Baron Marketing

When Good News is Your Worst Case Scenario

2006-01-04T17:58:00.000-08:00

Everyday the headlines teach us in public communication something new.

Today it is the tragedy in West Virginia with the 12 miners who lost their lives. But the lesson here is an unusual one: how good news can really hurt. In this case, false good news.

For more than three hours, as I understand it, the family members were allowed to believe that their loved ones were alive and well. This after they had nearly given them up for lost. The jubilation and relief expressed were understood and shared around the nation and probably the global village. Then, three hours after getting the message that they were OK, the families got the shocking news that there was a mistake and all were dead except for one who was in critical condition.

Any outrage the families might have felt for the company relating to any safety lapses or other mistakes were now compounded many times over. Giving hope and then dashing them is one of the cruelest things one person can do to another. When the nation is watching and participating it is that much worse.

How could such a thing have happened? I really don't know and perhaps there are good explanations and reasons. Regardless, there is a tremendously valuable lesson here. If you have bad news to tell, tell it as quickly, completely and accurately as you can. But if you have good news, especially of something so important that entire lives hang in the balance, take your time, double, triple and quadruple check. Be right. Know you are right. And then tell it.

I have preached the value of speed in communication for over five years now (example: My book entitled "Now Is Too Late." But this lesson tells me there is an important time to take your time to get it right. And that is when there is a real chance of cruelly dashing hopes.

National News: Wiki Misuse

2005-12-14T17:40:00.000-08:00

I seriously doubt that most people have heard the term wiki. Yet, it became a national news story recently when it was revealed that some submitted an intentionally false wikipedia submission that was disparaging of another individual. I can't remember if the intention was a practical joke gone awry or if the guy was really trying to hurt the other guy.

A couple of points here. Now a whole lot more people have heard of wiki, but in the context of a twenty second news clip, its not a lot of information for them to go on.

More important, it highlights something that those of us involved in self-created web content all know but don't talk too much about it. It ain't necessarily true. Traditional journalism has existed on at least the assumption of an obligation to the truth. They may spin the information, they may be intentionally biased, they may screw up the facts. The convention is that they will tell the truth as God helps them to see the truth and if they don't there's a price to pay. Just ask Jayson Blair.

Not so with citizen journalists, bloggers or wiki contributors. It's open. It can be abused. People can and do say all kinds of mean ugly things and things that aren't true.

The risk to the subject of self-publishing is great. That's why PR folks are starting to really pay attention to what is happening in the blogosphere. Rumors, misinformation, malicious campaigns can all build up a head of steam and become a juggernaut without the company having an inkling of what is about to hit them.

There isn't a company in the world with a brand of more than $100 that shouldn't be signing up for Google Alerts as one simple step. And if they are likely to be in the news or in the blogosphere because of controversial activities they are involved in (such as creating much needed energy products) then they need to assign savvy folks to monitor the talk out there.

A whole new career path. And obviously, more opportunity for smart communication consultants.

The Basics You Should Never Forget

2005-11-18T08:20:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me as I looked at the stuff I put on this blog that I have never gone back to the basics. The more complicated, technological and sophisticated marketing strategy starts to get, the more important it is to make certain you are building your marketing castle on solid ground.

In as simple a form as I can, here is what I think I learned (so far) in close to 30 years of working in marketing:

1) It's all about people.
2) There are only two really critical questions that need to be answered.
3) What you do is far far far more important than what you say.
4) That being said, what you say matters as does how you say it.

It's about people.

Business is about building relationships--just like life. I believe (and published a book on the subject) that the value of a company and the much vaunted value of brands essentially comes down to relationships. Although you can make a case for people have a relationship with a product (I LOVE Coke, for example) that is a much lower priority relationship than the people to people ones. The success of a business is very much tied to the ability of the people in that business to know the relationships that are right for them, focus on them, and then build long lasting relationships that have business value, but ultimately have value beyond the business. I have talked to countless business people and rarely has my faith in this concept been shaken. (When it has, for example when the president of a bank told me only money matters and people don't, it was clear that while he held that view (and paid for it in his relationships) he had much wiser people around him who built and maintained strong relationships both internal and external.)

2) Two critical questions: 1) Who do you serve? 2) What value do you offer? Businesses struggling with serious marketing issues have trouble with one or both of those questions. You must be clear about who your customers are and should be. You should also be clear about why they do or should do business with you. It is amazing to me the number of businesses who simply do not have a handle on those questions--particularly that last one. I asked the head of marketing for a large manufacturer recently about why their customers buy from them. Price, he said. It all comes down to price. Another manager in the room in an internal function looked at him and said, you mean all this stuff in our newsletters about how we are better at quality and service and all this stuff is just crap? Yup, said the marketing manager. A company that sells only on the basis of offering the lowest price can do very well (note Wal-Mart). But that is the value they offer. They are clear and consistent. Most sell on some dimension of quality--anything that is not price alone. There can be only one low price leader in any market--everyone else fights in the value-added realm. Know what your value is to the people you serve. Then perform on it consistently and communicate it effectively.

3) Doing versus saying.
Want to kill a company? Make promises you can't keep. If you set expectations and then disappoint, your time on this planet as a business is limited. Another way of looking at this: if relationships matter the most, character is the glue of relationships. Do your friends know you can be trusted? Do they know you will be there for them? Do you pretend to be one thing to them but actually are someone quite different? You will be found out and it is so very difficult to recover from a collapse of credibility. I'm not just talking about keeping shipping dates. I'm talking about when you tout your customer service, does it live up to the ad copy? And when things go wrong, how do you treat those people who are important to you? Do you look out for yourself, your company's welfare above all else. Or do you show concern for the impact on others and look first to take care of them? That is character, and real character builds trust.

4) What you say does matter.
Solving a marketing challenge usually comes in two forms: 1) is there a problem with keeping the promise or 2) is there a problem with communicating the promise. The keeping the promise part is identified above in number 3, and it is by far the bigger, more intractable marketing problem to solve. Marketers can't say, oh, that's not my domain, that's operations, that's accounting, that's sales. No, the job of marketing is to help the right people place a high value on what your company does. People. Value. Simple. But if the machine is working and promises are being kept, but the business needs to get moving, it becomes the job to communicate. The greatest problem with communication is not lack of creativity, it is lack of clarity. You can't effectively communicate the promise if you can't clearly articulate it. And the promise is no good if the customers could care less. A promise message has to be clear, it has to be relevant and important to the customers, and it has to be communicated in a way they understand. That part is getting ever more challenging. Every day you read in marketing "advertising is dead," "direct mail is dead," "telemarketing is dead", "publicity is dead" (well, I guess I haven't heard that one yet.) The point is figuring out how to communicate to the people important to you is getting more difficult. One thing is certain, more and more it involves the internet.

Which brings us back to the previous blogs.

To Be Free or Not to Be Free

2005-11-14T08:09:00.000-08:00

Marketers looking to develop a content rich site for marketing purposes sooner or later are going to get involved in the question of payment for content.

At the most basic level, the question will be: Why should we put information out on our site that for years we have been getting paid to provide? At a much more profound level, the question will be should I charge people to come to my site and use it's information or resources now that they are placing a high value on what is being offered?

Let's look at a few models of how site publishers are dealing with this now.

The sampling model.
The permission model.
The subscription model.
The just plain free model.
The advertising model.
The paid search model.
The aggregate first model.

The Sampling Model is based on the idea that you tantalize the visitor with sufficient information to get them hooked on what you have to offer, then charge them when their interest is sufficiently stirred. This is not only the model used by porn sites but also by most news sites looking to gain revenue off from their libraries of news stories. So you get to read just a bit of the story you are looking for and then you are asked to register with your credit card to download or read the rest.

The Permission Model, identified by Seth Godin, says that you offer something the visitor wants such as a game or a tidbit of information (like sampling), then rather than selling them on the rest, you gain their permission so that you can send them endless emails on what you actually do have to sell. It is the most common method used to capture email addresses to add to lists because by having them volunteer the information you are avoiding spam.

The Subscription Model is like a magazine subscription. You want to get this information on an on-going basis, you pay a monthly fee. This is also the Membership model.

The Just Plain Free Model. It's what most commercial websites use. They provide information that may or may not be of any value and do it in a sales environment so that the visitor who matches the profile of the organization's customers will have enough interest to make contact and the sale begins.

The Advertising Model. Wed advertising is proving lucrative and now, almost ubiquitous. The major news sites and heavy traffic information sites have gone to this model primarily. Interesting that even those using the Sampling Model may also use ads. In fact, advertising on the web is getting so common and so increasingly easy to apply through ad facilitators like Google that almost anyone that has a reasonable amount of traffic can probably figure out a way to generate some revenue. Google's blogspot (which I am right now using) is advertising based.

The Paid Search Model. This is Adwords, perhaps the most lucrative invention of the internet pioneers yet after Ebay. Companies who want their websites to be found easily can now pay for that at auction. And pay they are--in the billions.

The Aggregate First Model. This is what the false "new economy" was based on primarily. We'll give away what we have to offer until we get a huge audience and then we'll figure out how to make some money on it--by using one of the above models presumably. Interesting that AOL's announcement of In2TV today (November 14, 2005) uses this same model which has largely gone away. They are providing thousands of hours of television programming (like there are millions waiting to watch rerunds of Kotter!?) for free. As one analyst pointed out "free" in this context means advertiser supported. The question is how intrusive will be the advertising be? Web audiences have the idea that what they get should be free and tend to resent too much intrusion of advertising or other efforts to capture their cash so the competition will likely be around how free web providers can seem to make it while still getting paid.

So you're not AOL, a news site or a porn publisher, what does this have to do with you whose only interest in all of this is how to make use of the web to help sell your products or services? Only that the web will become an increasingly vital part of your business--not just for marketing but for how you do business with your customers. It really doesn't matter much what kind of business you are in. You are going to be affected by competitors who will use the internet in innovative ways to reduce costs, increase ease of doing business, add sizzle, or do whatever it takes to take customers from you and keep you from taking their customers.

That means you face a continuing greater and greater investment in web resources. Don't cry, get over it. But, start thinking right now about how you can recover costs of those investments by realizing revenue in new ways using your website. You just may have content that visitors would be willing to pay for. You may have unique ways to use your site to interest viewers in products or services you sell in traditional ways. You may be able to transition some services directly to the web and find new revenue streams. You may have the opportunity to build much larger audiences than you ever dreamed of and therefore the opportunity to realize advertising revenue--even while building your brand or selling your products.

One thing is quite certain--these opportunities are sure to slip by unless you start thinking about them.

Painting the Future of Internet Marketing

2005-11-08T17:41:00.000-08:00

t's one thing to talk about the new trends and directions with the internet and how companies and people are using it for promotion, for fun, for career enhancement and so many other things. But, seeing these ideas in action is really fun.

Here's one: www.duanekeiser.com. I enjoy painting and a few weeks ago when googling for some painters to look at I came across the "A Painting a Day" site. Duane Keiser's website offered to send me by email every day a new painting he completed that day. Pretty cool for someone who enjoys looking at paintings. And Duane's paintings are right up my alley. Impressionistic realism with the freedom and control that creates wonder and awe and a desire to imitate in me. But wait, there's more. You can bid on these paintings. Just click the link and you can place your bid via ebay. (A recent post, a lollipop taped to a board and so inviting you want to lick your computer screen, is going for $172 at this moment.) That's pretty cool, innovative and a great way to market for a painter. Heaven knows it ain't easy for a painter, even one as talented as Mr. Keiser, to get paintings in the hands of paying customers.

But wait, there's more. Click on another link and you will go to his video blog. Yes, video blog. On that you can select from a number of his postcard once a day paintings and watch it being painted in front of you. For someone who loves to paint and more than that, loves to learn how to paint, this is terrific. He'll even send you an email notice when a new video is painted.

I just watched him paint an oyster. Here's a simple but overwhelmingly challenging subject. How do you capture the wiggly, squeamy, beautiful but horribly ugly guts of an oyster? And do it in a way that captures your eye and won't let it go and makes you both want to pick it up from your screen and run off to your canvas and start painting all at the same time? He does it. As you watch you see it is almost a painful process, filled with uncertainty, moments of panic and disappointment, to ultimately a triumph of patience, vision and talent. Every once in a while, Duane's hand or fingers intrude into the scene so he can touch the paint and smear it or dab to accomplish something his one round brush that he uses can't do. And when that happens, you want to pull the camera back and see who is this guy who is creating such magic in front of your eyes.

But I digress. The point here is not really the painting, but the innovative and powerful way he is using the internet to link him to his audience of potential buyers. Now I admit, I have yet to bid on one of his paintings (although I've been tempted.) And I've been getting his paintings a day for a couple of weeks. But I can tell you this, if I saw a notice for a Duane Keiser showing at a gallery within a 100 miles or so, I'd be there.

And I wonder, what enterprising gallery will discover the terrific ideas for marketing that this artist is experimenting with. Which one will create a great online community of artists and art buyers where they can share experiences, learn from each other, negotiate purchases, run auctions, get to know each other? Someone will do it and I guess they already have or are working on it. That will be a web 2.0 community for sure.

Is Blogging Dangerous?

2005-11-06T17:45:00.000-08:00

I just read a fascinating article from Forbes.com by Daniel Lyons called "Attack of the Blogs." I can't provide a link but I encourage you to look it up and read it.

It points out very correctly that much of what you read in blogs is not true. Not only is a lot improperly researched, but some of it is downright vicious, intentionally harmful, and representing a personal self-interest.

What struck me as so strange about this journalist's anguish over blogging and how it is being abused is that he never detected the irony in what he was complaining about. Aren't the complaints about blogging the very same issues that have been raised repeatedly about the press, about journalism in general and about our infotainment news media today? A journalist in the traditional media complaining about abuses of "journalists" of the new media. Even when he referred to Jayson Blair, the former NYTimes (I think) reporter who wrote false stories, he never really made the connection between the abuses of traditional journalists and the "new journalists."

What was most astounding to me that he did in his article the very same thing he accused the libelous, attack bloggers of doing. He intentionally attacked Google and attempted to undermine the company's credibility while complaining about bloggers who do the same thing. His attack came in the form of between the lines comments suggesting that Google should assume legal and moral responsibility for EVERYTHING that is posted on the blog sites they host. This is outrageous in terms of freedom of speech and more outrageous in its implication that anyone in the chain of process of communicating should be held responsible for the content. I suppose that Weyerhaueser should be hauled into court because the trees they cut were made into paper that was used by Forbes to print this nonsense.

His logic and anti-Google agenda aside, Mr Lyons pointed out something that all of us need to be aware of. Don't believe everything you read. That means in the blogs, on websites, in the newspaper and on Forbes.com. Don't believe everything you read. There are personal vendettas at play, there are hidden agendas, there are personal gains to be made by attacking products, brands, character and people. There is great risk in the great publishing phenomenon of blogging--it is the risk that occurs everytime people are free to do things without restraint. The great risk is that they will do those things without a moral compass, a sense of right and wrong, and without responsibility.

I accept that risk because the alternative is to try to legislate goodness--and goodness knows that doesn't work. The best defense against hate bloggers is as was explained in the article. More communication--about who they are, about their motives, about their evilness. But communicate the truth. Then let the readers decide.

And if you get a chance, tell Mr. Lyons that his efforts to fix this big problem through legislation aimed at holding blog hosts legally responsible is ill conceived and dangerous.

The Next Wave in Web

2005-11-04T17:46:00.000-08:00

Web 2.0 is the name of annual conference in San Francisco that tries to predict where the web is going and how it will change our lives. Or in the case of us in marketing, how it will change how we create brand value and sell products and services.

So, what's the take this year? Social marketing is the best description I have for it. It tries to capture what is actually happening with the web that is not commercial, not planned and not forseen. And that is how the web is being used for socializing and social networking--particularly among younger people but actually across a broad spectrum.

Families scattered across the country and the globe are finding they can be stronger connected via email, blogs, photo sites like Flickr, and all kinds of other cool web communication tools. People with shared interests around very specific topics, such as "should Bellingham welcome tall condo buildings?' gather in forums and blog sites specifically for that purpose.

People who have need or desire for special information can find it on the web and in so doing they frequently discover companies, people, groups and others who also are seeking that info and have ideas or info to share. In fact, one of the biggest discussion items coming out of these prognostications about the future is the idea of shared content development.

Shared content development means that a website is not just a means of publishing information of interest, but a place where people can contribute content. Interactive publishing. Info sharing. A marketplace of ideas and information (or nonsense as they case frequently may be). The "wiki" phenomenon is the clearest example, as in wikipedia.com where viewers/readers are actually engaged in jointly contributing the content for this vast and unending new encyclopedia. I used it recently to get a better handle on Ajax--another new development.

All this actually means a lot of today's mid-level companies continually trying to understand the web and how to leverage its ever increasing capabilities to further their enterprise. What it means is something we will keep trying to figure out ourselves and offer you our thoughts and ideas--and sooner or later, our products and services to help with that as well.

Video Blogging

2005-11-02T17:47:00.000-08:00

Just read an article about integrating video into blogs.

Like most new things, the first question is, what would I ever want with that? Then it becomes more and more clear. Video is the language of the future and more and more the language of now. We are in a global environment. Video transcends language's limitations and connects us in ways otherwise impossible. It brings the abstract home, makes it real.

This morning I went to my new favorite news site: MyWay.com. Yes, it has the headlines, but it also has an astounding display of available video news clips. Unlike CNN or other other commercial monsters, these are without commercial interruptions. I love to read, but how quickly I went to scanning the video to see what I could watch rather than read.

It wasn't just the entertainment value, it is the reality of it. We've all read the stories about the incredible earthquake in Pakistan. But have you seen the looks on the faces of mothers, children? Have you seen the complete devastation from a helicopter view? Can you feel the cold on the homeless?

Is video on blogs essential? No. Not yet.

Blogging and Marketing

2005-11-01T17:48:00.000-08:00

I launched this on an impulse after reading two things (thanks Jon!). First was the stunning news that 55% of corporations now have blogs as part of either their internal or external communications. (http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3556606) Second, was a hilarious blog from the dilbert cartoonist commenting that blogging was a form of ultimate conceit. It says, anything I am thinking is more important than anything going on in your head.

Both are right. And consistent I guess. That corporate communicators would get excited about the most "me centered" egotistical form of communication yet devised is probably no great surprise.

So why launch a blog? To be with it? To learn more about the phenomenon? To use it as a laboratory for clients? To test its marketing and client relationship building potential? To talk to myself? Yes to all (see how I am talking to myself in this?) (Is there anyone out there?)

I seriously doubt the potential of blogging for making much of a dent in a company's marketing efforts/ The exceptions might be company's with huge brand names that attract love-hate relationships especially among those who use the internet as a form of social interaction. The other are highly niche players that can offer special expertise to highly interested people who are at least willing to use the internet. For the rest of us, it is no doubt at least mostly a conceit.

But, fun.