Painless conference charity
While there are any number of excellent causes out there that need and demand attention, I want to draw yours towards something relatively painless: conference charity. As someone who has attended, planned, and created conferences of all stripes, from Podcamp to giant shows, I can say with great confidence that there’s always room around the edges.
Crates of shirts from Podcamp Boston 2
For example, as any conference planner will tell you, meals and food are squishy numbers at best. Even when the price tag of a show is in the thousands of dollars, there are still no-shows. There are still people who eat less than others. There are still people who don’t take the freebies even when they’re built into the price, from shirts to pens to foods of every kind.
At the end of a conference, we all shake hands, exchange business cards, and go our separate ways. What we don’t pay attention to is the army of venue staff cleaning things up, most of which goes straight to your nearest garbage dump. Go look at the trash bins after an event and you’ll find everything from untouched meals to piles of shirts to televisions (seriously, I saw this after a major electronics show – the vendors tossed their gear rather than pay to ship it back).
Obviously, all that stuff at the edges, the excess, can find new homes. After every Podcamp Boston, we call in the Pine Street Inn to take away leftover food, which is distributed to Boston’s homeless. After the Blue Sky Factory user conference in the fall of last year, the local Catholic Charities did the same with the leftover food in Baltimore. Back when Podcamps were printing t-shirts for every event, a good number of the leftovers (especially from Podcamp Boston 2) ended up going to several local homeless shelters, because the shirts were perfectly good. I get tons of trade show swag including more pens than I could possibly count, and most of those end up at the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, a local charity near my home. Larger stuff gets picked up for free from the Vietnam Veteran’s Association.
The point isn’t to say here’s stuff I do. The point is to say that you’ve got tons of stuff from conferences that deserves a better place than a trash can. If you’re a conference organizer or event planner, you have literal mountains of stuff that other people will value greatly, especially after your attendees have left. You need only one look at the grateful faces in the local soup kitchen when you walk in with a few crates of really good conference food to know that there is always a home for leftovers. You need only one look at the faces of the kids at a local program when you drop off a few boxes of promotional stuffed animals that no one took at your trade show booth to know that a tiny amount of effort and no money on your part can still make a big impact.
If you want to make a painless difference at upcoming events, ask whenever you register if the event organizers will be donating leftovers of any kind (food, clothing, etc.) to the needy once the event ends, whether it’s a local Podcamp or SxSW. If the event organizers say no, ask them if it’s okay if you coordinate it, then find the local charities that can use that event’s leftovers and arrange to have them swing by at the end of the day to pick it up. If you’re an event organizer, make sure you have charities at the ready to pick stuff up when the day is done. (as a bonus, you can take a tax deduction on anything you donate) If you see tremendous waste from an event, do what you can to salvage at least some of it – if you see a few boxes of shirts sitting next to a dumpster, call in the troops to come rescue them.
In these times, charity is needed more than ever. The good news is that you have it within your power to make a difference at conferences and events with just a phone call or two. You know what needs to be done now. Go and do likewise.
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Winning back a lost customer’s heart
Saturday morning. The phone rings.
“Hello, Mr. Penn? This is Better Crates and Cartons Magazine calling. About five years ago, you signed up for more information about building a sunroom on your house. Are you still interested?”
Here’s something similar my colleagues at Return Path received:
“You are receiving this email because sometime during the past 20+ years you have registered with PACE, or one of our affiliated companies, to receive free information and offers concerning…”
Both of these outbound marketing efforts are obviously trying to resurrect very, very old databases in an attempt to drum up business. But like the obviously single person at the bar, they reek of desperation. In business, however, desperation sends a clear warning signal: don’t do business with this company because they’re obviously struggling to make it. They’re not making their numbers and so anything you buy from them is not likely to have a warranty that will survive the company’s apparently imminent demise.
Be careful about what signals your marketing sends out. There’s a fine balance between rebuilding a relationship long lost and appearing obviously desperate. Like the world of dating, if you’re coming back after a long time away, you’re not only starting over in terms of relationship strength, but also working to overcome past history and a lack of trust. Just as you don’t walk back into someone’s life expecting an immediate warm welcome, your marketing should not march back into someone’s life expecting a returning customer.
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Sign up for the Facebook Analytics webinar
Updated March 3: The webinar has been recorded and is now available by clicking here.
There was such ridiculously positive demand for a re-run of the Facebook Analytics webinar from Social Fresh Tampa that I’m going to record it and make it available in the near future as a webinar on demand. If you’d like to be notified when it’s available, fill out this form. Be sure to read it as you fill it out so that you know what’s going to happen. If you’re reading this in an RSS reader of some kind or in an email client, you’ll want to click here to get to the actual form.
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Brand dilution
One of my favorite definitions of brand is by Ze Frank, who calls it an emotional aftertaste from a set of experiences, a very apt definition. Brand is identity, true, but it’s also how that identity feels. When you think about your favorite brands, it’s not from a cold, dispassionate analysis. Your brand impression of an iPhone isn’t based on how quickly it boots up. It’s how the product makes you feel. Brand is about emotion because emotion is what triggers recognition.
If brand is an emotional aftertaste, then brand dilution is when the taste is spread too thin. You can spread a brand too thin by using it everywhere for everything, or by applying it to things that don’t live up to their promise. For example, one of the worst cases of brand dilution I can think of is Wolfgang Puck. The famous TV chef licenses his name to just about everything food-related, even stuff that’s terrible quality.
If you put the famous chef in front of the case bearing his name, what are the chances he’d say that the recipes were his own and were being displayed in the way he wants to be known? What are the chances, if you were able to invite him to your kitchen, that he’d cook exactly what’s in the case if asked to produce that dish? What are the chances that, if you put his name-branded food on a plate in front of him unlabeled, he’d think it were anything other than mediocre? Slim at best.
What happens when a brand gets diluted or corrupted? Our brand anchors, the memories that create the emotional aftertaste, change. They shift. They become anchored to the majority of the experiences we have with the brand, a new aftertaste. My anchor to Puck’s brand has shifted over the years. When I see Woflgang Puck’s name on a product, the feeling it conjures up isn’t the sensual power of food his agency and PR team is probably hoping for. It instead summons up crappy quality goods at very high prices, like the airport sandwich bar or crappy hotel room coffee, laughably billed as “Wolfgang Puck’s Chef’s Reserve”.
Be very, very careful who and what you lend your own brand – personal or corporate – to. If the product or service doesn’t fulfill your promise, your brand will suffer until the only emotional aftertaste left is bitterness.
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Yes, you need a CRM
Over the past couple of days, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to businesses large and small, in virtually every industry from non-profit rescue missions to Fortune 500 companies about their digital marketing, and one of the greatest consistent gaps I’ve seen is that few are using a CRM, or customer relationship management system.
For those who aren’t familiar, a CRM is a piece of software that does pretty much what its name says it does: helps you manage customer relationships. They’re used to stay in touch with customers, look for business-generating opportunities, stay on top of opportunities you’ve created, prevent customer loss by staying on top of support and service issues, and many other things.
In this day and age, when information flows freely and data capture requires the advanced skills of copy and paste, there’s no excuse not to use a CRM for your business. Price isn’t an issue – there are free and low cost systems out there that offer 80%-90% of the functionality of the top end systems. Here are a few options and some of the tradeoffs:
Salesforce.com. Salesforce is the 800 pound gorilla in the world of CRM, and for good reason. It offers an incredible amount of power, but that power comes at a price. Salesforce isn’t cheap (as much as $150/user/month), and it’s a bear to set up well. Out of the box, it’s okay, but it requires extensive configuration and expertise to make it sing. If you do set it up well, however, you will find that Salesforce can make a huge improvement in your business profitability. We use it at Blue Sky Factory email marketing and it’s amazing.
Zoho CRM. Zoho is the small business CRM of choice for me. I set it up for the Boston Martial Arts Center and I like to say it’s 80% of Salesforce at 5% of the price, around $12/user/month. Zoho requires configuration time too, but integration with other services is relatively painless. For the small business, Zoho is probably the best choice.
Sugar CRM. Sugar is an open-source Salesforce clone that is usually about 1-2 releases behind Salesforce. It’s financially free, but the free comes at a hefty price: not only do you need to be an expert in configuring a Salesforce-like web service, you also need to be or have a very competent developer & systems administrator to get it even installed on a server. If you have the skills but not the cash, Sugar is a great solution. I set several up in the past, and it’s not fun but it does work. If you lack the skills, pay the money for a hosted service like Salesforce or Zoho.
Are there other CRM solutions out there? Sure there are. These are the three I’ve had direct experience with, setting them up and configuring them to make them work.
No matter what CRM you choose, you will be doing a lot of configuration time to make it conform to how your business does business. This is a good thing, because in the process of setting up a CRM, you’ll also be confronted with the gaps where your organization does not conform to best practices, like following up on sales opportunities rigorously. It’s that process which will help you become a better-functioning business.
Are you using a CRM? If not, why not?
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