The danger of dabbling in marketing

Posted by on Feb 21, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing | 5 comments

Listen to the average marketing strategy meeting at a company and you’re liable to hear something like this:

  • “We need to adopt service like Zappos!”
  • “We should do what Chris Brogan does with Twitter!”
  • “Do we need a Comcast Frank?”
  • “What if we could reduce costs by making customer service self-serve like Dell?“

It sounds so tempting, so good, doesn’t it? Pick and choose best practices from market leaders and you’ll create a market leading company yourself. Makes total sense, right?

ETC2010Suppose we changed the context a bit. How does this sound?

  • “We need to use lots of garlic and butter like Emeril on everything!”
  • “What if we replace all our other cooking methods with a grill like Bobby Flay?”
  • “We should do what Rachael Ray does and use only Extra Virgin Olive Oil!”

If your goal is trying to make sushi, it’s going to be… interesting sushi, no matter how many expert ideas you try to implement.

The lesson here isn’t that Guy Kawasaki or Seth Godin or other folks are wrong. The lesson is that you can’t pick and choose little bits of what they do to replicate their success, any more than you can pick and choose ingredients and cooking methods randomly and get a five star meal. You not only have to know how to cook, you also need to follow the recipes for success to the letter in the beginning.

Let’s take Chris Brogan as an example. If you operate on the basis that Twitter and his book Trust Agents are the foundations of his success, you’ll miss his blog, company, Third Tribe, Kitchen Table Companies, Julien Smith, PodCamp, and many other pieces that all add up to his method. If you want to achieve similar success using his methods, you can’t just pick 10% of what he does and hope that 10% of his success appears. If you’re trying to cook a masterful meal using Emeril Lagasse’s methods, your food is unlikely to improve if all you change is yelling “BAM” at it.

Beware of being a dilettante in marketing methods and ideas. Yes, absolutely read, research, and explore, but if you choose to make a method your focus, you need to commit and go all in to make it work, at least in the beginning. Study the methods, teachers, and results that are available, choose a method that’s aligned with your goals, and then focus exclusively for a while just on making that method work.

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Awesome sword dance performance

Posted by on Feb 19, 2011 in Video | 3 comments

Caught this from Ze Frank originally. Wonderful to watch.

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Marketing White Belt

Basics for Digital Marketers
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Attend virtually! 		I recommend:

for Twitter audience building.

Building community

Posted by on Feb 18, 2011 in Advertising, Conferences, Marketing, Presentations | 3 comments

I had the pleasure of presenting recently to the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council about building strong, large online communities. The discussion ranged from World of Warcraft gaming sites to Marketing Over Coffee to many others, and we reviewed the methods and skills needed to build and grow a community. Instead of using slides, I chose to present off of a mind map. Perhaps one day services like Prezi will allow mind map imports. In the meantime, if you’d like to see the “presentation”, click on the map image below for a full-size version.

Building Community

While the “slide” may not be 100% intuitive, there’s enough on there to see a framework for successful community building.

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Marketing White Belt

Basics for Digital Marketers
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Attend virtually! 		I recommend:

for Twitter audience building.

How I blog with Evernote

Posted by on Feb 17, 2011 in Blogging, Technology | 4 comments

If you’ve got 1 or more mobile devices in addition to a desktop, you might want to consider using Evernote to blog. Here’s my methodology.

More info:

Barriers to entry

Posted by on Feb 16, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Social media, Social networks | 1 comment

What's wrong with this picture?

In the online world, much is made of reducing barriers to entry. Democratization of media removes barriers for people like you and me to be able to blog, podcast, video, etc. and share it with the world without requiring the sponsorship of a major corporation’s media channel. This is largely a good thing, but not always.

Sometimes, barriers to entry are supposed to exist. Sometimes, barriers to entry serve a practical and useful purpose. For example, the legal and medical professions have significant and serious barriers to entry in order to be called a lawyer or doctor. This serves to ensure that people who have no business practicing law or medicine without any training can’t simply walk around calling themselves lawyers or doctors without consequences.

In the martial arts, becoming a black belt requires significant time and investment, and doing so protects not only the public from frauds, but also protects the practitioner from believing they are more or less capable than they actually are. (in theory)

Sometimes barriers to entry exist to protect common resources. For example, you can’t set up a logging shop anywhere there are trees just because you want more wood for your business. We set up barriers to entry for common areas like parks so that you can’t do business there at all, or there are significant hurdles to cross, so that a common resource is not depleted. (see the tragedy of the commons)

Here’s something to think about in social media and new media. We’ve democratized so much that you don’t even need to be human to be an active participant in it. Look at any Twitter bot account for proof. That said, our resources these days are still fixed: 24 hours in a day, and full attention given to one thing at a time. If barriers to entry can serve to protect common, limited resources, then what barriers to entry should we consider for the digital landscape?

If you’re looking for stuff of a higher caliber to invest that time and attention to, ask yourself this: what are the barriers to entry for it? Sometimes, it’s price. There’s free content and then there’s not-free content. The price not only delivers profit to the producer, but also sets a significant barrier to entry to deter the casual user. Sometimes it’s invitation-only. If you’re looking for specific feedback (ToeJam 1.0 is in closed beta!), you’ll set up a barrier to entry to keep out feedback from people that might not be your target audience.

As the social landscape evolves, what other barriers to entry do you think need to exist? Which ones need to come down, if any? Which ones will you plan to use?

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Marketing White Belt

Basics for Digital Marketers
is now on Amazon & B&N

Watch me speak:
Small Square (200 x 200)
Attend virtually! 		I recommend:

for Twitter audience building.