Millenium Marketer

Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love writes that every person has one single word that they live by.
I had to remind myself today that my word is not “marketer.” A little bit shocking given the name of this blog, but marketer suggests a professional or expert.
Have you ever had this experience? You’re so entrenched with reading social media blogs and are so on-trend and steeped in marketing theory, you forget to connect with your actual customers.
At least that’s what was happening to me. So I had to tell myself this.

News flash, ace, your audience is not other professional marketers, it’s people who want to be marketers.

Identifying your Influencers is a Catch Phrase
A couple of years ago, when social media was still growing, I read a lot of catchy buzz phrases through the blogosphere.
Listen to the conversation.
Identify your “influencers.”
Engage or die.
Target your key words and measure your traffic.

I have to say the messages are changing a bit, and I don’t deny that they are true in their own way. The problem is that many bloggers (including myself) have gotten in the habit of repeating these catch phrases. I’ve gotten a bit tired of experts standing on their soap box, because if you are to follow their steps, you may not get your desired result. (A while back, I took some of Chris Brogan‘s advice about blog ideas way too literally. I managed to take some pictures of my neighborhood and post them on Flickr. In hindsight it is funny to me because none of those posts resulted in any of the conversations I desired to initiate.) The point is I started following instead of reaching out to others in diverse contexts.

And, Reciprocation in “Being Social” is Not Equal
Look at Freakonomics on Twitter, how many people do you see Freaknomics following?

The All Stars are few, and the chances that I will collaborate with THEM, are very slim. I may shake hands with an All Start Social Media talking head. It will satisfy that “can I have your autograph, I’m Starstruck” impulse. Still, these are people with already busy lives, families and many other fans to tend to, and I am not writing this blog to impress them.

There are so many more of the RIGHT people who want to have their 5 minutes of fame. So many more who would love to have their say, and who want to talk back.

Truth Is, Real Connections Happen in your Target Community
I met a blogger last week. His name is Will, and he is on a blogger network called Brazen Careerist. He has an awesome blog called Peoplegogy and has been very successful at bringing in guest writers. It is pretty cool, you can see people coming from different backgrounds talking about their lives. He likes to write, and clearly has an interest in social media as a means. I don’t think he pays much attention to the talking heads, the All Stars. He focuses on his audience.

What do you think? Is connecting with your audience hard or easy? How do you initiate conversations about the things they value and want to talk about?

OK I admit it.

I’ve been kind of out of it. There should have been fresh posts here since January 1st. Well, the truth is, while blogging isn’t perfect, the perfectionist in me doesn’t want you to see half-baked ideas randomly thrown on a page. I am thinking strategy, so if I am quiet, that’s a good thing because you probably don’t want to see what it looks like in my head.

So, apparently I can’t write as fast as I can think.

Even though the inauguration is tomorrow, I’ve had my mind on other issues, mainly cows, pigs, chickens and manure.
Yes, you’ve read that correctly: manure. I’ve been working on an event to appease a different part of my brain and stomach: the culinary arts, business and the environment.

I’ve recently learned that manure is causing a huge economic problem, called “externalities” where local communities in the US are suffering because of excessive quantities of manure due to dairy cows and mass meat production. And no, cows do not sing happily in green pastures.

So, what’s a girl to do about it?

In the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to learn more about where food comes from. The seed of thought was planted by CleanFish CEO Tim O’Shea months ago during an impassioned interview on TriplePundit.com. It took me a while to convince the President of Net Impact Silicon Valley to move on this issue, but we’re finally there!

If you are local to the SF Bay Area, come meet us at Bistro 413 on Emerson Street on January 28 for a deep look at entrepreneurship, food ethics and eating local.

I think you will be shocked by the origins of your food, but I would hope that would not stop you from having a good appetite–there will be hors d’oeuvres!

Until this event comes to fruition, social media and technology as a journalist’s beat is on hold. Business and management will take the front seat soon, but just hang tight….

There’s been a lot of my mind lately so the range of topics on this blog are really going to go all over the place for a little while and I hope it won’t be too hard to follow. Mainly, I’ve been out in the world talking to people and it’s tough to process all the ideas that are coming from different directions. I’m directly enjoying the benefits of info-preneurship (see my Mission statement).

So instead of write about any one topic, I decided I would outline a few of the things that I’ve been up to, and which are all experimental conversations that may or may not apply to you. I’d like to hear your comments on any one of these.

Social networking

This week, I’ve come back to social media and using LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Twitter as of late has become my main news feed. Twitter is great but it is also an awful distraction if you enjoy clicking links as much as I do. I thought that if I got back into it, I could find trends on what people were talking about and thus have better ideas on what to write about, but it’s really all over the map. People are talking about the Red Sox, Obama, a trip to Tokyo, and the last conference they went to or the next one they are going to.

It’s ridiculous and really obvious that Twitter is not going to tell me what people want to read on my blog. So, I decided whatever it is, it has to be professional but still transparent and personal. I’ll range between the two extremes until I find my blog’s sweet spot. So I think what I want to talk about next is the radical idea of crowd wisdom, because that is a theme that is coming up a lot for me.

Peer Resistance against social media and crowd wisdom

Some of my older friends, even those who say they are into social media, or the engineers out there who are really tech savvy, most of them don’t really understand some of the things that I do online because I do it differently.

Their way of getting news is different and they might even think that the way I do it is a little foolish, only because they can’t understand it. So the next post is going to discuss this in greater detail.

Staying connected: Touch point analysis

These two weeks were a whirlwind of new insights for me, mostly gathered from talking to other people. It is both exhausting and rewarding, and I love the challenge. High Riseis now my very good friend, because it’s a CRM for individuals who just need to keep track of conversations. At some point, I will have to figure out a strategy so that my touch points are consistent. There are email templates to be created as well, but that requires carving out a chunk of time to do so.

So I’m more certain than ever that you can’t hide behind your computer screen and send emails and IMs to people all day. Lead generation seems to require two key qualities that people don’t always talk about: persistence and optimism. That sounds vaguely familiar…oh, yes, that is what we say about entrepreneurs.

If you’re not too familiar with networking, Irene Koehler’s blogpost, “Top 10 Tips to Totally Suck at Networking Events” will make that entry into networking bliss a lot less painful. The main idea is that it’s not about you, it’s about them.

So, they say on blogs that Content is King, but actually it’s not true. Reciprocity is King, which makes Cialdini one very brilliant man.

One of the big themes from the West Coast Green conference last week is the idea that sustainability practices shouldn’t be separate from the goals of a business. Instead, businesses have to find innovative ways to identify a smarter business strategy which includes considerations for the environment and their communities if they want to thrive in this age of many crises political and financial.

This is a relatively new idea. Business strategists have been building business models to optimize everything, and to add yet another aspect to the already complex model can seem overwhelming.

The Creative Process
At the conference, I was intrigued by IDEO’s approach to this problem, where they make the creative process exclusively their proprietary model. This is very smart, because there have been studies done that show you cannot be in an analytical mode and move directly into creative. It takes a little bit of “warming up” before you can move into the creative line of thinking. You can read about that process on a story I wrote for TriplePundit.com called “IDEO’s Approach to the Demand Side of Sustainability.”

Politics, Economics and Renewable Energy
I was also surprised to find that the sentiment by eco-conscious politicians, particularly Al Gore and Jerry Brown at the West Coast Green closing keynotes, was that sustainable practices echoed thoughts by many that sustainability is simply a fundamental part of business that many start-ups and companies have forgotten in the mad rush for more money and short term growth.

If we are to rely on the Earth’s natural resources to create our products and support the services that we offer, then it makes a lot of sense to find resources that are renewable if we want to support ourselves in the long term and drive down the costs for our customers.

Typically, I try to keep costs (and save time!) by taking public transportation into San Francisco, Calif. when it is required. Also, face-to-face meetings with clients are limited to the most important and most crucial, and other communications is done mainly over phone and e-mail to keep communications running.

Aligning Branding Promises with Practices
The most intriguing of all the ideas to become more sustainable to me was the communication of a brand. The fundamental idea is to offer a promise to the customer where you will follow through. In these days, there is too much hype and it then becomes more and more important to set expectations for what you will do and will not do. We are in the information age where transparency is extremely important. Just as blogs need constant updating, any practices or commitments your company is making to become more eco-conscious and socially aware should be communicated to others.

In a nutshell, the business landscape has become much more complex and intertwined with politics, especially at the height of a financial crisis. It takes much more versatility for each individual to set aside time for creativity to be more productive.

The one thing human beings have not yet realized is that we are not separate from the rest of the world, which means we have to work towards understanding the complexities of the interconnections we have in business strategy, its relationship with nature and aligning our brand efforts with marketing communications.

Customers also have the right to know your internal business practices and by seeing a human side of the company, where it is not invincible or intimidating makes it much more approachable for them to ask questions and show interest.

Last weekend, I experienced something very strange and unfamiliar: I was pitched quite aggressively by a friend of a friend seeking a formal informational interview. This happened in my own home. At my housewarming party.

And, I was pitched the minute this friend/acquaintance walked into the door, before I could offer him a drink. Well, as I mentioned briefly in my last post, good will has its limits. People are generally interested in the value you bring if it relates to them. I was open to having this acquaintance at my home, but there was a certainly a limit to my good will when he fired a hard pitch just as he walked in the door.

The same is true for your communications with customers. Relationship marketing, often times called direct marketing, can often be perceived the same way as a hard pitch, and the consequences of such can negatively impact your ROI.

Don’t make elaborate demands of your customers. Make recommendations, suggestions and offers that are relevant to your customer. In other words, get their attention first and employ influence rather than a hard sell. And, do it in terms that they can understand and accept. The key word is relevance, and I’ve mentioned before in other posts that creating stories of relevance means understanding your targets well and in so doing, you can find opportunities to serve your audience better.

Ask the right questions at the right time. The acquaintance at the party certainly had a lot of questions to ask about marketing, but in my mind, they were not the right questions for the environment that we were in. I would have preferred the typical party questions, “What do you do, who do you know here, what do you like to do?” Marketing questions would have came later at a different meeting, as the timing was not exactly right.
In other words, the interlocutor had not set the right tone and placed his questions in the wrong context.

The same could be true for your audience. If you are fielding market research and asking about the how people consume baseball products (bats, balls, mitts, baseball tickets) and asking such questions at a football stadium, you may not get the results that you are looking for. Of course, if you were at a baseball stadium asking questions about baseball during the game, you may not get very favorable responses either.

Don’t be impatient. While not a brilliant statement, the implication here is that relationships take time to build, and multiple impressions. Memory experts show that people retain information better after three or more mentions, and this is especially true if your company’s products or services are not their first priority. It’s important to build on the first idea of providing relevance and offer this continuously to build the relationship. Your audience’s appreciation for you will grow if you respect and value their interests equally, if not more, to their own.

Overall, grace, precision and patience are the virtues that relationship marketers should value. It is only by respecting those who support you and your business that you will see better performance in your campaigns–no matter your level of company growth.

I hate to say this, but I didn’t get to make it to Social Media Camp. And it’s really a transparency thing than anything else to admit it, since I promised I might write something. I watched a few tweets during the day from @marianne_m from wordpress, @chrisheuer (but of course!) and @Pistachio talking about some Tweetups for Blogher also happening this week.

Things got a little crazy today. I have to say though, I have my eye pointed towards the social media horizon and I am going to get my questions answered.

As promised, I’m posting my mind map here to show you how you can use an extended metaphor to communicate an abstract idea by connecting it to a better known idea. I chose social media as my topic and the flower as a basic metaphor.
Some of the basic elements of this include:
*a developing idea about how flowers are not separate entities from the rest of the world, so in a way they are like people or maybe even your website content.
*There are different types of flowers, which can translate to your social media objectives.
*Insects live in flowers=digital natives, immigrants and even pesky spambots.
*Gardens are places where flowers inhabit.

Got a better idea? Leave a comment below.

Glen’s (LifeDev) post string on “Ideas from Start to Finish” is really clever. He focuses on refinement as a means to develop an original idea. Observation is also really key, and one way to best communicate what you observe in the trends is through metaphor.

If you read on, you’ll find five steps to writing a blog post and using extended metaphor to make your idea clearer to the reader. In other words pick a theme, much like some high schools pick their prom’s party theme (Mine in high school was Starry Night Sky).

The steps on this IdeaMeme are included here, as well as an example that I found from a REI mail order catalog.
Then tomorrow, I will post my extended metaphor to show you that I’m definitely in on it. Will you join me on pushing the limits on your blog writing?
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I’m always trying to figure out how I could blog better and keep people coming back to this website. One of the trends that seems to work well is to write about writing. I’m starting to notice that when I comment somewhere, I get links to my blog. Social bookmarking also seems to work well. My best day was May 3, thanks to a bunch of referrals from StumbleUpon. But it’s already May 13. Needless to say, blog maintenance if you are to do it as a profession is a campaign in itself.

Introspective thoughts aside, I’ve compiled a list of blogging advice from different sources which is a great way to get a good review of what you’re doing well and other things you could improve. Please leave a comment and add your links since it’s without a doubt that I will have missed a number of interesting posts.
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I’m in the Hayes Valley Café Boulange and I am in love with this place. It makes me feel like speaking French…“J’ai hâte revenir à Paris!!!”

I just looked up LinkedIn and found this in my newsfeed:

“between 1pm and 3pm PST (after lunch) or between 5pm and 7pm PST (after work) are the best times and Thursday is the best day. The worst time to post? Between 3 and 5 PM PST on the weekends – nobody cares.”

I’m trying this out to see what happens.

The funny thing is, I am not sure if announcing the best time to post will really get many eyes on the page, because information fatigue is an ongoing thing, so I’m trying to find ways to solve this problem.

In case you are interested, my new obsession is… Continue reading