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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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."
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 and the FDA 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.
Ignoring the data
The fear is particularly shortsighted when considering the data on how people make decisions related to their health. 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 because they live in reality not fear.
According to data presented at the conference by Tim McGuire from Greenville Hospital System, Bill Moschella of eVariant, and Anne Theis of Salem Health, 80% of Internet users look up health information online.
More than three out of four people use the Web to make healthcare decisions!
Yet 64% of hospital marketing departments devote less than 25% of their marketing budget to interactive. Even more telling is how hospital marketers spend their time. 83% of hospitals devote less than 30% of staff time to interactive media.
This is ridiculous.
The fearful lawyers say “no” to the 80% of customers and potential customers who use the Web to research health? Fear means that hospital marketers are busy making brochures and TV ads instead of creating Web content?
Can your organization afford such a disconnect?!
Learning from Chris Boyer and Inova Health System
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 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?
UPDATE - May 9, 2012 - Alison from @Acura_Insider commented (the 22nd comment down). Please be sure to read her explanation about what happened as you consider this story.
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This afternoon, Renee tweeted me from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival because she knows I am a big live music fan.
I tweeted her back using the #JazzFest2012 hashtag.
Which resulted in a tweet from @Acura_Insider "Acura's official Twitter account. Get the inside scoop & other Acura news. On duty: Alison w/ Acura PR."
This linked to a PURL that offered me a VIP experience at Jazzfest. (In case the PURL has been removed by the time you read this, I have reproduced it below).
Checking the @Acura_Insider Twitter ID, I note that there are hundreds of people who received such a spam message directed at them. In fact, the account is in broadcast only mode. There is no interaction at all, no humans involved. For the past two days the account has been generating hundreds of examples of this nonsense. (I have included a screenshot below).
This is spam. Plain and simple.
Just to be sure, I tweeted back to @Acura_Insider and got nothing. It would appear that nobody is monitoring their feed (heck it's a weekend, why would they be checking Twitter).
I'm not at #JazzFest2012 and anyone can see that from my tweet back to Renee.
I'm sure Acura spent a boatload of money sponsoring Jazz Fest. And they probably paid an agency a bunch of money for this campaign.
Actually, this could have been an interesting use of Twitter had a human been involved. I go to music festivals and it can get hot and I can get tired. If I tweeted that I was tired at #JazzFest2012 and then I got a tweet back inviting me to the VIP area, I would be kinda psyched. I might have taken them up on the offer. Then if I enjoyed it I would have talked it up. That would have worked.
But this machine-generated stuff is not a good way for Acura to generate attention. The negative feelings of those who are spammed far outweigh the good vibes of Acura being onsite.
Today when I checked out the Google News headlines as I do several times a day, I noticed a new feature.
Now, for each breaking story covered, there is a button called See realtime coverage. Clicking the button brings you to the latest news.
This is a cool development. As I've said for several years now the most significant development on the Web is the rise of real-time.
Social media are tools. Real-Time is a mindset.
As I write this, a breaking business story this morning is about Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson and the inaccurate educational information found in his biography. Clicking over to the real-time coverage of this story shows what the latest mainstream media journalists and bloggers are saying. (Note that if you are reading this much after the breaking stories in early May 2012, you may not see any real-time news so I include screen shots in this post.)
If you're clever and you understand how journalists scramble to file breaking news stories quickly, you can insert your ideas into the mix.
Think about this story for a moment. Who might newsjack it?
An expert in executive recruitment could blog their take on finding a new CEO.
An ethics professor could do a YouTube video with thoughts for CEOs about honesty.
An employment law expert could create a discussion document on the legal ramifications of this situation.
A securities analyst could give the stock price ramifications via an instant PDF report.
What ideas do you have? Get it out there now because now is the time. Journalists are looking for additional angles on this story right now.
The new Google News real-time feature is ideal for Newsjacking. Do what I do and check out Google News a few times a day to see what’s going down and consider how you can add to that discussion.
Back in the day, the only way to easily communicate with your public was to use mainstream media and analysts as your mouthpieces. So the public relations department and the agencies they employed spent a great deal of effort convincing editors, reporters and analysts that your company was one worth talking up.
Prior to the Web, there wasn't an efficient way for organizations to communicate directly to the public.
What's the role of public relations in the new world of the web?
There has been an explosion of channels that organizations can reach their audience directly with valuable online content: videos, ebooks, white papers, photos, infographics, and more – and then have that information shared in social networks.
However, many PR professionals still operate as if their only conduit is mainstream media.
Apologies if you've heard this because I've talked about this many times in the past. But there are still many holdouts so I say it again.
Don't confuse the superset (public relations = reaching the public with your information) with the subset (media relations = using the media to tell your story) and therefore insist that PR is only about mainstream media.
What you need to realize is that these are different activities. Media relations is still valid as a way to get attention. Who doesn't want to be quoted in an important newspaper, magazine, or television broadcast?
Today there are so many other ways to communicate with your publics
If your organization operates this outdated way, my recommendation is to re-name your public relations department the media relations department to reflect what they really do.
In this new world, smart PR pros realize they have a tremendous opportunity if they can effectively communicate directly with the public. They are transforming themselves into content creators. However, most are still operating in the traditional press release and pitching mentality.
If you're an entrepreneur or executive, don't put your PR department in charge of content creation for your company (unless they understand completely the power of the new world).
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