Ben Little

Stand Out

You have to specialize to be special.  Some business leaders want to be everything to everyone, and though your broad knowledge and abilities are admirable, you risk alienating some clients who rightly think that they are also special.  Go back to basics for each market and define your presence in a clear and substantial way.  What you can do to optimize billing is less important than what you can do to help patient billing, which is not as interesting as what you can do to help patient billing for community hospitals with about 100-200 beds when you are talking to a decision maker in a hospital that size.  You may need all three layers for your sales process, but the last one is the most important.

Know your audience.  A played out mantra for marketing, but it is always important.  Part of specializing is narrowing your focus and consequently, narrowing your audience.  Describe in detail the things you do best before targeting audiences that are new to you.  By having well targeted, well substantiated messaging you will have more effective responses because you will be more relevant every time.  If you are targeting a new audience, you need to develop some understanding of that audience and convey to them that you understand.  When you know your audience, you will know what options they have available to them, what things they would like to see, and, consequently, what you have to offer them.

Relevance prompts attention.  You cannot hold your prospects hostage.  They will not listen to what you want to talk about; they will listen to what they want to hear.  Make sure you are resonating with your audience by answering a question or answering a need.  If you are not needed, you are not special.  You might be different even if you are not needed, but I want you to be special (nothing personal, but it is better for our society and economy if businesses all put in the effort to be at least a little special.)

Listen.  If you don’t know why a prospect would prefer you over someone else, then you have to seek out the opportunity.  The great thing about the modern customer is, they do everything for you.  With the right communications mechanisms in place, you can have the community perform your product development, message definition, feedback gathering, prospect vetting, prospect nurturing, and possibly even promotions.  The key is opening up the proverbial door to stick out your proverbial head and see what is being said.  By door of course I mean online community and by head I mean your marketing department.  Well… you get the picture.  When you know what the community has and what the community wants, you can better strategize how you will uniquely meet them (or better yet, surpass their needs.)

Process, process, process.  Creativity is great; it is how I make my living.  However, creativity is not spontaneous and innovative companies that execute strategy poorly should not expect good results.  In my last post I mention the basic costs of doing business (good customer service, friendly faces, reliable products) and these cannot be ignored when trying to be special.  Sort of a Maslow’s need hierarchy for business (in fact I think I remember business school having something just like that… just don’t remember what it was called), an innovative business will fail if it does not perform the basic tasks of business well.  A great product that takes 12 weeks to receive will discourage most consumers.  A great idea for marketing is relatively useless without seeing how it will fit into the sales cycle.  Having a process means having a plan, and having a plan is the logical beginning and end to any strategy.  By knowing your process, you will know what needs to be done and how to ensure that your special status (or “specialosity” as I choose to call it for now) is not lost in the shuffle.

Competition is the great motivator for modern business.  It drives efficiency and innovation.  It keeps price in check and hands control over to the customer.  How much true competition is there when the contest in your industry is between marketing constructs?

Certain industries are doomed to commoditization.  Marketing assembles some differentiators through a combination of good customer service, reliable quality, and just plain friendly and personable brand representatives.  As a marketer, I don’t mean to marginalize the importance of these things, but in reality, every company is trying to do this (or should.)  These factors are not the metrics of real competition; they are the minimum requirements of doing business.

Moro Orange

Proof in nature exists for brand differentiation.  The blood orange (or the Moro orange) I think is the easiest to identify among a bowl of oranges, and holds the most mystique for its differences.  When every other orange is, well, orange and tastes like a variation of an orange, a blood orange is a linguistic paradox and sometimes carries a slight flavor of raspberry with it.  In this case, the differentiation is manifested in a special personality when compared to “peers’, but it all relates to nuanced differences in the core makeup of the orange.

Going back to business, this is where a brand like Virgin gets it and a brand like Northwest doesn’t.  One competes on price alone and relies on its marketing messages to make something happen.  The other tries to make flying a different experience through nuance and process, using marketing messages to communicate the real differences between one experience and the other.  If a consumer decides to fly on Virgin, the price is not necessarily the factor that pushed the decision, but that is where Northwest is competing.

Whether a core message of the brand or the subject line of an email, poor differentiation not only won’t sell your audience, it will likely annoy your audience.  I remember going to a booth at the AIIM tradeshow and asking someone to tell me about his company.  He said they were a “solutions provider for marketing” and I responded with, “sure likes like you specialize in printing on some interesting substrates to me.”  My time was wasted with the misdirection in their message, and I would much have preferred a frank answer to my question.  Everyone is a solution provider.  That tagline “Solutions for You” would fit under any logo because it is as ambiguous as the English language allows.

So here is my point: paying attention to differentiation starts in planning your business.  Messaging can paint a picture, but it cannot make something ordinary into something special (and of course lying will set you back further than being ordinary will.)  Focusing on innovation is obviously one “Blue Water” tactic that will keep you not only competitive, but maybe unique.  Being unique, however, is fleeting.  We will see the uniqueness of the iPhone fade as real competitors move in, and then it will be back to what makes the iPhone different.  Apple is surely an example of one company that constantly asks, “why us?”  Why should anyone do business with you?

You might be unique for a year or two, but you need to refresh your brand constantly to be any sort of a leader in your industry.  If you can’t answer the “why us” question every few weeks, or if your answer doesn’t change, then you may have been left behind and, worst of all, you may not realize it yet.

I don’t think you need drastic and constant changes to jar your stakeholders awake every few months.  Change can probably be done to scale.  Apple has set a high bar for change, making uniqueness a core element of the brand, but Apple is also a global leader focused on growth.  A local restaurant might focus on smaller changes like seeking local suppliers to identify with the growing number of locavores.

To summarize: Consumer expectations have risen and differentiators must be real in the modern marketplace.  Don’t count on success to come out of crafting your message more cleverly than your competitor.  If you can’t be direct and have a frank conversation with your audience, then perhaps you should revisit your core strategy.

The information super-highway.  I haven’t heard that phrase in a while, and I suppose it is now so dated that it elicits laughter before it draws you into a metaphor.  These days the glut of information out on the internet is creating a layer of haze that reminds me more of an information traffic jam.  Everyone wants my attention when I am online and marketers (like me) are all vying for a few minutes to explain themselves in a supremely commoditized world with shorter attention spans.  Explain why you think you are different in 8 words or less.

Some might say this has produced savvy consumers who can see right through marketing tricks.  To a degree I think this is true.  People are not subject to basic commands delivered by marketing.  To another degree, I think psychology has become more important for marketing and the internet has become a more manipulative environment, where we still expect consumers to follow the chain of calls to action that we marketers lay out like breadcrumbs.

I have enough data about myself online to assemble a rather complete profile of my consumer behaviors, psychological habits, political beliefs, intelligence, reading habits, and just about anything else that would be useful in creating an advertising environment where I might buy something.  As a marketer, I think this is an excellent opportunity to essentially aggregate my desires and meet me with things I might actually find interesting.  As a consumer, I don’t appreciate being profiled with information that I did not volunteer for the purpose of evaluation so much as for the purpose of ordering a book or connecting with people (it’s Web 2.0.  I’m finally a part of the movement!  So I’m not always an early adopter...)

Because of my conflicted approach to things, I am still not convinced that using the data out there to target our audiences is really the best new thing for MarComm professionals.  We run the risk of drowning in data while true understanding still evades us.  I know the use of demographic data will still be a part of my proactive marketing activities, but I put it in the same ethical bucket as direct mail.  It works at a predictable pace and though it runs some reputation risk for my brand, it is a manageable risk.  In favor of considering the virtual copies of personalities that form the modern web as rich mines of information, I would prefer to think of them as the individuals they represent, not the demographics they represent. 

The more data you know about someone the less you probably understand.  Someone like me with a plethora of personal information on the web does not "go online," we are always online.  The internet is a component of the modern world, integrated into my work, play, and everything in between.  As such, you may know what I buy and where I shop, but you will only capture the things I have done in the past.  Now, granted, there is a lot you can profile and infer based on where my information is coming from, my age group, my politics, and many other things that can be used to create a sophisticated model of who I am.  I know I just don't have the time or budget to concern myself with this, and there will always be companies and organizations that simply can't worry about such advanced options. My point here, is that in the basic steps of trying to push information out into the market, I do not think the all-seductive data is the only answer.  We need to be prepared for the fact that many users will want to find us on their own.  Some of that push through advertising, SEO, or media will create awareness, but once awareness is established, the modern organization needs to be prepared to be poked and prodded in ways that not everyone is ready for yet.

You cannot be all things to all people, and you cannot advertise everywhere; but you should have a flow to your online presence.  There should be direction provided to your online investigators that brings them to an information rich environment.  Nothing makes me dismiss a company more quickly these days than not being able to find anything online.  Even the pizza restaurant around the corner at least has some online reviews (whether they know it or not) and though I don't need an online presence for my brick and mortar stores, I do for my business partners.

If your brand is successful, people will identify with it.  People will talk about you (this may happen for a broken brand promise as well.)  You will not be able to control it.  The best thing you can do, however, is participate in it.  By participating, you can bring people where you want them to be.  Dealing with savvy consumers and giving control over to the mob does not mean you can’t let people find their own way to where you want them to be.  If you bring people to an information rich environment, and you are participating or responding to the good and the bad, then you will at least know what is going on.  If people complain about you and you do nothing, then you have made the choice to ignore the free advice.  If people complain and you respond, then you are embracing the collaborative environment that modern stakeholders demand, and you might stand a chance.

That is the point in the end.  It is not about trying to control the consumer through analysis and suggestion; it is about meeting the consumers on their own turf.  You should still be able to portray a voice of the company, even if the company is more transparent than it has ever been.  At times the new landscape of the information age can seem more compartmentalized than unified, but you should develop an idea of where the pieces click together and how you are doing in the community that your business serves.

I truly believe that most marketers have embraced a healthy sense of collaboration with stakeholders in their lead nurturing and acquisition cycles; I think this is meant more as an advocate’s plea for non-marketers to adopt a marketing mindset.  Don’t be afraid of the new landscape.  Jump in, embrace the opportunities.  You will benefit from it, your stakeholders will benefit from it, and ultimately the economy will benefit from it.

Vocus is an impressive web-based platform for PR. I spent a good deal of time with one of their sales reps on a WebEx demo, and I was impressed by the possibilities of implementing something like Vocus in a small department like mine.

Essentially Vocus acts as a CRM for PR professionals, but the database comes pre-loaded and is maintained by Vocus. There are over half a million media contacts in the database for North America, and nearly 300,000 for outside of North America. You can add to the database, as can any other Vocus user, and the new information is vetted and maintained by the Vocus team. Using in depth search features you can create a distribution list, attach it to projects (which may be clients for an agency) and have it updated in time. If a contact changes within a media outlet on your list, the changes are automatically made. The only thing we were unsure of is how distribution lists are updated if new media contacts (such as new top bloggers) are added since your list was created. Given the leap this database represents for many companies, I think this can probably be forgiven for now, and there are saved search options that may allow you to check in and update lists with new search results on occasion.

Putting the distribution list to use is the next step. Using the detailed information available on media contacts (which includes recorded monologues with some of the contacts on how they prefer to be pitched) Vocus can produce mixed media press releases that default to the preferred methods of the recipient. The variable data program can burst out emails, faxes, and printed pitches in the same instance that it posts the release on a newswire service. For pitching to particular audiences, personalized messages can be set for individual contacts, just as in many variable data email programs.

Treating this as a mass mailing, Vocus manages ISP relations and CAN SPAM compliance, allowing for recipients to opt-out of messages from specific organizations. The deliverability reporting is only the beginning of the measurement that is available once a release is distributed.

Automated reporting can be used in conjunction with the automatic clipping service or not. Using advanced metrics, Vocus can provide measurement down to the level of good, bad and neutral press. Using algorithms to value different media outlets and keyword density, worth is given to coverage in a way allowing unprecedented quantitative evaluation for media relations.

Aside from this push information, Vocus also has an opportunities window with some of the functionality of a ProfNet style media lead service. The three categories under which opportunities are managed include stories, awards, and speaking engagements. As a communications professional who manages all of these opportunities on Excel spreadsheets, the idea of someone updating the database for me is very appealing. Using the project tagging feature of Vocus, opportunities and subsequent or previous activities can all be grouped together for project management and review.

Vocus can also be used to automate the newsroom of a website. Though this part seemed somewhat limited to me, I have to give the disclaimer that I did not explore it too much nor was it a main selling point of the demonstration. What was mentioned was the non-automatic contract renewal which I appreciated. Rather than requiring advance notice for cancellation the contract is considered under review each year and you are expected to sign it to continue for another year. Support was described as working under a "no hold, no voicemail policy" for regular business hours. This seemed to hold true as I was called back within 15 minutes of the demonstration with answers to some of my unanswered questions.

In summary:

cons: Vocus included information on bloggers but did not seem to be entirely up on the idea of social media releases or social media news rooms. The company was founded in 1992 and I can only imagine they have made large strides to keep as up to date as they are, but it seems as though they are targeting agencies and larger companies in their approach. I would like to see something like a social media newsroom that might include their current clipping service and some RSS capabilities. If that could be truly integrated straight onto the website or into a private online community, I think Vocus would have even greater value.

The other thing I noted as missing was a feature of ProfNet that I really enjoy: the expert profiles. In an attempt to create a database for media contacts, I think this platform would be more complete if it employed a user generated database of professional and academic expertise for journalists to pull information from the users. This might also allow them to create stakeholders in the Vocus community if they made this a free account service. I know as soon as I got a media lead from my free Vocus profile I would be that much more ready to subscribe and see what else I could accomplish on the platform.

pros: I was truly impressed by them. They seem to take feedback from their clients and improve their product constantly using the ideas they hear. When I asked about the items listed as cons, the sales rep simply said, "we haven't been asked to do that yet, but I'm sure we can." Now I know that is what our sales reps say as well; but it is not always the philosophy (and our reps mean it when they say it, so I assume others do as well. There is always the option of "I'll look into that" followed with a delayed "no.")

With a minimum of $5K to $6K per year for a very basic installation, this web based application could be just the right thing to get smaller companies started off in PR with a more junior person in-house. The scalability of it to include things like the clipping service and advanced metrics make it an excellent platform for a growing company or department.

As a part of this blog, I will be providing reviews of vendors and service providers that I meet with or work with. I hope to help create good buzz for the people doing things right and warn anyone that trusts my judgment when I find a company I don't want to work with again.

The title is not entirely accurate. I am happy to welcome you to my blog and join the social media world.

The intent of this blog is to publish some of my professional work, opinions, and questions.