Business Insight Zone

You can decide for yourself how well David Meerman Scott has assessed the Obama campaign in this post:

Ten marketing lessons from the Barack Obama Presidential campaign

But one of David’s ten lessons is, to my mind, the most fundamental truth for all marketers to wrap their heads around:

“People don’t care about products and services, instead they care about themselves and about solving their problems.”

To make it more pointed, I might add the word “your” in front of “products.” In fact, let’s crank up the type to make the point even more clear:

People don’t care about YOUR products and services.

At all.

This isn’t because they can’t appreciate the features, or the time you put into getting the packaging just right, or the thought that went into your formulation of the “value proposition.”

It’s because they’re human. They care about what THEY care about: paying the mortgage, providing for their families, what they’re having for lunch, their relationships, whether the Cubs will be any good next year.

This doesn’t make the marketer’s job harder, necessarily, but it does mean that the job must be approached from the other end — not what I want but what you, the customer, want.

For good marketers and good salespeople, this is old hat. For those who try to do these jobs in a mechanistic or me-first way, it’s scary. But scarier still would be to ignore this truth, and then be left to wonder why people didn’t buy your product, vote for your candidate, or support your cause.

Every customer ever is thinking, consciously or unconsciously, “What’s in it for ME?”

Make sure you have a good answer ready.

Psst . . . even though our Hoover’s Customer Appreciation Month has come to an end, you can still access an archive of the great materials we gave out during the festivities. Just go to the Hoover’s Customers Rock main page and click on the links for each week* to find the free white papers and articles.

If your work touches any part of the sales process, I’m sure you’ll find something useful. So please wander on over there and immerse yourself in the goodness, with our compliments.

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* When I tried it just now, the link for Week 1 (Prospecting) didn’t work, but I’ll investigate to see if it’s temporary, or just me.

To paraphrase Willie Sutton: “Because that’s where the money will be.”

Vast pools of digital ink-equivalent have been expended over the past couple of years describing (or just wondering) how to calculate the return-on-investment of money spent on corporate social media initiatives.

Some of this work has been very good, and certainly the implementation of it calls for grownup business conversations, not just echo-chamber evangelism of the “Social media is awesome!” variety.

But two trends seem clear to me:

1. By its social nature, when it’s done right, social media can bypass some of the reflexes of the modern consumer. Not for nothing does each of us cultivate anti-marketing or anti-advertising reflexes in our own roles as consumers. To put it another way, there’s a reason why so many people from all walks of life hate-hate-HATE to be interrupted by a telemarketer during dinner. But social media offers the chance to form some sort of not-purely-commercial human connection between a company and its customer. I’ve made this argument before in describing how “Social media makes merchants of us all.”

2. Money is fleeing traditional media outlets in droves. At the moment, a lot of would-have-been advertising dollars (and euros, pounds, etc.) simply aren’t being spent because of harsh economic conditions. But many other still-being-spent ad dollars are simply moving online as newspapers, network television, and other traditional advertising outlets stagnate.

So, the various types of social media give businesses new opportunities to talk with customers, at the same time that those customers are moving away from traditional media outlets. Even better, businesses can genuinely talk with customers, not just at them as in traditional advertising. I’m saying what a thousand others have said before me, but it bears repeating in the current climate of economic uncertainty.

It’s early days yet for social media. When I was talking with Brian Haven yesterday, he and I agreed that we’re at the Model T stage — if not earlier — for social media as a whole. And the world’s current macroeconomic conditions cast all kinds of doubt on where things are headed, whether we’re talking about old-school advertising, online spending, investment in social-media platforms, or whatever. No one said divining the future was easy.

But, best I can tell, investing in social media takes advantage of major trends that don’t look like changing anytime soon.

What do you think?

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Addendum, Wednesday afternoon – These two items seem highly germane to this discussion:

• Jeremiah Owyang: Four Social Media Questions You Must Answer During an Economic Downturn
• Scott Monty: Please, Sir, May I Have Some More (Budget)?

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(Photo by covilha.)

This morning I got to attend my second — and Austin’s third — Social Media Breakfast. (See more about last month’s Breakfast here.) These SMBs have been put together by recent Boston-to-Austin transplant and all-around good guy Bryan Person. [Addendum: this one was held on the back porch of Rudy's BBQ -- lovely breakfast tacos! -- on a gorgeous fall morning.]

Today’s speaker was Peter Kim, formerly of Forrester Research and now of The Startup With No Name, which is headquartered here but has staff members — including Peter — in Boston. Continuing the Boston-and-Austin theme, Peter was joined by Boston-based colleague Brian Haven (another Forrester alum) and Austin-based colleague Kate Niederhoffer.

Peter’s theme, which led to all sorts of friendly-but-pointed debate, was “Does Social Marketing Matter?” Peter works firmly in the social-media space and has been a marketer throughout his career, so he has lots of thoughts in this vein. To open his talk, he brought up some of the notorious social-media disasters of 2006 . . . none of which had any discernible effect on the companies they befell.

My basic answer to Peter’s guiding question is “Not yet,” which seemed to resonate well with one of his closing observations about social media as a whole: “It’s early.” During the course of the talk, a lot of the smart folks in the audience shared their ideas about what social media is and isn’t doing for now, and how it might be used going forward. To be honest, the session had a chaotic feel to it — my notes are a mess — but (a) that might be expected, given the protean nature of corporate social media at this point, and (b) it’s all right with me, since it reveals how much opportunity remains to grow and clarify (and, no doubt, re-complicate) our ideas about social media.

At any event like this, some of the highlights are always the conversations you have before and after with old friends and new. This time, I got to talk with:

• Havens (about whose writing I blogged last week, having no idea I would meet him this week);
• Niederhoffer (from whom I hope to learn much more about psychology’s impact on business);
• Dell blogger Amie Paxton;
• my old pal Jon Lebkowsky;
• Karen Kreps (who, among other things, writes for The Good Life, where I used to have a column); and
  . . . drum roll, please . . .
• Gary Hoover, the founder of Hoover’s!

If you attended today’s Breakfast, feel free to chime in with your own thoughts. If you’re interested in attending future Breakfasts, you should get in touch with Bryan Person.

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Addendum, Wednesday morning – Here are more takes on the session:

• Jon Lebkowsky: Social media for breakfast
• Bryan Person: A conversation with Peter Kim about social media marketing (includes an audio interview with Kim)

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(Photo graciously supplied by Mr. Person — used with permission.)

Word-of-mouth marketing guru Andy Sernovitz offers an excellent piece of advice (and an example of how it works) in this short post:

Share your roadmap

If you want to keep fans engaged, let them know where you’re going.

Nothing is more frustrating than being dependent on a product and never knowing when they are going to make it better. We’ve abandoned more than one vendor because “that feature will be out someday” just isn’t good enough. I can’t run my business based on your secret plans. [. . .]

What Andy says makes me wonder how many companies looked at Twitter, thought that something like it would be useful in an enterprise/intranet setting, but laughed off the concept of using Twitter itself because of its history of downtime and the opacity of its roadmap.

Enter Yammer and its white-label counterparts.

Andy talks about the beneficial effects of sharing your roadmap in terms of how your fans will react. (Read his full post for details.) But I would add another benefit of sharing your roadmap, one focused on your own enterprise: When you share the roadmap, you commit yourself to hitting certain stops on the itinerary on certain dates.

Bands on tour don’t say “We’ll be in Texas at some point,” not if they want to reward their fans and keep themselves on schedule. They set dates — Houston on the 10th, Austin on the 11th, Dallas on the 12th — and push out posters (like the one above), postcards, MySpace pages, and anything else they can to get the word out.

Foresight in business isn’t perfect, and it’s not as simple to launch a new operating system or a open a new restaurant as it is to get in the bus and drive to the gig in Brighton. But it’s worthwhile to give your fans / customers / users / evangelists an idea of where you’ll be and when you’ll be there. By telling them you’ll be telling yourself.

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Related posts:

• Good reads for your weekend (See the item about Yammer.)
• What happens when you can’t keep up with your popularity?
• May the best product win?

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(Image by Tom Harman.)

Earlier this week, I got to meet Jackie Huba at the Austin Social Media Breakfast. Jackie co-writes the popular Church of the Customer blog, and she led a discussion of how some companies — for example Maker’s Mark — are using technology to build up a community around their brands.

After the meeting, I put forward an idea about social-media marketing to Jackie and some of my fellow attendees — an idea that’s been rattling around in my mind for a while. The short version is captured in the title of this post: Social media makes merchants of us all.

The long history of face-to-face business

In the old days, in bazaars and souks like the one pictured here, or in the local baker’s and fishmonger’s and dressmaker’s shops, you did all of your business face to face. You came to know the merchants in your community. You knew at first hand who offered the best products and the fairest prices.

This still happens in some face-to-face businesses today. If you start having lunch regularly at a well-run neighborhood cafe, the staff will soon get to know you. The owner may greet you by name when you walk in. They’ll remember what you mean when you say, “I’ll have the usual.”

The guy who owns the hardware store in my neighborhood remembers my name. He remembers that I work for Hoover’s. When I ask him for what product I should use to tackle a particular job, he doesn’t hesitate to show me what he has . . . but he also doesn’t hesitate to tell me if what I really need is something he doesn’t carry. He has even pointed me to his competitors, on those few occasions when he didn’t have what I needed.

In short, he’s a good, old-fashioned merchant.

Modern marketing rears its head

Modern big business, and epecially online business, unavoidably requires a level of abstraction. BMW can’t get to know all of its potential customers individually, which is why it goes to great lengths to convey its brand image through advertisements, cutting-edge design, and anything else it can. A friend of mine once bought a Mercedes and couldn’t stop talking — not only about the quality of the car, but also about the kid-glove service he got from the dealership. I’ve had the same experience with American Express.

To a substantial degree, all of the marketing efforts of BMW, Mercedes, and AmEx are math-driven. I’m sure the marketing departments of each company could tell you oodles about how their sales channels work, and what numbers they expect to see in terms of prospects, leads, and so on. Again, this is unavoidable in the modern world of mass marketing.

But there can be more . . .

Social media enters the scene

In its community-building aspects, social media can turn marketers (and other businesspeople) back to the old ways of the good merchant. Maybe you don’t get to know every customer personally, but you can meet a lot more of your best and most enthusiastic customers. There’s still a lot of the “science” of marketing — but with many more opportunities for the human touch, too.

In her talk, Jackie discussed how Fiskars has recruited “Fiskateers” to use and promote its scissors and other wares among avid scrapbookers. This enthusiast community bridges the online and offline worlds, and it has done great things both for the scrapbookers and for the bottom line of Fiskars. More and more companies figure this out every day — how to use the new panoply of social-media tools to bridge the electronic gap between themselves and their customers.

What is your company doing to act more like a good, old-fashioned merchant? What could it be doing?

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More reading:

• Jackie Huba: Do corporate-sponsored social networks work?
• Social media breaches barriers.
• Social media: the right tool for the job.

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(Photo by gatos.rojos.)

The Brett Favre deal offers a lesson in innovative pricing.

Stick with me, because you don’t have to be a football fan to appreciate this one. The deal struck to move the future Hall of Famer from Green Bay to the Jets has lots of angles — bad blood between Favre and Packers management, on-the-field implications — that need not detain us here.

What is worth noting is a key provision of the deal, explained in this NFL.com story, that governs the compensation Green Bay will get for cutting Favre loose:

The [fourth-round] draft pick traded for Favre turns into a third-round selection if he plays in 50 percent of the plays this season, a second-rounder if he plays in 70 percent of the plays and the Jets qualify for the playoffs, and a first-round pick if he plays in 80 percent of the plays and Jets make it to the Super Bowl.

In other words, the closer Favre brings the Jets to the NFL’s promised land, the more the Packers get. There are even more complex provisions in the deal that would tend to interest only diehard football fans. My point is that both teams went out of their way to make sure that they won’t feel burned if Favre overperforms or underperforms expectations.

Sweeten the deal to prevent “transaction remorse.”

Such complicated give-and-take is appropriate in this case because it’s so hard to know what to expect from a 38-year-old quarterback — even one who holds most of the NFL’s passing records.

Something in this vein may be appropriate for your business if you offer a product or service whose value is unclear. You know the value of what you offer, but how can you reassure your customers and vendors that they’ll be getting good value?

It’s an old idea, one embedded in the 90-day warranty, the subscriber loyalty program, the money-back guarantee. But why stop there? Why not come up with your own version of the Favre deal that alleviates the risk of buyer’s remorse — or seller’s remorse?

What are your ideas for helping your customers or vendors avoid transaction remorse?

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(Packers and Jets logos via Wikipedia.)

This morning I was talking to Tris Hussey via Twitter, and we were musing about why some products succeed while competing products — even superior ones — fail. The specific context was Twitter versus Pownce versus Jaiku.

Note that he and I were having the discussion on Twitter, which, after some initial hesitations, has become one of my main avenues of online communication. (Read: insight, laughs, gossip, professional networking, etc.) Tris, being the early adopter he is, used all three services from the early days. But he says that Pownce and Jaiku have “fallen off [his] radar,” while he uses Twitter all the time.

This takes me back to discussions from earlier years about first-movers and second-movers. Google, it has often been pointed out, was one of seven search engines, and at the beginning it was hardly clear that it would morph into an industry mover of Microsoftian stature.

But in the case of Google, we can at least understand the basic rationale: the interface was (and is) simple and clear, the algorithms kept improving, and the company kept optimizing around search-based advertising. While I like Twitter — and note with pleasure that its stability has improved radically in the months since I started using it — it’s a little early to say it’s smart-like-Google in terms of design or corporate management.

But what Twitter does have is . . . a community. Fascinating, fun people like Tris Hussey and Erin Kotecki Vest and Kate Olson and Shawn Zehnder Lea and . . . well, thousands more — all of whom share their weighty or flighty or mundane thoughts throughout the day. It’s the water-cooler deluxe.

Is that enough to explain its success? I don’t know — but I’d love to hear what you think.

Front to back: Hugh MacLeod, Tara Hunt, Chris Heuer, Deb Schultz.
(Jeremiah Owyang is obscured behind Hunt.)

One of my favorite panels at this year’s SXSW festival was “Self-Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing,” which was chaired by my pal David Parmet, who does social-media-savvy p.r. work from the New York City area. (He also took the picture above.)

The panel featured three social-media pros whose work I read regularly — Tara Hunt, Hugh MacLeod, Jeremiah Owyang — as well as two who were new to me — Chris Heuer and Deb Schultz. Whether before or since the panel, I’ve gotten to talk with all of these people at least a little bit; they’re good folks who know what they’re talking about when they talk about social media, social networking, and online community. My notes for this panel are long and a little freeform, which is probably appropriate since the panel itself was free-flowing like a good group conversation.

The first question that Parmet threw out to the panel was this: How do you market into a community without coming across as totally skeevy? Someone made that point that, most of the time when we say “marketing,” we actually mean bad marketing — the kind we don’t like having aimed at us. You don’t mind the good kind of marketing.

It’s Not about the Technology

Deb Schultz made the great point — which I think can’t be stressed enough — that marketing, even in its newer, social-media-enabled forms, is not about tools or technology, but about the way you look at your customers. She said that this regard for customers has to be in your DNA, such that you face the hard work of getting out in the trenches and embracing the feedback your customers give you to drive your marketing, customer service, and product development.

Chris Heuer said that he hates the idea that companies (including, occasionally, his own clients) would say, “Build me a community tomorrow!” He thinks that we need an attitudinal shift, to shift people’s mindset from “Stop trying to sell me!” to “How can you help me buy?” Like Schultz, Heuer also commented on the technology angle: he said that social media isn’t new just because it’s a new tech platform, but because it changes the ways that companies relate to customers, suppliers, employees, and local physical communities.

Turn Your Best Customers into Your Advocates

Jeremiah Owyang chimed in about what he’s found out by interviewing companies, Read more

. . . but with SXSW-induced thoughts very much in front of me.

Pending the refinement of those thoughts into something more useful, here are a few notes:

• Joshua Porter offers an interesting take on the tenor of this year’s SXSW, and on what it means to embrace social media in business. His basic premise: it all goes back ten years, to The Cluetrain Manifesto.
• Kathy Sierra is a rock star for the SXSW Interactive crowd, and her keynote this year didn’t disappoint her fans. I didn’t think it was quite as good as her talk last year, but that’s comparing it to a very high standard. Rex Hammock has a quick but complete recap of the session; Banky pulled out some key tidbits here. When I talked to Kathy briefly after the session, she hinted that she might make a return to blogging, which will bring great joy to readers of her (so far erstwhile) blog Creating Passionate Users.
• Sunni Brown is the sister of my Hoover’s colleague (and all-around good guy) Rocky Brown. She captured several SXSW sessions in real time with her amazing illustrated notes. Here, for example, is her version of the opening keynote session featuring Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson (which I recapped here).
• My friend David Parmet chaired a panel called “Self-Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing.” I thought it was excellent, but then again I’m such a fan of the folks who were on the dais — Tara Hunt, Hugh Macleod, et al. — that I’m probably biased on that score. I will definitely be writing more about the ideas in this panel later. Meanwhile, there’s a good overview here, and detailed notes here. I was particularly pleased to get to talk with Deborah Schultz and Chris Heuer after the panel — wasn’t familiar with their work before, glad I am now.

More anon.

(Photo by pittsinger.)