Content is King, President and Pope
August 6, 2008
I just finished re-reading an excellent book The New Rules of Marketing & PR.
Some stuffy PR guys would probably like to challenge the contents of this book as it does not promote the old truths of PR and marketing. David Meerman Scott has focused on explaining the world of opportunities that have opened up for aspiring journalists, marketers and small business owners via web-based tools and services. Free or low cost applications such as blogs, podcasts and social networking tools such as MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn are changing the old rules. Niche buyers can be reached with targeted messages that cost a fraction of big-budget advertising campaign. In addition, these marketing efforts often allow instant feedback and measurable results, so the “train can be stopped much sooner when it’s headed to the wrong direction”.
One-way interruption does not work as well as it used to. Instead, marketers have to create a dialogue with potential buyers and deliver useful content at the moment their prospects, buyers or constituents need it.
Readers learn that online marketing is not about pretty websites either. Per Meerman Scott, content is not only KING, but President and Pope as well. The key to interesting and entertaining content is the collaboration between the different departments of the organization. Websites cannot be stale either – content needs to be fresh and the reactions of the visitors should be measured and analyzed, so the content can be improved. I agree with all these points as I prefer information rich blogs and websites to flashy and design driven sites.
Here are some steps David Meerman Scott suggests for creating thoughtful content. These steps apply to websites and all social media tools in my opinion.
-
Do not focus on writing primarily about your company and products. Content should be designed to solve buyer problems or answer questions.
-
Define your organizational goals before you design your website.
-
Based on your goals, decide whether you want to provide the content for free without any registration, or you want to include some kind of registration mechanism (much lower response rates).
-
Think like a publisher. Consider buyer personas.
-
Write for your audience. Use examples and stories, make it interesting.
-
Choose a great title that grabs attention.
-
Promote the effort like crazy. Offer the content with easy-to-find links.
-
Alert appropriate bloggers, reporters and analysts that the content is available and send them a download link.
What is the main reason I like The New Rules of PR and Marketing?
It gives easy to read instructions on how to become a thought leader while remaining authentic and transparent. No need to pay a top dollar to reach your audience if you have expertise, find your voice, target a specific group of people and keep improving your skills.
Educate, entertain and motivate!
How To Read A Business Book
June 30, 2008
I tend to read through several reviews before I purchase or read a book. Very often I rely on my friends’ opinions before I spend my valuable time.
Here’s the summary of Seth Godin’s suggestions on reading a business book:
1. Decide to change three things about what you do at work. The goal of the reading should be to persuade you to change, it should help you choose what to change.
2. Go ahead and make your reading productive. Take notes, create marching orders. If after three weeks you haven’t taken action on what you’ve written down, you wasted your time.
3. The best use of a business book is to help someone else. You should share what you read, hand the book to a person who needs it. A book is a souvenir and a container and a motivator and an easily leveraged tool. Hoarding books makes them worth less, not more.
______________________________________________________________________
I have read some good books recently, have taken notes. According to Seth’s suggestions, I have to take action soon as the clock is ticking!
Here are some business books small business owners may find interesting:
How to Succeed as a Small Business Owner and Still Have a Life, Paperback by Bill Collier
Alpha Dogs: How Your Small Business Can Become a Leader of The Pack by Donna Fenn
Book Reviews: Is the Pursuit of Happiness Overrated?
June 2, 2008
If we stacked up all the books on how to be happy, the pile might reach into the stratosphere.
Professor Eric G. Wilson says the ideology of constant happiness has people in its grip. In his book, Against Happiness, he says many people read self-help manuals, watch feel-good TV, eat comfort food and pop pills, all to avoid the blues that are an inevitable part of the human condition.
Cherishing our melancholy, he says, lets us absorb the insight it provides. We should feel what we must feel: insecurity, shock, turbulence, anxiety and grief. These experiences introduce us to the beauty of the world with all its indifference.
In his 2007 book, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder, New York University’s Jerome Wakefield says feeling down after your heart is broken, even so down that you meet the criteria for clinical depression, is normal. But today’s sufferers want a pill instead of learning from the situation.
There is one problem with acknowledging sadness and depression: often times you get no sympathy. Friends and co-workers just want you to snap out of it. Take a pill!
Don’t get me wrong, - I am an optimist and I love to be around happy people. I enjoy doing business with happy people. At the same I like sincere individuals who admit to having difficult times now and then. Experiencing grief often opens our eyes to understanding other people’s misery.
Seth Godin is A Purple Cow
May 22, 2008
I registered for all my college marketing classes with great enthusiasm as I was dreaming of becoming a marketer some day. I learned a lot, but my enthusiasm often disappeared as the semester unfolded. Why?
In my experience there were two kinds of marketing instructors. First, marketing researchers who had not left the building for about 10 years and seemed to live in the past. They liked to talk about 4 or 5 Ps of marketing, gave me a solid foundation in marketing vocabulary as well as taught me how to analyze case studies. Secondly, corporate refugees who gained their knowledge of marketing working for big Fortune 100 or 500 companies. They had real life experiences and often times knew how to push products and services to the masses. They were well respected by the rest of the faculty for that.
I lost my enthusiasm in my marketing studies by mid semester with both types of instructors as I did not learn how to brand and market small business products and services. I was not interested in stories about big companies with huge advertising budgets.
Of course they were able to buy attention from consumers. In addition, I saw creative individuals getting below average grades in class as they did not do well at multiple choice tests.
Then I heard of Seth Godin and felt relieved. He announced that the “TV- Industrial Complex” that had lasted a half century, was broken and It was OK to be bored with traditional advertising and push marketing. It wasn’t just me.
The main idea in Seth Godin’s book “Purple Cow” is mastering the art of becoming remarkable as the New Era of marketing is NOW. Remarkable ideas that spread, win. Remarkable companies, that stand out, win.
Tips on turning your idea/product into a Purple Cow:
- Is your product/service more boring than salt? Come up with 10 ways to change it.
- Think small. Think of the smallest conceivable market, and describe a product that overwhelms it with its remarkability. Go from there.
- Outsource, if necessary.
- Build and use a permission asset. Once you have the ability to talk directly to your most loyal customers, it gets easier to develop and sell amazing things.
- Copy. Not from your industry, but from another industry. Find out what they do remarkably well and copy.
- Identify a competitor who is generally regarded at the edges, and outdo them.
- Find things that are “just not done” in your industry and do them.
- Ask “Why not?”
Seth Godin is definitely a Purple Cow amongst marketers as he is not afraid to do anything mentioned above.
Predictably Irrational
April 18, 2008
I took some time off to take care of my health at the local hospital. I made a mistake of bringing my assistant Blackberry with me. Here I was, one hour after my surgery drugged up and happy, talking business on my “Crackberry”.
Why did I feel a need to take care of business when I had a perfect reason not to.
Why do we make foolish and irrational decisions?
Read “Pedictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely. You may get some answers.
You’re already thinking the author of Predictably Irrational is not talking about a smart, practical person like you. But he is.
MIT professor Dan Ariely has been studying behavioral economics for 20 years. He contends that irrational behavior is a part of human nature. Don’t be put off by his academic standing. His new book is an entertaining read.
It’s a fascinating romp through the science of decision-making. Ariely shows how emotions, social norms, relativity and expectations lead us astray.
He illustrates how people keep their options open, even when one is obviously better; why a woman can’t decide on one of two suitors though one has demonstrated that he is better.
Want to know why a penny difference in price can prompt you to choose a different candy than the one you really want? Why coffee in a nice setting tastes better? Why a person looks more attractive when a less-attractive person enters the room? Or why people who would never steal money take office supplies?
Ariely says our understanding of economics is now based on the assumption that people behave rationally. It should be based on the natural irrationality of human beings. But once understood, irrationality can be overcome.
Some of his experiments had surprising outcomes. In one, people were asked to write down the last two digits of their Social Security numbers. After they did, it was found that people with numbers ending in the highest digits (80-99) were willing to pay more for items like wine and chocolates than those with the lowest numbers, those ending in 01 to 20.
Economists are using the new-found knowledge to design fixes for problems ranging from drug addition, to undersaving for retirement, or to the positioning of cookies and fruits in the cafeteria.
Go and buy Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, HarperCollins, 304 pages, $25.95.
Meatball Sundae
February 27, 2008
“Meatball Sunday” stirred up most of my beliefs about successful marketing. I enjoyed Seth Godin’s book and I wonder if I ever tried to fix Meatball Sundaes for my small business customers. Maybe we as marketers try to cover up Old Marketing with whipped cream and put a cherry on top?
New Marketing leverages scarce attention and creates interactions among communities with similar interests. In other words: if you want your product to be successful, you need to build a community around it. In addition, every product or service becomes a form of media through storytelling and interaction. Dreamers, be aware - the triumph of big ideas will continue. Forget the command-and control approach to the creation and spread of ideas.
The important part of New Marketing - permission marketing is not up to the person sending marketing messages. Permission does not exist to help the marketer. The moment the marketing message ceases to be anticipated, personal, and relevant – doors close in front of the marketer. Permission exists to help the consumer, and can’t be sold or bought. In a market where everyone is a critic, there is a constant need to create products and services that appeal to and satisfy critics.
“Meatball Sundae” focuses on 14 trends no marketer can afford to ignore. It explains what to do about the increasing power of stories and shortened attention spans.
———Gotta get me some of that New Marketing. Give me blogs, e-mail, YouTube videos, MySpace pages, Google AdWords…I don’t care as long as it’s shiny and new.
Dead CEO s and how they operated: Book Review
February 3, 2008
War heroes, long after they pass on, live on in the movies. The life and exploits of sports heroes are retold in books. Sixty years after his death, we still know Babe Ruth.
Stars of the business world may be less well-remembered, but their daring feats qualify them as heroes just the same. Dead CEOs still have a lot to teach. In New Ideas From Dead CEOs, author Todd G. Buchholtz dramatically brings their business stories back to us.
Take A.P. Giannini, founder of Bank of America. He cared so much for his customers that he reopened his bank four days after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. It was a Sunday. Giannini went down to the wharf, put a plank across two wooden barrels and declared himself open for business.
Some of Buchholz’s heroes started their empires from scratch. Walt Disney first supported himself by taking baby pictures. His career got a boost when he received $500 for a film on dental hygiene.
Sam Walton wasn’t shy about scoping out the competition. At one point, he sneaked around competitor’s stores and looked under the display racks to check inventory. Walton was a proud skinflint. He was so tight with a dollar that he once shared a hotel room with eight staffers. Those were the early days. By the time he became a retailing legend, he only shared his room with one staff member.
Book reviewer Paul Carroll says the author recounts fascinating stories of early beginnings of mega businessmen, showing how his subjects transformed business.
In addition to the dramas of Wal-Mart and Disney, Buchholz tells the adventures of Tom Watson Sr. and Tom Watson Jr. of IBM, Mary Kay Ash and Estee Lauder, David Sarnoff of RCA, Ray Kroc of McDonald’s, and Akio Morita, founder of Sony.
New Ideas From Dead CEOs by Todd G. Buchholz, Collins, 300 pages, $26.95.