Web Ink Now

Telling the Truth

UPDATE: On October 7, 2011 at 2:00 pm a representative of Starwood Social Media Team commented on this post. Please take a look at the response.

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“Your call is important to us.”

“We love our customers.”

Are you telling the truth? Or is some marketer making something up in an attempt to sound good while hiding what's really going on?

You know what? Your customers can see through the smokescreen.

Truth: We're trying to save money by firing customer support reps and therefore average wait time is now over 5 minutes.
Marketing: Your call is important to us.

I stayed at the Gaylord National, a Westin property near Washington DC this week. The hotel sports a massive energy sucking atrium. It's really a rather nice atrium. I liked being in the climate controlled outdoors.

So is this the truth? (This is what the marketers say in one place.) "The Gaylord National Resort features a dramatic, soaring 18-story glass atrium complete with vibrant indoor gardens, flowing waterways, and panoramic vistas of the Potomac River."

Or is this the truth? (This is what the marketers say in another place.) "One of your Heavenly® Shower heads has been turned off in an effort to minimize water usage and protect one of our most precious natural resources."

Does the Gaylord National want to protect the environment? Or do they want an atrium with water fountains and sunlight coming in during the hot day?

Or maybe this is the truth? Some bonehead convinced the Westin to install these newfangled shower heads and when the CFO saw the huge increase in water and energy use the CFO had a fit and told the boneheads to do something about it so they made up some hogwash about how they love the environment.

Or this: Westin Hotels really want to save the planet and some idiot convinced them that an atrium makes sense and now they are stuck with it.

Your customers can spot hypocrisy a mile away. What are you saying to people? Are you telling the truth?

Shower photo by David Meerman Scott
Atrium photo via Gaylord National site

Yahoo! vagues up leadership reorganization PR with cutting edge gobbledygook

Yesterday, Yahoo! announced a reorganization of top management. The press release is choked with cutting-edge, innovative, industry-standard gobbledygook.

Check out the third paragraph: Roy Bostock, Chairman of the Yahoo! Board, said, "The Board sees enormous growth opportunities on which Yahoo! can capitalize, and our primary objective is to leverage the Company's leadership and current business assets and platforms to execute against these opportunities. We have talented teams and tremendous resources behind them and intend to return the Company to a path of robust growth and industry-leading innovation. We are committed to exploring and evaluating possibilities and opportunities that will put Yahoo! on a trajectory for growth and innovation and deliver value to shareholders."

Read the full press release here.

WTF?

The release is so full of gobbledygook words and phrases as to be completely ineffective.

The problem with this is that the words chosen in this release are so overused as to have become meaningless. When I last analyzed gobbledygook, "innovate" and related words like "innovation" was the most overused word in press releases. The paragraph above uses the word "innovation" twice.

The information being conveyed in the Yahoo! release is tough. The board sacked the CEO and is looking for a replacement. Yahoo! missed an opportunity to communicate like humans and deliver some real information.

When companies vague up their communications like Yahoo! did, it doesn't give people reason to cheer. It may even make them wonder what else is happening in that boardroom. Investors might sell or short the stock.

Your buyers (and the media and analysts who cover your company) want to know what specific problems your product solves, and they want proof that it works—in plain language.

Every time you write—yes, even in news releases—you have an opportunity to communicate. At each stage of the sales process, well-written materials will help people understand how you, specifically, will help them.

A big hat tip to David Dalka for pointing us to this press release.

Marketing is not Advertising

UPDATE - August 26, 2011 - Shar VanBoskirk commented on the post. Please make sure to read her thoughtful response to this post (15 comments down).

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Yesterday, Forrester Research released a report US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2011 To 2016: Spend Will Near $77 Billion As Interactive Gains Legitimacy In The Mix written by Shar VanBoskirk

The executive summary reads:
By 2016, advertisers will spend $77 billion on interactive marketing — as much as they do on television today. Search marketing, display advertising, mobile marketing, email marketing, and social media will grow to 35% of all advertising spend as they are embedded in the marketing mix. We expect this growth to help firms become adaptive, kill off daily deals, re-emphasize marketing's "p's," and turn consumer electronics into audience-targeting tools.

I violently disagree with how VanBoskirk and her colleagues continue to equate "advertising" with "marketing" as they have done in the report. (Re-read the title of the report and the executive summary and pause on the words "advertising" and "marketing" to see what I mean.)

I first wrote about this issue back in 2007 in a post called Forrester Research misleads CMOs by confusing advertising with marketing in new research report

Marketing is not Advertising

Prior to the web, organizations had only two significant choices to attract attention: Buy expensive advertising or get third-party ink from the media. But the web has changed the rules. The web is not TV. Organizations that understand the New Rules of Marketing & PR develop relationships directly with consumers like you and me. That costs zero (unless you count the human resources cost).

We now have a tremendous opportunity to reach niche buyers directly with targeted information that costs a fraction of what big-budget advertising costs.

A representative of Forrester sent me a copy of the current report. There is certainly a great deal of interesting information in it. I'm sure the data will be valuable for CMOs and executives as they plan 2012 budgets.

However, I wish that Forrester analysts would look at the new ways that companies can reach people online as more than just a check box that you can spend advertising dollars on.

I also wish that they would not continue to intermix the terms "advertising" and "marketing" as this makes it 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.

Hat tip: I tweeted my frustrations with Forrester this morning and my friend Steve Johnson replied, which prompted this post.

Why the 4 Ps of marketing do not work on the Web

The four Ps of marketing -- product, place, price, and promotion – used to describe the marketing mix, was coined way back in the 1960s.

Business school curricula still frequently include a discussion of the 4 Ps of marketing and I see the 4 Ps pop up frequently in marketing books to this day.

For marketing on the Web, I think focusing on the traditional Ps lead directly to failure because the concepts force marketers into a marketing paradigm that just isn't effective in a social world.

Others, with sly smiles, have commented on the outdated nature of the Ps before me.

My good friend Steve Johnson, author of the excellent Product Marketing blog, insists that PowerPoint should be added as a P. Ha Ha, good one Steve!

At a recent speaking gig as I was walking the tradeshow floor, I had a conversation with a company representative in their booth. Somehow we got onto the 4 Ps and he says: "Oh, we've got Marketing Barbie in our booth. She's expert in the four Ps: perfume, polish, peroxide, and Prada." I about keeled over with laughter! (Yes, there are still companies who hire models to appear in booths in a strange attempt to draw men in. Which P is that? Promotion I guess.)

I did search for the 5th P with my friend Tim Washer. We found a few.

I thought about redefining the 4 Ps but couldn't take myself seriously. The best I got was: Psychobabble, Puffing, Poseur, and Permalink. Lame, I know.

Why the 4 Ps of marketing don’t work on the Web

A focus on Product means you create web content about the wrong things.

Let's be honest, OK?

Nobody cares about your products and services except you and the others in your organization.

What your buyers do care about are themselves. And they care a great deal about solving their problems (and are always on the lookout for a company that can help them do so). The good news for smart marketers is that this knowledge has the potential to make you many times more successful. It may quite literally transform your business (that's not just my opinion; many people write me to tell me so).

The best way to market on the Web is to create valuable information for the people you are trying to reach. That usually means not talking about your products.

A focus on Promotion gets you into a campaign mentality.

Promotion usually means advertising campaigns that "target" a specific market within a fixed time period (note the war metaphors).

I've seen a large increase in the number of advertising people who have contacted me in the hopes that I would talk up the "social media campaign" that they developed for a client.

In particular, the ad agencies love to tell me about the contests and games they've created as part of the campaign. And frequently, the pitch they send me includes talk of some award they've won.

However, I think there is a huge difference between a sustained development to creating valuable information online -- YouTube videos, blogs, photographs, infographics, ebooks, Twitter feeds, Webinars, and the like -- vs. promotions via a one-off Facebook game in the hopes that people will "like" you.

For many companies, social media and content on the web is a check box in the promotion category. Direct mail? Check. Tradeshows? Check. Magazine ads? Check. Social media? Check.

Place and price imply that all that matters in creating content on the web is driving people to purchase.

While making a sale is always the ultimate goal of Web marketing, true success comes from educating and informing and entertaining so that people are eager to do business with you.

Get away from the Ps if you want success on the Web.

What do you think?

Mobile phone hacking, sleazebags, and doing the right thing

I've been following the unfolding scandal at the British tabloid News of the World and wondered: How can people be so silly to not protect their privacy with a password on their voicemail?

Well, it turns out I am silly! Hundreds of millions of us are. The default settings with most mobile carriers are set at "PLEASE HACK ME." That's why it was so easy for reporters to hack thousands of people's voicemail systems. I outline how to protect your phone below.

Sleazebags

But I've also been thinking: How can people be so sleazy and unethical?

I've seen this before.

When I worked on Wall Street there were many insider-trading scandals. It's just plain sleazy (and also illegal) to trade on inside information.

Pretending to be somebody you’re not such as Edelman PR's fake blog, Wal-Marting Across America. It's just plain sleazy to try to fool people on social networks.

And now the phone voicemail hacking. It's just plain sleazy to invade people's privacy by listening to their private voicemail messages.

You'd think that financial markets professionals, PR professionals, and media professionals would know better. But some are prepared to stake their reputations (and even the possibility of jail time) to gain an unethical advantage.

You are vulnerable to phone hacking

If you can access your voicemails from your mobile directly - without entering a password - then you're vulnerable. I was, and I didn't even know it.

Hackers use simple services called caller ID spoofing, which allows them to make a call that appears to be coming from any phone number they choose. So if somebody were to call my mobile phone number and use spoof software to fool the system into thinking it was me calling from my own phone, they get access to my messages. Here's a good 7-minute video from WSJ that outlines spoofing.

This is what reporters at News of the World did. The resulting crisis brought down the 168 year old newspaper and derailed News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch's proposed takeover or BSkyB.

Protect your voicemail now

I'm an iPhone user and use AT&T. I'm told that the vulnerabilities are similar on other devices and with other carriers.

I found out how to protect myself and reproduce the steps here. If you are not an AT&T customer, there is probably something similar for your carrier. (Users of other wireless providers feel free to leave the steps in the comments section.

Protect yourself now.

Please, do the right thing.

There are no shortcuts. And even if there were, how the hell can you live with yourself if you pretend to be someone you’re not, or trade on inside information, or hack people’s personal information?

DANGER: Using digital PR tactics to hype digital expertise

UPDATE: Craig Kallin, Senior Vice President of Marketing Services for Acsys Interactive commented on the blog post. Thanks, Craig.

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Using digital communications tools (such as an emailed press release pitch) to hype how wonderful your organization is at digital communications is fraught with danger.

I've written about this before in my post Creating a Social Media Monster about Lady Gaga’s digital agency of record.

Yesterday I received a press release via email from a representative of Acsys Interactive, "a Connecticut-based firm specializing in digital media consulting."

The subject line of the email shouted in nearly all caps: New Survey: MARKETERS ANTICIPATE 400 PERCENT INCREASE IN USE OF DIGITAL MEDIA.

The body of the pitch contained the text of the press release which can be found here.

Really?

A press release sent via email to talk about the use of digital media by marketers? And in all capital letters? Why not use digital media to talk about this instead of an emailed press release?

Normally I just let this kind of thing pass without notice. Delete the email. No harm done.

But this time I wanted to talk about it because the email itself was sent with a major flaw that no self-proclaimed "expert" should ever make. The email was addressed to 219 people all in the "To" field.

In other words, all 200+ email addresses of the members of the media that this so-called digital media consulting firm pitched were exposed for all to see. There is no other way to describe this than the worst form of email spam. Not only am I sent an unsolicited email from a company I do not know from a list I did not opt-in to, but anyone on the "to" list could see the other email addresses and potentially harvest them.

If you're a self-proclaimed expert, you need to show it.

Yes, mistakes happen. It is likely this error was made because the release was sent in haste or a junior person was assigned to send the release and nobody explained to the representative how to use email correctly to send a press release. We all make mistakes. Like the time I tweeted an unauthorized offer and had to scramble for a full day to stop the damage. I certainly do understand that errors occur. It's likely that Acsys Interactive is a good firm that simply made an error.

Lesson learned

You need to be very, very careful touting your digital media chops using traditional and digital forms of communications. Everything you do reflects on your level of expertise.

In fact, this advice is true of any person or company. Whatever your expertise, you need to be extra careful how you promote it.

People naturally say: "How good can they be if they can't even do it for themselves?"

Portal 2.0: Google Plus, Facebook and Twitter take social backwards to the 1990s

Have you used AOL, Lycos, Excite, MSN, or Yahoo! recently?

It seems we are entering Portal 2.0 as the major social sites have been jockeying for position this past week to win the minds of consumers much like the portals did more than a decade ago. These companies appear to be creating islands by erecting the same sorts of barriers as the portals did in the late 1990s.

At that time, the portals fought with each other and consumers were left out of the discussion. So while the analysts talked up the merits of this portal vs. that as if that’s all there was, a little search engine called Google figured out a better way to organize information on the Web.

Read my article just published in the Huffington Post
Are Google, Facebook, and Twitter Taking Social Backwards?

As I was playing around with Google+ this weekend, I noticed much discussion about Google+ vs. Facebook. People were talking about which is better and which they would use more. That's exactly the talk that played out in 1998 regarding portals.

This weekend the social services responded with a round of blocking access to their services from each other. Google discontinued its excellent real-time search feature - powered mainly by Twitter - that had been active since December 2009.

And Facebook blocked a contact-exporting tool used to let people save the email addresses and other information of their Facebook friends as a file or to import them into Gmail.

Ugh. Not again! It's Portal 2.0

I worked in the portal world in the late 1990s. I was with NewsEdge, a real-time news provider that sold information feeds to the portals. It was an exciting time. But as the portals fought with each other by spending their investors money, information users were increasingly bewildered by choice. Where to find quality content? Enter the Google search engine.

Sure, I understand that Google, Facebook, and Twitter need to make money. Their investors are counting on that. But in their scramble to erect moats around their services and as they try to keep users, are they potentially driving them to consider a more nimble way to communicate?

I'm sure there is a smart company waiting in the wings ready to swoop in with a better way to organize social contacts that doesn't rely on a Portal 2.0 mentality. I have no doubt there is a company out there solving this problem just like Google solved search a decade ago. I look forward to the day when my social services and personal contacts are not housed in separate islands dotting the ocean of the social Web.

Island image: Shutterstock / R McIntyre

Lessons from Fox News Twitter hack

This morning, the @foxnewspolitics Twitter feed was hacked and populated with tweets reporting the death of President Obama. A group called Scriptkiddies claimed responsibility.

As I am writing this about 3 hours after the messages were posted, the offending tweets were still live. Assuming they will be taken down soon, I took a few screen shots. (Click to enlarge)

Here are a few things I take away from this.

Don't retweet something unless you are sure.

Had you seen the fake tweets from Fox News in your stream, you should have taken a moment to look at Google News or some other place to see if any other news sources are reporting the news. Confirmation is essential. In this example, hundreds of people retweeted the misinformation.

Have a plan in place in case your organization is hacked.

The compromised Twitter ID is still showing the offending tweets hours after the incident. My guess is that the Twitter ID was changed by the hackers, so Fox News may be having trouble getting into the Twitter ID. That's understandable.

There should be a notice on the Fox News Politics site that explains what happened. As of this writing there is no such notice. A search of the site brings up nothing.

At the very least, the main Fox News twitter feed should have a notice about the hack. But the last tweet from @foxnews was 8 hours ago as I write this. It's sort of embarrassing that a real-time news organization has gone so long without seemingly noticing what's going down.

If you're in a real-time business (and aren't we all?) your site and Twitter feed are not comfortable Monday to Friday, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm toys. They are instant communications tools.

A crisis happens when you are least prepared

Remember, when a real-time crisis happens to your organization, it is likely to be on a holiday, or a weekend, or at night, or when the boss is away.

In this case, since this happened early in the morning USA eastern time on the 4th of July long weekend, it was all of the above.

Who has the keys to the site?

If this were to happen at your organization and you were the first to see it, could you get an update to your site at 5:00 am on a holiday?

Do you know how to get an update your company's Twitter feed in a real-time situation?

When lawyers stupidly get in the way of marketing

At many organizations, the legal department is heavily involved in marketing and communications initiatives, frequently requiring every blog post and press release to be vetted by a lawyer.

In some extremes, corporate legal eagles even forbid employees from starting a blog or participating on Twitter and Facebook at work.

This problem can be so pervasive that I know people who call the legal department the "communications prevention department."

I've found that the restrictions come down to two factors: ignorance of social media and a lack of trust in employees.

RISK

Legal people want to mitigate risk. So they naively think that saying "NO" is the best approach. No to blogging. No to Twitter. No to Facebook.

They say "no" from an ignorance of the value of the new tools of marketing and PR in real time.

Yet from a communications perspective, the most risky thing you can do is hide behind "no comment."

Since legal people don't usually understand real-time media themselves (and don't use them for business in their jobs), they naturally respond by just slapping on controls. After all, their job is to reduce risks within a company, so it’s temptingly simple to just say no.

This is especially true in companies that mistrust their employees. However, if a company trusts its employees and understands that social media can be a powerful way to do business, then it is the lawyers' job to create an environment where you can do what you know is right.

Are you allowed to look over the lawyers work?

Just an aside... I find it really interesting that marketing is never invited to review the corporate lawyers’ work. Shouldn’t we clean up some of the gobbledygook-laden letters that go out to important customers?

But no – they can get into our knickers, but we can’t get into theirs.

What you need to do

My recommendation is to work with your managers and your organization's legal team (and perhaps the human resources department as well) to create guidelines that you can operate under. Your company’s guidelines should include advice about how to communicate in any medium, including face-to-face conversations, presentations at events, email, real-time media, online forums and chat rooms, and other forms of communication.

Rather than putting restrictions on real-time media (that is, the technology), it’s better to focus on guiding the way people behave.

You may have to take the lead on creating the guidelines at your organization, but the effort will be worth it.

Image: Shutterstock / EmiliaU

You and I are incredibly lucky

Imagine what it was like to be a marketer a few decades ago?
- Marketing meant advertising and those with the biggest budgets won.

Imagine being in Public Relations in the 1980s & 1990s?
- Your Rolodex was critically important and you needed a great fax machine to get those pitches out.

How about finding a job 20 years ago?
- You had to obsess over your printed CV and continually "network" - cold call friends of friends or some random person you met once to see if they could help you land a job.

Getting attention a few decades ago was nearly impossible.
- I know because I started in sales and marketing in the mid-1980s. It was expensive and I had no budget. And to be honest, it wasn't so much fun.

- Don't even get me started on looking for a job in the ‘90s. Ugh. What a downer.

You and I are incredibly lucky

We're living in a time when we can reach the world directly, without having to spend enormous amounts of money on advertising and without investing in huge public relations efforts to convince the media to write (or broadcast) about our products and services.

Today, you can show potential employers what you know and what you can do so they will find you!

There is a tremendous opportunity right now to reach people by publishing great stuff that brands us as leaders. Now we can create videos, tell stories, interact with people and develop interesting information that people want to consume and that they are eager to share.

Hey, we can have fun!

It's incredibly rewarding to create a video or a blog post that's seen by thousands.

How amazing is it to have people contacting you every day to learn more about your offerings?

Isn't it cool that potential employers reach out to you?

There's a new world – are you part of it?

Are you earning the attention of your potential customers? Or is your marketing and PR program the same as 1994?

Are you developing a social network and publishing the information that will make you a must hire employee? Or are you still sorting out what color beige is the best paper to print your CV on?

If not now, then when?

Now is a terrific time to start. It is not too late. If you've got something to say, then say it.

We're looking to hear from your company. We're searching Google for what you have to offer. We want to hear from you.

If you create something interesting, we're eager to share it with our friends, colleagues, and family.

What are you waiting for?

You are in charge of your own success.

Top image: Shutterstock / filip323
Bottom image: Shutterstock / Tetiana Savitska aka Solaie