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Jul 13
Love0

How The Facebook Timeline Changes Destroyed an Industry. What???

By Uncategorized

So all day today I’ve been reading posts about how the changes to the Facebook business pages, wherein the tabs were de-emphasized and the timeline became a requirement, have destroyed an entire industry, namely that of agencies and design firms who charged a lot of money to build and maintain Facebook landing pages for their clients. Here’s one from Fortune, here’s another from Geoff Livingston.

This surprises you? Really? I’ve been a digital professional a loooong time (> 20 years), and one thing I’ve learned is that tools change. A lot. And often. And on a whim. Standards shift, strategies change, business models come and go. I cannot sympathize with a model that says you should build an entire business around the whims and trends of a mercurial software company, no matter how large. Developing an expertise in Facebook design as a component of the servies you offer makes total sense. Assigning an FTE to monitor, track, prepare for, and execute against evolving functionality makes more sense. Being experts in a particular technology is always good. But if your entire business is building landing pages around the Facebook Tabs feature, you’re gonna pay at some point.

Features change. If you hook your wagon to them, be prepared to be unceremoniously UNhooked somewhere down the road, and without your consent. To be honest, I’ve never been particularly enamored of building big marketing plans around platforms–you cede too much control over the success of your business to the purveyors of said platforms.

Jul 10
Love0

It’s Not just that WE are Social. The World is.

By Communications, Social Media

We talk about social media. We talk with clients about their social media strategy. We talk on this website about social media trends and forecasts. We are a public relations firm. Our job is to relay a company’s stories and messages to the public. It’s just that the public happens to be on social  networks.

We have said this in so many different ways. Social networks were a fundamental tool in the Arab Spring uprising. They are a platform to help people get jobs. If Facebook were a country, it’s population would be 100 BILLION. We’ve talked about how it doesn’t matter what your perception of the social networks is, their importance is undeniable. But still, companies occasionally still tell us that they are not interested in the social media piece.

That is ok. We can still help you with brand positioning, crisis communications and public relations. But there’s a big chunk of the world that will never hear your message because you didn’t present it in the space that they’re already visiting.

 

Jul 04
Love0

I’m reading this great book.

By Communications, Marketing

After a ton of friends recommended it, I finally picked up Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. You can visit that link for a synopsis on the book. But essentially, it is a discussion about success and what elements (timing, talent, practice, place, parenting, etc) make up the perfect formula for creating it. The anecdotes are wonderful, and I find that I am referring back to the book when thinking about anything from my kids’ futures to the challenges our clients are working on.

The book analyzes what factors had to come into play in order for a person to be truly, outrageously successful. Getting a more in-depth look into Bill Gates childhood (whose high school received a computer in 1968) or the KIPP school in New York or  the perfect year for an entrepreneur to be born (right around 1835 in case you’re wondering, sorry) is all fascinating. It’s also a good motivator for reevaluating our standards.

Reading the book made me think about the idea of success and how we define that as individuals and organizations. Marijean and Rusty can tell you that I am an obnoxious number keeper. Since my job is business development, I always want to know where we are in contrast to our goals. Is our percentage of growth what we had estimated it would be? Do we have the right size and amount of clients?

But what I’m finding is that both personally and professionally, I feel more successful when the clients that we do have are satisfied AND my family has dinner on the table. What I mean is that, I’m never going to have Bill Gates-style success. I don’t have 10,000 hours to dedicate to development. I could not cater to 75 clients. And actually, taking VERY good care of the clients that we do have seems to be what we do best. To me, spending the time to make them successful and still maintain happy lives outside of work is the ideal.

Maybe I’m soft. Have any of you read this book? Did it make you reevaluate what you believe success to mean?

 

Jun 28
Love0

Want More Sales? Trust in Me!

By Corporate Strategy, Marketing, Media, Social Media

So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about sales and how social platforms and processes have affected them. Sales, in case we’ve all forgotten, is the mother of all ROIs. No matter what marketing or business development efforts you engage in, the rubber meets the proverbial road at sales. Did all our effort generate more closed business, or didn’t it?

The social, mobile web has unleashed a torrent of attention deficit issues. There are so many “opportunities” thrown at us everywhere, so many chances to “connect” and “share” anytime that it takes a LOT to get our attention, and the usual cold call or marketing drivel just doesn’t make the grade. At all. As soon as we see an ad, we’re out. To make matters worse (for the seller), we can get most of the information we need to make a decision online these days. To rise above the crowd, companies need a serious advantage, a serious leg up. So what is that leg up?

Trust.

Trust? Wow, OK. So how do you build that with perfect strangers when you’re under a lot of pressure to close new business from the higher-ups? Well, it’s not simple, but it’s well worth the effort. The good news is that one really great feature of all these amazing new social, digital and mobile platforms is that they provide an unprecedented opportunity to LISTEN and absorb conversations that may be taking place around your brand, industry, and process that were never previously available. That means that if you choose, you can start anticipating your customers’ needs by paying attention the conversations they are already having without you. It’s like 24-7 market research that helps you know when and how to interact with a potential customer so that your abilities are aligned with his needs.

Will this chair fit in my office? When’s the payback on that power purchase agreement? Do I need seven or eight generators to run my office? What’s the best way to select a delivery company? When you couple listening with a decent content development strategy, you can become the go-to thought leader in your space because you listened to these questions and created content to proactively answer them. Trust can be further established, often with people you haven’t even talked to yet.

So when you DO finally choose to engage in a sales call, you might have already provided the answers to a potential customer’s business problem via some other process like a white paper, tweet or an online referral. If you offer those solutions freely, in a consultative way, even more trust can be established. You have the proper context at the right time to sell successfully. At that point, it’s not even selling—it’s helping.

To win business these days, you have to be engaged in a lot more places, and over a longer period, to establish trust. Trust is the only way to hold a prospect’s attention in the attention deficit world.

Jun 15
Love0

Listen to Hillel

By Communications, Crisis Communications

Usually this space is used to discuss recent technology or news in the public relations and social media sphere. But I want to take it back. Way back to Babylon actually.

For your listening pleasure: Rivers of Babylon

“If not now, when?” said Hillel the Elder in Babylon back at some point during the big BC, AD change over. Maybe he was not talking about creating a crisis communications plan before you have a crisis. And he may not have been referencing the importance of a solid social media strategy, but I’m pretty sure he meant that if there’s something worth doing, you better get on it.

He also came up with the Golden Rule, and people seem to like that one quite a bit.