I was reading a transcript of an online discussion regarding the benefits of blogging for business. One of the people in the discussion declared that she did not have time to blog since she was way too busy doing client work. Her blog was basically abandoned, and she was OK with that. I wasn’t in on the conversation, but if I had been,  I would have told her she is making a big mistake.

It’s very simple. If you don’t do any marketing because you are busy, you will inevitably have to work twice as hard to market yourself when you aren’t busy. And yes, blogging is a marketing effort:  It boosts your visibility. It keeps your website current. It helps with SEO.

Not blogging because you are too busy is like not networking because you already have a job. If you lose your job (which unfortunately can happen from one day to the next) you will soon realize you don’t have relationships in place to help you in a job search. You must keep networking and building relationships, whether you “need” them now or not, because you never know what will happen in the future.

Whether you are busy or not, blogging should be a part of your business marketing routine. To neglect your blog now because you are busy working on your client’s behalf is a rookie mistake. Those of us who have been in the business world for a while know that clients come and go. Clients can face budget shortfalls and cut you from one day to the next.

Put energy into your own business, not just your client’s business. This applies to you whether you have your own business, or you work for someone else, and even if you are concerned with developing your career. If you are a worker bee, why not have a personal blog? If you work for an organization, you should insist that the organizational should be kept up to date.  And it goes without saying that if you own your own business, you are solely responsible for keeping you presence out there.

Don’t wait! Write a blog post today!

In case you missed it, last night was the movie awards ceremony formerly known as The Academy Awards, now known simply as the Oscars. Not sure what the TV broadcast viewership was, but it was large (very large). The Oscars are one of the most viewed, most commented and most followed awards.  The #oscars2013 hashtag certainly lit up my Twitter stream last night, proving that most major televised events are having the “second-screen” effect.

Do you know who won for Best Picture? Or for Best Director?You should, but in case you are a person who doesn’t watch TV or movies or read a newspaper or the Yahoo! home page, it was Argo and Ang Lee for Life of Pi,  respectively.

If you want to be successful in marketing communications, you need to be conversant in pop culture. You just do. Pop culture is the currency that allows you to participate in the world. It is the fodder of small talk at happy hours and cocktail receptions and what brings people together around the proverbial water cooler (even if your water cooler is Twitter). If you don’t know Ben Affleck from Quentin Tarantino, Adele from Lady Gaga,  you are out of touch with what many people share in society.

I know people that refuse to watch movies or TV shows because nothing compares to whatever they feel was the golden age of entertainment. Some people never tune in to the top 40 station on their radios. Others don’t read current bestsellers claiming nothing worthwhile is being written today. That’s fine. No one should have to watch, listen or read anything they find distasteful.  But they should know what it is they are not watching, listening or reading.  In other words, you should know who won the Oscars last night even if you didn’t watch the show or see any of the movies nominated.

Will something evil befall you if you don’t know? No, of course not.  You will just be out of step with what most people follow. If you see a reference to Jennifer Lawrence or Anne Hathaway, you won’t understand why they are being talked about.  And you may also be missing out on relationship-building conversations.  The beauty of pop culture is that it is out there, available to everyone. You don’t have to be an insider or well-connected.

So, do you know who won at the Oscars last night?

Want to improve your blogging?

If you want to improve your blogging or even get your blog off the ground,  and you are in the Washington, DC metro area, check out my blogging workshop this Thursday. You must pre-register. More details and registration: http://howtowriteyourblog3.eventbrite.com/#

You may have a great offering, beautiful marketing collateral, an interactive website, a robust presence on social media and yet, you are not achieving your marketing objectives. There could be many causes for this, like a poor economy or poor pricing or too much competition, but it could also be that you are being too aggressive. You are turning people off.

Telemarketers are especially bad at understanding that aggressiveness does not build customer trust. Quite the opposite. It builds distrust and worse, dislike. Calling repeatedly at all times of day and night does not make a potential customer or donor enamored of your product or cause.

Perhaps this is the divide between marketing and sales. In marketing, you are trying to build interest in your product and service by using tools such as the “Four Ps” (pricing, promotion, product, placement), whereas in sales you are trying to achieve quotas, generally measured in revenue.

Say you are shopping for a new car. The marketing function will get you to consider the new XYZ hybrid sedan from the big car manufacturer. You are intrigued by the miles per gallon or the comfort or whatever other attribute. You walk into a showroom and immediately a sales representative is there, trying to get you to buy. If he or she is too aggressive, chances are good you will walk out without making a purchase. The marketing worked but the sales pitch didn’t.

Brad Phillips of Phillips Media Relations had such a thing happen to him with a PR service. He discussed it yesterday  on his Mr. Media Training blog, and received a lot of support (read the comments).  He signed up for a service that is marketed to people like him, but then was assaulted by a too-aggressive sales person trying to sell him other products and services.  The problem was not the offering as much as the aggression.

Are you being to aggressive in your pitch? Here are some instances of marketing (and sales) aggressiveness:

• Calling too much/ too often
• Sending too many emails (including enewsletters)
• Invading privacy (such as asking Google or Facebook to scan private messages for keywords)
• In traditional advertising, opting for frequency over reach (have you ever watched a TV program where the same ad is shown multiple times?)
• Send enewsletters out without prior opt-in, and without an easy opt-out.
• Loud (literally) advertising (even though it has been regulated, I am still hearing ads that have a higher volume than the programming)
• Bait-and-switch tactics

What results from these tactics is that people feel attacked or overwhelmed or frustrated. They can’t lower the volume and they resent it. They feel that your sales pitch is invading their private space.

Can you think of other aggressive behavior? How do you react to aggressive marketing? Do you think the results justify the means?

Blogging workshop next week!

There’s still time to register for my How to Blog Workshop, which takes place next Thursday, February 28 in Silver Spring, MD. Visit howtowriteyourblog3.eventbrite.com for more details and registration.

Have you ever looked at someone and wanted to make him/her over? Yesterday I saw a woman with frizzy, long and shapeless hair wearing an equally long and shapeless prairie-type dress of a circa 1982 vintage.  Perhaps vintage wines are good but dresses fade and look, well, dated. I wondered if she was aware of how she appeared: as someone who did not care about her appearance and/or hadn’t been shopping in 30 years and/or didn’t have a good friend to tell her she needed to update.

What does this 80s refugee have to do with marketing and communications? Simple, they too can benefit from an update and a makeover. When was the last time you really examined your website? Does the design indicate that we are in 2013 or is it the same look you had when you launched your website back in 1996? When was the last time you posted something on your blog or changed your about us page? How about your logo? Still using fonts that were popular in the 1970s?

But updates don’t only refer to outward appearance. You must also look at the back end. Is your software up to date? Have you looked at your mission statement lately? Or your target audience description? Perhaps your messaging needs an update too.

Make it one your goals for 2013 to determine what needs to be updated and then get it done! Here is a list to help you:

• Logo
• Tagline
• Website (including blog)
• Brochure (even if it’s a PDF/online version)
• Business stationery (including letterhead and business cards)
• Annual report
• Press release boilerplate
• Organizational mission/vision
• Target audience description
• Organizational description in various formats and lengths
• Services/products list (and pricing if appropriate)
• Social media avatars/biographies/descriptions
• Software/hardware

A makeover is a chance to refresh and renew.  With people, makeovers tend to make them look younger and more attractive. With organizations, makeovers make them look in touch, modern and more attractive (to potential customers/clients/donors/supporters).

What are you going to change this year?

Improve your blog/blogging process!

If you are in the Washington, DC metro area and would like to improve your blog or blogging process, sign up for my How to Write your Blog workshop today! The workshop takes place on Thursday, February 28 at the Silver Spring Civic Building.  For more details and to register, visit the Eventbrite page.

Yesterday, I wrote about the need to work with experts. Nobody knows everything and many times it is imperative to hire an expert to help in the areas where you are lacking in specialized skills or knowledge.

Keep in mind that not every expert has the same level of expertise. Let’s take accounting. If you are someone that has few investments and a W2, you may be perfectly fine doing it yourself, using tax software or going to one of the big box tax advisers that we often see advertised around this time. However, if you are in a special situation (small business, self-employed freelancer, artist, etc.) you will NEED to find someone who understands the tax implications of your situation, and can work with you on filing the proper forms. This is an area where expertise (or lack thereof) can have tremendous financial consequences.

How do you figure out if someone has the expertise you require?

First, figure out the exact problem you are trying to solve. If you are having a slump in sales, is it fulfillment, customer service or your marketing/communications?

Second, start searching through your network first. Say you need someone to help you with a public relations issue, ask your network whom they recommend. Alternatively, use LinkedIn to search and see if you have connections in common. Ask your connections if they can give you some idea about the professional.

Third, interview the expert. Be prepared to ask a lot of questions such as “have you worked with this type of situation before?”
Fourth, see if the expert asks you questions. A real expert needs to get a handle on a situation. He or she should be asking you a lot of questions, including “why do you need an expert?” or “why have you contacted me?”

Fifth, be wary of pat answers or 100% assurances. Nobody, but nobody can solve any problem with 100% certainty.

Sixth, check with your gut. Do you like this person? Does this person seem genuine?

Unfortunately, there are great many people out there who are very good at talking themselves up. And as I said in my post yesterday, you don’t know what you don’t know so you are unable at times to ask the right questions.

For example, I had a client who was desperate to increase his share of the market. He had hired a “marketing expert” to help.  The client knew next to nothing about marketing and neither did the “expert.” By the time I came in and asked questions like “who is your target?” and “who is your main competition?” they had already set out a marketing destination that was not aligned with BASIC MARKETING PRINCIPLES. These questions had never been asked before because the so-called expert was not a strategic thinker but was really selling a package of tactics (put up a website, use a QR code, print a postcard, make a video) without a unifying message or idea of how success would be measured.

Could the client have avoided the situation above? Maybe yes or maybe no. He didn’t know what he didn’t know, but he also didn’t bother to ask questions and study up on the topic.

My takeaway here is the old Ronald Reagan line: trust but verify.  You should do your due diligence when hiring an expert because not everything is as it seems.

Thoughts?

Obvious right? If you don’t know something, you don’t even know you don’t know.  But you do know that you don’t know everything, which is why you hire experts to help you with stuff like your taxes, your computer network, your health, and so forth.  And this is why you hire people to help you with marketing, advertising, public relation, design and web development.

What is tricky about hiring experts to help you with what you don’t know, is that often you don’t know enough to ask the right questions or even evaluate the outcomes.

Let me give you a specific example. I hired someone  (who shall remain nameless) to create my website using WordPress and transfer the contents of my former blog hosted at WordPress.com. Check and check. However, somehow people were still finding my old blog and commenting on stuff over there. The person I hired to develop my site had proven to be unreliable and has never been heard from since, so I couldn’t ask how to fix this problem.

I needed to make a few other backend changes and contacted Kim Woodbridge .  I asked her how I could get people to stop going to my other blog. She told me that it was simple, all I had to do was pay WordPress.com to redirect people to my website. (Note: it took about two minutes and $13 to get people redirected.) Once people are no longer going to the other blog, I can bring it down.

I didn’t know what I had to do or I would have done it sooner. Since the first WordPress developer failed to do this or advise me to do this, people have been going to my old blog, not realizing it was housed elsewhere.

Working with experts

1. Remember: you don’t know what you don’t know. When hiring experts you are expecting they will have the knowledge you don’t. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. You must start with the assumption that nobody knows everything, but they may know more than you do.

2. Remember:  you can question. If something seems wrong or gives you a funny feeling, question it. This is why we get second opinions from doctors. This is why if your taxes seem unusually high, you may ask your accountant to recalculate or even find another accountant.

3. Think of it as trial and error (and hopefully, more trial than error). But remember that you absolutely don’t know and the expert knows a bit more than you do.

Blog Workshop on Feb. 28

Want to improve your blogging? If you are located in the DC area, attend my upcoming How to Write Your Blog workshop on Thursday, February 28 in Silver Spring, MD. Details and registration are here.

Is your organization’s blog feeling tired? Perhaps it’s time to try  a few new things like soliciting guest blog posts, or live blogging a conference. Read the five tips to re-invigorate your blog that I share as a guest blogger at Bates Creative Group‘s Align blog.

My thanks to Director of Business Development Heather Shelton and Marketing Specialist Amanda Jennison of Bates Creative Group for including me in their blog!

Long-time readers of this blog know that I have written before about Pepco, the Potomac Electric Power Company, which serves nearly 800,000 customers in Maryland and Washington, D.C.  My posts have focused on the fact that Pepco’s advertising does not match people’s experiences with the power company.

Last night, viewers of Super Bowl 47 were surprised to see the lights go out during the game in the Superdome in New Orleans, where the game was being played. In fact, the power was out for about 35 minutes. Entergy, the electricity provider in New Orleans said that the issue was not with them but with the stadium. As of right now, I am not sure what caused the power failure but I do know what people in Maryland and DC thought about it by their postings on Twitter: Pepco must surely be involved.

Pepco’s reliability has become a joke. It has a negative perception so deeply ingrained in customers’ minds that comments like: “Who knew Pepco was the official energy provider for the Super Bowl” by @djrothkopf or “Talked to Pepco and they’re confident power will be restored to all parts of the stadium by Wednesday” by @timothypmurphy were rampant (and often retweeted) on Twitter on Sunday night.

No amount of advertising will fix a real, on-the-ground problem. Other organizations, such as the Washington Metropolitan Transportation Authority (WMATA), need to learn this lesson too. When you have let your customers down repeatedly, they will no longer trust you. Your advertising and your public relations will not rehabilitate your image.

In order to change people’s perceptions of your brand, you need to move beyond just communications. You need to make positive changes and be able to provide proof that you have done so. Once you have made measurable progress and you have something tangible to report, you can move forward with a communications program. Even then, bad experiences are difficult to overcome.

It will take actual reliability and good experiences with Pepco for customers to learn to trust this company.  As I have said before, you can tell me in your advertising that you are working on your reliability, but if I am sitting in the dark for days on end (like I was during last summer’s Derecho storm), I am going to doubt you are doing very much at all.

What are your thoughts? If you are in Maryland or DC did you also joke that Pepco was behind the power outage at the Super Bowl?

You know the stakes are high when an advertiser takes out a full page ad to promote a TV commercial. Of course, it’s not just any TV commercial–it’s a commercial during the Super Bowl.

Super Bowl advertising costs are at an all-time high. According to Lisa de Moraes’ TV column in today’s Washington Post, CBS is charging nearly $4 million per 30-second spot. De Moraes says that due to the high cost and the clutter, advertisers are doing what they can to promote their commercials. Some advertisers are releasing the commercial prior to the game and others are giving viewers the option of choosing the ad ending.

Cars.com seems to think that producing a full page ad will focus eye balls on their commercial. Notice that in addition, the ad is promoting this website, where, in meta-fashion, they have some drama about the focus group about the impact of the ad. Let’s see, based on this, I think we can expect a dramatic ad, or an ad with drama, or an ironic take on car buying, or an exaggeration. Or maybe the point is that we won’t know what to expect.

I am not sure this tack works. For one, the need to advertise an advertisement seems bizarre. And second, it sets up a very high expectation that this ad is going to stand out. If the commercial doesn’t meet expectations, then no one wins. The advertiser will have spent $4 million plus the cost of producing the video about the commercial plus the cost of advertising the ad (design, placement, etc.). I would say cars.com’s investment is a minimum of $5 million (and I don’t know how much the Super Bowl commercial cost to produce or how many newspapers the print ad ran in).

Will you be watching the Super Bowl?

Want to learn to blog?

If you would like to have a successful blog (consistent, interesting, and focused on your audience) and you are in the Washington, DC metro area, check out my next blogging workshop on February 28. More details and registration here.

As anybody who knows me (or sees the theme in this website), I like coffee. I brew a huge mugful every morning. For years, I have been using  store brand (ok, cheaper) unbleached filters and thought nothing of it. However,  I hosted a brunch in December, and was out of coffee and filters, so I bought premium coffee and premium filters ( always want to treat my guests right). Brunch was great and who knew my cousin was such a huge coffee drinker (brewed three pots!).

After I ran out of premium coffee, I reverted back to my usual (good) coffee, but still using the premium filters. And then, two days ago, I ran out of premium filters and was back to store brand. Guess what? My coffee tasted different–and not in a good way. It was more bitter.

Being a coffee lover, I had to correct this situation and promptly ran out and bought the premium filters again. Coffee this morning tasted good. The filters make a difference.

These are tough times, and many of us need to economize. But, we choose our battles and sometimes price does not win over quality.

Let me rephrase that: quality can trump price.

Marketing lesson here is simple: price is not the best unique selling proposition (USP). This is not the same as talking about value.  If you are betting that your target audience will be swayed by price alone, you will be disappointed. People may try a product because it is cheaper, but if the quality is not there, they won’t buy again.  In a sense, generic brands “get” this. How often do you see a generic advertised? Never, because the only reason to buy a generic is because it often has a lower price. You don’t promote generic/store brand products as being of HIGHER quality than brands, just comparable in quality but lower in price.

Find what makes your product (or service) special outside of the price.  If your target values that attribute,  the target will buy it very often regardless of price.

In other words, it’s about showing value and not about discussing price.

What say you? Are there products you buy because you think they have a higher value?