THINKing

Squirrel!

Like Dug The Dog from Pixar’s movie, Up!, marketers too often are distracted by the latest shiny thing. In my view, strategy should dictate tactics. But tactics are fun and strategy is hard, marketers say.  And that’s the way it is with social media. More than half of all marketers are currently engaged in some form of social media, according to eMarketer, but do they really have a grasp of how it fits into overall business objectives?

“With so much intense interest and activity, the big question is, Are marketers doing it right?” said Geoff Ramsey, eMarketer CEO and author of “10 Best Practices for Success with Social Media,” one of the Insight Briefs in the series. “Since social media marketing has the potential to affect so many areas of an organization,” he said, “the enormity of this opportunity leads many marketers to chase after every technique, tactic and metric that passes them by.”

Social media is not about marketing, and that is why I believe an organization’s PR group should take the leadership. Good public relations has always been about dialogue, listening to your publics before you respond.

Do you agree? Tell us who you think should be responsible for social media.

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Creativity 2010 - Week #6

30 Seconds To Creativity - People who watched a target moving side-to-side for 30 seconds have been tested as producing significantly more ideas when immediately given a creative task. This technique is, “thought to increase the cross-talk between the hemispheres.”

Switch Off Your Social Self.  Switch On Your Creativity -  The paradox is that, when you’re being yourself, rather than trying to imitate success, you’ll be your most original and creative.

Were The SuperBowl Ads Any Good?  Let’s Ask Twitter! - Even in an age of social media there’s still something about Superbowl advertising that appeals to us all.

Need A Business Idea? Look For Pain - If you really want to innovate your business and improve your revenue look for the pain that customers face daily.

Why Design Matters -  All of the energy fed into the debate about the value of good design to the world of commerce would be better spent building ways to make holistic design a routine activity in business—and society.

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Put Away The Diamond Ring

It seems to me that many marketers are like the guy overeager to get married. That guy walks up to the first pretty girl he sees and immediately whips out the diamond ring, asking for the order, so to speak.

Marketers who ask for too much information from prospects the first time they meet is guilty of this, too.

I am always cautioning my clients about asking for too much information too soon.

If someone wants to sign up for your enewsletter, it’s OK if you initially just get an email address and a first name. That’s what I recommend. You can give the prospect the option to provide more but I only require those two elements.

As the prospect gets to know you and appreciates the content you are providing, then you can ask for a little more information.Or, if you want to provide them with some increasingly valuable content, then its appropriate to require a little deeper contact information.

FutureNow addressed this topic recently and I loved this line for their post,

Remember, it’s not about you or your sales process. Your visitors are volunteers in the process and are coming to your site with motivations and intent.

That’s dead-on. Those visitors are volunteers, there of their own accord. If you don’t provide them the information they need without asking them to marry you right away, your competition will. So, let’s put away the diamond ring until we are really sure about this whole marriage thing, OK?

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Front Page Coverage - That’s What I Want!

Does everyone in business seem to think all you have to do is call the local daily paper and they come out to do a page one profile of your business? With all the downsizing, it’s hard enough just to get the media to open your emails or take your calls. Getting a front page story just because you want it: priceless.

I was talking with a prospect once who tossed this off as if it was no big deal, “of course we’d like to have the paper come down, meet our principals and do a profile of our business.” Another one wants to become a “rock star-type celebrity” in his industry.

Well, I’d like to win the lottery, but at least I know I have to buy a ticket first in order to be in the running.

Got any thoughts on this subject?

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Creativity 2010 - Week #5

This week’s top creativity links from My Creative Team:

Alternative Scenarios - Scenarios are qualitatively different descriptions of plausible futures. They can give you a deeper understanding of potential environments in which you might have to operate and what you may need to do in the present. Scenario analysis helps you to identify what environmental factors to monitor over time, so that when the environment shifts, you can recognize where it may be headed.

Brainstorming: Mastering The Bad Idea -  Have you ever noticed that it’s always the other guy who comes up with the most creative idea first.

My Creative Team Custom Creativity Search -  We’ve set up a custom Google search to help you locate innovation-related links.

Innovation Blogs -  A directory of blogs focused on innovation.

BusinessWeek On Innovation -  A constantly updated source for stories relating to innovation in business.

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More Brain Exercises

In our past two posts we talked about pumping up your brain and we offered a couple of brain exercises. Here are a couple more for your little gray cells.

Group Think
Brainstorming in a group often does not work because people are afraid of speaking their ideas out loud. This is a way around that fear. Assemble a group. Write down three ideas on a piece of paper and pass it to the person on your right. That person reads the ideas and adds three more ideas triggered by the previous ideas. This continues until it gets back to the beginning.

Random Input
A random piece of information often can take your problem-solving process into hyperdrive. Once you have your question or problem clearly stated, open up a dictionary or a thesaurus to any page and select a word. Now, think about how this random item applies to your problem. There is some connection and your job is to find it.

OK, now you have some new tools to pump up your brain. Do some heavy lifting.

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Brain Exercises

We talked recently about pumping up your brain with exercises for the little gray cells. Today, here are two more to try:

Ignore The Rules
Now, I’m not suggesting that you should break laws. Rather, I am saying you need to look for approaches that fall outside the norm. Ancient prophecy said that whoever could untie the Gordian Knot would be king of Asia. Everyone, including Alexander the Great, failed when they tried to unravel it. Frustrated, Alexander took out his sword and sliced the knot in half. Mission accomplished.

Reframing The Problem
You can look at problems from different perspectives using what is called the Reframing Matrix. Take a piece of paper and write down your question in the middle of the paper. Draw a grid around it. In one grid you might ask, “how would a doctor approach this problem?” In another, “how would an engineer solve this?” In yet another, “how would a farmer look at this?”

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Pump Up Your Brain

According to Nobel prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling, the best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas. Unfortunately, school teaches us to find the right answer, when actually there is usually more than one right answer for a problem.

When an adult is challenged to come up ideas, he or she typically generates three to six possible solutions. The average child generates 60. We need to be more child-like in our approach to ideas. In the next few posts, we’ll discuss some exercises to help us generate ideas or to look at things from a different - and perhaps, childlike - perspective.

Change The Question

Sometimes just by changing a word or two in a question, you can come up with radically different ideas.

Centuries ago a plague spread across Europe which was almost always fatal. In one town, a person thought to be dead was buried alive. Townspeople wanted to make sure this didn’t happen again. One group proposed putting food and water in every casket and an air hole up to the surface. Their question: “what if we bury someone alive?” Another group suggested placing a 12-inch spike in the coffin lid and aligning it with the victim’s heart. Their question: “how do we make sure everyone we bury is dead?”

Do you have a current problem in which changing the question might help?

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5 Best Posts - January 2010

We had some very popular posts in January - some old and some new. I thought I’d share them with you.

1. 8 Ways To Use Twitter Lists
2. Twittering Journalists
3. Be Relevant
4. When Billboards Go Bad
5. 7 Ways To Kickstart Your 2010 Marketing 

What’s your favorite?

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My New Business Secret Formula

We’ve talked here often about the fact that there is no marketing magic bullet. But there is a new business magic bullet, and I’m going to tell you the secret formula. Only a handful of those who read this will successfully implement within their business because it is not shiny and new.

Like most businesses, you are probably spending up to 80% of your marketing budget on bringing in new business because that’s exciting. It’s not as much fun implementing my new business secret: do great work for current customers.

But Harry, you are saying, I’d rather go out and bring home the new business buffalo than focus on my current customers. Where’s the benefit?

Let me disabuse you of the notion that there is no benefit in this hyperfocus on current customers.  Doing great work for current clients spawns so many good things for your business.

Even if you have the best salesforce in the world and they can sell anyone anything once, if your company doesn’t wow them with your service they aren’t going to buy from those superb sales folk again. Some estimates show that if you cut customer churn by just 5%, you can increase profits by at least 25%.

If that’s not reason enough, then consider these stats relating to customer retention:

• 91% of dissatisfied customers won’t return
• 96% of dissatisfied customers won’t tell you the real reason why they won’t be back
• it costs 10 times more to replace a customer than it does to keep him
• repeat customers spend 33% more than new customers

But how is doing great work for current customers the secret to my new business program, Harry?

I’m glad you asked. Here’s the key statistic that you need to internalize: referrals from repeat customers are 107% higher than from non-customers. Loyal customers talk you up to others who are like themselves. In other words, they are targeting the right customers for you and you don’t have to spend a dime.

Are you doing great work for your customers? Maybe it is time to reevaluate.

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