“Hey, there’s something in my shoe. It’s a pretzel. And here’s another one.”
Year: 2012
How Thoreau helped me understand youth soccer
If a four year-old does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different coach. Let him step to the whistle which he hears, however measured or far away.
Enterprise content marketers are making a huge mistake with Facebook
A survey of Inc. 500 companies shows the first decline in corporate blogging since 2007. Many are switching their content efforts to Facebook. Big mistake, as Janet Meiners Thaeler
points out in the post linked above. I agree with everything she says.
And here’s another way to think about it; Facebook is a valuable channel, but it’s not the Internet. It’s a walled garden, as we’ve come to call it. If you put your content solely on Facebook, you’re saying, “I don’t want my content on the Web, just this one place that can only be found one way by one group of people.” “Even if there are 800 million of them.”
As Janet suggests “and many of us have been advising companies for years”, publish to your blog, then share the link in all your other networks.
As long as people still search the Web, a company blog should be at the core of your content strategy.
Your customers don’t believe you because you lie to them every day
I recently got a robocall call from a home security company, offering me a free system so they could get a foothold in my neighborhood. I considered it for a moment, and then hung up, even though I want a home security system. Why?
Because I assumed they were lying. Do they really mean free, or are they just waiving some fee? Do I really think it’s going to end up costing me nothing? Clearly not.
Every time I get on an airplane, the pilot lies to me.
If there’s anything we can do to make your flight more enjoyable, please don’t hesitate to ask.
I’ve rung the call bell exactly once in all my miles of air travel, to ask a flight attendant to throw away a half-full cup of water. I had a two-year-old on my hands and nowhere to put the cup. She glared at me as though I had asked her to disrobe and sing show tunes.
How do you think your boss would react if you went into your next performance review and said, “I did everything I could possibly have done as well as anyone could possibly have done it. I am flawless and perfect.”
Yet that’s what most companies do with their marketing and communications. And when a real issue comes up, only then do they admit there might be something possibly that could maybe be ever so slightly better, and now that it’s been raised to their attention, they’ll address it immediately.
Your customers and prospects, especially the ones you want to attract and keep, know as much or more about your products and services as you do. They know the flaws as well as the benefits. They know how you stack up against your competitors. They know if you’re cheaper or more expensive. They know if you’re easier to use, or provide more value.
In every industry I’ve ever worked in, our prospects were extremely intelligent and well informed. When they came to us, they had done their research. They didn’t want a sales pitch; they wanted an honest exploration of whether or not our products could meet their needs. And I’ve been fortunate enough to work for companies who felt confident responding honestly, knowing that we would prevail.
Why is “We’re only human” an excepted tenet of life, but a last resort and an admission of failure when a company says it?
What’s the worst thing that could happen if you admitted to your customers that you know the truth as well as they do, are sincerely working to make things better and value their input in the process?
Could that really be a bad thing?
Now you’re talking my language
Me: “We’re having a yard sale and we thought we might sell some of your old toys.”
The Boy: “Nooooo! Don’t sell my old toys!!! I still want them!!!”
Me: “If we sell your old toys, we can make money to buy new toys.”
The Boy: “I think maybe we should sell my old toys.”
Are you ready to get simple?
I don’t consider myself a particularly trendy person, but I do live in a funky little town on the edge of a college town. I walk all over the place for exercise, walk through campus a lot, and I keep my eyes open. I’m also spending a lot of time on Pinterest these days, planning a future wardrobe for when I hit my goal weight. All of these things are causing me to see a trend. Simple is in.
“Forgive me if I’m the 9 millionth person to say that, but I’m trying to look at the larger implications here.”
I live less than a mile away from one of the best farmers markets in the country. All of the food is organic and grown within 50 miles. We’ve been written up in The New York Times, in fact. The man I buy my green beans from was quoted in the article.
The trend in bicycles among the urban hip is for simple, single-speed bikes called “fixies” that don’t even have brakes. Major manufacturers, inevitably, are copying the style, but the coolest looking people in my town are riding bikes that look like they were pulled from a dumpster.
One of the most sought-after sneakers among the cognoscenti is called the GAT “German army trainer”. A plain white style issued by the German army, they have obviously influenced trendy sneaker design for the last few years. You can hunt them down online cheap, or you can buy a designer’s version for $500.
I’m wondering what it is in the Zeitgeist that is causing people to return to the simple, unadorned and honest. It may just be a natural pendulum swing, and I’m sure the economic decline of the last decade played a huge part. When no one has a lot of spare cash to throw around, price and value obviously become a much bigger consideration. But I think it goes deeper than that.
Social media also embodies a more personal and honest style of communication that goes hand-in-hand with this attitude. Whether social media helped cause it or evolved at the right time to benefit from it is something we probably can’t figure out, nor do we really need to.
How does this affect your marketing and communications efforts? It’s no secret how I feel about transparency and openness, and the role social media plays. But are you too complicated for your customers? Does your corporate brand feel simple, honest, personal and valuable? Or complicated, insincere, distant and self-centered?
Are you offering the $50 product that offers real value, or the $500 product that is mostly show? And of course I mean that metaphorically. “Unless you’re in the sneaker business.”