David Meerman Scott's Blog, page 83

Never pitch again

How do you generate new business? Or find a job? Or get ink in mainstream media?

Do you cold call? Do you send email pitches? Do you hang out in your tradeshow booth and approach passersby? Do you go to networking events and hand out business cards?

Each of these methods for generating attention requires you to approach others -- potential new customers or employers or journalists -- to tell them about what you do in the hope that they might be interested.

These classic outbound marketing techniques are all we really had prior to the ability to become brand journalists by creating valuable information on the Web. Yet many people operate as if we are still in 1993 and the only options available are outbound strategies.

Inbound Marketing

Many organizations are finding tremendous success by planting hundreds or even thousands of new business seeds in the form or blog posts, ebooks, infographics, videos, photos, how-to guides, research reports, Twitter feeds, and other forms of Web content.

In a technique called Inbound Marketing, each of these marketing assets gets indexed by Google, Bing, and the other search engines so when people enter search terms related to your business, they find you via your valuable information. When people find something interesting you created, they may share it on their social profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, and the like.

Here are some real-world examples of Inbound Marketing in action in healthcare, from a rock star, in finding a first job, in retail products, for PR agencies, in politics, and for B2B products. You can acheive similar results.

INBOUND 2012

I'll be delivering a keynote at INBOUND 2012, a 3-day inbound marketing conference and training event produced by HubSpot.

More than 2,000 inbound marketers, entrepreneurs and executives are expected in Boston August 27-30 and the agenda includes keynotes, breakout sessions, parties, learning, and fun. I'm speaking the first day but will be at the event the entire time.

HubSpot has kindly offered readers of this blog a 25% discount on tickets to INBOUND 2012. Use the code DMS25. This link has the discount code already applied.

Disclosures: I am Marketer in Residence and on the advisory board at HubSpot. I wrote the foreword to the book Inbound Marketing, by HubSpot co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, which is part of my New Rules of Social Media book series.

Getting fired: Ten years later and much happier

Almost exactly ten years ago I was fired. Sacked. Let go. Terminated. Made redundant. Booted out. Canned.

Getting fired was an incredible gift. I just didn't know it at the time.

After NewsEdge was acquired by The Thomson Corporation (now Thomson Reuters), my position as vice president of marketing was eliminated.

I like to think that my ideas about Web-based marketing were a little too radical for my new bosses. Perhaps.

Or like in many acquisitions, maybe the new bosses had a pre-determined list of who from the acquired company were redundant to people already in the parent company. Likely.

Or maybe I just pissed somebody off. I was an unknown. I wanted to impress and might have been too aggressive. The people already in the company were familiar. In business the familiar usually wins. Possible.

Anyway, after six years at NewsEdge, I was out on the street.

This was in 2002, one of the worst job markets in history.

It was awful.

But it was also incredibly powerful and amazingly liberating.

It's too easy for me to say from my vantage point today that it was just a matter of starting my own business. The truth is that after 15 years of working for a living, it took some time to get my head around the idea that I could support myself by my own wits.

I had always been an employee. Except for doing yard work for neighbors when I was a teenager, I had never been an entrepreneur.

I did look around for another full-time marketing VP job, but it was a terrible economic situation after 9/11. There was nothing I could find in the Boston area.

I used the bruises on my butt from having been kicked out the door to motivate me to do something new.

It was very difficult.

I was a guy who always had a nice fat corporate teat to suckle. I was used to a corporate nanny to provide for me plus a business card with a name that many recognized.

Now I was going to be a company of one person.

I started my own business to refine my concepts about Web marketing, work with select clients, and teach others through writing, speaking at conferences, and conducting seminars for corporate groups.

Aren't you still unemployed?

It took a long time to convince my family, friends, and colleagues that "marketing strategist" wasn't a euphemism for "unemployed." No, I'd say, I do want to make a go of speaking and writing and consulting for a living. Really, I'd insist, I wasn't just waiting for a full time gig to come my way.

It's an enormous cliche to say that you need a disaster like being fired to change your trajectory in life. For me that was absolutely true. Had I not been kicked out of Thomson in a crappy job market, I'd likely still be working in a full-time marketing role today.

I was given the gift of a new direction.

That was ten years ago. The result has been the best ten years of my life.

Reinvention is difficult.

But the hard work can pay off.

Thank you for your support during the past ten years.

#FAIL: When copywriters don't know the product

At the beautiful JW Marriott Starr Pass resort Hashani Spa in Tucson, Arizona there is a big disconnect between marketing and reality.

The copywriters say:

"At Hashani Spa, one is not healed by the treatment they are receiving, but by the sensory bliss of the magical Sonoran Desert."

The rocks are engraved with the words: Tranquility. Harmony. Peace.

Check out the very relaxing photos on the Hashani Spa site.

They play loud music with vocals. You cannot relax. There is no tranquility. There is no harmony. There is no peace.

#FAIL.

Direct link to #FAIL: When copywriters don't know the product on YouTube.

I spoke with four different people about this disconnect. It turns out the music to the outdoor part of the spa is on the same channel as the other outdoor pool areas. You know, the ones with adults drinking and kids screaming – the place where blaring music is acceptable.

It was impossible for hotel staff to eliminate the music being piped into the spa.

Do the copywriters know this? Probably not. My guess is they're in some comfortable corporate office somewhere and have never visited the property.

How can we trust marketing if there is a disconnect with reality?

Stop confusing social media marketing with advertising on social sites

I'm amazed that so many seemingly smart people are *still* using the words "marketing" and "advertising" interchangeably.

While I see the silliness everywhere, a good example is all the hoopla around General Motors' decision to stop advertising on Facebook.

The GM news broke during the same week as the Facebook IPO a few weeks ago.

Mainstream media reporters and citizen journalists jumped on the story. Except for the awesome newsjacking of the Facebook IPO by GM I didn't think it was a big deal so I chose not to write about it.

The resulting headlines such as The Real Reason GM Left Facebook and General Motors unfriends Facebook imply that GM was no longer communicating to fans on Facebook.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Some people like Mitch Joel and Yaseen Dadabhay got the story right. But most did not.

Marketing is not just advertising

While GM did pull $10 million in ads from Facebook, they continue to use the Facebook channel.

A very quick search shows GM has hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Facebook pages including brand pages like Chevrolet, model pages like Camaro (2.8 million likes and tons of fan engagement), location pages like Chevrolet India, and even specialty pages like Team Chevy auto racing.

So GM has certainly not left Facebook.

Heck, imagine if they used that ten million dollars to hire a huge team of brand journalists to engage people on social networks! (That’s what I would do).

GM is certainly engaged on Facebook. They just stopped spending money on Facebook ads.

The New Rules of Marketing & PR

As regular readers of this blog and The New Rules of Marketing & PR will recall:

OLD RULES -- buy your way in with advertising and beg your way in with the media

NEW RULES -- publish your way in on the Web for free

As many successful marketers know, on the Web, marketing is not the same as advertising. Winning is all about creating great content. For free. To be successful, you must unlearn what you have learned.

It's not about advertising on YouTube, it is about making a YouTube video. It's not about advertising on social media sites like Facebook, it is about participating by creating pages, personal profiles, and events on Facebook like GM does.

Attention journalists: Stop intermixing the terms "advertising" and "marketing."

It's difficult for CMOs to make the transition to a world where there are alternative ways to reach an audience other than spending buckets of money on expensive advertising campaigns. Many reporters aren't helping.

Amanda Palmer freaks out to celebrate hitting $1 million on Kickstarter

Yesterday evening, I met up with Amanda Palmer (together with my friend Steve Garfield) on Lexington Battle Green.

We filmed a video that I'll be using in an upcoming presentation and which I'll be sharing here in the future.

The timing was awesome as just a few hours before we met, Amanda's Kickstarter for her new album Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra passed the $1 million dollar mark.

Here's Amanda celebrating her milestone which is the largest amount ever raised for a music project on Kickstarter.

I wrote about her new project when she launched a month ago in my blog post We are the media: Amanda Palmer and the future of your business.

There are now over 21,000 backers, including me, Steve, and many of our social friends including Denise Wakeman. I'm looking forward to Amanda’s Boston art opening and concert. If you go to the Boston event, let me know.

Imagine that. Tens of thousands of Amanda's fans backed her new album before they even heard it. That's the power of a fan base and using social media to connect with fans.

One way to do an album is to have a record label fund it. As Amanda shows, there’s a better way: Have your fans fund it and then you retain control.

Direct link to Amanda Palmer Dances to Celebrate Passing $1 Million on Kickstarter on YouTube.

Amanda Palmer site (where you can get a free album preview track).

@AmandaPalmer on Twitter

Amanda's Kickstarter

Avoid controversial topics like politics and religion in your marketing

There are subjects that should not enter into your company's marketing because they are too controversial.

For many organizations, politics and religion are topics to be avoided (unless you work at an issue-based nonprofit, for a political candidate or elected official, or at a church).

Another touchy subject is sex. There may be others in your market.

Most organizations should avoid politics and religion

I've been a subscriber to the Publishers Weekly email newsletter for many years because I like to keep up with what's happening in the book business.

I was surprised this morning to receive an email from PW with the subject line PUBLISHING PEOPLE FOR OBAMA. The email was one big image (reproduced below) which links to a landing page on barackobama.com

I can't figure out for sure if PW sold their list to the Obama campaign or if PW is supporting the President’s reelection. (I think they sold the list).

Either way, I think this was a mistake for PW to venture into politics like this.

Seth Godin says that an email list is permission marketing - "the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them." PW subscribers like me give PW permission to contact us. We can just as easily revoke that permission if we are offended.

If you are in the business of renting your email list, you need to be very careful who you allow to use it. When doing your own marketing, you need to consider the ramifications of alienating people who not share your beliefs.

Note -- this is a marketing blog, not a political one. I am not talking about the merits of the presidential candidates here but rather the marketing aspects of this example.

Educate and inform instead of interrupt and sell

You have the power to elevate yourself on the web to a position of importance.

In the e-marketplace of ideas, successful people educate and inform. They highlight their expertise with videos, content-rich websites, social streams, blogs, ebooks, and images.

We also have the ability to interact and participate in conversations that other people begin on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, chat rooms, and forums.

The key is to focus on buyers' needs, not your own ego.

Stop hyping your products and services. Don't rely on interruption techniques. You'll regret taking advantage of people’s time and attention with unwanted communications.

Instead you need to deliver the right information to buyers, right at the point when they are most receptive.

Organizations gain credibility and loyalty with buyers through content, and smart marketers think and act like publishers in order to create and deliver content targeted directly at their audience.

Don't push product

Teach people something. Share your expertise.

It's counter intuitive: You sell more when you stop selling.

As you build your market people will find you via search engines and talk you up on social networks.

The art of turning heads with video

I really like this video The art of turning heads... from Cooei, an Australian company founded by sisters Cassandra @castrevitt and Brooke @brooketrevitt.

The video focuses on the problems faced by Cooei's buyer personas (pain from high heels) and uses humor to tell a story quickly.

I asked Cas to tell us a little about how the video was done.

Cas and Brooke did the video on a very tight budget, thinking up the concept themselves and using family and friends as actors. Fortunately, their brother Luke has a background in film so he shot the footage (with a moderately priced Canon 7D DSLR rig) over two days. Friends helped with editing and other aspects. The music rights were acquired through APRA|AMCOS.

Lessons learned

Great video does not need to be expensive. If you have some creative skills and some friends to help, you too can make a professional quality video.

The big challenges are coming up with the concept that will interest your buyers and keeping it short.

Risk

"Don't do that, it's too risky."

In business, people spend a great deal of time and money evaluating risk. It's one of those things they teach in MBA school.

But are we looking at risk in the right way?

According to the American Bar Association, there were 1,143,358 resident and active attorneys in the United States in 2007 (the most recent data I could quickly find). That's over a million people, many of them advising businesses on what to avoid because it is risky.

They lawyers say things like: "Don't let people blog and tweet because they may say something that gets the company in trouble." As I wrote last week, lawyers clamping down is especially true in highly regulated industries.

From the legal perspective, saying "no" might make sense (it avoids lawsuits). But thinking about risk in totality (instead of just what the lawyers think) is saying no the right way to do business? Frequently the businesses and the people saying "yes" to risk are the ones that succeed.

When the perceived risk is low, we tend to do okay evaluating a situation. Yes, it is risky to fly to the business meeting (the plane may crash) but we figure the risk is worth taking.

But when the risk seems high (starting a business or quitting your job to go freelance) we are unable to accurately evaluate the risk.

I think this is because we humans fail to evaluate the risk of staying the course. We don't evaluate the risk in *NOT* starting the business or keeping the job at the big company.

How's that big stable company working out for you?

Perhaps your parents advised you to get a degree from a good university and then work for a nice, stable, well-known company. We're told that is the least risky path. But is it?

If you worked for Lehman Brothers or Washington Mutual or Enron or your company had to downsize or your division was acquired or manufacturing moved to Laos or your boss thought you were too smart and therefore a threat or the company moved to Atlanta or you hit 50 years old or any number of other scenarios - BOOM - you were out of a job. Unemployed.

When you put yourself at the mercy of an employer, you have significant risk. When you work in an industry in decline, you have significant risk.

The flip side of risk

In my experience, people fail to evaluate the risk of taking the opposite course. They look at risk without thinking the problem all the way through.

What is the risk of *not* starting your business this year?

What is the risk of *not* letting your employees communicate via Facebook?

What is the risk of *not* taking a few years off to travel with your rock band?

What is the risk of *not* learning that new skill?

What is the risk of *not* quitting your job and going freelance?

Consider the opening line of this blog post again: "Don't do that, it's too risky."

Maybe the better statement is: "You had better do that, because it's too risky not to."

photo credit: postaletrice via photo pin cc

Content marketing in highly regulated industries

On the global speaking circuit, I frequently get pushback from audience members who work in highly regulated industries. They claim, erroneously, that laws like HIPAA and regulations like those from the SEC forbid them from creating valuable content on the Web or engaging in social media.

Nonsense!

This is just a fear-based excuse perpetuated by lawyers in the pharmaceutical, healthcare, and financial services industries who want to avoid risk at all cost.

Learning from Chris Boyer and Inova Health System

Last week I delivered a talk at the National Healthcare Marketing Summit and had an opportunity to meet many marketers who are happily reaching their audiences with valuable information.

For example, Chris Boyer, Director, Digital Communications and Marketing, Inova Health System is doing a terrific job. Inova is Northern Virginia's leading not-for-profit healthcare provider, serving more than 1 million people each year.

Under Chris' leadership, Inova is active on social sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and Pinterest (and more). You can see all the social platforms on this page, which also has information on Inova's social media policies. In addition, Chris has a personal blog (as do others in the organization).

But it the content that Inova publishes to reach specific buyer personas that interests me the most. For example, there is a Life with Cancer site that contains valuable information for patients and their families.

In a world where others are fearful of creating content, Inova publishes videos like this one. Phil Gilbert's Story - Relief After Hip Replacement.

Content for Inova’s buyer personas

In the last two years, Chris has transformed the Inova organization to be more focused on creating relevant content. I asked a bunch of questions so that we can all learn from his efforts.

"We take a lot of time understanding who our viewers are and actually write different types of content for different types of users," Chris told me. "Patients are using our patient and visitor information so they're looking for specifics about how to make their stay easier and we write with them in mind. Other people view our services and all the different clinical stuff that we provide at Inova. They could either be referring physicians who want to research what we're doing here or there could be consumers who are actually shopping for healthcare and we want to provide them content that's appropriate for them. It is written so that they don't have read through pages and pages of clinical content to get to the crux of what they're looking for."

Hire journalists

Chris manages the digital marketing and communications team, including a handful of editors and web graphics professionals as well as several part-timers.

A full time social medial manager on the team focuses on social media channels, although there's a lot of content interaction and cross-publication efforts because the lines between social media and the website are blurring tremendously at Inova.

Long-time readers of this blog know that I frequently talk about hiring journalists to create content. Professional reporters and editors, more than marketers and PR people, are the best staffers for content sites because they understand how to tell a story and don't fall back on product pitching. That's exactly what Inova has done.

"The two main editors for our website are actually former journalists," Chris says. "So they have experience in terms of writing; of course, they started in traditional media. But in the last few years, they migrated over to focus exclusively on online journalism and communications."

Manage fear

I wanted to know how Chris has dealt with the whole "fear" thing. Why has he been successful in hiring journalists and creating content when so many other management teams and legal departments simply say: "no".

"Healthcare organizations typically are very conservative in how they market or communicate about their services," he says. The main concern of management was that a shift to content marketing would mean a shift away from what they thought were the key differentiators of Inova Health System in the market that attract the best physicians. "It took a long time for us to educate that the existing content is not being lost, we're just providing it to each audience in the appropriate places. There will be pages for consumers, pages for physicians that are looking to refer or be employed here. It took a while for them to be comfortable with that."

Measure success

What about the whole ROI thing? With a team of people, there are significant resources devoted to this effort. Is it paying off?

"We use tools like Vocus to measure effectiveness," Chris says. "But I also manage, as part of my larger responsibilities, our CRM team and our customer relationship management database. So I've been creating a social media strategy that is aligned with our customer relationship management database so I can actually measure downstream utilization and ROI of our social media activity."



Chris is a bit of a social media ROI rockstar and was even filmed at a Mayo Clinic conference singing his Social Media ROI Rag.

Chris has three specific areas that he measures:



New patients. How many people become patients who first connected online either through content on the Website or social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

How much money can be saved by using online tools. For example the existing Inova nursing communications is a printed newsletter that goes out to all nursing staff and it costs $80,000 a year to produce. So converting over to a blog they means eliminating that expense while increasing readership.

Long-term patient engagement and wellness. Chris measures patients (or potential patients) who get involved wellness programs. For example, Inova has email communications focused on how to have a healthy heart, how to eat well, and the like. He’s looking for people who stay healthy because of the information they consume and how that effects things like re-admittance rates.

Advice to the fearful

With all of his success, I wanted Chris to provide suggestions to people in other regulated businesses.

"Realize that you don't have to transform your entire organization all at once," he says. "I found a lot of success in focusing on areas where there are some obvious opportunities and used social communications in those areas. Try something and see how it's working. You're gaining valuable expertise and understanding about how to use the tools. Eventually in most organizations once you introduce social communications to your portfolio, very quickly you'll start to see how it will start to augment, if not replace, some of the current ways that you're communicating."

No excuses

As Chris shows, content marketing is alive and well in highly regulated industries.

Isn't it time for your organization to eliminate fear?