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15
Jul 2010
Posted by Michelle LaPointe
1 comment

Do You Need To Be On Twitter?

If you’re like 80% of businesses, you can safely  ignore the cute little bird. Here’s why.

Twitter Bluebird of Happiness

I got a chance to catch up with my friend Marti Barletta last week. It was delightful, as always, and fun to catch up on news of our lives, work, and families. But when the talk came around to marketing, Marti shared two astonishing bits of information.

  1. She is now among the top .05% of Tweeters in terms of followers.
  2. She has just over 700 followers.

You read that right, and because you can do math, you know what means: 99.5% of Tweeters have fewer than 700 followers.

How can this be, you ask?  Twitter is EVERYWHERE!  Dell, Walmart, and Four Seasons Hotels invite you to follow them on Twitter.  Cable news anchorpersons read tweets on the air. You know that Lindsay Lohan is upset, and that Aston and Demi are doing The Cleanse, because they posted it on Twitter. Maybe you even opened a Twitter account, just because you thought you should, and you haven’t used it since a month after you opened it.  The Old Spice Guy is responding to tweets via a whole series of towel-clad videos on YouTube.

And that’s why you should be on Twitter, if you want to bring your marketing program into the 21st century, right? Wrong.

In fact, everything I just said is why, if you’re like 80% of businesses, you probably won’t gain a thing by being on Twitter. You won’t have much to lose, either, unless you post things that are incredibly stupid — but you will be wasting your time.  Here’s why:

Dell, Walmart, and Four Seasons invite you to follow them on Twitter. Have you accepted? No? Why not? Because you don’t care? Because you have enough stuff to follow already?  Because you’d rather get information some other way?  Because you don’t have a Twitter account?  Because your Twitter account is somewhere…you think…maybe under the bed with the dust bunnies?

Twitter can be a good tool for communicating breaking tech news and frequent sales and other offers, but it’s not the only tool — and maybe not even the best one. Unless you post your Twitter feed elsewhere, you’ll only reach your Twitter followers.  They won’t stumble across your message on a casual visit to your website, blog, Facebook page, user forum or message board, or even mobile app.  So you might get traction that’s just as good, or even better, via one of those other channels.

Cable news anchorpersons read tweets on the air. News organizations use Twitter a lot, mostly as a tool to get up-to-the-minute information that they can follow up with traditional reporting. Why do cable news networks read tweets on the air? Partly, I’m sure, because it’s a faster — and shorter — way to get viewer feedback than traditional letters to the editor.  Partly, I suspect, because they have 24 hours of air time to fill. Every single dang stupid day.  If you’re not in the news business, you may not need Twitter.

You know that Lindsay Lohan is upset, and that Aston and Demi are doing The Cleanse, because they posted it on Twitter. But I’ll bet you read it on The Huffington Post, or People.com, or heard it on Entertainment Tonight.  Even for celebrities and other heavy Twitter users, the news is disseminated to the wider world via bigger channels.

Maybe you even opened a Twitter account, just because you thought you should, and you haven’t used it since a month after you opened it. You’re not alone. A study last year by Nielsen reported that Twitter has an alarming 60% churn rate — that is, 60% of Twitter users abandon their accounts within the first 30 days.

Tamagotchi, C. 1998Twitter is like owning a Tamagotchi. Some people love it. Others find it amusing at first, and then kind of a pain.  And that’s the other side of Twitter — if you intend to use it for marketing, you have to keep feeding it, preferably every single dang stupid day.  You’re going out to an audience that is not quite as engaged as you might think, so you have to constantly give them something really interesting and fresh.

If you’re a celebrity trend-setter (or a celebrity train wreck),  your very life is the drama that your followers want to know about.  If you’re speaking for your company, not so much. That’s probably why even some very famous brands don’t have Twitter feeds. Take Clorox, for example. What are they going to say?  ”Day 2,327: still getting socks 30% whiter.”

The Old Spice Man is responding to tweets via videos on YouTube. Think about this sentence for a moment. Instead of responding to Tweets via Twitter, they’re responding via YouTube. Limitations of the medium aside, why might that be?  How about because there are a lot more people visiting YouTube than using Twitter?

As with all things on the Web, that’s the state of the art at this moment.  Things may change, and there may come a day when a Twitter feed is an indispensable marketing tool. But for most of us, that day is not yet.

Posted in: marketing, social media

08
Jul 2010
Posted by Michelle LaPointe
1 comment

Should You Be On Facebook?

Smashing Magazine had a very useful posting yesterday on how to create effective fan pages on Facebook. It turns out that creating an effective Facebook fan page takes just as much effort, design sense, good copywriting, and marketing savvy as any other advertising effort. Most of all, like the “real” web, an effective Facebook fan page also takes carefully crafted content with a high perceived value.

To that I say: duh. Too bad, but, duh.

(What’s a “fan page”? Unlike the U.S. Supreme Court, Facebook believes that people are different from business entities. This means that your business can have a  ”fan page,” but not a “profile”.  There are more restrictions on a fan page than on a profile; for example, you don’t have the ability to add friends.  The penalty for confusing the two is abrupt and ignominious removal from the Facebook universe. Ironically, that means it’s easier for a business to be tossed out than for an individual to erase their Facebook presence voluntarily.  So if you’re having trouble closing your Facebook profile account, I suggest you try changing your name to Giant Corporation, Inc. and see if they’ll close it down for you.)

Should your business even have a Facebook Fan Page?

It’s probably worth a try, if…

  • You’ve got a consumer brand that customers regularly engage with, or get passionate about.  Cars. Trendy clothing. Starbuck’s. A rock band. Organic knitting wool. Artisan olive oil. Boutique wines.
  • Your target market is a heavy user of Facebook. Examine your market closely. There is a big difference between “has a Facebook account” and “lives on Facebook”.
  • You offer a lot of coupons, short-term offers, or events. Facebook lends itself well to these kinds of programs.
  • You do it right, both creatively, and as part of a thoughtful online strategy.  This is not a task to leave to the summer intern.
  • You have all your other marketing ducks in a row. Facebook is cheap — however, as I’ll show in a minute, by no means free — but it’s no substitute for a real marketing program.

It wouldn’t hurt, and might help, if…

  • You’re a business-to-business marketer with an offbeat brand.
  • You have a cutting-edge product in an emerging field where there is a lot of discussion between product creators and end-users/consumers. But be cautious — where Facebook might be a good forum for interaction and brand-building if your product is a highly experimental surfboard, I’d steer clear if it’s something like commercial-scale green energy technology.  Facebook is, after all, a social network, and can appear frivolous.  If you want to be taken seriously, a blog is a better choice.
  • Your consumer customers are on the cusp: some of them live online, some don’t. Do some real testing to see if the results are worth your time and effort before committing to a program.

You probably shouldn’t, if…

  • You’re going on Facebook only because you keep hearing that you should.
  • You think it will instantly make your solid, traditional brand look hip.  It won’t.
  • You’re a traditional b-to-b with traditional sales channels. Hardly anyone we know develops fan-like zeal for a particular brand of rooftop tarring materials or network-management software.  Customers may love your products, but they almost never feel compelled to shout “Hinkley’s Industrial Packing Tape rocks!” Nor are they likely to visit you on Facebook.
  • You don’t have the resources to maintain it.
  • You want to protect your content.

And that brings us to…

The Great Facebook Content Hitch

Quick quiz: Who owns your Facebook content?

A. You do.
B. You do, but Facebook co-owns it as long as you’re a member.
C. Facebook does, forever and for all time.
D. You do, but Facebook can borrow it as long as it’s on your page.

Most people think that the answer is (A).  It’s actually never been (A).  For most of Facebook’s history, it was (B).  Except for a strange, unsettling period lasting from February ’09 until just recently, when it was (C).  In fact, during the megalomaniacal fever dream that was Policy (C), the company claimed “unending and irrevocable license to use any content uploaded to its service”. (Read more: Concern over new Facebook content rules – Wichita Business Journal)

Scary. Creepy. And with the potential to collect all user-posted content into some giant Wikibook or Faceipedia.  (One can only imagine the lengthy entry on uses of the word “dude”, or the photo essays on the topic, “Me and My Friends at a Party.”)

Facebook’s policy is now (D), to wit:

“You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:

  1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”

(Read the full statement on Facebook.)

As far as I know, Facebook has not ever used these considerable powers over content, let alone abused them. But the potential for such unlimited (albeit temporary, as long as Policy D is in force) power over content makes me nervous.

This is a big deal, because content is expensive. If your content is created in-house, you may think it’s cheap, or even free, but it is most definitely not.  This content, for example, took me a dang long time to write. In my opinion it’s a worthy investment, but it’s still a cost.

Of course, the best way to maximize that investment is to re-use your content. Facebook’s content ownership policy has the potential to diminish or dilute your ability to do just that. How? Here are two hypothetical examples of what Facebook could theoretically do under this policy:

  1. You have a line of clothing that you market to pre-teen girls.  Every week, you liven up your Facebook page with a clever, quotable saying.  Eventually you decide to put these sayings on your back-to-school tees.  Only Facebook has already loaded them into a highly popular rotating widget and printed them on bumper stickers, none of it tied to your brand. Now you’ll look like you got them from Facebook, not the other way around.
  2. Your company is the world’s leading expert on dust-repelling heating ducts. To save money and time, you use your Facebook fan page as a blog instead of setting up a real one.  You post answers to customers’ FAQs. You and your engineers write about how to achieve smooth installations and why your ducts are the best ducts of all time.
    After a while, almost without trying, you have the makings of the kick-ass white paper that you’ve been putting off for years.  You have loads of text and pictures to enrich your content-starved website.  Only by now, Facebook has launched Faceipedia, and the article under “Dustless Ducts” has all your accumulated wisdom. Nobody needs to go to your branded site, or to download your white paper.

I don’t know that Facebook wants to do any of these things. They probably don’t. But the fact that they might be able to should give you pause about what kind of content you post there.

It would be lovely if Facebook could make you instantly cool, drive millions of new customers to your door, and allow you to eliminate all but a pittance of your marketing budget. But the fact is that it’s pretty much like all marketing tools: valuable for some, highly effective when used with skill to the right target audiences, and no magic bullet.

Posted in: marketing, social media

07
Jul 2010
Posted by Michelle LaPointe
0 comments

3 Lessons from the $500 Solution, Part 3

I recently wrote about how a one-time investment of $500 could help computer companies — and Adobe — sell thousands more units this year. What follows is a summary of the lessons all organizations can learn form that industry’s mistakes.

Lesson #3: Don’t dismiss a niche market.

The most expensive pronouncements in the world start like this: “____________________ are not our core customers, and we only market to our core customers.”

My reaction to this is always the same:  ”Really? What is it about money that you don’t like?”

I agree that you shouldn’t be distracted from talking  to your core customers by every shiny new market that comes along. I agree that in most cases, a niche shouldn’t get a full-court press of your marketing resources. But before you dismiss them, consider this:

Sometimes it’s cheap to market to niches.

Compared to the universe of “business users” — which I previously defined as “people who use Excel and PowerPoint” — graphics professionals are a microscopic subset of computer purchasers. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, however, that tiny sliver of the pie chart is almost 300,000 people in the U.S. alone.If 5% of them need to upgrade their computers to accommodate Adobe CS5, and if they each spend $1500 on hardware and software, that’s 22.5 million dollars.  Is a share of that revenue worth a one-time investment of $500?  If you have to think about your answer, you’re in the wrong business.

Look at the market holistically before you write them off.

In fact, if you’ve set a percentage of sales or customers as a threshold for what constitutes a worthy market, 1) change your strategy right now, and 2) don’t tell anybody that you ever did that.
It’s easier, I guess, to say that you’ll only consider marketing to a niche when it reaches 20% of your sales or 30% of your customers.  Putting aside logical fallacies that would make Mr. Knight, my high-school Philosophy teacher, erupt in hives (how do they get to the threshold if you’re not marketing to them?), consider the most obvious practical problems of this strategy. If you’re only measuring by one criteria, how do you know it’s a smart decision to ignore them?

I’ve worked with more than one organization where we’ve learned that a niche market, while small,  has much higher sales per transaction than the core audience. That means it’s a good idea to find more customers like them.

Sometimes we find that a niche market is growing while the core market is slowing down. That could mean a lot of things, from a general market shift, to a new market to exploit, to a market that will stay niche, but that will keep your company afloat until your core business is busy again.

It’s not unusual to find that what looks like a niche that you can safely ignore is actually a market of critically important influencers and specifiers. These are people who rarely or never make a direct purchase, but who drive a huge percentage of sales.  (Think business customers who request certain software packages from their IT providers, homeowners who tell their architects to use green building products, or a child begging his parents for a particular brand of sneaker.) One client told me that “we only need to advertise to people who write checks.” He changed his mind when an analysis of his own web inquiries and sales data showed that up to 50% of his existing sales were fueled by influencers and specifiers.

Niche markets can even out cash flow.

As I said earlier, an active niche market can help you keep the lights on when times are bad for your core. But they’re even more useful when your business is humming along. If your business is seasonal, cyclical, or requires a long lead time, one of the fastest and smartest ways to even out the curves and improve cash flow throughout the year is to nurture a niche market.

Let’s say you sell industrial flooring, your core market is commercial real estate developers, and your typical time from inquiry to close is six months.  But you also nurture a niche market of avant-garde  architects and interior designers who like to put your product in houses. Each sale is a small fraction of your big commercial projects, but so what? If you’re doing it right, those sales are a lot less work, and are concluded much faster, than your core sales. Ergo, more cash in your pocket while you’re waiting for the big commercial developments to get off the ground.

Posted in: marketing

06
Jul 2010
Posted by Michelle LaPointe
0 comments

3 Lessons From the $500 Solution, Part 2

I recently wrote about how a one-time investment of $500 could help computer companies — and Adobe — sell thousands more units this year.  What follows is a summary of the lessons all organizations can learn form that industry’s mistakes.

Lesson #2: There’s no substitute for continual, meaningful communication within your organization.

You can put down your Blackberries and iPhones and stop updating your Twitter feed for a moment. I’m not talking about constantly touching base. I’m talking about serious, focused, intense sharing about who your customers are and how they use your products and services.

I encourage all my clients to conduct something I call a Quarterly Convergence. This is a formal meeting that includes a representative of every department that touches your customer: sales, marketing, customer service, R&D, product management, channel marketing, billing, management,and your ad agency. We sit down with a full pot of coffee, a basket of bagels, and no cell phones, and talk about the customer: who they are, what they want, how they’re using the client’s products and services.

I won’t go into detail about how this works, but I will say this:  the result is always enlightening and always helps the organization become more effective.

Very often, it also results in extremely rapid development of new products and/or markets. That’s because — imagine this! – your customers are under no obligation to use your products or services in they way that you intended. They come up with all kinds of innovative ways to use whatever it is that you sell. And when they do that, they frequently call your support lines, mention it to a sales rep, or post in an online review. In most organizations, that extraordinarily valuable intelligence goes nowhere. But if it’s shared, you can turn a hidden demand into sales.

Had the product teams from Sony, Toshiba, Apple, Adobe, HP, Intel, or any of the other players in my example been doing this, they would have instantly seen the value of providing the information that customers in this niche need to make a buying decision.  And speaking of niche markets…See next post.

Posted in: marketing