Invisible Marketing

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.

Unpaid announcement: bone marrow

2009-03-12T21:25:00.000-07:00

On behalf of a friend of a friend --

Karen Mellow Stock was diagnosed in December 2008 with lymphoma, a life threatening disease. Karen’s only chance at a cure is through a bone marrow transplant from a genetically matched donor.

Finding a donor is critical to her survival. Imagine what you would do if someone you love were in this situation.

Please help in any of three ways:

(DFW area) Join us on Sunday, March 29th, at North Park Center (lower level near Dillards department store mall entrance) from 12:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. DKMS, the largest marrow donor registrant center in the world will be on-hand for you to register to be a bone marrow donor and potentially save a life.
(anywhere in the US) Go register online at www.dkmsamericas.org to become a marrow donor or pledge a monetary donation.
(anywhere in the US) Pass this message on to your friends and family in hope that they may find it in their hearts to participate in this cause.

To keep up with Karen’s progress – visit her website: http://www.lotsahelpinghands.com/c/609264/

A few things you should know about registering to be a donor:

· You don’t have to give blood or bone marrow to register. All you need to do is swab the inside of your cheeks and send it to a lab to be tissue typed. Once you are processed, your information is stored anonymously in the registry until your 61st birthday, unless you request to be removed.

· There is a misconception that donating bone marrow is a complicated, painful procedure. There are two ways to donate. 70%-80% of the time, stem cells are collected from the donors’ blood, similar to donating plasma. 20%-30% of the time bone marrow is withdrawn from the hip (not spine) using a special syringe. It is an out-patient procedure done with local or general anesthesia.

Thanks for your help!

I am doing my part by registering to be a donor.

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

2009-03-12T12:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-09T07:24:00.000-07:00

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.

Barcamp: a marketer's review

2009-03-06T18:23:00.000-08:00

Attended my first barcamp-style event today. (What is a barcamp?) Fascinating mix of very old and very new ideas about community and events! And in-person relationship building plus social media. Loved the experience, both as a marketer and as a human being.

Here's how I saw the barcamp format play out at this event (vs traditional professional conferences and educational tracks at trade shows).

Pros:
- Highly engaged participants. More than 2 or 3 attendees talking during the sessions. A cross between a round table discussion (which it is supposed to be) and a panel discussion (the most experienced, outspoken, curious, and/or knowledgeable people tend to talk most).
- Lots of networking. People felt relaxed enough to introduce themselves to others - even if they are visibly not accustomed to doing so.
- Lots of available information, freely shared.
- Creative, comfortable setting: conducive to learning, ideation, thinking, asking questions. Nonthreatening.
- Variety and quality of participants' disciplinary expertise, professional backgrounds.
- Diversity of age, interests, personal stories.
- Format is heavily dependent on Q&A; relatively easy to ask questions.
- Very humane, spontaneous forum. Very good cross-training for living in a democracy. Very flexible format, attendee-driven. Responsibility is on the attendees to say what you want, get out there and meet people, and get what you came for.
- Liked the public space where this particular event happened.
- Started with a small panel discussion. This worked well as an icebreaker.
- As with online social media, information flows like a stream at the event. You can get up and move yourself to a different person or group at your choosing. You can go outside and take a break if you need to.
- Liked the use of social media to promote the event, capture RSVPs, capture meta information about the event
- The barcamp forum is not designed for privacy and doesn't really allow participants to be invisible listeners. Not everyone is intrinsically comfortable with that. This event did a nice job of letting people show up and get as involved or as visible as they wished.
- Fun! Really fun. Surprisingly fun.

Other observations:
- A lot happening at once. (Ex: simultaneous sessions, side conversations during the sessions, people coming and going all day)
- As with traditionally organized conferences, you must accept that you're going to miss something b/c of the simultaneous sessions, comings & goings, & side conversations. As with a traditional conference, it's up to you to go after what you want to get out of the experience.
- Because the sessions are essentially unplanned, it's difficult to set expectations or match what someone's coming to learn with the information people are planning to bring. A more traditional conference agenda or some other form of advance planning could offset this. (thoughts on that below)
- I like the informality of the event, which encourages wandering between groups. However, still uncomfortable moments where someone is sitting with one of the breakouts for a while and is wondering whether it's *really* OK to get up and move to the other group.
- Informality breeds side conversations. Uncomfortable moments can happen where someone gets pulled into a side conversation but wants to hear the main discussion. (This can happen in any informal business setting, of course.)
- If you're trying to meet people of specific background, niches, or interests within the community, the format makes it difficult to facilitate that when a bunch of people just show up. This is true of most networking events, but I think barcamp's integration with social media actually offers some avenues to counteract it (ideas further on in this post).
- At risk because of the egalitarian format: breakout sessions could get hijacked by the loudest people in the room, who might not be the most knowledgeable or have the most interesting questions.
- Also at risk because of the egalitarian format: the quietest people in the room may have the most to offer. How to get them to participate?

Ideas:
- Would have liked an overhead projector to...
.......project a "who's who" list of participants and capture keywords about them during the roundtable introduction,
.......capture the session agenda while the attendees develop it,
.......capture notes as the sessions progress,
.......do all of this real-time in the event wiki, which would be available to attendees online after the event.
.......project a countdown timer or clock during the breakout sessions.
- Insert formal break(s) about once an hour. Observed uncomfortable moments when people were wondering when it was OK to take a bio break or go get coffee yet not miss an introduction, an announcement, something important. Also, choreographed breaks will help brains process the incoming information.
- Given the unpredictability of internet access in public venues, would have liked a sign in sheet-- even if just old-fashioned paper or spreadsheet.
- Breakout sessions would benefit from professional (or at least experienced/trained) moderators. That's how focus groups and other types of meetings keep from hijacked by talkative/forceful personalities, and ensure that quiet persons have a voice. It fits the egalitarian, democratic vibe of barcamp but could add a level of professionalism, planning, and order to such events.
- I think there's room to experiment with the sizes of breakout groups. Traditional meeting/focus group facilitation tells you that if you get more than a certain # of people in a group (8-10ish) not everyone can participate equally in the conversation. The larger the breakout group, the less likely quiet persons will talk. The group ownership dynamic of the event changes. Individual accountability for participating changes. I'm not sure that's a bad thing or a good thing. I think it would be interesting to experiment with and understand.
- Ideally, I think attendees should register in advance, receive guidelines for preparing (even specific assignments) upon registration, fill out some kind of pre-event online questionnaire at registration, and (potentially) participate in some form of social network with the group before the event. This would help attendees identify who they need to meet and plan what they want to cover during the time.
- For walk-ins who didn't register and attendees who are new to barcamp, it would be nice to have a "democamp" where organizers hold a panel discussion to demonstrate in microcosm how the entire group will interact during the breakouts. Including taking breaks and having presenters wander in and out of the session. Whatever behavior you want from the attendees, model it.

Overall:
- Excellent format for getting informal mingling/networking with people in a community of interest.
- Really challenges traditional top-down, teacher-driven, classroom-oriented notions of learning!
- A really exciting tension between structured events and serendipitous occurrences.
- Creates much more space for building relationships and trust than traditional networking events.
- Takes some getting used to and a lot more work than meets the eye. You really get out of it what you put into it.
- Very flexible event format which can be customized to serve many purposes -- company meetings, client needs assessments, teambuilding, customer advisory committees, problem solving/war room situations, professional networking events, political organizing, fundraising...

Remember the Alamo!

2009-03-06T06:30:00.000-08:00

(Fall of the Alamo: March 6, 1836.)

"You may all go to Hell and I will go to Texas." - Davy Crockett

Happy anniversary.

Buying is irrational...even B2B buying

2009-02-19T22:13:00.001-08:00

Is your customer buying...

impulsive gratification?
the right to procrastinate?
the fact that someone else can't have it, while they can?
looking good to a boss?
a moment of positive attention from a significant other?
stress reduction?
adventure?
self confidence?
a class or economic or social statement?
a way to reverse a risky decision (if it goes bad)?
security in the face of perceived danger or attack?
job security?
human kindness and appreciation?
blame avoidance?
rapport?
bragging rights?
found time?
not having to learn a technology or skill?
not having to understand or think about the problem they're solving?

Even B2B buyers are buying for such reasons. It's never about the lowest price for Widget or Service X. Price follows value. Value often lurks in irrational places.