Marketing

Have you already read "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking", by Malcom Gladwell? I first heard about Malcom in one of my "Fast Company" numbers a while ago. Then heard people talking about him and his books. I then bought and listen to Blink's audio CD version, about a year ago. I really enjoyed the book, all the way from start to finish. To the point I would sometimes stay in the car for a few extra minutes in the parking lot before going wherever I was meant to go.

A few days ago, I went to the outlet mall. After shopping for a while, I got hungry and decided to eat something from their food curt. I don't particularly enjoy fast food, but sometimes that's exactly what I want: fast food (hey, I didn't mean bad quality! ... hmm).

Anyway, there were three choices: subway, an italian place with the usual pizza and pasta offer, and a chinnesse food store. I didn't feel like sandwhich, so I discarded subway first. Then looked at the pizzas and ... blink! They looked really bad. The pasta looked bad too. The whole presentation was bad. People waiting in the line didn't seem happy. In one or two seconds, just by looking at all this, my fast food expert-mind resolved (without thinking) to go give the chinnese food store a try.

The chinesse store had their marketing guy standing on the way and offering free samples of chicken-something. He wasn't smiling. He wasn't very polite (neither his body language, nor his words). The sample food was OK. The line was going fast, but got stucked. There was a lady complaining in the register, apparently because she was billed incorrectly. She was being loud. The guy from the register could speak some English. It was my turn. I took the "two meats and fried rice or nooddles or white rice" plate. The lady serving me did not talk to me, but waited for me...

"May I have some rice & nooddles please?' She answered... "No". That was her first word to me, the customer. And it wasn't a friendly "No". There wasn't an "additional fee" or anything else available. The only option she offered me (after seeing I was not moving on), was to surrender one of my meats to get a full portion of rice, a full portion of nooddles, and one meat. "That's not what I want" ... she didn't quite care.

Down the line, a little kid, probably 5 years old was doing the drinks from the soda dispenser machine. I blinked again. Auugh! That was really disgusting now. Needless to say, I did not enjoy my food.

About a few more days ago, I had an extremelly good experience with another fast food chinnese store. Why was that? Whas the food so different? Not really. OK, may be it was a bit better, but not that much. The fact is, once you've blinked the bad experience flag, you probably wont enjoy the rest.

So, anyway, my points are:

• Care who's on your business front line. You can't train them to be polite. You probably can't train them to smile (at least not all the time). You can't train them to be a people's person. But you can train the skills. Don't care so much about experience. Hire the right attitude, the right personality, then train the necessary skills.
• Care about the how, not just the what. Putting the marketing guy to offer free samples wont help if he ain't good at it. The first chinnesse place had a terrific guy offering the free samples and, in one or two secconds, he induced a very possitive blink. You gotta do it, but you gotta do it right (or it might be even worst than not doing it at all!)
• Listen to your blink. Listen to other's blinks. I think I might have been better off just going somewhere else, or simply holding my appetite (that's difficult!). If possible, have your friends, employees and family experience your products or services and tell you their different perceptions. Correct whatever you want and can, then iterate. Get feedback from your customers (not only from the unhappy ones!).
• Care your presentation. Not matter what service or product you sell (or give away), it has to 'blink' good. Blink good can be induced by the product itself (e.g. beautiful design), or may be just by your sales guys creating a possitive blink (BTW, I believe this is also closely related to Keith's Ferrazzi "deep bump" concept). If your front line can't deep bump, then they probably can't induce a positive perception either.
  

Oh ... and, by the way, don't forget to go read Malcom's latest post on degree of difficulty. After reading it, we understand why sometimes it is hard to realize all this in a clear and easy way. If we are not an insider, (i.e. not the customer, not the one doing the job, etc), then you might not notice a few things; you might have an absolutely different perception. That's why it is usually so hard to auto-analyze yourself or your own company. So, one more time, go ask your friends, family and employees to do that for you. Repeat this periodically. But also remember Jerry Weinberg's Marvin's Second Great Secret: Repeatedly curing a system that can cure itself will eventually create a system that can't. If your employees can fix it, tell them to, and let them do. If they can't, teach them how.

Here goes the second part of this series. On the first part I wrote about Why you should be blogging. Now I would like to write about the What:

Failure to plan is planning for failure. What do you want to achieve? You should:

1. Define your objective and mission. What do you want from your blog? What is your ultimate goal and reason why you want to blog? Think about the values behind it, they will go a long way if you follow them (e.g. "to share my knowledge in ...").

2. Following your objective, write down a few short and long term goals. You want them to be SMART:

a) Specific: "I want to grow my business" is not a good goal statement. Choose instead something like "I want to increase my sales by 20% as a result of new leads coming exclusively from my blog in the first six months".

b) Measurable: Achieve 1000 unique visits a day on my third month blogging. Get 10 new leads in the first six months.

c) Attainable: I said 1000 unique visitors, not 1M. Write at least three articles a week, not thirty.

d) Realistic: Research what is a realistic goal by looking into other similar initiatives. What are they achieving? Contact them and ask them questions. What's the worst that can happen?

e) Tangible: You want to have feedback, grow your network and connect with new people. Get more business, etc. Is the press talking about your articles and ideas?

OK, so now you know why you want to blog and what you want to achieve with your new blog. The next question should be:

3. What am I going to write about? What will my content be? Unless you are already well known, writing a few articles about very diverse topics wont help you much. You want to focus in a few (may be three or four to start with) different but somehow related topics. A few unrelated articles from time to time are OK though. Think about these topics as the different categories you will use to classify your articles in your blog. These categories should keep your blog organized and help your readers easily find the articles they may be interested in. You can also later use these categories to tag your articles. Think about your passions. Writing about them will keep you motivated.

Write down 10 to 15 keywords and their relationship with your topics (e.g. golf is a good keyword for your sports category). These keywords will later help you with your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) activities.

That concludes part two. I hope you will find this post interesting and that you'll share it with your like-minded friends. Part three will deal with the Who (your intended audience).

I've just finished reading Keith Ferrazzi's book entitled Never Eat Alone a few weeks ago. I loved it and find myself applying the ideas from the book in my everyday life, over and over again. Each time I do it, they keep making more and more sense while his theory keeps getting validated.

It feels somehow as if each little step I take compounds with the previous one. This is no surprise. I think that's how its supposed to feel if you are doing things right. My friends are loving it too. Think about a tree. Or, if you are good with math, think about combinatory and set theory:

How many unordered pairs can one take from a set of N elements?. That's N times N - 1, divided by 2. How many new relationships can get established by adding one element to a set of N? That's [ [(N + 1) x N] - [N x (N -1)] ] / 2 = N. What? You don't believe me?

In a set of 3 elements, there are 3 x 2 / 2 = 3 different unordered pairs. In a set of 4, there are 4 x 3 / 2 = 6. In other words, adding just one element to the set of 3 increases the possible number of relationships among the elements by 3! Exactly the same happens with social networks. When you meet someone new, you can introduce her to (read: she can benefit from) your whole network and so creating new N relationships! In other words, the total number of relationships in a network grow exponentially with the amount of people you know (hint: as long as you are connecting them with each other!).

I must mention some of Keith's ideas come to me as common sense. However this is, in part, what makes the book so valuable. Growing your network of contacts and becoming successful is not just about approaching a few things differently here and there, or making a good move from time to time; it is about helping others, about being professional, about being persistent and being smart about it too. You can't afford just leaving it open to chance! (well, may be Paris Hilton can, but not me )

So yes, I was already implementing some of the ideas before reading the book, but I think following the whole, complete set of ideas and processes as presented by Keith is really what makes the big difference. Call it being serious and organized about it if you wish.

Anyway, Mark Goulston has posted a great summary with the main ideas at their blog (check out Never Eat Alone made simple). If you haven't read the book, I strongly recommend reading the article (and of course then buying the book if you like the article). If you have read the book, you should still read the article!

On a similar line, although more simplistic, there is also a change this manifest available for free: The caring and feeding of your network.

Professional individuals such as Realtors (TM), contractors, freelancers, financial advisers, insurance salesmen, consultants, writers, composers, teachers, sport stars, researchers, actors, musicians and artists alike, among others, usually need to take care of growing their own business (by growing, I don't necessarily mean obtaining a financial improvement but rather achieving a measurable improvement towards reaching their goals and objectives).

This is the foundation to this series. I'm writing to you, the ambitious professional or small business owner who wants to get to the next level but has limited resources to get there.

I strongly believe focusing on your Marketing activities is the best, natural way to achieve this. Wikipedia makes freely available different Marketing definitions which should help backing up my point. For example, let's take this one:

...Marketing, as suggested by the American Marketing Association, is "an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders"

This is kind of a traditional definition. For individuals and small businesses, a fresher approach like that of relationship marketing fits better. Again, from Wikipedia:

...On the other hand, Christian Grönroos, in the context of a move to relationship marketing, summarized a rather different European view in his definition: "Marketing is to establish, maintain and enhance long-term customer relationships at a profit, so that the objectives of the parties involved are met. This is done by mutual exchange and fulfillment of promises"

I've supposed above that your resources are limited. If that's the case, then implementing successful marketing campaigns can be pretty challenging. This is when Technology comes into place. I believe blogging is today's ultimate tool for you to implement a good part of your marketing activities. Some of the reasons are:

• It is a great channel to communicate with your potential and existing customers. It allows them to better understand your business and interact with your network (feel part of it).

  
  

• It is very inexpensive.

  
  

• It is simple and fast: allows you to have that quick reactivity your contacts expect from you and also differentiates you from the slower and bureaucratic big guys.

  
  

• Freely sharing your content makes you an authority on your subject. It helps you differentiate from your competition and clearly define your value proposition.

  
  

• It allows you to reach a global audience and leverage on existing social networks (read propagate buzz) that you might have not even though about.

  
  

• It is also a great way to create exposure to other important people, such as existing and potential partners, angel and venture capital investors, the press, team members and future employees, associates, etc.

  
  

• It is flexible: for example, if a given article doesn't work out well then you don't need to continue writing on it, or you may even choose to edit it (compare this to an expensive ad campaign)

  
  

• It helps you leverage on freely available and existing technology. The technology behind blogs makes them the perfect networking tool. Pings, tracebacks, comments, feeds and sites like boing boing illustrate this (more about the technology will come later on the next parts).

  
  

• It connects you with the early adopters. They love blogs. Connecting with them is one of the keys to your success (mostly if you are offering products to the end consumers).

  
  

• If you have great content and keep updating your blog regularly, your audience (read prospects, customers, potential partners, etc) will keep growing and coming back again and again.

  
  

• It helps you building your brand. Think Nike (more about this later).




• Because of the informal nature of blogs, they allow you to be more relaxed on your writing style. You are suddenly more human, have emotions and feelings. This will help you reach and connect with your audience on a more intense and personal level than, for example, the one achieved by a white paper, a press article or even by a traditional website.

OK, that was long. I'd be surprised if you are still with me. In any case, I would like to hear from you . Thanks for reading!