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3 differences between social media & F2F relationships:

Christie Turner — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:22:12 +0000

Social media connections are (arguably)

1. quicker to form…

2. weaker, and…

3. more transparent to observers…

…than offline, face to face (F2F) relationships.

The implications of these differences:

Transparency enables Targeting. I can identify potential customers online with relative ease. It’s easy to see what topics interest a Twitterer and strike up legit conversations about mutual interests.

Speed enables Offline Integration. With appropriate targeting, it’s a pretty short step from a weak online tie to a phone call or even a lunch conversation. Send personal invitations to events you’re hosting or a conference you’re attending. The 1-1 nature of social media helps you here. It’s not a blast email from your company but a DM on Twitter or a note sent to a LinkedIn connection – from you.

Weak ties means transience. It’s a well known statistic: 30% of Twitter users don’t return after a month. The twittering executive may not have time to stay in 1-1 conversation with you when their numbers hit 1,000+. And you may not have that kind of time, either. Choose your prime relationships carefully, nurture them, and spend time crafting offline invitations for those relationships (ideally leading to sales handoff).

Social media = a hybrid venue for B2B marketing.

Christie Turner — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:38:31 +0000

Social media is a hybrid venue for B2B marketing. A little bit sales, a little bit brand positioning. A little bit news distribution, a little bit 1-1 conversation.

Outcomes of certain social media tactics can be measured. But the big difference between social media exposure and traditional brand advertising is the opportunity to build 1/1 relationships around shared interests. This is the power of social media. It’s also where all the cost is located, because I can’t automate human relationships and 1-1 interactions; I’ve got to staff for them.

Casual online influences can become powerful in aggregate, when they act virally. But not every story gets to go viral. Especially in B2B.

Can I use it for direct lead generation in B2B? Maybe.

Is that all that social media is good for? No.

I’d compare it to the offline networking most professionals do to build relationships.

Showing up at a networking meeting may not lead to this quarter’s revenue. It’s part of a portfolio of things we do to meet people, help people, establish credibility, build trust, find help… and do business.

An element of serendipity comes with networking. Someone I never planned to meet may help me in ways I could never anticipate. I create space for this kind of serendipity if I (1) have an overall objective and networking plan, (2) generally work my plan, and (3) keep showing up.

So, yes, social media plays into awareness strategies. I say it dovetails nicely with awareness that leads to B2B prospecting opportunities, especially with an integrated offline strategy. And forget the idea that social media is a cheap marketing tactic. The tools are cheap for now, but it’s a time-consuming, people-powered medium, and time is money.

6 Reasons People Can’t Tell What You Do Even After Reading Your Website

Christie Turner — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:52:37 +0000

Widget makers have it easy. Plaster photos on the website. We.Are.Selling.This.Thing. It.Looks.Like.This. (Do you want it painted in Autumn Glory, Technicolor Stainless, or Urban Soot?)

For those of us who sell things whose souls cannot be captured in a photograph, it’s not quite so literal.

Here are six reasons why your erstwhile customer can’t figure out what on earth you DO, actually. Even after visiting your website.

6. Representative Imagery. Someone let the agency get hip and artsy at the expense of the brand again. So much so that nobody can tell what any of that hip artsy stuff on the website actually means. Creating a whole visual and literary language in which the customer must be educated before they can actually learn something about how your company solves their problem… not cool.

5. Industry Buzzwords. True meaning is completely obscured in a thicket of industry benchmarks, certifications, technical jargon, association relationships, awards, TLAs… The site may be connected to many third party ideas and standards. But what does the company actually do or think to help its customers?

4. Vague Benefits. We do everything. For anyone. Just call us to find out what that actually is.

3. Steaming Piles of Features and Promotions. Do you need a _? How ’bout a _? Do you need a service contract with that? Would you rather buy _ and _ together, at a 1.208598% discount on second Tuesdays? A five year contract will get you an additional 0.00029% discount for the first 34 months!

2. Product Bureaucracy. The website has to explain our entire internal bureaucracy to you before anything else happens. Obviously our bureaucracy is the most salient benefit of working with us. Why else would we lovingly provide you with 16 different numbers to call in each of the 28 countries in which we do business? Heaven forfend that our service teams in any country should ever look like they could talk with you as a global team. I mean, how weird is that?

1. The Very Nature of Intangible Products. If I’m buying a widget, I may actually have an affinity with the look or functionality of the thing itself. If I am a business person, and if I’m buying software or services, what I am really buying is an outcome. I don’t want accounting software. I want my accounting done well enough that the government doesn’t investigate or fine me over SOX compliance. I don’t want consulting, I want more productivity or more revenue or both. I want to keep my job and not be embarrassed by your performance. (Etc.) All the other hoopla is you trying to convince me that your intangibles will provide that outcome.

Current Cloud Computing discussions on Twitter

Christie Turner — Sun, 24 May 2009 20:11:18 +0000

If you’re not seeing the chart, try clicking here

No related posts.

Quick! Save us from this overwhelming wave of indifference!

Christie Turner — Tue, 12 May 2009 16:30:39 +0000

Marketplace indifference is a soul-killer. It’s a big reason why sales people hate prospecting. All reasonable efforts must be made to manage the amount of indifference to which a sales person is exposed. Sure, rejection comes with the job. But what’s gained by throwing away emotional energy if nothing is learned from the experience?

I’ve said before that the competitor which always steals the most business is Doing Nothing. (Doing Whatever We’ve Been Doing is also a toughie.)

It’s so deadly tempting to react to market indifference by simply raising one’s voice. The marketing equivalent of “Hey. Hey! HEY!!! WILL YOU LISTEN TO ME?????”

It’s tempting for the marketing leadership to get drawn into this desperation, and use our powers like a bullhorn.

The irony of relationships, however, is that they don’t spring forth spring forth on command any more than my lawn does.

Typically they were already there, sown and watered and lovingly drizzled with preemergent weed killer.

Lists wear out and gimmicks fade. To get out from under the overwhelming wave of indifference, there’s no way out but investing in relationships and doing the work.

Monetizing relationships…

Christie Turner — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 03:14:35 +0000

One of the paradoxes of marketing and sales is “monetizing relationships.”

We typically hate to be sold. The harder the sell, the more we hate it. However, we typically like to buy. Any person who has had an experience of spending their own money knows this. Many of us have been blessed to be able to buy something from someone we found ourselves liking.

This is no accident.

On the other side of that transaction, the sales person has to build trust, rapport, peer-to-peer credibility, some level of personal connection. An emotional connection. A relationship, if you like. That goes triple for the B2B complex sale, where a company is buying big-ticket, high-risk items from another company. (I believe that it’s also true in many other types of sales where the stakes are much lower.)

We who are selling stuff need buyers who will confide in us with some candor about their problems. Unless they trust us to understand and help them solve those problems, nothing is going to get bought. At least not from us.

Why would a buyer trust me [a marketer, sales person, company PR representative, executive leader, etc]? Because he or she believes at some level I am willing and able to act in their interests as well as, and possibly even counter to my own (at least in the short term). There’s some human vulnerability going on. They tell me what’s really going on, and I tell them what I really can and can’t do to address their situation. Because we have a relationship.

Now, in addition to all of this, the sales person is also on the hook to monetize that relationship.

How can I maintain your trust (which implies vulnerability) and still do things that move you toward buying something from my company (which implies control)?

If you’ve ever wondered why so many startups fail, it’s because selling is a lot harder than it looks. Most startups are not run by people who can sell. And sales (including repeat business from happy customers) are what keep companies in business.

If you ever wondered why great sales people make a lot of money, it’s because the ability to monetize a relationship is worth a lot of money.

OK, I am futzing with Wordpress now.

Christie Turner — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 02:58:55 +0000

Confession: I am a recovering Bloggerholic.

Thanks to Hubspot for this post which made me feel sufficient SEO-guilt to go ahead and make the switch.

Henceforth I shall set a better example.

In addition to the SEO benefits, Wordpress is also rife with useful plugins. These make it incredibly powerful, though not quick to set up. With great power comes great complexity.

I am reposting all the old content from my blog on this feed. Mostly this is for search engine optimization purposes. After that’s done, the new posts will begin. (Nostalgia for the Blogger blog? Previous posts are still over here.)

Self indulgent personal statements are not marketing.

Christie Turner — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 03:07:33 +0000

People ask me all the time why I think marketing should be invisible. Here’s one of those examples.

Did you see the 2008 Microsoft/Seinfeld ads? (If not, time for a quick trip to youtube.)

This campaign illustrates why many innocent young creatives go into advertising: to get their personal creative statements funded.

Now, the agency sounds reasonably intelligent and businesslike when talking ABOUT the campaign.

But just look at the ads. Pick someone who you think represents their target audience for those ads (say, a colleague in your office or a friend’s college-age kid). Ponder the actions the company probably wants the audience to take. Contemplate what Microsoft wants us to believe about their company and products.

After seeing the ads, what do you think Microsoft achieved?

If you answered, “Awareness,” who discovered Microsoft’s existence through this campaign?

Here’s what I think. Either Microsoft has nothing interesting to reveal, which I doubt, or Bogusky (the agency’s creative leader) failed to understand Microsoft and their mojo, which I suspect. Perhaps Microsoft could not get behind a clear message strategy. Perhaps Bogusky’s people failed to execute.

But I think the agency’s responsibility to make the value of a company more visible through the marketing it creates. Or to bow out.

If Microsoft had spent the $30 million on direct response ad testing with niche markets, niche messages, and niche media where they think they have growth potential, would they have come out ahead? Maybe.

Marketing voodoo…the fluff formerly known as collateral…and why we made the logo blue.

Christie Turner — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 03:01:29 +0000

A friend and colleague was recently describing common failings noticed at marketing departments, especially in startups, with a number of companies where he has consulted (not as a marketer).

His first observation:
What marketing VPs do often looks like voodoo to him. And a lot of it looks like a me-too game. “If I pull up our website, and a competitor’s website, they sound like the same company. And I can’t tell what either company actually does.”

His second observation:
When he asks honest questions about the how and why of marketing tactics that are going out the door, he often gets a huffy response.

Now, even a patient professional (in any discipline) can tire of being second guessed within their zone of expertise. But I think my friend is correct in viewing his observations as signs of trouble in a marketing effort. Here’s why.

– Even if your strategy has all the validity in the world, if the rest of the company doesn’t understand the marketing message, you’re in trouble.

The rest of the company doesn’t necessarily have to understand why the CIO picked Microsoft or why the COO closed the plant in Guangdong. (Though it’s better if I understand how these visible decisions serve the same larger strategy that my daily chores do.) However, the marketing message is closely tied to the entire company’s strategic purpose. We shouldn’t all parrot the same canned phrases to describe why customers buy from us. But if we really have no shared ideas about what our customers expect to get from us in exchange for their money and trust…that’s going to breed problems in delivery. Marketing messages are greatly handicapped if they are concocted in a vacuum. They are much more powerful when rooted in past operational results, and in companywide shared beliefs (okay, how about overlapping beliefs?) about customer needs.

– Differentiation isn’t what I say it is in my meticulously crafted positioning statements. It is what my customers say it is.

Quite frankly, good line managers and strong sales people usually know more about the customer than their marketing executives do. They also know more about what the company does and how the sausage gets made. Carefully observe the reaction of your delivery organization and sales people to a big redesign of your website (or other marketing materials). I would argue that any silence, hesitation, question, or concern they express is a red flag.

If they want to know why the logo is blue, well, you may not need the most sophisticated of answers to that. If they think the logo is ugly, it’s worth hearing why. If they don’t understand the tactics, you can be gracious about others’ lack of expertise in your profession. And not everyone has to love the tactics. (Only some customers, some sales folks, and the CFO do.)

But if good people in other parts of the company don’t see a connection between what you’re telling your customers and what those people think the company is about, then drill down and understand that one.

Even if the campaign tactics and strategic approach are defensible, getting questioned about them creates a chance to lead. We’re never done building that shared (OK, overlapping) vision of what the customer needs and what we’re all supposed to be doing about it.

Respectfully disagreeing with Seth Godin on equity

Christie Turner — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 02:58:59 +0000

Seth Godin just gave some really out of the box advice on how to structure equity in a new company.

It’s actually great advice, but I disagree with his claim that his method offers a better way to value the company.

Here’s why: just as Seth points out that we don’t know what the company’s going to be worth in 18 months, we probably don’t know what it’s going to do, how it’s going to make money, what market forces we’re going to have to address, nor how we’ll address them during the next 18 months.

We have a plan. If we’re really smart and sophisticated, we have a Plan B and a Plan C and so on.

But it’s even harder to say “here’s what this task list will be worth in 18 months” than it is to say “here’s what this company is going to be worth in 18 months.” Both are equally dependent on the same unknown variables in an uncertain future.

What’s really valuable about Seth’s advice is the brass-tacks conversations you have to have about expectations and the implementation roadmap if you take his advice. It’s a lot easier to dream together than to figure out how to work together. Better to figure that out now, not months from now.

Spending lots of upfront time hashing out the roadmap should make the equity conversation a lot simpler. We should come away from that conversation with a clearer sense of shared vision, what everyone’s got to do toward it, and to what extent we trust each other to do what we say.

But I don’t think that actually structuring the equity in the manner Seth suggests has any more value than 50/50, 49/51, the % of startup capital each put in, the % of decision responsibility you expect to share, whatever motivates and satisfies your partners and stakeholders.

Attention B2B online marketers: one for the swipe file!

Christie Turner — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:55:10 +0000

For you non marketers, here’s a secret of the trade. Many marketers maintain a little box called the Swipe File. It’s just a collection of marketing tactics we’ve observed that caught our eye as an example of a good idea, good execution, clever humor, whatever.

My tip for your swipe file: Tatum LLC. They have a fantastic email newsletter targeting financial executives. (Full disclosure: I have no relationship with Tatum except for being buddies with some of their current and former team members.)

Regardless of our profession, all of us will be spending more time helping financial executives understand why we want their money for our various game-changing, must-have, do-it-right-now projects and tools.

Wondering how the financial executive thinks? What they’re worried about? What language they speak? How they define value?

Or, are you simply a hapless B2B marketing looking for ideas that speak to the executive reader?

Check out Tatum’s website & go sign up for their e-blasts. (And it wouldn’t hurt to brush up on financial ratios and Net Present Value, too.)

Having trouble picking up the phone?

Christie Turner — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:48:12 +0000

Most human beings (except for a few superpeople) experience moments where it’s tough to make a phone call. Or perhaps a whole set of calls.

Each of us faces the call that no one else should make. Hiring someone. Firing someone. Delivering bad news to a key stakeholder. A crucial conversation in a negotiation. Saying thank you. Strong leaders earn their keep on these calls.

And then there’s the calls I *should* make… but which aren’t time sensitive, aren’t on any critical path, and require more time and/or emotion than I can find in my schedule.

Here’s what trusted friend/consultant and I did a few years ago to get past this internal resistance.

We swapped lists of people we knew we should call but hadn’t. She called a client of mine and asked for feedback about a project I’d done for them, what they’d thought of me and my work. I called a connection she’d made at a conference to take his temperature about a potential alliance.

It was surprisingly freeing.

Why I think this worked:

… The accountability (“If she’s going to make her calls, I’d better make mine!”),
… Our relationship (“I can’t let her down; she needs my help”),
… Our passionate belief in each others’ work,
… Our emotional distance from the people we were calling (and whatever they might say)

We each got what we needed, too.

Successful leaders work with a community or coalition of other professionals. Developed within companies (informal personal networks determine survival, stagnation, or failure for many corporate careers). Nurtured across industries (ex: professional associations). Gathered around communities of interest. Rallied around specific issues or even charismatic personalities. Whatever the glue may be, it takes relationships to get things done. Because most of us really don’t want to do everything.

Look at your to-do list. Can you arrange a swap with a trusted colleague to do things you’ve been avoiding?

The end of top-down message control

Christie Turner — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 04:28:39 +0000

For the corporate brand, online social media represent the end of top-down message control.

If media have gatekeepers, then messaging is a top-down event. To be heard, I have to make friends with gatekeepers. (In many markets/niches, that’s not over. It’s just not as powerful a channel as it once was.)

If media are democratically owned and accessed, then messaging is a 2-way conversation. That is the case in social media.

To get close to our customers in this 2-way conversation, we are going to have to assume that they are going to talk. We will not always sell more stuff during this conversation. We cannot control this conversation. It may not go where we want it to go.

But is this really different from the way it’s always been? Conversation was always going on among our customers. It was going on in homes and bars and churches and schools and offices, where we couldn’t hear it. We had to pay market researchers to extract a cross section of it and filter it into PowerPoint and data charts for us. We had 2-way glass and focus groups trying to hear those animal spirits in a lab setting.

The good news? Now we can hear what they are saying: faster, easier, and less expensively than listening has ever been. We can also respond faster, more relevantly, and more purposefully than ever.

Now, the group conversation influencing a B2B complex sale, especially at big companies, remains mostly invisible to outsiders. The CIO in the throes of an agonizing ERP implementation and the COO with a botched call center outsourcing program are not going to Twitter about it in real time. The risk of a big, tough decision is still spread across multiple stakeholder departments. Many people in the mix can still say “No” to a vendor even if they cannot greenlight the project itself. Social media won’t bring me those dynamics. Gatekeepers are still with us.

However, an incredibly valuable stream of conversational chatter is available to an incredibly wide variety of companies. To which you can listen for free, participate openly, and influence more directly than ever. Here’s a small but significant B2B example: Look how many professional industry analysts are on Twitter. Smart gatekeepers are mixing with this public conversation stream in order to stay relevant.

Will this new world of connectedness to our customers be more profitable than the old one-way world? Maybe. But this highly visible, faster-than-ever group conversation is here as long as Twitter and the other social media are around to host it.

Is 22 Tweets-Per-Day the Optimum? A Twittercurmudgeon mumbles.

Christie Turner — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 04:17:30 +0000

OK, here’s a disclaimer: This is completely personal. It’s not intended as a best practice for building your business or landing good PR or anything like that.

I refer to this post on a good inbound marketing blog (Hubspot). “Ever wonder how often you should be tweeting? How much is too much…”

They ran some analytics to come up with…
- average # of Twitter postings per user (~4.4)
- average # of followers per Twitterer (~103)
- average # of Twitter postings for the 50 MOST FOLLOWED Twitterers (~22!)

Regarding this third statistic, they raise this excellent question:

“Is this correlation or causation? for example – is it that the most interesting people just happen to tweet at that frequency, or is it that this is the “goldilocks” number – not too frequent, not too seldom – to be most productive at attracting followers? Or some other phenomenon?”

Here is my humble, yet accurate opinion.

When you’re in the top 50, then a huge number of people perceive your content brand to have celebrity cachet, information value, or (most likely – just see who’s in the top 50) both.

When you’ve got that kind of influence, the demand for your content is higher than for that of most Twitterers.

For those of you who are not in the top 50 and do not have that kind of brand power, here’s my personal, and admittedly somewhat curmudgeonly rationale for why you should NOT tweet 22 times per day:

- You’re drowning out all the other people from whom I want to hear, who only say 1-2 things per day (or less). But those things are interesting, insightful, informative, witty, of human interest, or otherwise valued.

- From how many people can I reasonably absorb a daily ~500 word essay in 140 character episodes? Here’s the math. Say I follow 100 people. Each of them tweets only 10x/day. That’s roughly 20,000 words per DAY. I’m reading this on my smartphone, people. Do you think this is even possible?

- Very, very, very few people have 22 fascinating, informative, insightful, witty, valuable things to tell the rest of us each day. (And many such thoughts are restricted by contractual agreements, space limitations, and/or personal taste.)

- Even if some Tweeple make it a full time job to crank out interesting things to say, do I need to make it my full time job to watch for and consume these sayings?

I assure you, as a follower of a few folks on Twitter, that if any of you good Tweeple on my list start Twittering 22x/day… I will put you on mute. And if you keep it up, I’ll unfollow you.

Hopefully I’ll find some tools for swimming deeper in the social media river without drowning. (Your suggestions are welcome!) Meantime, I’m looking for low volume, high value Tweeters. I follow very few Tweeple who routinely average more than 4 posts/day on Twitter.

Having said all that, I hope to see and hear from you on Twitter!

Barcamp, continued

Christie Turner — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 04:16:06 +0000

Another reaction to the Barcamp-style event I attended last week…

Ten years ago, I founded a concert series called SALON: live classical and jazz music concerts in people’s living rooms. It occurs to me that the Barcamp forum has a lot in common with the structure I have developed over the years.

- User generated. The audience all chip in donations for the musicians, so no one person is stuck with the bill. The audience and host bring food, so no one person is stuck cooking.
- Grassroots. The events occur in private spaces, not rented venues.
- Egalitarian. No cover fee is charged, and no one makes money off of the event (except the musicians; the point of the event is to support them).
- Organizer driven, not organization driven. The events happen whenever a few people and I decide to make one happen. If there’s demand, the events happen more often. If I get busy with other things, there are fewer events. With no bank account, no state filing fees, no articles of incorporation, no advisory board meetings… there’s no overhead to support. The SALON events just happen when they happen.
- Community oriented. Participants come into the community and keep coming because of a shared interest — in the case of SALON, it’s music. This common ground is strong enough to keep the community together & drives continued demand for the events.

The SALON format also has much to experiment with from the barcamp world:

- User generated content streaming to the internet during performance
- Audience participation
- Use of social media to promote / manage events
- Worldwide community of users participating, not just one geofocused community

I’ll continue to think about this while finishing up the re-release of the SALON home concerts website. Stay tuned.