Relevant Engagement

Taking a Stand

How do you take a stand if you don't stand for anything? 

We preach that line to our clients all the time but do a horrible job of walking the walk.  If I were a client, I'd demand proof that we eat our own food.  Of course most would say something cute but produce nothing but vaporware.

You might say to yourself, "self....how can you stand for nothing?  Everyone stands for something.  Even Seinfeld stood for something: it was a show about nothing." 

According to Tim Williams in his new book Take a Stand for Your Agency Brand most don't even come close to taking a stand.  If you've been in the industry more than ten years you know this to be one of those self evident truths.  That being said, Tim has done a great job of providing relevant facts and information that provide compelling evidence that we need to start walking the walk. 

I loved this, "Agencies are so anxious to try and meet every client need that they don't realize that it actually increases client trust when you tell them you can't do something." That is a very counter intuitive statement but it is absolutely true.  Your delivery to the client needs to be handled delicately but it is very effective.

Another favorite, "calling your agency a 'full-service, integrated marketing communications firm that serves a wide range of clients' is not positioning.  It's merely a description of an agency that's a mile wide and only a few inches deep."  That is strong medicine to swallow, especially when your ass and hundreds of employees' asses and their families’ asses are on the line. 

It is, however, medicine we really need to take.

Jenne' use to say to me all the time, "sometimes you're confronted with a shit sandwich and you really have no choice but to chew and swallow."  As an industry I think we are there.  We owe it to our clients and to ourselves.

I endorse and highly recommend you read Take a Stand for Your Agency Brand by Tim Williams.

Book Titles

I'm thinking about writing a book with some friends of mine.  We're trying to come up with some interesting titles. 

Please note: I have not edited them or put to much thought into what I wrote - it was a free flow of whatever coming out of my head.

This is what I have so far:

Three Guys in a Trench

Tired of reading marketing whack, whack?  Inside is a new framework that will allow you to engage your customer in a way that matters to them.  If you haven't figured this part out yet, your customer is the only thing that matters.  Your brand doesn't mean jack if they can't relate.  Good luck with crafting that perfect creative brief.

Compression

The world is flat as well as your ability to ask for more time.  Consumers want it now and they want it right.  Find out how to build sense and respond solutions that move the needle and create shareholder value.

Firm

Ad agencies are a bunch of wet noodles.  Let's be an idea factory - weeee.  Let's think outside the box and land in another box or maybe a cube.  If we want a chance to sit at the grown up table it is time to start adding more science and thought to our marketing efforts.  Inside we’ve developed a guide that can be used to help you strengthen your efforts and achieve success.

Magic Eight Ball

If you don’t use our approach you might as well use the magic eight ball to get your answers.  We know it all and are about to spill the beans, thus losing millions of dollars in opportunity to pimp licenses to you.

Are you an idiot?

There are really smart people in the marketing industry.  The marketing industry however is pretty big so in actuality the number of smart people reflected as a percentage is relatively small.  This may be the case because the advertising business for decades has been so formulaic it made everyone complacent and ignorant.  There are no more free lunches – people need to get smacked in the head with the bug of curiosity or go find another job.

Activate

Move now or suffer the long road of painful learning.  Or read this book and save yourself millions of dollars and thousands of lives.  Hopefully you find four useful nuggets that can be applied to your marketing efforts.

Being There

Preparing for a conversation is too late – your customer is already talking to you.  How to design a marketing platform that allows your brand to be able to sense and respond as if you were talking to a real person.

Am I close to a brilliant nugget or should I go back to chopping lettuce at McDonald's?

7 Tips To Start You Off Right

It's time to boil the ocean or eat an elephant...I can't remember.

If your company does not or has not considered integrating interactive marketing initiatives into your business and marketing plan, it’s time to start.

That’s because competitive differentiation through relevant and engaging interactions is becoming the new battleground for businesses of all sizes.

The Internet can be an exceptional strategy that enables you, as a marketer, the opportunity to create, enhance and sustain your competitive advantage.

The biggest challenge for most is that the Internet has no beginning and no end.  Peering down this path can present itself as a labyrinth of options so stifling that the mere thought of attempting to integrate interactive initiatives into a marketing plan can cause inertia rather than action.

If you’re suffering from inertia (and you’re not alone) I’ve compiled some rules of thumb that should help create some momentum.

1. First, get over fear and complacency.  If you do not start to take some action you are exposing yourself to a real threat and putting your business at a competitive disadvantage. 
2. Second, no one has “the” solution.  It doesn’t exist.  “The” solution must be your solution, customized to meet your business and marketing objectives.
3. Third, good, fast and cheap has never been a truism and is a remnant concept from the Web 1.0 snake oil salesman era.  You know this, but I have to say it anyway, “You get what you pay for.”  You want cheap, you get cheap. We all know a guy in a garage that will build something for 20 times less than your current bid from a professional services firm. Do yourself a favor and do a quick cost/benefit analysis of the impact of that decision: is a $10,000 garage version of a Website worth the price tag you paid after that solutions crashes while 500 customers are on your site engaging your brand and they each have a life-time value of $250 ($125,000)?  I’m not an economist but I’d have to say, “it’s not worth the risk.”  You could get away with this approach in 2001, not anymore.
4. Fourth, your company (or brand) is interactive.  The quickest way you lose a customer online is the same way you do in the real world: You don’t respond to their needs.  Your company and your brand are not a static entity – relationships are at the core of success for every company.  The Internet empowers companies of all sizes, to be engaging and relevant to all future and current clients on their terms, not yours.  Interactive initiatives that can support this rule of thumb includes: a Website, Real-time help, and E-mail.
5. Fifth, measurement means nothing if you can’t act on the information.  Engagements are real.  Truly successful marketing efforts contain actionable measurement.  Because you now have networked solutions in real time you can and should be feeding information, results and actionable items back into your sales and marketing processes to make continuous improvements.  Interactive initiatives that can support this rule of thumb include: Web Analytics (e.g., Google Analytics, WebSideStory, Omniture and Webtrends).
6. Sixth, continuous optimization needs to become a critical component within your culture.  If the culture is clinging to the, “We’ve always done things this way” mentality, then that statement will be the opening line to your company’s eulogy.  Unlike traditional forms of offline marketing, once you launch a Website this marketing solution needs constant feeding and care.  If this seems like a distraction, remember that your Website is the only asset you have that represents your brand every day all year long.  Interactive initiatives that can support this rule of thumb includes: User experience analysis (e.g., Morae), triggered response solutions such as email (e.g., ExactTarget) and finally, integrated feedback loops into your CRM solution (e.g., salesforce.com).
7. Seven, the ultimate rule of thumb…The customer is king!  Henry Ford was famously quoted as saying that you could get a Ford in “any color you want, so long as it’s black.”  Translation: you get what we choose to give you.  Those days are gone forever.  The customer is in total control – they have the money, they have an endless supply of parity products and services at roughly the same price points and finally, they are empowered with an endless supply of information about you and your competition.  Interactive initiatives that can support this rule include: User Generated Content (UGC) – this includes Social Networks, Blogs (Six Apart/TypePad), podcasts, WIKIs, video (YouTube), bulletin boards, mashups (Technorati), Email, Text and Instant Messaging (Yahoo IM) to name a few.

It may seem as if I just gave you directions on how to boil the ocean.  To some degree I did but this is the new reality – like it or not.

Just take a deep breath and remember that baby steps are perfectly acceptable and sound.  Even though your customer is king, you are responsible for guiding your company into this new space and you need to do that in a way that works for you.

What the F?

Amazon, known for their ability to engage a customer as if they were in their very mind, has made me pause.

Straight up… I love Amazon. 

Now I love them 99.9% of the time.  Today they sent me an email that made me laugh.  My fat belly was jiggling like a bowl of Jello.

-----Original Message-----

From: order-update@amazon.com [mailto:order-update@amazon.com]

Sent: Wednesday, January 03, 2007 8:48 AM

To: Geoff Pickering

Cc: order-update@amazon.com

Subject: Your Amazon.com order (# 000-0000-000)

Hello from Amazon.com.  We wanted to let you know that there is a delay with some items in the order you placed on August 29 2006 20:15 PDT (# 000-0000-000).

To see the current status of this order, please visit the Order Summary page in Your Account:

We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this delay.

August 29^th!!!!!  What the F#&%?

Candidly, I forgot I ordered the books and had lost interest in the topic so I canceled the order.

Amazon won't lose me as a customer but they did disappoint me today.

If it were a smaller company that just started an engagement with me, I would have fired them forever.