Bloghound

What are marketers most interested in? Buzz Marketing for Technology’s top 10 posts over the past year:

# 1 – 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)

#2 – Harnessing User-Generated Content for B2B Marketing

#3 – Exclusive Interview: Malcolm Gladwell discusses Web 2.0

#4 – A Podcast with Robert Scoble on Communities, Social Media, Twitter and More

# 5 – Want more sales? Give sales something to talk about. A podcast with Lois Kelly of Foghound

#6 – How to Start a B2B Community

#7 – 150-Person Work Teams Are Dead

#8 – Calculating ROI on Web 2.0 tools

#9 – What’s Working in Lead Generation?

#10 – Marketing in a Wikinomics World, a podcast with Don Tapscott

Forget about trying to convert the world to your cause. Transform from missionaries into marketers into mission. Think in terms of customers not converts. Rather than trying to convert people to our cause by imparting vast amounts of information, focus on getting people to take a specific action.

These are some of the pearls of wisdom from Robin Hood Marketing by Katya Andresen, a must read if you’re in non-profit marketing, development or communications. (Or, in my case, on a board of a non-profit.) Every couple of years a fresh, inspiriting voice emerges, and Katya is one of those voices.

Filled with many “aha” insights, practical advice, fascinating case studies and interviews by some of the most interesting people in non-profit marketing, Robin Hood Marketing will help you see marketing through a new lens.

Some things from pages I’ve turned down and highlighted:

• We assume that people give to our cause because they value our mission. They probably approve of our mission, but that’s not why they write a check. When we dig into the deeper reasons behind the decision, we find that they are more likely rooted in the person’s fundamental, personal values than in pure ideology.
• Good causes need to offer rewards for action because most people are not motivated by morality. Unless people see an immediate reward for an action, they may not act.

• Falsely assuming that information results in action is the single deadliest and most common mistake in marketing good causes. People don’t need to know everything; they simply want what is immediately relevant to them.

• Good marketing campaigns focus on spurring one audience to a single action.

• Wild claims don’t work, but bold ones do. Good causes get themselves into trouble by agonizing over whether it’s fair to make bold promises on their audiences’’ subjective reality. We shouldn’t shy away from making bold claims.

“The last mile in word of mouth marketing is personal relationships. At the end of the day I’m most powerfully influenced by those I know, respect and love,” says Malcolm Gladwell in a podcast interview this week with Paul Dunay.

Why oh why do organizations obsess over logos and tag lines? If execs looked at the the return on investment they’d be shocked. And, by the way, people hardly ever “get” what the brand experts say the logo and tag are supposed to mean.

Two recent cases in point.

What does the logo for the 2012 London Olympics, pictured above, say to you? It says nothing to me, except that I think the Olympic Games paid too much for not much at all. Yet the Olympic Games went a step further and paid to produce a video to explain the logo. Promote a logo? Good grief, what a waste of money. But to top off the ridiculousness, the video showing an the animated logo has been found to cause epileptic seizures. (And not just among the people who authorized the branding firm .)

Then in tag line la la land we have all the car companies using just about the same tag lines, and also making a big deal about announcing a new tag line.

Mercedes-Benz use to have the tag line, “Engineered Like No Other Car in the World.” which as tag lines go is pretty descriptive and clear. But it dropped that lined for the bland “Unlike Any Other” because the car company said the brand was about more than engineering.

In the past month Audi has introduced a new tag line, “Truth in Engineering,” as has Chrysler with its “Engineered Beautifully.”

Mmmm…seems like all the auto brands are starting to sound the same. Will these tag lines, which probably cost of hundreds of thousands once you add up the market research, copy writing and testing fees, make a dent on the brands revenues?

While a strong, distinctive visual identity is important, it seems that too much money and executive time is spent on logos and tag lines in relation to their value.

[Olympic logo] [taglines] [branding] [Audi tagline] [Chrysler tagline]

The Break Up
Uploaded by geertdesager

Don’t miss this great video, produced for Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions by Geert Desager at Bring Back the Love. It captures the change in selling and telling marketing to conversational marketing, reminding all of us that the consumer has had enough with old style techniques.

Hat tip to Tony Bloomberg over at Diva Marketing for sharing.

What do conversations have to do with innovation? Here’s an excerpt from a post by Chris Flanagan over at the non-profit Business Innovation Factory based on a talk I gave yesterday.

By definition, an innovation is something new and different. All too often, executives find themselves coming out of a sales meeting or vc meeting or employee meeting scratching their heads saying, ‘they just didn’t get it.” Creating interest and momentum around an innovation is all about conversational marketing. It taps into both the head and heart, and gets people to respond and perhaps accept a new way of doing things. As Lois says in her book, “intellectual food fights, candid debates, and frank perspectives help speed understanding. Don’t hide behind overly polite language, “safe” topics, and accepted business jargon. It clouds rather than clarifies.” Mastering conversational marketing just might be the hurdle between success and failure.

Going more narrow is an under-valued marketing strategy. When we focus on a narrow slice of an issue or focus on a very specific audience it’s often easier to provide insightful advice and perspectives than appealing more generally. Going narrow doesn’t mean that we don’t understand broader aspects of an issue or industry, but that we understand the issues so well that we’re able to hone in an especially relevant or or overlooked area of importance.

Don Dodge of The Next Big Thing blog and director of business development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team gets this. Don and I met this week at a conference where we were both speaking. I asked him why he thought his year-and-a-half-old blog has generated such a following, upwards of 25,000 people a week.

“When I blog I talk about topics that are relevant to to a relatively small group of people — venture capitalists and technology start-ups,” he explained. “I only write about what I think will interest this group, which in reality is maybe just 2,500 people. And I only blog when I have something to say.”

Next time you’re wrestling with what to talk about, try going narrow.

New research from Communispace shows that people participate much more in private communities — up to 86 percent — than public social networks, just one percent.

Key findings, based on behavioral research among 26,539 members of 66 private online communities:

The more intimate the community, the more people participate. Up to 86 percent of the people who log on to private, facilitated communities (average community size: 300-500 people) made contributions: they posted comments, initiated dialogues, participated in chats, brainstormed ideas, shared photos, etc. Only 14 percent logged in and “lurked.” In contrast, on public social networks the ratio is typically reversed; one percent of site visitors contribute and the other 99 percent lurk.

Why people participate: social glue, shared passion, having a voice

• Communities of parents get the highest involvement: of the 66 communities analyzed, parent communities, as a group, had the highest levels of participation. In general, the research found that the stronger the “social glue” – common interests and passions among members– the greater the participation.

• Differences between how men and women participate: based on analysis of single-sex communities, the research found that although members of women’s communities participated more frequently than men, men seemed to have more to say when they did participate: 4.8 weekly contributions for men compared to 4.1 for the women.

• Homogeneity triggers participation:the research found that communities based around a particular demographic tended to have higher participation rates. Women and men each participated more in single-sex communities than they did on average in co-ed communities. African-Americans participated at a higher overall level in an all African-American community than they did in other, multi-racial communities. This suggests that people have more in common and are more interactive with a homogeneous group in an online community setting.

• Education and household income were not related to community member participation. Again, the passion around the community’s purpose or its social glue appears to influence participation more than traditional demographics like education and income.

• Having a voice, productive leisure: One of the implications from the research is that people may get more involved in private, intimate communities because they feel like they can have a say and that community members and the sponsoring company hear their views. Another implication is thatpeople may view the time spent as “productive leisure.” They see participating as an interesting or fun outlet for communicating with other people who love what they love. It’s a bridge from what they do in real life to their passions.

People get more involved when they know who they’re talking to and why

• The study also compared participation levels of branded vs. unbranded communities. While the contribution and lurker rates were fairly consistent, branded sites showed a higher volume of participation.
• When potential members were considering whether to participate in a community, they were 30 percent more likely to log on when the welcome notice disclosed the company sponsoring the community. Branded sites had an initial log in rate of 71 percent, compared with 55 percent for unbranded sites. This suggests that transparency – being upfront about who’s behind the community – is a key factor for companies that want to engage with customers in a community.

The research analyzed participation behavior along three factors : frequency (how often members contribute), volume (the number of contributions made by each member), and bystander or “lurker” rate (what percentage of members observe versus participate.)

For more on Communispace’s “Community Participation Trends and Drivers” study, go here to get the white paper.

social netowrking online communities Communispace research

David Lawee, Google’s vice president of marketing, shared these “Seven Principles of Google Marketing” at this week’s Red Herring CMO 2007 Conference:

1. Let others peak for you.

2. Data. Not hype.

3. Results must be trackable.

4. Promote trial.

5. You’re smart and your time matters.

6. We’re serious. Except when we’re not.

7. Big ideas move us.

Google marketing David Lawee

General Electric values these two marketing competencies over all others, according to CMO Dan Henson, who spoke this week at the CMO 2007 conference:

1. Segmentation, particularly down to very granular level.

2. Ethnography. Helps in finding innovative ideas, fueling GE’s “Imagination at work” focus.