Marketing Ideas!

Networking — the act of actually going out an meeting people face-to-face — is simply one of the most powerful marketing tools any person or organization can use. However, there is one issue with this tool: it’s not scalable.

A colleague and friend of mine runs his own business. This margins are thin and he has little to no help (i.e., employees). Thus, it’s hard for him to both run his business and look for new business at the same time. After talking through his specific situation, we were able to find a great solution for him: email marketing.

Email marketing, while never able to replace the face-to-face networking, can be a great supplement. It’s a great tool to help build virtual relationships with people. What’s a virtual relationship?

A virtual relationship is something that many of us have with Hollywood celebrities (or have had at some point in our lives). We see their image on the screen (movie or TV) and project feelings and situations about the person that are simply not there: we are engaging with a two dimensional image that is not human — but we perceive the image as a real person. Then, we we meet our favorite star at a local restaurant or event, we call them out by their first name and feel as though we already know them.

The star, of course, doesn’t know who we are, but because our celebrity as had some training and has likely experienced this before, reacts as though he or she does know you … which build their brand.

Email marketing works in much the same way. It is a way for people to see your ideas interact with you on some level, and when done well, can feel personal and sincere. For my colleague, email marketing will serve as an augmentation to his normal networking efforts. It can replace several simple meetings with his existing clients and serve as additional touch points for prospects he just met. All the while, he can continue to build his brand, maintain the same personal service he’s known for, and scale his business to the point where he can hire new help.

Steve Golab, Bijoy Goswami and Heather McKissick gave an absolutely wonderful presentation at the last Austin Social Media Club meeting.

Their message was about the Austin experience. This is something that I’ve been thinking about for quite some time and it was only with their help that I was able to really articulate it in any way. And as they were describing it, diagramming it, I was amazed.

At this point, let me just state how important it is to find the words — and I must admit that I am still searching for the right ones to describe their presentation and this “thought” or “feeling” I’ve been stewing over for so long. Having a specific lexicon, being capable to articulate a specific idea or through is incredibly powerful. Not only are you able to share the idea with others, which is critical to get ideas to spread, but it’s only with words that we can really identify what we are thinking. Only after we find the right words will we become capable of manipulating, working with, and using the ideas to do “something.”

And this really gets to the core idea of their presentation. Austin has been trying to identify itself in some way. It’s known as the “live music capital of the world,” but it has also tried on other identities, such as Silicon Hills (trying to be the next Silicon Valley), or being just plain weird.

These are all accurate depictions of Austin. Still each are just part of the puzzle. Music, technology, local businesses, and more are individual scenes and don’t really intersect with other scenes. In other words, there’s no bigger community that brings them together. They don’t mingle.

What is a community? Generally, a community is a group of people who share specific symbols and their meanings. A great example I learned from Milkshake Media during a presentation on how they put together the Livestrong campaign is the community of cancer surviors. They don’t share a specific geography, but they have had a common experience and can identity and understand — more than anyone else — some of the symbols that go with the experience, such as hair loss.

Thus, while a scene within Austin can be a community, some scenes are too fragmented to be pulled together. A great example is in social media. The Austin Interactive Marketing Association had an event the same night at the Social Media Club (or vice versa — it’s not important to identify who stepped on whose toes). There wasn’t enough communication (perhaps other issues as well) to bring the scene together into a collaborative environment. They were distinct territories that didn’t overlap.

Another example is the Austin Independant Business Alliance and the Austin Chamber of Commerce. They have many common causes, yet they are not overtly cooperative — and in some instances they are oppositional (e.g., the Keep Austin’s Word campaign).

So, to continue Austin on a path of growth, and sustainable growth at that, Austin needs to find its identity. We need to help get the different scenes within Austin to be more open, collaborative, and engaged. I’m really excited to have met people who have been able to find the words to articulate the issue … now it’s time to find solutions!

Note: Steve, Bijoy, and Heather will be presenting this is a more complete and in-depth manner at the Interactive Austin 2009 conference in April.

Kyle Flaherty, Twitter commander-in-chief at BreakingPoint, put on a great presentation yesterday at the monthly Social Media Breakfast, and here’s my take-away from the event.

Social media is all about the story you tell. By telling a good story, you will engage people. We all love our crazy uncle, or the weird guy at the coffee shop, or the engaging presenter at a conference, because they all have one thing in common: they tell great stories.

By telling a good, authentic, consistent story through various social media platforms — Kyle used Twitter as his example — you can help drive traffic to your blog. By bringing people to your blog, you’ve moved to the next logical step in your relationship: You can have more substantial conversations. At this level, you can also introduce this new relationship to the rest of your “friends” — or community. As they read the blog, read comments by others, and become engaged — and educated — by others who are like-minded.

Communities naturally rally around good stories — local kid makes it big, rags to riches, overcoming all odds, the list goes on and on. To build a community for your business, you need to find the story.

The more people can relate to your story, the stronger your community will be. Kyle shared a great example of how the Associated Press picked up a thread of a story about BreakingPoint — but that thread was inherently inaccurate. BreakingPoint didn’t have to spend too much energy on getting corrections out … their community did it for them through their blogs, tweets on Twitter and other places that users can post content.

By finding your story, and creating community, your business will be creating loyalty, which is the magic bullet of branding. Why is loyalty so important? People prefer to buy things from others they trust, others they have relationships with.

There’s been studies that show most people, when presented with a blind test, prefer Pepsi over Coke. However, when the subject is shown which brand they’re drinking, they prefer Coke. In other words, Pepsi tastes better for many people, but more people are loyal to the story of Coke.

I’m trying to write about the Austin AMA’s recent event Navigating Social Media’s Wild, Wild West: A Practical Guide for Communicators and Marketers for the AMA blog. And, as I go through my notes, I realize I’m in a similar predicament that many in the audience expressed to me before and after the event: There’s so much information, it’s hard to know where to begin.

Many people I met at the event told me how overwhelming the concept of social media has become, partially because there’s such a proliferation of various tools and methodologies, terminology and philosophies. There are so many tools, tips, tricks, and “rules” that even choosing a relatively simple, well-defined task — such as starting a blog — becomes mind-numbingly complicated.

And, as I mentioned, such is my current predicament: I could give you a blow-by-blow account of the event, but the presentation was recorded — in both audio and video — and you’ll be able to access them in their entirety (link coming soon). I could write about other specific bits of the event, but that would make for a really long post. Instead, I will give you my personal take-aways that didn’t make it into my final version for the AMA post.

Take-Away #1 — Social media can make good marketers great and bad marketers worse.

Social media is — in its own way — putting your brand and the value you provide customers under a magnifying glass. All successful social media campaigns have two things in common: authenticity and an experience that encourages people to participate. If you don’t have that, social media will expose you.

Take-Away #2 — It’s not what you sell, it’s what you stand for.

As Dave Evans said, if you are going to create something authentic and an experience that encourages participation, you had better know who you are and what you stand for. It is more important than knowing what you sell.

Take-Away #3 — Never take “online” people for granted

As with any kind of networking, you never know who you are going to meet, and you never know who they know. Case in point: one of the panelists (Giovanni Gallucci) put together a video for a client, which was posted on YouTube and promoted on Twitter. Someone who follows Giovanni on Twitter said it looked cool and he’d put it up on his blog. Giovanni was pleased, but thought little of it. Turns out this “someone” has a blog on CNN.com. When the video was posted on the blog, it took out Giovanni’s web server.

Take-Away #3 — Social media is a means to an end — not an end in-and-of itself.

It’s still important to have real conversations, face-to-face meetings. Social media has a role in making these meetings happen sooner than they might have traditionally. As Erica O’Grady mentioned in her presentation, social media can help accelerate serendipity.

Take-Away #4 — Substance still matters, content is still king

If you don’t have anything to say, anything to share, or are generally not providing a mutual exchange of value, you will find out very quickly in the online world.