.

Let’s go back to our Staples example.

If you’re Staples and you want to rank for “hanging file folders,” your competition isn’t just the brick and mortar guys. You’re also up against Amazon, The Container Store, Walmart, Sam’s Club and who-knows-else. There doesn’t need to be a physical location within 200 miles of your storefront. If their website is showing up above yours (or comparable to yours) in the search results, they’re a direct competitor.

3. Competitors Whose Social Media Pages Rank For Your Keywords
Like most organizations, you’ve probably got a website. You might even have a Facebook page. Maybe even a LinkedIn business page. But what about the competitors who are seemingly everywhere in Social Media? They blog, they contribute to industry forums, they comment on articles. They post videos on YouTube and photos on Picasa. Keep in mind that Google indexes each and every one of these pages. And the more dynamic the content (the more frequently it is updated), the higher it will generally rank, usually against the very words you’re hoping to be found with.

This is a whole new category of “search competitor”: those who get in through the side door while everyone is trying to push through the front. This is a big reason why it’s so important to have a meaningful presence in as many social platforms as you can manage, and why all digital assets related to your brand need to be optimized for search.

4. “Share of Buzz” Competitors
Thanks to social media, there’s another class of nagging competitor to think about – the ones who are winning in the “Share of Voice” battle. These are the businesses that sell similar products or services as you but who seem to be involved in every social conversation out there. People are tweeting their stuff, sharing their links on Facebook, talking up their promotions and referencing their videos or SlideShare presentations in conversations all across the web.

Bottom line, your competitors are no longer just the names you’ve always known; your competition is anyone who gets themselves in front of your customer’s line of sight.

Once you’re aware of the volume of competition you truly have, you can take action to come out on top. Yes, a big part of that is to focus on a sound SEO strategy (more on that here). And it’s also important to have a meaningful presence across several platforms. But more than that, it is important that you truly understand the value your customers consistently say they receive from you that is unique and meaningful. And turn that value proposition into a Brand Vision that is reflected throughout your organization and your communications.

Just as you compete with your local brick-and-mortar types by being uniquely “you,” so too can you successfully compete with virtual entities—as long as you narrowly focus on what you do best.

Heck, you might even show up in your competition’s searches and steal a few sales from them.

If you’d like to read more about competing with search engine competition, I recommend checking out this thoughtful blog post from TopRank.

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“There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately, they talk the best game. They know all the rules. They can tell you that showing people in an ad will get you greater readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this short or that long. They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion, and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.”

The Creative Director that composed that memo was William (Bill) Bernbach (1911-1982), who two years later would co-found an agency that would become the first to demonstrate the success a marketer can attain by fully serving the interests of the reader or viewer.

Bernbach would have celebrated his 100th birthday this weekend, and this provides a fitting time to pay homage to the man who single-handedly saved us from the hacks of the “Mad Men” era.

Bill not only supervised and championed great creative work for clients like Volkswagon, Avis, American and El-Al Airlines, Polaroid, Ohrbach’s and many many others. He elevated advertising into an art form that people actually enjoyed, critiqued and talked about.

He proved that smaller clients with smaller budgets can outperform industry leaders just by forming a human connection with the audience. He changed the way agencies worked. His model of creating teams of writers AND art directors to tackle creative assignments has been the standard in the industry for going on 50 years. And above all, he inspired tens of thousands of creative people to get into the business (yours truly included) by demonstrating the ad business to be a place where creative ideas could be championed.

Bill was a storyteller. His team worked endlessly to discover the “story” DDB’s clients had to tell. Then they told them in a way that was relevant, respectful, and above all, true.

Despite being associated with some of the most attention-getting advertising of his or any era, Bernbach never gave short shrift to the business disciplines behind it. He famously said “good ideas build sales, but great advertising builds factories.”

Bernbach’s point of “art vs. science” in his memo of 64 years ago is also of relevance to marketing practitioners of today. Endless articles, ebooks and webinars are published that fill us with “best practices” and “how-tos” for the various new media and social platforms. But what often gets lost in all this is the importance of the art of persuasion.

Today, we might give such thinking a haughty name such as “permission marketing.” Bill just called it “treating the customer with respect.”

What do you say we pay that respect forward?

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