Web Ink Now

World's worst website

I'd like to nominate the English-language edition of the Tokyo 2020 Candidate City website as the worst English-language site in the world. The site is built in support of bringing the 2020 Summer Olympic Games to Tokyo.

Where to start. Well anywhere, really. So let's look at content.

How about Vision:
"Tokyo 2020 will bring together dynamic innovation and global inspiration. It will unite the power of the Games with the unique values of the Japanese people and the excitement of a city that sets global trends. It will be a unique celebration that will help reinforce and renew the Olympic Values for the new generation. And will contribute to more young people, worldwide, sharing the dreams, hopes and benefits of sport."

Huh? WTF?

This is about as gobbledygook as any paragraph I have ever read. And I've read a lot of bad ones over the years. We've got weasel words like the number one most over-used phrase in English language marketing: "innovation". Then there’s "global inspiration," "unique values" plus other world-class, cutting-edge, mission-critical nonsense. These phrases are so overused to have become meaningless.

A fun test of superlative-laden content like this is to substitute a competitor. So how about substituting into the paragraph above for Istanbul 2020 with the words "Istanbul / Turkish" or Madrid 2020 with "Madrid / Spanish." If the paragraph still makes sense with the competitor city substituted, then vision has failed.

Buyer personas... Or not.

While I could poke at additional content aspects of this terrible site that make it stink so much, I'll stop. Because what it really comes down to is the typical mistake of not understanding buyers.

I lived in Japan for seven years and my wife is Japanese. What we've seen so often is Japanese organizations that enter the global markets by simply translating the content they created for the local Japan marketplace. That's likely what happened here.

And it's too bad, really. Because Tokyo would make an excellent host city. But I fear the candidacy is doomed because of this rotten site.

For an example of missing the buyer persona, consider the use of animated characters that are so big in Japanese marketing. The people who made this site assumed that everyone in the world is attracted to anime so they carried it over to English too: All-Time Cartoon Hero Doraemon Joins Tokyo 2020 as Special Ambassador. Well not everyone is into the same stuff as the average eleven-year-old.

Who should be the buyer persona for this site? I'd argue the 115 voting members of the International Olympic Committee who choose the location of the 2020 games are the most important buyer persona. I'd have a tough time believing that this site reaches those people effectively.

When your organization goes global

While it is easy to sneer at this site and other crap-filled sites like it, imagine what happens when *you* simply translate *your* materials into the local languages of countries whose markets you enter. It is likely a similar thing happens to your site in the eyes of the local market if you translate your content.

To really globalize, you need local content creators who understand the local buyer personas and create content especially for them.

Voting for the Olympic host city takes place on September 7, 2013, as I write this a little more than 4 months away. There is still time to fix this site and increase Tokyo's chances.

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UPDATE May 2, 2013 - I am not a consultant (I write books and deliver speeches around the world. I have no interest in trying to generate consulting business from this blog post. I am simply pointing it out so we can all learn from it.

Content marketing and video showcase expertise and drive tons of business

You could hardly ask for a more dramatic example of how near zero-cost videos can expand reach and drive business. And it all started because Mary McNeight identified a problem that no one online was helping people solve.

When Mary couldn't find anyone in the Seattle area who would help her train her own dog Jasper for service work, it fell to her to teach her pet to be her service dog. Service dogs that help people manage disabilities like blindness and diseases like recurrent seizures and diabetes.

Later, she enrolled in puppy classes to train Liame, her new Labrador retriever puppy. In the process, she became addicted to dog training—so she made it her business.

Mary spent countless hours learning all aspects of the business, got her accreditation from the Certification Council for Professional Dog Trainers, and is now owner and director of training and behavior at Service Dog Academy. This business offers private training sessions and small-group adult-and-puppy training classes for both service and pet dog training. They even offer a groundbreaking train your own Diabetic Alert Dog program.

Content marketing and video production

But credentials, skills, and even passion alone don't bring in customers. Her excellent website (featuring dozens of videos that she shot and edited herself) educates buyers and generates high search-engine rankings, driving business her way.

"I've gone from barely having any students to getting anywhere from twenty to forty emails per day requesting my services and advice and verbally praising my work," Mary says. "If that isn't a story of success, I don’t know what is. I have the power to create an audience for any product or service I put my mind to. But I think I will stick with what makes me happiest, helping dogs and the disabled live more productive lives."

In 2010, Mary started making YouTube videos with an inexpensive Flip Video camera and the software that came installed on her Mac notebook computer. "Seeing a need for my students to understand how to make a Kongsicle, I produced my first instructional video," Mary says. Kongs are natural rubber-food puzzle toys for dogs, and a Kongsicle is a Kong with frozen food inside. The video is titled Best Dog Food Puzzle: The Kongsicle.

"A couple of months later, I went to the Association of Pet Dog Trainers conference, and I was startled by a young trainer who said, 'You're Mary McNeight right? You made that video on Kongsicles! I use it as a reference video for my students.' Here was this dog trainer in Florida using my materials for her classes. That was the day I understood the power of YouTube." Since then, Mary has made many instructional videos, with titles that include “Diabetic Alert Dog Scams,” Puppy Doggie Ants in the Pants, and a multi-part series on diabetic alert dog training.

The content on the Service Dog Academy site, including the video series, is created for three buyer personas: pet dog owners, service dog owners, and people who want to train their own diabetic alert dog. After her initial success, Mary purchased a $400 HD video camera, a $20 microphone, Final Cut Pro software, and, as she describes it, "some funky alien-adjustable-arm-looking lights at Home Depot, since I couldn't afford to light my videos with professional lights. The really cool thing about my content is that it proves that it doesn't have to be shiny, flashy, spiffy or cost thousands of dollars to produce. People will watch anything as long as its packed full of useful information."

Make it free

Mary's notoriety and search engine results are aided by her willingness to post content that others in the dog training business are fearful to post because they don't want to give away information for free. "A great success was a video on how to travel with your service dog, something nobody on the entire Internet was teaching people how to do," she says. "I also hosted a webinar that gave an overview of how to train a diabetic alert dog. I placed the webinar capture video on YouTube and was afraid of being banned in the dog training community. This information was not available on the Web because nobody wanted to share how they trained dogs for tens of thousands of dollars. I started getting emails and phone calls from people all over the world asking me for advice on training their dog or just outright purchasing my online diabetic alert dog training program. I’ve had dog trainers who want me to fly out to their location and teach a class on diabetic alert dog training for them.

"How cool is it that this now three-person service dog training organization is getting worldwide attention? I never would have gotten that type of exposure printing brochures or running expensive ads on local television. A couple of months ago, I even had a woman tell me the video I made saved her life! It allowed her to get enough information to help her train her own medical alert dog by herself."

Yes, Mary, it's cool. Keep up the great work and thanks for sharing your story.

Not Another Junky Blog

Tania Venn, director of PR at 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, the largest full-service professional junk removal company in the world, oversees a team that creates content with a focus to reach customers who may not think that they need a junk removal service.

“Once they hear about what junk removal could do for them and how it could impact their lives, they become interested in our service,” Tania says.

Tania and her colleagues focus on what information would be valuable for buyers as they create content for the 1-800-GOT-JUNK? Not Another Junky Blog and then use their Facebook page and Twitter feed @1800GOTJUNK to let their followers know of new posts.

Making junk interesting

I hear all the time from marketers who tell me something like "My business is boring. Nobody cares about what we do so how can I create content?"

Tania's example shows any market or company can be made to be interesting. We're talking about junk removal here, people!

"We think about what’s relevant," she says. "That could be tips and suggestions for people on getting their space back. It could be about decluttering and how to do a garage sale. We also focus on environmental sustainability, what happens to the stuff we haul away and creative ways to reuse junk." Right on the homepage there is a counter showing the number of pounds 1-800-GOT-JUNK? has saved from landfills. As of this writing, the ticker reads 2.264937 billion pounds.

They also create content about what's timely, either because it is in the news or tied with the time of year. "With the holidays coming up we'll post about making space to have your in-laws over and making room for new things you might get as gifts," Tania says. "And with New Years, everyone has resolutions. We know that the top ten New Year's resolutions includes 'getting organized' and 'simplifying'. We also look at what's trending. For example, there is a trend called trashion, when people make fashion out of trash, so we'll write about that."

Writing for buyers

Unlike when a blog is written from an egotistical perspective and turns into a bunch of advertising messages, Not Another Junky Blog, because it is written for buyers, focuses on real problems that people have with junk in the home.

"We know there’s an emotional component to getting rid of the stuff that you have," Tania says. "Our customers have an emotional release and an amazing magical feeling of 'that crap is not there anymore' when their junk is taken away. They don't realize until it's gone how good it feels. We hear it time and time and time again from our customers. So we build that into our blog because it answers what customers are looking for." The 1-800-GOT-JUNK? business is a franchise model, so the content they create also appeals to franchisees who learn about clever ways to market in their local area.

When you focus on buyers' problems as you create content, frequently you'll write about something that doesn't have anything to do with what your organization actually does. This is true at 1-800-GOT-JUNK?.

"We might talk about how to set up your own garage sale," Tania says. "That wouldn't get us business necessarily, but we’ve got the experience and we can share that with people. We know that readers may not be able to afford our service right now, but some day they will be able to. They'll have learned something from us that can help them out, something that can help them get rid of some of their junk, but they can do it themselves."

Measuring success

It's not just the billions of pounds of junk that the company saves from landfills that's measured. Tania knows that the content published in Not Another Junky Blog and shared on Facebook and Twitter is working because she uses analytics to measure content success too.

"I look at how many people view our blog on a daily basis and a weekly basis," she says, also paying attention to any content that becomes particularly popular with readers. "We've learned that we need to create content in order to be recognized on the web. It's a way of engaging with customers. It's a great way to get information directly to who you want to reach rather than going through the media."

Hey, if Tania can make junk interesting, there's no excuse for you not making your company interesting!

Metrics to Show How a Content Marketing Editorial Calendar Drives New Business

This is the third in a three part series on how professional services firm Sales Benchmark Index has made the transition from traditional outbound marketing like cold calls to a content-driven marketing approach using blogs, twitter, ebooks, and videos. I conduced several lengthy interviews with I love the approach Greg Alexander, CEO of the company to learn the inside scoop. If you haven’t done so, read the first installment Professional Services Firm Grows 50% through Switch from Outbound to Inbound Marketing and the second How to Target Buyer Personas with the Right Content Created Especially for Them.

Content based on the buyers' business

Greg knows from his buyer persona research that 75 percent of his US potential clients are on a calendar-based planning cycle. "July through October is when they go through their annual operating plan," he says. This is the time that buyers are most receptive to Sales Benchmark Index services and when the majority of sales tales place. "They are trying to figure out things like how many sales people do I need? How should I place the territories? What should the quotas be? How should I pay them? A lot of the research is centered around those issues."

Because Greg's sales happen July through October, he has a calendar-based approach to content creation.

"From November through June the approach is to give away lots and lots of intellectual property to build up the subscriber base," Greg says. "We believe that permission to have a conversation with buyers is a valuable asset. Within the blog we will write about a problem. We'll offer up a tool that we used with one of our clients to solve that specific problem. All we ask is that they click on the link. We put it behind a form, and then they get the tool for free. During the November through June time period, we don’t bombard them with follow up marketing activity."

As the subscriber roles grow, Greg's team shifts focus during the selling season when buyers have a greater need for information because they are planning next year's budgets from July through October. "During that time period, we shift the focus of the blog to having subscribers participate in our annual research tour, which we call Make the Number: How Your Peers Plan on Allocating People, Money and Time for the Upcoming Year."

Make the Number allows potential clients to have a personal review of benchmarking data and research. "This is an onsite seminar," Greg says. "If you want access to all these tools, and you've been a subscriber of ours for months and sometimes years, one of our experts will come on site and give you a presentation for 90 minutes to the executive team on kind of a set of best practices heading into the New Year. So it allows somebody to compare and contrast the sales strategy before the New Year begins."

Greg has had tremendous success with the calendar approach to content creation. "Just to give you some stats here on the power of content marketing, in prior years we might do between 50 and 100 visits during the July to October period," he says. "But this year, we'll have done over 220 of them. We know that about half of them eventually, inside of six quarters, become clients of ours. When people buy a professional service like ours, it's intangible. So we use the Make the Number meetings to turn what we do into a tangible by actually introducing people face to face. It makes it easier for the buyer to buy."

Measuring success

I love how Greg's team measures every aspect of his content efforts. After all, this is a company that helps sales and marketing executives be more effective, so you can imagine how they focus on measuring the effectiveness of their own inbound marketing.

In fact, they measure down to the blog post level (something that they learned from HubSpot, whose marketing software Sales Benchmark Index uses). "We grade posts based on things like how closely each are related to the problems of our buyer personas," he says. "We count the number of words in sentences, targeting six and 14 words per sentence. And we grade the effectiveness of the title. Then there are the hard metrics like the number of comments and social shares and links generated, and view counts."

Greg also analyzes what he calls "branded versus non-branded keywords" looking at how many people come to the blog on a monthly basis for each. A branded keyword is when somebody hits the blog for a term like "sales benchmark index" (they entered the company name into Google). A non-branded word would be if somebody searched on "sales territory design".

"Important phrases for us include 'territory design,' 'lead management', and 'sales incentive compensation'," Greg says. Note how these terms are fairly specific, but not so long tail as to be obscure. They specifically target 'lead generation' as a term because the phrase is so competitive. "We go after 'lead management', and we’re doing better as a result of that. We're looking at the number of incoming links and we use the HubSpot Link Grader Search Engine Optimization Tool. This year we've generated 579 new domains linking to us with 27,780 individual links that came from those domains. The thing that I'm probably the happiest about is the quality of the links has gone up. HubSpot graded the links earlier in the year at 47 on a scale of zero to 100. Now the average link rate is 82."

I wanted to know about the ultimate success measure, so I asked Greg how revenue was tracking. "We're up over a little over 50 percent this year," he told me. "That's our revenue number and our head count, which in professional services is a key metric. In consulting, utilization numbers are really important, too and we're running at 80 percent utilized right now, which is great. I can directly attribute much of that gain to inbound marketing and content marketing."

Advice to other organizations on how to implement inbound marketing

With his measurable success, I wanted to know what advice Greg would offer to other CEOs interested in adopting an inbound marketing content strategy.

"This is a mental shift to realize that you're really in the publishing business," Greg says. "If you embrace publishing, then the transformation that we talked about here will happen. If you're a CEO and you still believe that you're in another business, I don't believe you're going to make that transition. Unless you grew up in the publishing world, there’s much to learn. It's a steep learning curve. I've spent my time studying how successful publishing companies build their business. I understood things like audience acquisition and things I never knew about before. It helped quite a bit. You've got to learn how to be an effective publisher."

Disclosures: Greg and I serve together on the Eloqua board of advisors, which is where we met. In addition, I am on HubSpot advisory board and serve as Marketer in Residence at HubSpot.

Professional Services Firm Grows 50% through Switch from Outbound to Inbound Marketing

I recently had several lengthy discussions with my friend Greg Alexander, CEO of Sales Benchmark Index to learn how he made the switch from traditional outbound marketing like cold calls to a content-driven marketing approach using blogs, twitter, ebooks, and videos. The strategy has grown Greg's revenue 50% in the past year. Sales Benchmark Index has grown from a very small firm 6 years ago to a firm with dozens of consultants today.

The wide ranging discussion was so chock full of valuable information I want to share with you, that I've decided to make it a series of three blog posts starting today and running tomorrow and the next day.

Sales Benchmark Index is a professional services firm, focused exclusively on B2B sales force effectiveness. Sales Benchmark Index helps large and small clients gain a competitive advantage through the way they engage with their clients, the sales process, and the effectiveness of their sales force so they make sales numbers faster and with less effort.

This is a particularly fascinating example of success because Greg's business – the services his company offers – is completely metrics driven. And that's how Greg markets and sells too, based on the metrics, so this is a case study chock full of ROI measurements!

Outbound Marketing stopped working

Prior to making the switch to Inbound Marketing, Sales Benchmark Index deployed classic outbound activity. "We hired telemarketing firms to cold call," Greg says. "We did batch and blast email. We did interruption-based marketing tactics of all kinds and for a period of time from 2006 to 2010, that approach met our needs. And our needs are really well defined: We know how many inquiries we need to generate all the way through to paying customers. Then early, the effectiveness of the outbound channels just stopped. It's like somebody slammed the doors shut."

Greg thinks that his outbound strategies stopped working because his target audience was super busy. "I wasn't competing against other companies," he says. "I was competing for buyers' attention."

How buyers solve problems

Greg has done a great deal of research on how his buyer personas solve problems. And that was the starting point of his efforts to switch to Inbound Marketing.

"When our target customer (the head of sales or the head of marketing in a B2B organization) has a problem or need in their business, the very first thing they do – and we've done a lot of research to support this – is start searching the Web and reading and educating themselves," Greg says. "They typically don't want to engage with a service provider, us or anybody else for that matter, for a long time. Through education on the Web, they develop a crisp, well-articulated problem statement. Then they reach out to a small number of people to ask for their assistance in how they might approach solving that problem. It's similar to the way somebody would hire a law firm or a strategy consulting firm or an advertising agency."

Building buyer persona profiles and buyer process maps

Once Greg and his team understood how buyers solved problems, the next step was to develop buyer persona profiles and buyer process maps.

"We wanted to understand the key business objectives of each target audience," Greg says "What was standing in the way of them accomplishing those objectives? What were the things that were important to them when they made a decision to hire a service provider? How were they measured? What would the definition of success be? Once we understood that, we mapped the buying process for each persona. We identified when information requests were happening in the buying process for example, and what those information requests were."

Greg quickly realized that he had to create a lot of new content assets so he chose to create what he calls an "internal content marketing agency."

I love the approach Greg has taken to building content. Since Sales Benchmark Index is a professional services firm with smart subject experts, they needed to create an environment to channel the expertise into the creation of blog posts, videos, and longer form content assets like ebooks.

I talked in detail in the second installment of the series about how his team creates content How to Target Buyer Personas with the Right Content Created Especially for Them. Then on Friday. I'll discuss how Greg measures success and provide his advice to other CEOs on how to get started with a inbound marketing content strategy.

Disclosure: Greg and I serve together on the Eloqua board of advisors, which is where we met.

NBC Digital scraps Madison Ave demographics in favor of personas

Douglas Burdett points us to a fascinating story in the Media Post NBC News Kills The Demographic, Personifies Its Viewers Instead written by Joe Mandese.

The Media Post piece talks about how NBC News Digital is abandoning the traditional Madison Avenue demographics approach that has been used for decades that uses attributes like age, income, race, sex, and other factors to cluster audiences. This demographic approach is how advertising space has been bought and sold for a generation.

The new buyer persona approach on is based on their actual behaviors rather than a list of attributes.

The Media Post article lists the four personas used by NBC Digital as:

• "Always On:" Consumers who are constantly connected to news feeds across multiple devices throughout their waking day.


• "Reporters:" A slightly smaller segment of "digital natives" who grew up consuming news via online and mobile media, and who have manifested the behaviors of news disseminators, taking pride in their ability to break important news to their friends via their own social media postings.


• "Skimmers:" Consumers who are not passionately connected to news.


• "Veterans:" Consumers who primarily rely on traditional media as a trusted source for news.

NBC Digital is using the personas both to develop new content and to pitch advertisers.

Buyer personas and your marketing

The idea of buyer personas is difficult for many people who are used to traditional demographics to grasp. In a New Marketing Masterclass I recently conducted for several dozen consumer marketers, we were discussing a brand of premium grooming products for men and as I probed the buyer personas they target with the product, I heard language like: "Upscale, young, urban men in their twenties." This is a classic Madison Avenue approach and not as effective as a persona based approach. When I pushed a little about the market and who buys the products, we ended up with language like: "Shy single men who spend lots of money on products to increase their chances of finding a girlfriend."

Now we're talking! It is tough to create marketing for "Upscale, young, urban men in their twenties," which is why so much advertising ends up focused on the product attributes. However, creating marketing for "Shy single men who spend lots of money on products to increase their chances of finding a girlfriend," would be fun!

I recommend that you actually name your buyer personas. With the example above, we could name the buyer persona "Shy Sam." Armed with this sort of persona, marketers can then create online content that appeals directly to them. How about an ebook with a title like: "How to get a close shave that women love."

They key here is to develop buyer personas using actual input from interviews. You can’t just make this stuff up. The nuggets of gold here is that "Shy Sam" is shy and has trouble finding a girlfriend. You don’t guess at that. Rather you learn from your interviews with 25 or so members of the Shy Sam persona.

Buyer personas will transform your marketing. Building your content strategy around buyer personas is much more effective than prattling on about what your products and services do. With a switch to buyer personas, many organizations have dramatically better marketing success.

My book The New Rules of Marketing & PR uses buyer personas as a fundamental starting point of great marketing. If you want even more, my friend Adele Revella of the Buyer Persona Institute has great information.

I'm always looking for examples of buyer persona success. I'll be sharing an example from a professional services firm in the next week or two.

Obama says his biggest mistake as president has been communication

Yesterday, President and First Lady Michelle Obama spoke with CBS This Morning anchor Charlie Rose in the White House Blue Room, where they discussed the failures and successes of his administration as he heads into another election, among other things.

Rose asked President Obama about his biggest mistake as president.

"When I think about what we've done well and what we haven't done well," the president said, "the mistake of my first term - couple of years - was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that's important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times."

Direct link to Obama reflects on his biggest mistake as president on CBS.

After the election in 2008, I wrote a post Ten marketing lessons from the Barack Obama presidential campaign. My number three was: "Clearly and simply articulate what you want people to believe."

It's fascinating that Obama has identified his failures in this area as president. (While the President used the phrase "tell a story" in the interview, I am expanding it to "communicating" in this post.)

While I think he did an excellent job during the 2008 campaign, I certainly agree with the president that he hasn’t done a good enough job communicating over the past three and a half years as president.

Learning from the President Obama's mistake

These lessons are applicable to all. Many companies don't do a good job communicating. They don't focus on buyer personas and use the techniques of brand journalism and content marketing to tell a story.

Or, like the president, CEOs communicate during a product launch to make sales (the election cycle in Obama's case) but not once the product is released and used by customers.

Unlike the President however, many CEOs don't recognize this as a failure. Often, the people at the top think a good product is enough.

What can your organization learn from the President's mistake?

Note: This is a marketing blog, not a political blog. These are not political observations, but thoughts about marketing and communications.

Salespeople's brains vs the public web

Prior to starting my own business speaking and writing about marketing strategy, I ran several global B2B marketing teams. This was in a world prior to the ability we have today to create content on the web and have it be indexed by the search engines and shared via social networks.

Prior to the web, salespeople were in power positions because they were keepers of information.

With B2B products and services in the old days, the only way for buyers to get detailed information was from salespeople. Buyers had no choice.

To illustrate the point using an expensive consumer product example, think about the process of buying a car in, say, 1995. You'd be exposed to television and magazine ads. Perhaps you'd purchase a buyers guide such as Consumer Reports. You could ask friends and coworkers for advice. But to get detailed information on models and options and pricing required the dreaded visit to the dealership to "talk" to the salesperson, who smugly knew he had all the information power.

Today, buyers find information on the web

When researching a B2B purchase today, buyers just hit a search engine and their social networks. Tons of information is available.

Now how do you buy a car? Do you blindly go to visit the dealership to ask the salesperson? Or do you spend hours on the web learning as much as you can and only visit the dealer when you are ready to buy?

Are you still forcing your buyers to interact with salespeople?

The problem I see is that nearly all B2B companies are still operating in a world as if the salesperson is the king of the information kingdom. Companies insist on driving all online interactions to a salesperson.

One manifestation of this behavior is the insistence by most B2B companies that buyers supply personal details such as an email address before they can get information such as a white paper. When I question marketers about this practice, they tell me the reason is that they need sales leads and that salespeople follow up on the information requests.

Circa 1995 calculus

The idea that you cannot give your information for free pre-dates the web. Requiring email registration is simply applying what we did in the past to the new realities of how people research products. This is not as effective as making information freely available to be downloaded and shared.

Are you managing your B2B sales and marketing process using 1995 calculus? Do you assume that salespeople are the fonts of all knowledge and all information flows through them? If so, I think you are less successful than you could be.

Assume buyers are already educated

Your salespeople should assume they are the last place a buyer goes, not the first. They must assume that very little of their knowledge is proprietary. They need to facilitate the sale, not control the information.

Think back to buying a car. How do you want the dealer to interact with you when you walk in? Do you want a confrontational relationship where they feel they have the information power? Or do you want the dealer to assume you have already done your research and are ready to close a deal?

photo credit: dharder9475 via photo pin cc

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.

KLM social media Meet and Seat

My friend Gerard Vroomen, who lives in Amsterdam and flies KLM frequently, alerts us to KLM Meet and Seat.

Gerard (who tweets at @gerardvroomen and has an excellent blog) is a co-founder of Cervelo, the premier high end racing bike company. He built his company by focusing on a great product for his buyers (including road racers and triathletes) and by building a huge and passionate following through social media. So when Gerard brings something to our attention it is certainly worth checking out.

The KLM Meet and Seat lets those booked on certain KLM long-haul flights find out who else will be on flight too. With Meet & Seat you can view other passengers' Facebook or LinkedIn profile details and see where they'll be sitting – long before the flight leaves the ground.

You might search for people who are going to the same conference as you. Or someone from the same industry.

Opt-In to Meet and Seat

The KLM Meet and Seat service is opt-in. You can still be anonymous if you want. Or you can share your Facebook or LinkedIn profile through the KLM Manage my Booking interface. Once you share yours you can see the profile details of other passengers as well as their seat assignment (you can even try to sit next to someone interesting).

"I think this is a great way to use the capabilities of social networks," Gerard says. "Let's face it, many airline offerings are very similar and the consumer focuses on price a lot, so any time you can get your customer to think about something else, that's a good thing. Of course, KLM has to be careful it doesn't backfire, you can't run before you can crawl. Their website has had problems in times of crisis (Icelandic volcano, snowstorm at Schiphol airport) where online management of bookings wouldn't work, and their call centers would only play a recording telling people to manage their bookings online and then hang up on them. If you offer fancy services but the basics don't work, you'll take a real beating. But presuming they got the basics working now, this is a great addition and it also shows the benefits of being original; people will talk about it simply because you're the first to implement it."

KLM is a social media pioneer. When Foursquare first took off, they created a KLM Surprise program for those who checked into their flight on Foursquare at the airport gate. Sometimes, KLM staff would surprise you with an upgrade or travel bag or some other gift.

Each of these interesting KLM social initiatives are designed to get people to talk about the airline on their social networks. Imagine being seated next to your next customer or business partner (or even your future spouse) as a result of the social matchmaking.

Interesting stuff. Thanks Gerard.