By Leo Valiquette
A Cutting Edge Focus on Social Media for Business was the thrust of this week’s Ottawa Network event, but while each of the presenters offered useful insights on the abrupt paradigm shifts in customer and media engagement driven by Web 2.0, what struck me was that no matter how much some things change, they remain the same.
Chris Biber, president and CEO of SearchingWorks, started off the evening by reiterating that social media, be it Twitter, Youtube or a blog, is simply another set of tools in the marketing toolbox, while marketing itself is simply the “consistent application of common sense.”
It all begins of course, by taking the time to research and understand your customers. Who are they? Where are they? What interests them? And what are their needs and expectations? The same basic foundation that’s always been a requisite for an effective marketing program. The difference now, of course, being that social media allows for a much more candid and informal two-way flow of communication between company and customer.
But this is a conversation that cannot be dominated by a “me, me, me” approach. While companies and brands can make themselves part of the conversation and attempt to direct it, they can’t expect to control it. Nor will their audience respond favourably to anything that is blatantly self-serving or promotional.
Rick Radko, president of R-Cubed, drawing on his software-engineering background, took a different perspective and focused on the application of social media as an internal, rather than external, communications tool set. From online tools for document sharing and collaboration, to wikis, Rick talked about how “Enterprise 2.0” is becoming the norm for organizations with teleworkers and remote offices, to keep staff in touch and part of a common corporate culture.
In particular, Rick touched on using a wiki to keep staff informed on everything from new corporate directives, to who down the hall is offering to car pool. It’s the digitization of that ubiquitous cork board that adorns staff lunch rooms everywhere, plastered with pushpins and dead-tree notices.
Lastly, Natasha D’Souza, founder of Virtual EyeSee, talked about the distinctions between the social media release, versus the traditional news release, an example of which she offered for a recent Mother’s Day event she held. As her example illustrates, the social media release tends to be less formal and directly addresses the intended audience. It also moves up the contact information and incorporates multimedia elements to support it, from pictures, to video and links to other relevant sources of information.
Two things in particular struck me about the structure of a social media release and how she used it.
First, is the volume of supporting content that can be added, in terms of pictures, video, links and so forth. In the good ol’ days of tree slaying, a comprehensive package such as this was called a media kit. Is the social media release, in its fully realized form, in many ways not simply the digitization of this traditional public relations tool? (Editor’s note: Actually, long before the term “social media release” was ever coined, savvy PR practitioners have been offering their contacts multimedia-rich content. And we’ve been hosting or delivering that content via electronic channels for decades. The web has made it easier for practitioners to do it all themselves but there are still some media formats — broadcast-quality b-roll, for example — that you probably don’t want to host yourself.)
The second point came when one attendee asked Natasha how she distributed this social media release. And this is where another classic and intrinsic element of marketing and PR came in. She researched the influential bloggers in the Ottawa area who would be interested in her Mother’s Day event and contacted them to pitch the event and direct them to her release. Proving once again that they’ve yet to come up with a social media tool that is a suitable substitute for hard work and old-fashioned solicitation.
By Francis Moran
I was interviewed a few weeks back by the Ottawa Business Journal for a piece on marketing through a downturn. While a good bit of what I had to say did make it into the article, I thought it would be useful to expand on my thinking here. So, here are my 10 tips for marketing through a downturn.
1. Do as much marketing as you can afford
We’ve written a lot about the merit of maintaining your marketing spend through an economic downturn. There is still business to be written, markets to be taken and customers to be won. And a downturn, when many of your competitors may well be going quiet, often represents an unprecedented opportunity to grab a much larger share of voice.
2. Recalibrate your strategy and recast your budget strategically as opposed to simply cutting x% across the board
The OBJ reporter kept trying to get me to name the “one thing” that companies should do in response to a downturn. I resisted being so binary since a downturn represents doom to some but incredible opportunity to others. And even for those for whom it’s a challenge, an across-the-board response is rarely the right one.
At times like this, strategy becomes more valuable than ever. Know where you’re trying to go, the best way to get there, and how you’re going to know that you’ve arrived. Cut those marketing tactics that won’t help get you there and re-invest the money in the tactics that will.
3. Negotiate pricing
All the vectors you use to communicate to your marketplace are feeling the pinch right now. There is no better time to play hardball on pricing, or to negotiate added extras that usually cost a lot more. Most media outlets will cut their line rates or give you valuable extras like a free newsletter distribution, web conference, white paper distribution or even additional insertions. Trade show organizers may agree to a bigger booth space for the same price or throw in sponsorship opportunities or show guide advertising that in better times might cost you thousands more. Even if your supplier must hold the line on fundamentals, see if you can’t snag some of the valuable extras.
4. If you have channel or other partners, consider pooling budgets and activities to make your dollars go further
Can you share a trade show booth with partners? Can you initiate a co-op advertising program that sees you put up some of the cost while your channel partners put up the rest? Is the opposite available to you — are you a channel for an OEM with a co-op program?
5. Do not abandon measurement
If marketing is seen as the easiest thing for companies to cut during a downturn, then measurement is seen as the easiest thing for marketers to cut. After all, it doesn’t really contribute anything, right? Wrong. Harken back to tip No. 2: If you’re not measuring, you have no idea where you are or what got you there, you don’t know what’s working and what isn’t, and you simply can’t be strategic about your marketing spend. When times are good and there’s budget to spare, you might be able to afford to have some things work a little less effectively. When times are tough and every dollar must produce a result, you need to be measuring so you know which tactics are delivering and which ones aren’t.
6. Be transactional if there’s an immediate opportunity
As I’ve already noted, a downturn means different things for different companies. If there is good business that can be immediately secured, be highly transactional in going after it. Alter all your messaging to “Buy now,” and focus on tactics, like advertising and direct marketing, that communicate transactional messaging best.
7. If there isn’t an immediate opportunity, go long
It’s far more likely, however, that your customer’s buying cycle has stalled; it almost certainly has lengthened. So if your customers have hunkered down waiting for the storm to pass, there’s no point in blaring the hard sell at them or offering them discounts and other incentives to immediately do something they’re simply not going to. Does this mean you, too, should hunker down and draw the blinds until things blow over? No, it means your messaging should shift to support longer-term objectives such as awareness building, thought leadership and marketplace education. Tactics like media relations, trade shows and white papers that establish your authority and expertise are a better use of your resources if this is your reality.
8. In all communications, employ story telling that emphasizes how your product or service saves money or drives additional immediate revenue for your customers. Speak to the pain they’re feeling in a recession
Whatever the economic conditions, your marketing and communications messaging should be all about your customer, not you. You should always be speaking to the pain your customer feels that your product or service solves. In a recession, your customer’s pain is almost certainly all about revenue — making more of it or keeping more of it. Make sure you’re speaking to this.
9. Be overly attentive to your existing revenue base
“Love the one you’re with,” says the old song, and that’s never more relevant than in a downturn, when new customers are hardest to acquire. Your current customers are keeping you in business and it’s almost always cheaper to maintain and build business with existing customers than to find new ones. Lavish your existing customers with love, look for low-cost ways to improve the value you create for them, and communicate, communicate, communicate — let them know you love them.
10. Effective relationships never expire, so keep talking
Keep talking to everyone in your value chain, including suppliers, service providers, channels, influencers and, of course, customers and prospects. Even if they can’t use your services or you theirs just now, keeping those lines of communication open and full of useful information will serve you very well when the economy recovers.
By Francis Moran
I understand very well that setting up straw-man arguments just to knock them down can be a useful presentation tactic and a powerful rhetorical device but at some point, if that’s the only way you can prop up your case, you run the risk of sounding as vacuous and intellectually dishonest as the bleating sheep in George Orwell’s seminal “Animal Farm.”
I’m afraid that’s the chief reaction I was left with following this morning’s Social Media Breakfast Ottawa where presenter Chris Greenfield of Toronto’s Clever Communications had an argument that regrettably distilled into the single phrase, “Old way bad; new way (by which I mean my way) good.” He got a lot of chuckles from the crowd and several tweets hailing him as a fresh-thinking skeptic merely by highlighting the most egregious failings of traditional marketing and communications practitioners and then showing how the brave new world of social media is totally different from how those dinosaur hacks operate.
Here’s the thing, Chris: Many — dare I say, most — of us old-school marketing practitioners understand very well that the opportunity to communicate effectively lives at an intersection of interest between the participants in the communications process. We have been working our entire careers either to build those intersections or to meet our customers at the intersections where they already gather. By definition, this means we must engage — one of your most repeated terms but not an alien concept to the rest of us — in a bi-directional conversation characterised by honesty, openness and the fair exchange of value. For most of us marketers, a social-media strategy is a potent new tool we add to a complete and integrated campaign when they deliver the ability to bring us to the intersections where our customers gather.
For all his social media eagerness, Greenfield seemed to be peculiarly derisive about one tool, Twitter, with an argument that simply left me confused. On the one hand, he told us that social media tools were superb at distributing content through trusted channels to where customers can actually interact with that content. On the other hand, he was critical of Twitter because too many tweets simply parrot content available elsewhere. Huh?
Maybe I started with a chip on my shoulder because I walked in a little late but in time to hear him say that “ad agencies are just like print shops.” They have made themselves undifferentiated commodity propositions that “aren’t partners (with their clients) any more.” Only social media agencies can play that role, apparently. Tell that to the countless stand-out agencies — and yes, Chris, I think there are even some in Toronto! — whose people are creating brilliant, compelling and breakthrough campaigns, many of them effectively deploying social media elements, that are creating massive value for their clients’ brands as well as their own.
Finally, I have to comment on one piece that I think exposes Greenfield’s whole proposition that what he is doing is somehow new and different. “We use 30-second equivalents” to measure the effectiveness of social media engagement, he said, suggesting that perhaps 10 minutes spent on a web site is equal to a 30-second television ad. For as long as I have been a communications practitioner, I have railed against the common and popular but downright wrong and misleading practice of measuring media relations results by calculating ad-value equivalencies. Now Greenfield suggests we take one of the very worst and most discredited practices in measurement and apply it to social media, an approach that fails to recognise that the objectives of the social media component of a campaign are simply not the same as the objectives of the television advertising component of the campaign.
Sometimes, both four legs and two legs can be good. Even Orwell’s sheep eventually found that out.
