October 2011
Social media demands personality. Yet most companies and brands are uncomfortable with personality. Marketing consultants – like yours truly – have been encouraging them for years to temper personality in favor of staying on message.
If your brand is in social media, you may want to rethink that balance.
Lisa Barone at Outspoken Media wrote a phenomenal post about the problem that causes most brands to commit social media suicide: they act too big and miss the opportunity to connect with users.
“I don’t care how big your brand is,” Barone wrote. “You need to act small because that’s what attracts people.”
Social media is unlike any other media because individual consumers own it. They represent their own interests and have different expectations for the way they interact with brands they support.
Treating social media like any other media is a sure way to waste your time, resources, and money.
Can you fix the big brand personality problem? – Outspoken Media
October 2011
Understanding and job alignment are two keys to high performance. Executives often face a difficult challenge of explaining their company’s business in a simple format.
The Business Model Canvas helps solve this problem. In a single page, the canvas captures:
- Key partners
- Key activities
- Key resources
- Value proposition
- Customer relationships
- Channels
- Customer segments
- Cost structure
- Revenue streams
Originally designed for business brainstorming, we see useful applications for explaining the big picture to employees and engaging them in the process of improving all business functions. It’s a document that executives can use for presentations, leave with employees after meetings, and post in public spaces around the company.
As a bonus, it’s a useful strategic planning document for the executives to use in retreats and other strategy sessions.
October 2011
Everyone who ever worked for a very talented CEO got the POIE lecture numerous times. He made people step back before they came up with an idea and pulled the trigger on it.
P — Plan
O — Organize
I — Implement
E — Evaluate
Who among our readers can identify this CEO?
October 2011
Why don’t people buy more Dell MP3 players? After all, the company builds great computers.
Why do we never talk about Samuel Pierpont Langley when we discuss the pursuit of manned flight? After all, his effort at the turn of the century was funded by the War Department and the Smithsonian museum.
In a 19-minute TED talk, Simon Sinek explains why Apple inspires fanatical consumers and how the Wright brothers, neither of whom had a college education, inspired their team to engineer the first manned flight.
Sinek’s solution focuses on why a company is in business rather what it builds or how it is different from the competition.
He has also written a book about the same subject.
October 2011
www.raventools.com
Nashville-based Raven Tools helps companies better manage and report about their online marketing campaigns. The software brings together more than 15 different forms of data, such as search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, social media, website analytics, and email campaigns. Users can add events, such as product launches, to see how those events affected online metrics without having to remember the dates of each event.
Atkinson PR spent tons of hours collecting data from Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and email campaigns for reports about the Red White and Food campaign we managed the last four years. Raven Tools would have simplified that to a few minutes.
October 2011
Convert!: Designing Web Sites to Increase Traffic and Conversion
By Ben Hunt
Every business has a website. The question is whether every website is really a factor in the business.
Ben Hunt’s Convert! is an excellent primer in turning any company website into a tool for attracting and converting users.
The book does a commendable job of covering the macro issues, such as messaging for different buying stages, and micro issues, such as writing great calls to action.
Hunt writes several times that every web page is “an advertisement for the next step,” whether that step is to sign up for a trial, download a whitepaper, sign up for a newsletter, etc. He says engaging users so they take the next step requires a web page to meet four criteria:
- Affirm the positive signs visitors are looking for.
- Resolve their concerns and built trust.
- Build interest.
- Make it easy to keep engaging.
Fortunately, Hunt provides plenty of examples and advice for achieving all four criteria.
