Web Ink Now

Sex, shaving, and your oral health

Please forgive the gratuitous headline but I couldn’t resist. Two new free ebooks have been sent to me recently and both of them involve sex. Well, sort of.

Dianna Huff points us to Dr. Helaine Smith, a Boston, Massachusetts cosmetic dentist. Dr. Smith asks the question: "When was the last time you thought about your teeth? That's like asking when you last thought about your femur or your elbow."

In her new e-book, Healthy Mouth, Healthy Sex! Dr. Smith explains the connection between oral health and sexual well-being: "a topic not too many people talk about."

She says: “What many people don't understand -- or even consider -- is that the health of our teeth and mouths has a huge connection with our overall physical health -- and our sex lives!

Luke Faccini points us to an ebook that his agency The Sponge created called The 6 Essential Elements to an Exceptional Shave!

The ebook asks: "Were you taught how to shave by a pro? More likely you've unknowingly taken on the bad habits of your father, or even worse, you've taught yourself to shave from what you've seen on television commercials. If you ever get razor burn, ingrown hairs, redness or irritation then you have to read on!"

The ebook includes six reasons why you should pay attention to your daily routine with number 6 being: "The amount of sex you get is in direct proportion to how well you shave!"

The sex angle, while just a teeny bit gimmicky, does spark some interest because the authors are linking sex to unexpected things like shaving and dentistry.

I really like these ebooks. If a dentist and an Australian company producing "male grooming products that were created to increase the appeal of the uncompromising man" can find topics to write an ebook about, it shows that virtually any company, product, or organization can use an ebook to tell a story.

You can too!

Disclosure: Both of these ebooks kindly mention me in the acknowledgments and I thank the authors for that. I had nothing to do with the development of either ebook. However, both authors were in some way inspired by the information about creating ebooks that I included in this blog and in my latest free ebook The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free.

Meet Greg the (software) Architect

The good people at TIBCO Software have a great series of videos about Greg the Architect. TIBCO is one of those enterprise software companies that has a difficult marketing challenge – how to make what they do interesting. The About page says: "TIBCO Software Inc. provides enterprise software that helps companies achieve service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) success."

This is my favorite from the series. I've known a lot of B2B software salespeople, and man do they nail the types here in this video. But it's all in good fun. Watch how the sales guys work over poor Greg.

Watch more videos and meet the cast here.

Hat tip to Erin Smith, Director of Marketing Communications at Axeda for pointing me to Greg .

Why CEOs and executives must work harder to blog successfully than mere mortals

In the past year, I've had many conversations with CEOs, Presidents of companies, and other senior executives about the new rules of marketing and about blogs in particular.

I've always wondered why these senior executives have so much more trouble creating a popular blog than mere mortals. Why, in most companies, is the most popular blogger a product manager or junior marketing person? At first I had thought it might be because CEOs and executives had less time to devote to blogging or that they relied on underlings to do first drafts of posts. While both of those may be true in some cases, that wasn't enough of an explanation for the relative lack of really good senior executive bloggers in most companies.

Last week, I keynoted the General Catalyst Marketing Summit. GC is a venture capital company (Brightcove, Kayak, HubSpot, and many other interesting startups). In a brilliant move, GC brought together the senior marketing people of more than 30 of their portfolio companies for a day of discussions and best practice sharing. Todd Defren also spoke at the summit, and talked about the difference between "Influence 1.0" (shouting about your product) and what he calls "Participation is Marketing." Todd is an excellent speaker and I was honored to share the stage with him. We were saying the same things but in different ways.

So with Todd's help, it finally became obvious to me why most CEOs and corporate executives make poor bloggers. CEOs are used to being the most important person in the room. When CEOs are in a meeting, everyone defers to them. At conferences, people clap at CEO speeches even if they suck. CEOs talk about their company, its products, and nothing else. CEOs happily ignore email and phone calls because nobody expects a personal answer back. CEOs direct others to do their work for them.

These are precisely the things that make for crappy blogs.

CEOs and executives expect that the world will stop everything and pay attention and The Wall Street Journal will write about them as soon as they put out their first blog post. The posts they do write shout: “look at me!” CEOs don’t comment on other people's blogs or link outside their own little world. Yeah, a few ass kissers might comment but unless the CEO is saying something interesting, the blog will fail to gain traction. Then the executive will quit blogging.

There are notable exceptions like Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems.

Great bloggers participate. They link to other bloggers. They comment on other people's blog real estate. They blog because they want to, not because they have to. They talk about things other than their own products and services.

Attention corporate executives: check your ego at the door if you want to be a successful blogger.

Understanding an audience and creating great content

At every speech I give, I suggest one of the best ways to create great Web content is for companies to hire a journalist, either full or part time, to create it. Journalists (print or broadcast) are great at understanding an audience and developing information that buyers want to consume.

At a recent speaking gig in North Carolina, I met Kathy Boyd who works in corporate communications at Neighborhood America, a company that creates enterprise social networks for organizations to reach consumers.

Kathy is exactly the sort of person I'm talking about. She studied Mass Media Communications and Broadcast Journalism at Florida State. Upon graduation, she spent a few years as a TV reporter for WFTX-TV, the Fox affiliate in Ft Myers, Florida.

After Kathy honed her journalism skills as a TV reporter, she joined Neighborhood America and now works on the company's corporate newsletter, produces some stellar videos, and develops customer case examples.

Here are two videos Kathy created that you must check out.

The first one is a video case study of Adidas, a Neighborhood America client Adidas Goes Mobile At NBA All-Star Week 2007. Note how different this approach to a case example is compared to most written case examples that are either a) dreadfully boring or b) prattle on about the product or c) both.

This next video Mission Impossible: So, What Does Your Company Do? is Kathy’s video riff on my Gobbledygook Manifesto. After hearing me talk about gobbledygook, Kathy thought it would be fun to cleverly capture interesting information about Neighborhood America in a fun and approachable way. It works, don't you think?

Well done, Kathy. And kudos to Neighborhood America for taking a chance on hiring a journalist to do marketing instead of the "safe" route of hiring someone with a traditional marketing background.

How about your company? When will you hire a journalist?

Video mashups: Easy to create and informative for visitors

Alert readers of this blog know that I am a believer in the power of YouTube videos for any organization to show the world what they are doing. Video, done well, is great marketing.

Many people (particularly those from large companies) push back and say things like: "We can't do a video like Blendtec's Will it Blend – that seems too difficult. Besides, we’re a _______ company." (Fill in the blank with conservative, B2B, nonprofit, famous, startup, or some other excuse for not doing videos).

Well, there's an option. Why not do a video interview program that's essentially a mashup of the audio from a telephone interview with someone of interest to your market, with some in-house video.

WebProNews does a great job with this format. Kara Ratliff interviewed me on the phone for about a half hour and then condensed the conversation into just under four minutes in the studio.

Watch WebProNews Publicizing Your Blog

I've had many people tell me they’ve seen the video and there are 16 comments as of this writing. Clearly people are interested in this format.

Here's another example, WebProNews Reporter Kara Ratliff takes a look into how you can make money from blogging through syndication. She talked with President of Newstex, Larry Schwartz about benefits and disadvantages, along with other various topics of syndication.

Kara uses audio from Larry plus some video footage of him from the BlogWorldExpo conference and a bunch of screen shots. I syndicate my blog through Newstex (and, disclosure here, I am on the board of advisors of Newstex). Despite being affiliated with Newstex for several years, this is probably the best explanation of blog syndication I've ever seen and the video mashup format is what makes it work.

So if your company is considering some YouTube videos but you think that the funny viral stuff may not be for you, consider a video mashup like these from WebProNews. You can interview people in your industry, perhaps some customer, partners, and analysts, add in your own analysis, and pop the videos up onto YouTube.

Personal branding, great design, and a new masthead

I'm a huge believer in the power of personal branding on the Web. How cool is it that you can create interesting content that people want to read and share? Things like ebooks, blogs, YouTube videos and the like show the world your passions. And then interested people seek you out.

For nearly a decade, my favorite designer is a genius named Doug Eymer. I worked with Doug in my last corporate VP marketing job and continued using Doug to create killer designs for two of my book covers – Eyeball Wars and Cashing in with Content. Doug also designed my Web site and my two most popular ebooks The New Rules of PR and The New Rules of Viral Marketing.

I commissioned Doug to do a new masthead for my blog. The direction I gave Doug was that I wanted to convey through the masthead the ideas I talk about, particularly the concept that you can create great content on the Web and that you don't need to rely on expensive advertising or begging the media to get noticed.

I also wanted to carry consistency of my designs through my various publishing endeavors. The blog masthead was the one thing that had been a little "off" because the old design (which I liked very much) was done by a different person.

Here is the old masthead

My friend, the positioning guru Mark Levy, says of the new masthead: "Doug nailed it, David. It's perfect. It's energetic, passionate, and shows the power of the individual's mind and voice in action. Bravo."

I think Doug did a great job, don't you?

(Note – if you're reading this soon after I changed mastheads today and you're seeing my old masthead, you may need to hit refresh on your browser.)

Thanks Doug!

What are the search terms your buyers use to find products and services like yours? Where does your company rank on Google for those terms?

Three months ago, Mike Volpe at HubSpot blogged about his experience speaking with a friend at EMC, a huge company (roughly ten billion US $ revenue). Mike and the EMC person discussed the most important search terms for EMC and came up with two critical ones "data storage" and "information infrastructure."

They then Googled those terms. Remarkably, EMC was nowhere near the top of the search heap for the phrases. Mike came to the obvious conclusion: "EMC is a Laggard Playing by the Old Rules of Marketing."

I thought that was an amazing thing. Here is a company that spends well over one billion US dollars on sales and marketing and they are nowhere near the front page on Google for two of the most important phrases in their industry.

As Mike at HubSpot said: "This is like opening the Yellow Pages in 1990 and looking under 'car rental' and not seeing an ad for Hertz!"

Last week I Googled those phrases again, wondering if they EMC had implemented any Web marketing programs to boost their results in the past three months:

Google search for "data storage"
Google search for "information infrastructure"

At the time I checked, EMC was ranked number 115 in the Google search results for "data storage" and number 76 for "information infrastructure."

Not so great for a company whose tagline is "where information lives."

EMC is not doing a good job at helping buyers find them via search engines.

How about your company? You should be able to answer these questions:
Do you know the most important search terms that people are using to find products and services like the ones you sell?
Where do you appear in the results?
If you aren’t satisfied with your results, what great content can you create (a blog or an ebook or some news releases) to help boost your ranking?

Disclosure: I am a member of the HubSpot board of advisors.

"Make my logo bigger!"

Is your tiny-logo-loving-designer always cramming your beautiful logo into an obscure corner of your ad? Well not anymore with Make Your Logo Bigger Cream!

Boring white space on your website? You can eliminate that white space and fill it with your marketing messages with White Space Eliminator!

You gotta check out this video. Anyone who has worked on a Web site project can relate to the bosses and the salespeople. They say something like "shouldn’t the company logo be a bit larger?"

But what they really mean is: "We want to make sure that our dumb prospects know who we are so make the damn logo bigger you silly pony-tailed geek!"

This incredibly clever Make My Logo Bigger video comes from Agency Fusion, a web development firm who says: "We understand that you are the trained designers and our expertise lies within the geek realms of programming. We are proud to be some of the best-qualified geeks around. We can't keep your client from asking you to make their logo bigger than Texas, but when it comes to websites we can help. Make My Logo Bigger Cream might be fake, but we are not."

Tip of the hat to Kelly for sending me this. Kelly is the publisher of a book that I enjoyed called Spinning Disney's World: Memories of a Magic Kingdom Press Agent. The book is a fascinating inside account of PR at Disney written by Charles Ridgway, the long-time head of public relations for Walt Disney.

Lights! Camera! Sales! Welcome Wall Street Journal readers

I am quoted in a terrific article in today's Wall Street Journal by Raymund Flandez titled Lights! Camera! Sales! How to use video to expand your business in a YouTube world. The article includes many examples of viral videos and is worth a read. We also filmed a television segment for the Wall Street Journal Report where we discussed how small businesses can create online videos that can increase their exposure on the Internet. Thank you for speaking with me Raymund.

If you've found your way to my blog via The Wall Street Journal, thanks for stopping by. I am an online thought leadership and viral marketing strategist and through my books, seminars and speaking I show organizations how to harness the amazing power of viral marketing.

Here are a few things I've written on this blog about viral marketing using YouTube videos that you might want to check out:

8 tips to make your YouTube video go viral

Viral Marketing with Jerry Garcia's toilet

IBM's terrific "Mainframe: Art of the Sale" sequels now available on YouTube!

Video on the Web to reach your buyers

You may want to check out my bestselling book The New Rules of Marketing & PR. I provide much more information about creating content, including YouTube videos, that people want to consume.

My ideology: marketing and public relations is vastly different on the Web. The old rules of mainstream media are about controlling a message and the only ways to get noticed is to buy expensive advertising or beg the media to write about you. The new rules of marketing and PR (on the Web) are completely different. Instead of buying or begging your way in, anybody can publish their way in using the tools of social media such as YouTube videos and other online media (blogs, podcasts, online news releases, ebooks).

Steve Kayser proves B2B software companies can have a sense of humor

Most marketing and communications programs from business-to-business software and technology companies are dreadfully dry and painfully boring. I mean if some of these companies tried to smile at themselves, their screens would crack.

But guess what? Your buyers, no matter what sort of organization you work for, are people—real people with a sense of fun—not nameless, faceless, corporate drones. Sometimes a bit of the unusual and funny can work wonders.

Steve Kayser is a marketing executive at Cincom, one of the largest privately-held software companies in the world. He’s a master at online marketing and communications, having built the Cincom Expert Access e-zine from zero to 135,000 subscribers. Expert Access is written for senior-level corporate executives, IT and operations managers, and technology buyer committees. Cincom is a global company and Expert Access counts subscribers from dozens of countries.

Humor plays a large part.

Can you think of any other B2B software companies that have a spokes-donkey?

Or can you imagine another company in this market running a lead article in their online newsletter comparing General George Patton to Dog the Bounty Hunter? Steve Kayser does all of this and more and he proves that humor works in the B2B world.

Of course, it's not all fun and games. Cincom is a company that delivers value to its customers. Cincom has achieved 21 straight years of producing more than $100 million in revenue - the only private software company in the world to attain this lofty feat.

Steve proves humor can be used, even in B2B marketing. But it’s tricky to strike the right balance. And if you’ve never used humor before, you’ll need to start small. A spokes-chipmunk perhaps?

Disclosure: I am one of Cincom’s many outside "experts" and my writing occasionally appears in Cincom Expert Access.