Bloghound

On Friday, June 27 at 1 p.m. EST, I’m going to be sharing what I’ve learned so far about marketing, social media and word of mouth marketing over at Learn From My Life. (And answering calls and email questions.)

There are some great interviews over at Learn From My Life from people like free-agent author Daniel Pink, former CNN reporter Daryn Kagan, legendary basketball coach Dale Brown, and Dan Ariely, author of the must-read new book, Predictably Irrational.

Hope you can make it!

I recently came across two companies that block employees’ access to blogs. (”Don’t want people wasting time while at work.”), yet are trying to encourage employees to read newspapers more often. Yikes!

I listened patiently while the executives explained the value employees would get if they would only read the newspaper every day — and how much more valuable that would be than “surfing the net.”  I then told them — both around my age — that the first thing I do in the morning is to open my blog reader — not my newspaper.

Then I shared how blogs are replacing trade magazines, go into more depth than many newspapers are able to, and are becoming the preferred way of learning, keeping current, finding and networking with  new people, hearing about emerging trends.

Blocking blogs is like saying you don’t want your employees to learn or help you find great talent or help you grow the business.”Really?” they asked. “Really.”

Two small breakthroughs in opening up senior executives to the social media age. But hearing their views makes me think we have a long way to go in educating the people who control the controls.

Pope Benedict plans to text thousands of young Catholics during World Youth Day in Sydney in July; the church plans to also set up a Catholic social networking site and use digital prayer walls. The goal: make the Catholic church more relevant to younger churchgoers.

Good for the rather conservative Catholics to use new ways to connect — especially in view of the declining number of members of the Catholic Church in many Western countries like the United States and Belgium. According to a recent Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life study:

Catholicism has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes. While nearly one-in-three Americans (31%) were raised in the Catholic faith, today fewer than one-in-four (24%) describe themselves as Catholic. These losses would have been even more pronounced were it not for the offsetting impact of immigration.

The question for the Pope, as it is for all marketers,  is whether using social media tools can help  attract and keep members without also changing the message and experience.

Tonight I’m going to hear the brilliant designer Stefan Sagmeister speak at RISD. His topic is the same as his new book: “Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far.”

He came up with the book concept while taking a year off, and then came back to work with a whole new perspective. Here are the 20 things he’s learned so far.

1. Helping other people helps me.

2. Having guts always works out for me.

3. Thinking that life will be better in the future is stupid. I have to live now.

4. Organizing a charity group is surprisingly easy.

5. Being not truthful always works against me.

6. Everything I do always comes back to me.

7. Assuming is stifling.

8. Drugs feel great in the beginning and become a drag later on.

9. Over time I get used to everything and start taking for granted.

10. Money does not make me happy.

11. My dreams have no meaning.

12. Keeping a diary supports personal development.

13. Trying to look good limits my life.

14. Material luxuries are best enjoyed in small doses.

15. Worrying solves nothing.

16. Complaining is silly. Either act or forget.

17. Everybody thinks they are right.

18. If I want to explore a new direction professionally, it is helpful to try it out for myself first.

19. Low expectations are a good strategy.

20. Everybody who is honest is interesting.

And here’s the talk he gave at TED.

When I called Andersen Windows today to make an appointment to get an estimate for replacement windows the sales representative asked me if my husband would be home for the appointment. “I don’t know. But one of us will juggle our work schedules to be home at that time.”

“So your husband will be there?” she asked, pushing it. “We’ll give you a $100 discount if your husband is there with you.”

What?! I’m so offended by Andersen’s approach. Am I the weak little Missus with no buying and decision power? (On the other hand, it might be that we women ask the good questions and bargain tough — and Andersen’s market research has found that the guys are pushovers.)

Nonetheless, the sales angle has backfired. I’ve shared this story with several people today, and now with you. Word of mouth at work.

I went through crazy hoops buying my first house as a young single woman 26 years ago. ( A network television affiliate even came out to do a spot because I was such a novelty.) House decision sexism was bad then. Today it’s unforgivable — especially as part of the sales process of a well known brand like Andersen.

There’s one big thing holding companies back from innovation, growth, attracting and keeping amazing talent, realizing the possibilities of emerging trends like social media: obstacles. (aka fears)

Reflecting on some recent experiences I see it everywhere.

• I spoke with a small group of Fortune 500 executives about social media and they zeroed in on what don’t like about social media: losing control.
• A group of brilliant IP attorneys got really involved in a session about conversational marketing, but suggested I spend much more time on one particular slide: overcoming obstacles.
• A workshop for a Fortune 50 company resulted in a powerful point of view that management, sales and marketing collaboratively created –and loved– but a then decided to stay with a safe, bland message platform. Why? The official reason was “internal politics;” the real reason was fear to have a point of view so different and evocative from the industry norms.
• A pharmaceutical company hired actors to pose as customers because they feared what real customers might say to their employees.

Going to fear school

Every year I do one big thing for my own professional development. There’s only one criteria: it needs to scare me, shake me out of my comfort zone so I really learn something.

This week I’m taking a workshop on how to design and develop transformational workshops at Kripalu. I’m the only business person among medical professors and educational activists, healers and shamans, ministers and coaches. Dropping into this touchy-feely environment where people chant in the morning instead of firing up PowerPoint made me feel very, very uncomfortable — so much so initially that I wondered whether I could learn anything at all. My own obstacles and judgments kept whispering in my ear, “Get in the car and get out of Yogi Dodge.”

Then in a session called “Going Beyond What Usually Stops Us,” David Silberkleit led us through an exercise where we had to articulate those obstacles (and the fears lurking behind them) that stop us from pushing forward to accomplish more, reach higher, take risks. Unarticulated fears/obstacles are what usually stops people. Acknowledge the obstacles, then you can go forward faster. (And David should know; he acknowledged his professional obstacles and walked away a sizable family business and inheritance — Archie Comics.)

During the program I thought about how thrilling social media is, opening up new business models, changing product development, innovation, customers service, CRM, marketing, public relations and leadership communications. Yet for so many companies and people the first step in realizing the possibilities will be acknowledging the very real obstacles of social media: eliminating job types and functions, reallocating budgets, losing control, lacking new skills, feeling irrelevant. I’m sure you can add more as there are many.

Mindset vs. toolset, human change vs. program change

Just as social media is a mind set as much as a tool set, success will require human change as much as functional and program change.

Just as we marketers know strategy and creativity, so we will need to learn how to guide our organizations through tremendous behavioral change.

So for my final project tomorrow morning I’m trying out a new workshop: “Burn Down the Obstacles.”

Oh yeah.

PS — warmest thanks to teachers Ken Nelson and Lesli Lang and my brilliant fellow workshop participants for teaching more in a week than I’d learn in a year of business conferences.

As I study? what it takes to get customers’ attention, I’ve become a student of observing stand-up comics.? No one has a harder time getting and keeping an audience’s attention.?? Last Thursday I saw eight comics perform at the little hole in the wall club, Stand-Up New York.? Two were outstanding, four were so-so, and two were bombs.

The bombs were mean-spirited, perpetuating tired, old stereotypes. Worse, they didn’t seem passionate about what they talked about; their focus seemed more intent on setting up a punch line to get a laugh.? The very worst came across as condescending and egocentric? — me vs. all you stupid people. In fact, he picked on an elderly couple in a way that cam e across as nasty and hurtful, not fun-spirited heckling.

The stars, on the other hand, took issues, human behavior and stereotypes and riffed on them through fresh lenses.? Their material was hilarious because the comics’ points of view were so different, insightful – and of course warped.? They were edgy, often raw, yet always inclusive, helping us how we’re weirdly all the same. They seemed more self-less, genuinely wanting to connect with the audience vs. just tell jokes.

While I’m still learning, here are some possible marketing lessons from successful stand-up comics:

• Challenge assumptions with counterintuitive and contrarian perspectives. Great stand-ups start with assumptions that get people’s heads nodding and then, pow, present a wildly counterintuitive view.
• Share real personal stories. Genuine stories resonate, and audiences can quickly sniff out the stories that are set-ups vs. real.
• Be intent on giving the audience a great experience; it’s about them, not us.
• Be inclusive? without being intrusive.
• Be likable.
• Be fearless and experiment: some things will connect, others won’t the only way to know is to try.
• Tap into passionate beliefs. “You must go on stage with a passionate desire and the intent to communicate your thoughts and feelings, not just make people laugh,” says Judy Carter in her book, Stand-Up Comedy.

PS – If you ever get a chance to see Kyle Grooms, don’t miss him. He’s likely to become the next big name in American comedians. Amazing talent and one of the stars last week.

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In an age of financial transparency, here’s an annual report that is anything but. The food company Podravka’s annual report has to be wrapped in foil and baked at 100°C for 25 minutes to be able to read the words. The text and images are printed using a special, thermo-reactive ink. which emerge after cooking the books, so to speak.

Last year shipments of Macs were up a whopping 32.7 percent, according to Gartner. Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has an article, "Apple edges into the mainstream." So why would a company like Intuit ignore this growing market — and, worse, torture Mac users?

My firm switched over to Macs during the holidays without much of a hiccup. That is until we turned to our financials, which we run on QuickBooks.

• First bad news: there is no Web-based QuickBooks service for Mac users, as there is for Windows. Bummer, as many of us work remotely and the Web-based service allowed us all to easily plug into QB.
• More bad news: there is no Direct Connect service between financial institutions and QuickBooks Pro Mac. (But most banks’ customer service reps don’t know this, so many people get mis-information.)
• And more: trying to get Web Connect between financial institutions and QuickBooks Pro can be a nightmare. (Plus Web Connect is no where near as useful as Direct Connect.) My bank’s advice was to use Windows or Netscape vs. Safari or Firefox browser. I had to point out that Windows is for PCs and that Intuit is discontinuing its support of Netscape.

With still no luck in downloading and importing transaction data from my bank into QB after many service calls and work-arounds, I decided to join the QuickBooks Mac online community
I didn’t find answers in the community, but I did experience just how frustrated and downright angry people are with Intuit about the difficulty of making QB work for the Mac. Holy Moly! Talk about an unintentional way to ruin a brand’s reputation among a large and growing segment of consumers.

I don’t know at this point if I’ll shop around for a bank that can connect with QB for Macs,run our financials on my old PC., or install Windows on our Macs. But I do know that I’ll follow Intuit’s actions to see how closely they’re paying attention the growing Mac market trend, how seriously they’re listening to their Mac customers, and how skillfully they use their online community to turnaround angry consumers. (Or not.)

Interrupting is a communication felony, says Jerry Seinfeld in an interview with Oprah. “If someone is talking — and I don’t care what they’re saying or how excited you are to say what you have to say — wait until he or she is finished. When you interrupt, you’ve stopped listening. People want to be heard.”

One of the upsides about online conversations is that we listen better because we can’t interrupt. And maybe the reason many people say more online than they would in-person is that they feel that they can have a say. MySpace’s “Never Ending Friending Study,” released this summer, found that 50% of those surveyed said that they are “less awkward when I communicate on this site than in person,” and “the site allows me to more social than I am in person.”