The swirl of conversations going on about your business are not new, they have always existed around any product or service. But they used to be small, controlled, and inaccessible to outsiders.
If you were a plasterer in Boston in the 1800’s you knew what products you needed to do your job and where to get them. If a new technique was invented, or a better or cheaper product emerged, the word would make it’s way through the community of plasterers, the trades that supported them, and the people that used their services frequently. The fast mechanism was conversations–word of mouth–though it had a high level of distortion since it spread by repetition, and the information got muddled in repeating. The slow but more accurate mechanism was information in books and journals that covered this business. The chatter was more or less continuous, but the volume was low and access limited.
Today, whatever business you are in, there is a literal maelstrom of instant information about your product or service. However mundane or esoteric your business is, people are talking about it, access is unlimited, and the volume knob is turned up to eleven. Blogs, forums, specialty magazines, webinars, audio broadcasts, video, pictures, wikis, and thousands of channels of television transmitted by cable, satellite, broadcast, internet, and perhaps taut strings. While I was typing this I got an email from Speed Channel offering to let me watch live streaming video of the American Le Mans qualifying at Laguna Seca. One click and I was watching, courtesy of Michelin.
Once the only information channel that was open to everyone and uncontrolled was word of mouth. Every other channel was controlled by people who had enough money to afford access. Money to print and distribute, money or power to access radio and television. Now there is virtually no control and the most important channels are free or nearly so.
Everyone participates.
That’s pretty important. Everyone participates in the new conversations, and credibility is not just dependent on formal credentials, training, experience, or title. People who simply stay involved and connect appropriately with the culture gain influence. A highly qualified person who doesn’t step properly through the social dance is not only less influential, they are likely to be shunned.
This is an odd circumstance–it runs contrary to some aspects of general human experience, but it’s explainable and understandable. The social platforms currently deliver a limited scope of interaction–credentials are not obvious, and people who try to present them must interrupt the flow of a particular conversation to do so. And they would not necessarily be believed. Instead, credibility accumulates through relevant and useful posts, even though the person doing the posting might have no real expertise and might just be looking up answers to questions with a quick google search.
Forums, for example, generally have very short comments since people are typing. The apparently more limited format of Twitter is illusory–most forum posts are less than two hundred characters. People who can stay on point, provide useful information, remain engaging and human, and speak with the language of that particular venue are welcome and credible. When they provide romantic advice you can’t see that they are living in a rusty camping trailer, surrounded by cats and stacks of old Popular Mechanics. You don’t see the food-spotted T shirt and the deferred dentistry. All you see is 200 characters of information: Four sentences. Their reputation within the culture of that forum depends on the hundreds of posts that preceded their response to your plight.
In more technical venues and richer communications channels credibility can be somewhat more formal, but it can be hijacked by better presentation or more interesting viewpoints. Charlatans can trump experts. Hey, that’s us! Marketers rule.
Not so fast. Remember that Everyone participates. You can’t control what Everyone says about your company. You certainly can’t gain any traction as a Troll. What you can do is try to stay out in front of the conversation, or at least run along beside it. You can highlight good things and respond honestly to bad. You can encourage people to speak up in your favor. You can respond to criticism in a thoughtful, honest, and wise way that resonates in the culture of the venue.
Hey, if nothing else you can LISTEN. And then maybe you can speak with authority.
But first of course you have to understand those cultures and pay attention to how to speak to them. Once again the answer is…keywords. Or at least something that looks and smells a lot like them.
The Cultural Divide
This is a big topic that we will return to again and again. People call it other things, from Cognitive Dissonance to Culturally Clueless. Let’s start by picking up a small corner of it.
Your boss doesn’t listen to you. You’ve given him brilliant advice on leading edge and traditional marketing, crafted a superb plan and laid out the milestones to get there. In spite of your efforts and some pretty good performance by the agency you know and trust he forces an agency review. I show up. I show him pretty much the same stuff you have, and my presentation naturally lacks the key factors your deep knowledge of your business enables.
After our presentation your boss says “Wow, that guy is brilliant, and so current on all the latest approaches. We need his insight. Hire them.” Or words to that effect.
I use myself as a positive example because it’s fun, but believe me it’s gone the other way. For example, we showed up at a review for a client for whom we had done stellar work. The new VP Marketing had been promoted from heading up marketing in Asia. One of the competing agencies showed up with an account rep that spoke five languages, including Mandarin, and a presentation that focused on global coverage rather than the key market strategy we knew they needed. We were toast.
Before you toss yourself out the window, consider what conspired against you–the cultural divide. Works for every consultant and outside gun in the world. If you ever have a chance to see a full-fledged McKinsey presentation, or any company that has achieved their level of practice, sit quietly in the corner and take notes. Here’s what you’ll see:
They look like your boss, and at least one of them is probably older.
Nothing jars the presentation–all the cues are in place
Their information is flawless and correct
They talk about your competitors frequently
They rarely make any attempt to convince–about their information, their credentials, or their suggestions
Your boss believes and wants to act on every word they say, even if you said the same thing for free three weeks ago and he ignored you.
Why can’t you do that? Because you have to live with the guy. He knows you as the aggressive punk that would crawl across his cooling dead body to take his job. He remembers how little you knew when you started, remembers every social and business faux pas you ever committed. You’d have to change yourself 24/7, and no one can really pull that off. All it takes is one slip, and you’re pegged as who you are. I’m not there long enough to be caught picking my nose.
I also connect culturally–because I’m careful to. I’m dressed like him, I talk like him. I’ve got the white hair and all my mistakes were made where he couldn’t see them. I say smart stuff but I don’t threaten him and I’ll probably do him a lot of good. He likes me. Who wouldn’t?
Why is this important? Because the cultural divide is part of what informs every consumer, whether they’re buying a beer or a geosynchronous satellite. Your dentist has a little brown spot on his smock. The waitress in a fancy restaurant has support hose. The bartender in a biker bar has no tattoos.
The quality of your dentist’s work has NOTHING to do with the spot. The quality of the food or service has NOTHING to do with the support hose. The flavor of the beer or the atmosphere of the bar has NOTHING to do with the bartender’s lack of tattoos.
And yet it all does. The experience is compromised by an unrelated element that is culturally disconnected. Uncool.
Marketing has to cross cultural divides, and modern marketing has to do it constantly, with limited bandwidth. Every thing that is important to the prospect is important.
If that’s true than how are you going to cope? How are you going to convince your boss that I’m a shmuck and he should listen to you. How will you convince those bikers that it’s cool the bartender has no tattoos? You must cross the cultural divide, find the conversations that are important, and join them. Take the time to cross the divide–and you’re in.
You can cross the cultural divide suddenly or incrementally. Incrementally takes lower effort and lasts longer. Take our goofy example of your boss for example. If she is really a problem then you need to build a marketing campaign to deal with that. You can analyze the things and people that influence her and start understanding how to manipulate that interest in favor of your credibility. You’re a marketer, what’s stopping you? You got a problem with manipulation?
On the web we have a wonderful organizing component in Keywords, which we will explore and exploit in depth–they expose the culture of the web, in fact they are the backbone that the culture forms around. In the offline world you have to rely on paying attention and gentle probing. My guess is that there are conversations you can join or initiate to ratchet up your credibility with your boss–if you consciously choose to do so and make the effort. But you can’t do it the day that I show up to present to your boss. That’s way too late for you to have significant influence. The key principle in long-term cultural adjustment is persistence. If you set specific goals, and ask yourself each day “have I moved forward on these goals” then over time you’ll be where you need to be. It’s all a matter of finding the right conversations and speaking the right speak.
New marketing approaches are EXACTLY like that, only we have better tools and a bigger audience.
What’s in it for me?
The subtitle above will be a frequent refrain of this book. It will generally lead off an exercise for you along with a description of the knowledge, information and power you will gain when (if) you do the exercise. It’s also a goad to me to insure that I provide that information. After all, it’s the one question I constantly return to when I’m writing advertising copy
In this case the exercise is a benchmark. Get a notebook that you can keep along with this book. Yeah, paper, put that crackberry or iPhone away for now.
Write down ten keywords each for these three groups:
Those you think define your business
Those that define your products
Those that define what your customers are looking for
Leave lots of space under each group.
Now, on the basis of those keywords, write down what the world is talking about when they use those terms. We don’t need a thesis. Take the time and effort to keep the conversations short.
If we do a decent job in this book then your view of the likely keywords and the conversations around your company and products is going to change a great deal. I believe the end result can be a very useful transformation.
Truly, what’s in it for you is that your purview, as a marketer, is what is really transformed. You can be the voice of your company, indeed, of your entire industry. Your scope inside your company can dramatically expand as well. At one time we just got prospects to raise their hands and tossed them over the wall to sales. That was completely boneheaded. Sales cannot convert interest into sales (and if they do, they are rightfully entitled to take full credit for it) any more than a clerk in a furniture store can grab a passerby and wrestle them into buying couch. We can cultivate interest into need, need into sales, and sales into standardization and evangelism if we locate, participate in, encourage and guide those conversations. And you can precisely track your effectiveness every step of the way.
You need knowledge and a plan to pull that off. Your plan needs to include the fashionable tools so your distracted boss will be happy. And you need methods to test and tune along the way so you can deliver accountable results.
That’s what I plan to deliver.
What you won’t find herein is anything about awareness, brand, or any of the magnificent strategic stuff that big agencies peddle. I understand the value, I just don’t know much about it. There surely is a brand advantage to being part of the conversations that swirl around your industry and market. Surely there is a brand advantage in getting lots of new customers and keeping them happy.
But as Peter Sellers said, “That’s not my dog”.