Saw a great spot promoting California last night.
The playful commercial “Work”
grabbed my interest, entertained,
educated, and
left me with a deep desire to re-visit the State.
There is only one thing holding me back…
That is one of the issues with marketing.
You can come up with a great promotion,
implement it at the perfect time
to the perfect target, and
have an incident undermine all that planning.
Luck does play a factor.
The closer people are to food,
the more they will eat.
Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating,
told CNN why
“every time we see it,
we have to make a decision.
Do we want to eat it or not?”
But this doesn’t only work with food.
It works with every purchase.
That is why Coca-Cola’s mission statement
includes the words “within an arm’s reach of desire.”
Can you move your product
closer to your customers?
Last year I ran an event
for a not-for-profit organization.
I came up with the idea for the event.
I managed it.
I promoted it.
It was a roaring success,
the most successful event the organization held.
This year the organization decided that
it was too important an event
not to be run by the executive.
I am not on the executive and so
am excluded from the event management.
This happens in companies every day.
And the results are the same.
The founders get ticked and
take their abilities elsewhere.
Let your people run with their successes.
Give them extra resources,
extra training but keep them involved.
On one of my blogs,
I’m spicing up content by
posting more interviews with experts.
At first I was finding these experts
with simple Google searches.
Took time and
I didn’t have a very good response rate.
Then I realized that I was searching in the wrong place.
I went to an article directory.
Here were a list of experts writing content for free,
all in hopes of publicity.
Suddenly my response rate increased
to pretty close to 100%.
Are you also searching for customers
in the wrong place?
Are you buying ad space for online ventures offline?
Are you trying to sell romance novels to poetry readers?
Today I was manning an information booth
and was swarmed by a team of student journalists.
I happily did interviews for their class assignments,
easing them over their nervousness, and
treated every… well… rather junior question seriously.
When they left a few hours later happy,
one of the other women at the booth said
“I can’t believe you gave them so much time.”
I can’t believe I didn’t give them more.
You see, student journalists graduate
to become “real” journalists or
go into public relations or…
and they never forget their first few interviews.
I was lucky enough to be one of those interviews.
When looking for project staff,
there’s one personality trait I insist upon.
They need to have project thinking,
not linear thinking.
Linear thinking is…
do Step 1 first, Step 2 second, Step 3 third.
Project thinking is…
do all three Steps as soon as possible
if they’re not dependent on each other.
If Step 3 is dependent on Step 2,
do Step 2 either first or at the same time as Step 1
and THEN Step 3.
Linear thinkers add days,
even months,
to project timelines.
I received an email promoting an event.
At the end of the email, I read this…
“We will begin at 6 p.m. sharp.
Please be on time!
No Cancellation after Wednesday October 17, 2007
and No shows will be charged .
Advanced Registration Required.
Payment required in advance by credit card only.”
Was this sent to a bunch of high risk attendees?
Nope, professional accountants.
And it was for a bowling night.
With this fun, fun email,
what do you think attendence was?
(I don’t know… I didn’t go)
On one of my projects,
customers, in the past,
contacted a business partner first.
These contacts were filtered for junk and
then forwarded to me.
A couple years in,
the partner left the company.
It was only then that I discovered there was a problem
with our system.
What was the problem?
Simple.
The partner’s definition of junk was
VERY different from my definition of junk.
She was filtering out possible media opportunities.
These opportunities could have
built the business quicker.
So if you’re using filters,
and I do recommend using them,
check them every once in a while.
In the writing community,
there is an ongoing discussion
about “free” writing.
I give away free short stories
on my writing blog.
Should I be trying to sell them
to magazines instead?
Or is it keeping the “discussion” going?
Communications specialist Renate Zorn in
“The Woman in the Red Dress” points out
“When most conversations falter,
they do so not because the participants
don’t have anything in common to talk about,
but because one or both participants
aren’t giving or using “free information.”…
Free information includes
any unsolicited comments
or information provided by the speaker.”
So to communicate well,
you have to give some information away.
With services such as TiVO,
TV commercials are increasingly ineffective.
Networks know that so
they are experimenting
with other forms of advertising.
Two of the latest are snipes and bugs.
Bugs are the static logos that
watchers often see on
the bottom left hand corner of the screen
(Why left?
Because that is where the viewers eyes go first).
Snipes are very similar to bugs except animated.
As advertising evolves, so will content.
To leave this space of the screen clear
for bugs and snipes,
I soon expect to see
little to no programming content there.