A Surprised And Delighted Customer

How is that Apple gets it right?

We can talking again and again about "God Jobs," as George Parker calls him. We can talk about a strong brand and simple, functional and beautiful product design. We can even talk about in-store customer experience. But the success of Apple for me constantly comes back to to the fact that they empower their people to make common-sense decisions.

Yesterday I walked into an Apple Store. The battery door on my laptop wouldn't close and it seemed that the battery was starting to Torque. Instantly the sales associate recognized that the battery was expanding and upon consultation I was told it was leaking and needed to be replaced.

"That'll be $129."

"Excuse me?" I asked.

This wasn't just a battery going bad after a year and half of use. This was a battery on the verge of exploding. And he wanted ME to pay for it?

It seemed I was at an impasse. I understood that it was out of warranty. I knew that they had no obligation to me. But an exploding battery was class-action-lawsuit territory.

So off he went to fetch the battery as I dug into my pocket for a credit card. That's when he arrived back with the new battery and a smile.

"My manager says this isn't supposed to happen to a battery. So we're just gonna replace it for free."

Hallelujah! Sanity!

And that's the essence of my point. When employees are afraid they will be fired for breaking the rules, despite all common sense to the contrary, I walk out of the store and write a much different blog post. I cause irreparable brand damage and tarnish the image of brand. But when a store manage recognizes that for $129 part (that probably cost them $60 to make) he can buy immeasurable good will, future sales and possibly word of mouth impact, the outcome is much different.

This is why I hammer home the point that marketing is not just in the hands of marketing. The best operations understand that you need every arm of an organization actively participating in the brand building and sales driving process. Product needs to be designing items that people want to buy. Customer service needs to be embracing and rewarding loyalty. Accounting still needs to see late payers as future advocates. It's all part of a single experience to the customer, so why break it up within the organization?

My history with Apple is a string of such events. I've had a customer service rep transfer me to a warehouse in Texas where a manager there actively rooted through boxes for my part. There were no "we can't do that" answers. Of course they could do this. They just needed to choose to do it.

It's time that business stops siloing and starts realizing that their customers will touch multiple parts of a company during their lifecycle. And every stop along that route is as important as the ad that first draws them in.

Why Smaller Can Be Better

Recently a social photo sharing site came online that limited friends to 50 people per user. The social network, called Path, launched under the premise that you can only really have a close relationship with 50 people. So it made you think deliberately about who those 50 people would be and limited you to only those people as your friends.

Obviously there was much criticism. In fact, we criticized it roundly on The BeanCast in episode 129. And while I'm not necessarily going back on my comments about a site that forces friend limits, the premise of being socially selective may actually be more valuable than we realize.

Too many of us have entered the new social networking sphere holding onto an old idea — the thought that success is always measured by the amount of response. We envision rating points and business reply cards and think that social media success needs to be measured in similar ways. Success is equated to scale. The more responses or retweets or likes, the more measurably successful our social program is. And certainly, this is one valid way to measure effectiveness. But the very idea of "being social" also provides another metric of success that is harder to measure — the quality of the engagement — and not only is this a valuable metric to have, it could also be desirable enough form the entire strategic objective of some programs to be built around it.

I'm taking part in the MarketingProfs Content Marketing Crash Course this week. (Yes, that's my affiliate link.) For my session on Wednesday, December 8th at 2pm ET, I'll be talking about content as a networking tool. And in preparing for this, I've come up with a way of explaining what I do with The BeanCast. In a nutshell: I have created the most exclusive and effective social network in advertising.

In fact, my social network is so exclusive that only about 96 people have ever been allowed to participate. But these 96 individuals represent the most influential voices in marketing, key members of the advertising press, ad bloggers of note and rising stars in marketing thinking. I've provided these people with a forum that exists nowhere else. There is simply no other place where people of such stature can meet and debate the latest news and trends in advertising on a regular basis. This forum provides not just an outward platform, but opportunities to meet and network with each other as well. Deals are struck, products are promoted and jobs are found.

Of course I can still look at The BeanCast as a show that a few thousand people listen to each week. But when I consider the smaller, more targeted audience of the participants, then I find the real value of what I am doing.

The BeanCast is not just about promotion and mass appeal. Frankly, the subject matter is far too niche for the mass side of the equation to ever value-justify the work that goes into the program. (It's 10-15 hours a week, by the way.) But the networking opportunities are invaluable. It's led to an entire chapter just about me in Content Rules. It's lead to numerous paid speaking and teaching engagements. It's lead to credibility that has landed me paying clients. And now, as I contemplate a few opportunities before me, it's possibly leading me to a whole new career path.

To make this simple, if I had measured the success of my content purely based on the number of show downloads, I would have killed the program long ago. But by always keeping my focus on the value of networking, I derived value beyond any hopes I had for my efforts.

So my advice today is that as you develop content, always start with understanding all the possible objectives. Because on the social web, engagement holds much more value than that of raw impressions.

Branding Directly

The battle between direct and brand is age old. On one side you have solid metrics and clear profitability. On the other you have looser metrics, but high emotional value that can swing sales your way for decades. Each has value in the marketing chain. But they remain like oil and water.

Direct adherents are so ruled by the

effectiveness

of the program that they will often myopically ignore long-term value in exchange for immediate gain. Meanwhile, brand adherents will feverishly resist the bastardization of the image effort and will willingly leave sales opportunity on the table in exchange for memorability and good will with the customer.

Then along came digital.

I'm reading a fascinating white paper from Ad Age Insights called Building Brands Online. The paper itself is an amalgam of many of the stories and stats we've covered ourselves over the last year here on The BeanCast. However, seeing it all together in one place is crystallizing a vision for both the need to blend the disciplines of direct and brand in our planning and what that would look like.

If we've learned one thing from the last 15 years of marketing in the digital space, it's that interaction is branding. The quality of a customer experience can dramatically alter perceptions and receptivity of both brand and sales messaging. So understanding how to create a desired action and memorable experience is essential to branding in the digital world — and direct provides the essential toolbox for doing this.

I won't try to recreate the entirety of the whitepaper. I'll let you form your own opinions. But it is interesting to me that the digital tactics we get most excited about these days (Blendtec, the Old Spice guy, etc.) are examples of branding married to interaction and response. And the agencies and marketers who understand this will clearly dominate the next decade.

Drive To Disappointment

"To see the the rest of the story, go to YouTube.com/disappointment."

I understand the desire to have a transmedia focus. I also understand the desire to turn a client's advertising effort into a viral phenomenon. But there's something that fundamentally bothers me with the "rest-of-the-story" approach that most advertisers take with YouTube.

In my world, a call-to-action needs to have purpose. Not necessarily a sale, mind you. But every call-to-action should amp up the engagement at the very least. There are always exceptions, but I'd say these are rare.

Now take the average rest-of-the-story approach. We're driven to YouTube by the TV commercial to get an extended video play that promises to complete the story. Then usually we're treated with the option to click yet again — or worse, type in the url for some other site — to get more information about the product. Sometimes the experience is entertaining. Sometimes it's a waste of time. That's irrelevant. The point is...well...what was the point?

I'm the average consumer. I follow your call-to-action because I like your spot and I'm perhaps even vaguely interested in your product. I end up on YouTube and rack up a click for you that you can trot in front of the client or your bosses as an "engagement metric." And then I'm rewarded with a chance to click once again? Talk about diminishing returns!

Every subsequent click is a subset percentage of the audience before it. So even with an extraordinary 10% click through, you've taken a large audience of hand-raisers (say 100,000 folks) and taken them down to a not-so-large audience (10,000 folks) by the time you finish. How is this smart marketing?

Understand, I'm all for moving people from couch-potato to engaged über-fan. I like the idea of incorporating YouTube into the call-to-action. But use the medium to its advantage, folks. The online video can be interactive and could be used to set up a call back. The online video can make a specific, clickable offer. The online video can even apply contextual ads for local vendors of your product. Something!

When YouTube — or any other microsite or social network — is specifically called out as part of the campaign, make it part of the campaign, not just an exercise in meaningless metrics. The opportunity is there. Make it work for you.

An Afternoon With The Ad Contrarian

I'm trying to think what will surprise people the most about Bob Hoffman. And I'd have to say it's how pleasant the man is.

Don't get me wrong. I assumed that he would be nicer than the ranting blogger he comes off as on "The Ad Contrarian." (Almost every blogger is nicer in person than you would think by their most scathing words.) But Bob was truly welcoming and was one of the most caring individuals I've ever met in the business. 

As soon as I arrived, he rushed out to see me. He invited me to his office with a smile and a handshake. He listened intently and shared enthusiastically. He was completely engaged. And when we moved to the restaurant next door for drinks, he footed the bill and made me feel completely at home.

And suddenly it hit me. After spending this time with him I understood that this demeanor he showed me was exactly why he blogged the way he did. He's not blowing off steam. He's not ranting for the sake of stirring up controversy. He does it because he cares. He cares a lot. He cares that this business is so volatile and doesn't need to be. He cares that clients don't appreciate agencies as partners anymore and treat them as vendors. He care about his people and aches about every layoff he's ever had to make. And he's tired of the same old cycle of agencies prostituting themselves to be the expert in every new tactical trend in order make the numbers, whether those trends make sense to the business or not.

We sat out on the patio at Houston's on the Embarcadero for about an hour and had a great talk about the state of the agency world. And in this time he shared with me both the struggles and highlights of his career. I got a glimpse of the accidental vision he had for an agency. And I saw that even after all this time he was a man willing to reinvent himself and his agency. 

I'm thinking this gushing of mine will embarrass him a bit. But he needs to hear it. And so do the rest of you. You may not agree with every one of his opinions on The Ad Contrarian blog. (Heck, his own agency isn't exactly comfortable with it.) But don't misinterpret his intentions. This man has a vision for creating focused partnerships with clients. And he's definitely someone more of us should get to know.

We Don't Call It TV Marketing

For the past couple weeks I've had a mantra: We don't call it TV marketing, so why do we call it social marketing?

Think about that for a second. TV is a media. Social is a media. In fact, unlike TV, we actually add media to the name for social media. So why, may I ask, do we treat social media as a tactical discipline?

With TV we don't limit ourselves to one set of tactics, after all. There are rules, certainly. Some things work better for some products, and some time slots work better for some executions. But essentially TV functions as a canvas upon which we paint our programs for branding, direct selling, product placement or press relations.

Now consider the gospel of social media. In this gospel, we have conversations and create engagement. We talk about it being hard to accurately measure effectiveness and we claim we shouldn't negate brand building as an objective. And most of all, we talking about it being a relational media, not a broadcast media. 

First let me say, all of the gospel is good. And God smiles on the socially savvy. But the facts don't hold up when it comes to looking at this approach as the one and only true faith.

A Problem of Scale
I can't emphasize enough that I agree in the principles of using conversation marketing as a relational medium. However problems arise in this model when it begins to scale.

What happens when you reach 20 million followers? Do we really expect a brand to have meaningful engagements with that many people? Even if we find key influencers and distribute the effort, we'll never cover that amount of folks. And as Valeria Maltoni pointed out on this week's episode of The BeanCast, problems occur when trying to keep up with even 200 followers.

At scale, there is no getting around the fact that the medium becomes a broadcast media for a brand. You can still listen and even engage in some dialogue, but for the majority of followers you are nothing more than a mouthpiece for the brand — a source of information and discounts.

And Let's Talk About Discounts
This brings up another issue with the social gospel. While it is good — nay, even desirable — to engage with followers, most people don't follow brands for a relationship. They follow the brand for discounts, deals and information.

Given that understanding, we begin to realize that it's not taboo to sell via social venues. It's just imperative to understand the level of the engagement and market appropriately.

For instance, if we understand that there is a difference between someone who "likes" a brand and someone who engages with a brand, then all we need do is message them appropriately. Likes are given brand messaging, while engagers are given offers. But to say that we can't pump an offer or two out is just silly. We just need to follow rules similar to direct mail in the end. We can blanket send the offer (which is stupid and annoying) or we can target specific channels with offers that make relevant sense (which is smart and effective).

What I am advocating here is not throwing out social media puritanism. What I am saying is that in advertising we rule media, we aren't ruled by media. And as such we need to get back to basics and stop muddying the discipline pool by saying we do social marketing. In marketing we do branding, direct selling/lead generation and public relations. I know it's semantics, but it's important to distinguish this in order to understand that we are able to paint all kinds of tactics on the canvas that social media provides.

And God smiled

Amen.

Branding Vs. Graphic Standards

How many times have you walked into a new marketing job or met with a new client and were handed the "binder" and told, "This is our brand manual. Learn it."

Fonts. Point sizes. Acceptable logo usages. PMS colors. Preferred phrasing. Taglines. This crap is not a brand. These are graphic and copy standards. They are a baseline for look. But they are not your brand.

A brand is a feeling. It's how your customer feels about you. And we're not talking about that Brand Hijack BS, because I think it's safe to say that it's been debunked. You still control the things that influence the way your customer feels. But in the end, your brand is the feeling a customer gets whenever they see your logo or interacts with a customer service representative or Likes you Facebook. And cultivating that feeling is the job of the marketer, not just making sure that the colors in the graphic standards manual are correct.

I think many of the problems with branding today stem back to this basic misunderstanding of the difference between brand and graphic standards. We get so caught up in establishing the yardstick and policing the standards, that we forget that branding is about emotions and heart. 

If you don't believe me, look at the Bank of America. They have done a stunningly brilliant job of establishing graphic standards and making sure that everything communicates the core message. Yet there is no heart. I still think of Bank of America as an uncaring behemoth with a maze of customer service issues. And when I look at Bank of America, I have conflicting emotions between their messaging and my memories of how they have treated me in the past. 

This is why I say over and over again here on the blog that a brand has to be a guiding objective of how we want customers to feel about us, and that objective needs to move beyond marketing to guide everything we do, say and make. Because if our brand isn't doing that, all we have is this year's binder with some color chips in it.

The Price Of Recession Discounting

Last week I asked for some feedback about the recession topic we discussed on the BeanCast. To remind you, the recession apparently ended in June of 2009. (Yeah, right.) So I was looking for some perspective on the topic.

What I got, though, was some insightful commentary from Karen Tabaka (here's a link) to an expanded version of these comments in the forum) that took me in a whole different direction and made me realize that the reason the recovery continues to lag is probably a result of our own marketing foolishness. And I also realized that I had called this very thing out a year or so ago on the show and in several blog posts, including this one.

I won't repeat everything she said. You can read that for yourself. But one particular points stood out for me: There are two groups of people — the lesser portion of the population that have been affected by layoffs and economic hardship and the greater part of the population that remain employed and have no comprehension of the hardship, but have now become accustomed to discounts.

And that's the rub. We talked about it on the show. The experts wrote about it in Ad Age and other trade journals. Folks discussed it on Twitter. For the last year we've been saying that discounting at the expense of brand investment will always hurt a brand in the long run. Now we're seeing the proof.

Just think about it. The recession hit and everybody, whether they had a job or not, pulled back spending in fear. If folks didn't loose their jobs, they were afraid of losing their jobs and everyone got gun shy about big purchases. So most retailers and manufacturers, acting in desperation, started discounting in order to woo people back to the stores. For the most part it worked. Folks operated at a reduced profit, but the healthy operations managed to keep product rolling off shelves. Trouble is, now that the recession is over, all this marketing to the lowest common denominator — the lesser part of the population that was really out of work and really on hard times — dragged the rest of the population down with it. It may take years (if ever) for brands to increase profit margins back to pre-recession levels. 

Now let's turn to my favorite example, Apple, and we see a different story. They didn't discount. They didn't pull back brand spending. One could say that they may have even ramped up branding efforts and product introductions. And while it's true to say that not every brand is as cool as Apple, my retort is, "Why not? Why can't every brand be as cool as Apple?" Let's face it, Apple makes computers. Computers are a commodity item now. Yet Apple makes them special. They make them cool. So why can't other commodity operations do the same?

The drive for immediacy in terms of profit, rather than long term investment in brand position has left far too many companies exposed to economic risk. So when the recession hit, these lackluster branding efforts revealed themselves as less than useless and all that was left for survival were discount tactics. Which, of course, just served to exacerbate the situation in the end.

Karen's point about the two groups hammers home that knee-jerk responses to advertising are foolish. In this case, everyone was affected by recession news, but the greater portion of people still had money to spend, as Apple proves time and again. So brands pulling back on ad spends in favor of discounting ended up creating a short-term fix that ignored the huge potential that was out there. It was like the investor who pulls his mutual fund at the first sign of downturn, only to watch the market come back without him. He saved some short-term losses, but he missed out on the long-term gains. Some investments are meant to be slow, steady and long-term and branding is one of those investments.

The Press Release As Junk Mail

In the direct marketing world we often joke about being called "junk mailers" and say instead that we deliver, "targeted, personalized solicitations." But we all know why people think of direct mail as junk mail. It's because no matter how well crafted and targeted the best of direct mail can be, it's drowned out by the deluge of untargeted, poorly produced, creatively devoid mail pieces that flood our households. It doesn't make direct mail bad as a tactic, but it lowers the effectiveness and perceptions of the entire industry.

The exact same thing is happening today to the PR world because of the press release.

The History Of The Release

The press release was created as news about a product or service. Notice the operative word, "news." It wasn't created for promotion or selling people on an idea, but to inform journalists about interesting facts regarding what was happening at a company.

What's more, the release was not something everyone got. It was a document that was distributed one-on-one to journalists or influencers that either the PR expert had cultivated a relationship with or who requested this information. It was rarely, if ever, sent blind. 

Further, it was never intended to be the first line of the pitch. Indeed, it was often little more than a follow-up to the true work of picking up the phone to talk to a journalist about why the story mattered. After all, it's called public "relations" for a reason — it's about relationships, not promotions.

How Email Created Laziness

Admittedly, people have always bent the rules and there was always "that" PR rep who just mailed the release out to a hundred journalists. I'm not suggesting that PR is an exact science here. But generally people played fairly and there was a true symbiosis between the PR rep and the journalist. Then email happened and all bets were off.

Email made it possible for the PR practitioner to blast out a message to every known journalist in a database with a click of a button. And if 1% or 2% of them ran the story, the PR rep had a win. It was easy, it was fast and it was cheap.

It's also direct marketing at it's absolute worst.

Think about it: Would you just send a direct mail solicitation out for Viagra to everyone in a 5 ZIP code area of the US? No! It would be a waste of time, a waste of money, a waste of effort and may even offend a bunch of people along the way.

Direct marketers understand that if we don't target, we truly are "junk mail." And the best PR practitioners know the exact same thing is true in public relations.

Promotion Instead Of News

At the same time that email blasts of releases were become the norm, came a change in the content. This was no longer a relationship, after all. This was pure email promotion. So the tone of releases changed. Certain words started to slip in. "Outstanding." "Best-of-Breed." "Super-Amazing-Awesome!!!"

Suddenly the press release really was a direct piece. Even box mailers were created and freebies were sent out. It was if many PR agencies suddenly became B-to-B direct mailers and were trying to sell their story, rather than pitch a story. 

Now mind you, I don't think this is a bad thing. I love direct marketing. But when it totally replaces public relations, then you and I have a problem here. Because I love public relations too. And a box mailer sent out to every journalist on a mailing list is not PR.

The Debate Over The Release

Simon Dumenco's piece over at Ad Age has sparked a pretty vigorous debate on this subject and it's high time it happened. I'm a huge advocate of PR. I think it's a vastly undervalued component of the marketing pie. But laziness is killing both the perception of the discipline and the effectiveness of the programs.

I've been lucky enough to learn PR from some of the best and brightest in the industry — both big names and rank and file. And from these relationships I've learned that PR is much more than events and promos and getting your product on the Today Show. It's the hard work of getting to know the people who can influence your story and being as much a help to them as they are a help to you. 

Do you regularly feed information to your contacts that have nothing to do with your clients? You should be. Why should they help you if you aren't helping them? And do you try to craft angles on your stories that can actually help them get attention and maybe a promotion? Why not? They have a life too.

The debate shouldn't be over whether the press release is dead. It's not. The debate is over how the press release should be used. And I, for one, think there are plenty of direct marketers out here already.

Influencers Are Hiding In Forums

Long-time listeners will know that I believe forums are the most under-appreciated venue in social media. One might say that the forums — as well as Usenet and the bulletin board systems before them — are the true grandfathers of social media. And the fact that they are still around and thriving in force after 20 (sometimes 30) years, shows they have a viability that is simply unmatched in the digital realm. MySpace didn't invent online conversation. Nor did Facebook or Twitter. Open, online conversation was born in forum spaces, where people intensely interested in common conversations would gather to discuss. And while other systems and platforms have come and gone, all trying to reinvent the wheel, forums have continued to march on and even proliferate in thousands of different guises. Even today it is not the Linked In Questions space or the Facebook "Like" page or even the blog comments that are getting meaningful two-way conversation. That honor predominantly belongs to forums.

Why Forums Are Valuable To Marketers

We talk about the value of Facebook and how friends will recommend to friends, and that leveraging a person's social graph will increase the likelihood of extending sales among like-minded people. But here's the problem: Even my wife and I don't agree on everything, let alone my college roommate or the guy I met at a conference. So how "like-minded" are these social graphs? Probably not very much.

Yet a person who commits to a forum is intensely interested in the subject(s) being discussed. They wouldn't have joined if they didn't want to specifically discuss the topics at hand. It's not like a Facebook or a Twitter where you join to either connect with people you know or enjoy an ever-widening circle of friends with a range of interests. This is not a group formed by and for relationship, but one created to facilitate commonality.

Let me put it bluntly: This is where the most intensely interested, loud-mouthed advocates on any subject known to man hang out. Whether it's video games or parenting, you'll find a wealth of key influencers. No Facebook drama to deal with. No overwhelming slew of tweets to navigate. A forum takes you right to the heart of any given online conversation. And the opinions formed here make their way out to all the rest of those venues.

And tell me again why you're ignoring forums?

Putting The Transparency-Gospel To The Test

Now to be fair, I know the challenges here. While forums are the havens of intense conversation, they are also vigilant against the threat of marketing. We all know the horrors stories of forums rising up with a mighty ban hammer against the unwary marketer. And so we shy away from them.

What most marketers don't realize, though, is that in every case this happens it's not in response to the marketing itself, but to irrelevancy.

The absolute, rule-number-one no-no of forums is irrelevancy. Topics and threads are set up for a reason — to stay on topic. Moderators police threads and regularly shift posts from one thread to another, all in an effort to combat the dreaded monster of irrelevance. So when you look at a forum as your cheap way to post about a deal on video games, you shatter relevance in the conversation.

But forums don't hate marketers. They just hate marketing copy. And if you find a forum or thread discussing something of specific interest to you or your product, most forums would totally welcome you into the conversation. In fact, you'd be a hero as the knowledgeable expert (or willing scapegoat, depending on the conversation).

You see, we talk a good game in the social space about being transparent, but it's real easy to pretend transparency when all you have to do is write a blog post, write a Facebook status update or answer a few comments. But forums demand true transparency and a much more intense level of interaction. Which is probably the real reason behind why most organizations only offer passing attention to them.

Yet there's no denying that forums continue to offer us the best source of finding key-influencers on a range of subjects. And we're not talking bloggers here, who will take our message back to their 100,000 monthly uniques. We're talking everydaypeople who will take our message back offline, where 90% of all social interactions still happen. (Thank you Keller Fay Group for the research on that statistic.)

So take some time to revisit how you are approaching the social space and take a look at your forum outreach. It's hard work, but just like building any key-influencer relationship it will always pay off in spades in the end.