Mythology - The Meaning Behind the Marketing

Microsoft Marketing Goes "Bing!"

I often observe my old company's marketing with a mix of critical eye and hopefulness, all colored by my fourteen years at the company. So I'm obviously enjoying the marketing related to the launch of Bing, Microsoft's latest effort to humble Google.

In many ways this is classic Microsoft: an emphasis on feature-rich improvements over the competition, a major publicity push, and "launch event" stunts like a campy "Bing-a-thon" hosted by Hulu.com and (of course) a Space Needle stunt.

(Some of these launch stunts can go horribly wrong. I still cringe and break into cold sweats at the memory from my days as a young Microsoft marketer in the early Nineties when someone thought that sticking MS execs in a broadway-musical style product launch musical was a smart thing to do. Yikes.)

In terms of raising awareness that there is an actual choice in search engines now, it seems to be working.

Google has always taken pride in not really marketing itself other than by coyly generating buzz about what service it may or may not be launching. In some ways that approach has created significant media and consumer craving for the next cool Google innovation.

Microsoft has rarely, if ever, taken the understated approach to marketing. It has a saturation-style approach that in many ways is "old school." The Bing campaign seems to be an interesting mix of old and new media and tactics.

At least - thank goodness - the central marketing group has taught the Microsoft product groups to consider unique, memorable names vs. "Microsoft Search Engine 3.0". You can take that to the Bing. That's a major breakthrough, although some are disagreeing.

For the good of search engine competition and more options in search marketing, let's hope Microsoft gets some traction this time.

Advice on 21st Century Social Media Success from 1936

Recently I had the pleasure of presenting at West Virginia University's Integrated Marketing Communications Program Weekend. The IMC programat WVU has taken a leadership position in the journalism and marketing world with its unique online-only format and focus on a new approach marketing: viewing the whole marketing picture, not just the parts. Students in the program learn to see things they way the consumer sees them - as a constant flow of information from indistinguishable sources.

So what do you say to a roomful of professors, administrators, students and prospective students that they haven't heard before that will inform and inspire?

Well, you go back to 1936.

That's the year Dale Carnegie published his historic guide to social success, How to Win Friends and Influence People. In a world where the marketing and media megaphone has been replaced by collaborative conversations, Carnegie's advice seems more relevant than ever.

Here are a few of Carnegie's laws for success:

• Become genuinely interested in other people.
• Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
• Talk in terms of the other person's interest.
• Make the other person feel important and do it sincerely.
• Show respect for other people's opinions.
• If you're wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
• Let the other person feel the idea is his/hers.
• Throw down a challenge.

Think you could generate a few Twitter followers and Facebook friends with that advice? My wife probably exhibits these skills more naturally than anyone else I know. People are drawn to her because, well, she makes them feel valued and really does listen intently to them. She probes them with questions, getting them to open up about things that they would never share with others. (She's declined my suggestion to get her own talk show.)

Here is a view of the rest of the presentation. What do you think about Carnegie's advice and its relevance for today's social media world? (That's me being genuinely interested in other people.)

21st Century Social Media Advice from 1936

View more OpenOffice presentations from Jeff James.

Build or Borrow a Social Community?

The mad dash to set up Facebook fan or group pages by businesses has reached the early majority and may be entering into the late majority. Even United Airlines has a "fan" page (Is anyone really a fan of an airline? Notice they seem to have turned off posts. Perhaps JetBlue or Southwest Airlines in their early days?).

The social media platform player Ning has grown quite a bit recently as more organizations determine they want more control and functionality over their organization-sponsored social network. Ning allows you to brand your site to your liking (for the most part), set up your own profiles and integrate more content than a public social network like Facebook.

However, if you set up your own network, you'll have to work harder to get people to join and participate. Facebook's beauty is its inherent viral functionality; when someone signs up for your page, all of their friends see that they've done it and some will sign up also.

We think it is useful to think of using each tool at different points of the customer adoption funnel. For example, a Facebook fan page will probably generate more members at the earlier stage of commitment, but due to its light functionality, it is less likely to deeply engage. 

A customer social community, on the other hand, is more likely to attract true advocates who are seriously ready to engage with like-minded advocates. This one that  designed and manages for the Hatfield-McCoy off-road trail system is a great example. Fans of HMT are already deeply engaged in answering questions, connecting with each other, and providing feedback. 

In some cases, companies and non-profits are forgoing a traditional web site and just launching a Ning-based site as their primary web presence. In many cases, especially where deep interaction with customers or constituents is important, this is a smart move.

Does your company participate in social communities? On what level? We'd love to hear about your successes and challenges in this ever-evolving world of social marketing.

Beginning with Sticky Trust in Mind

Think of your own likelihood to open an email and act upon it. Your split-second decision process might look something like this:

• Unsolicited - Unknown Source: Spam, pure and simple. You delete it quickly and are probably more than a bit annoyed.

• Unsolicited - Known Source: You may know the company, but you still didn't request it. Still annoyed, perhaps slightly less so depending on your existing opinion of the company. However, your opinion probably went down slightly after receiving their spam.

• Opt-In - Coerced: An email received from a company who required you to give them your email address in order to get to something you wanted (a free white paper, etc.). In reality, you really don't care to hear from these folks again. Most likely you'll delete it, or perhaps open .5% - 1% of the time when you're cleaning out your Hotmail. If you have the energy and time, you'll probably opt out (although most people don't, preferring instead to ignore it or flag it as junkmail that gets routed to the delete folder).

• Opt-In - Desired: This is actually becoming less common and less needed with RSS, but there are times when you actually do want something sent to you on a regular basis. Sometimes it's related to offers, most often it's related to valued information. These emails get opened, but still only 3% - 20% of the time.

• Forwarded From an Annoying Friend/Colleague: You know the ones, thinking every other joke or urban legend is worth forwarding to their entire address book. You may pay attention for a split second, but mostly just to shake your head and wonder why they have so much time on their hands. These are tougher to opt out of receiving, but mentally you're most definitely opted out.

• Forwarded from a Trusted Friend/Colleague:  Ah, now we have something. This is an email from someone who you know personally, or have placed some trust in because of others' opinions of them. You've experienced a track record of value in what they send, so most likely you open it. You may even forgive them a couple of times if they send something less than valuable, but the long-term trust remains. These are the pinnacles of influence in a word-of-web world.

The question is: Why do we plan and spend so much time and money on architecting "campaigns" that look so much like the first few scenarios, and so little on thinking of something uniquely and consistently valuable that it would earn a forward from a trusted source?

Sure, it's harder. And we're not at a point where marketers can completely rely on word-of-web to generate enough response volume. The scale just isn't there. But...If we re-prioritized our planning, if we started with that end in mind, wouldn't even the rest of our "traditional" marketing (including traditional digital marketing) be that much more effective?

If we started with "sticky" in mind, most likely it would stick to all of our communications and lead us towards higher return on marketing investment.

Marketing Manager as Community Organizer

Hey, if "community organizer" is a stepping stone to the presidency, why not as a qualification for Chief Marketing Officer? As more and more marketing tasks are shifted to the community (The latest? Get your community to design your logo.), a key issue has been drawn out in regard to hiring marketing talent: What skills are really needed? 

In the past, a thorough understanding of traditional media planning was required. Who can we find who understands reach and frequency? Who knows solid direct marketing tactics that generate ROI? 

These days, more companies are embracing the fact that they need community organizing skills within their marketing department. It's not enough to spread the "message" through Twitter and Facebook, which are just tools; you have to understand how to build true community through those tools.  

Here's a list of a just some of the skills for a good community organizer, whether it's organizing on the streets or online:

• Building coalitions, including among those who may have felt powerless
• Mobilizing large numbers of people
• Training and empowering leaders
• Effective listening skills
• Effective questioning and messaging skills

The Marin Institute, an alcohol industry watchdog and a resource for solutions nto community alcohol problems has developed their own community organizer self-assessment test to help determine whether this is a good career choice.

Perhaps we need to adopt these kinds of organizing skill assessments for hiring marketing professionals?

Sweet SUCCESs: Are Your Messages 'Made to Stick'?

One of my favorite practical books of the last few years is Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. It takes up where the insanely popular Tipping Point left off by providing a clearer template for how to construct messages in a way that they would "stick", or have more viral pass-along potential.

The authors' formula is SUCCESs:

• Simplicity - Finding the core of the idea
• Unexpectedness - Combining surprise with interest
• Concreteness - Bringing it alive by engaging the five senses ("memory Velcro")
• Credibility - Tapping the power of authority - or anti-authority - to build belief
• Emotional - Priming people to care
• Stories - Generating involvement that leads to action 

Essentially, the more a message - including an advertisement or other commercial message - incorporates these stickiness factors, the more likely it will be remembered and even passed around to others in the Internet-connected world.

Advertisers have been fighting hard to cut through the clutter with unexpected - even shocking - imagery. A handy shortcut often involves the use of innuendo or overtly sexual images.

However, often these efforts are disconnected to the value proposition of the product. Which of us haven't seen a memorable commercial, but completely forgot what it was even advertising?

I thought it would be fun to review some recent commercials as I watch TV in my hotel room and see how many are "SUCCESsfully Stick" using the Heath brothers' formula:

• Castrol: Think With Your Dipstick - OK, a dipstick-wielding Scottishman who sneaks up on consumers about to make a bad motor oil decision and whacks them on the back of the leg got my attention. It's disturbingly humorous, I guess...And of course it has the "think with your dipstick" innuendo. But I didn't get the sense that Castrol's unique selling proposition came through and was almost overpowered by the abusive Scott. Why is Castrol EDGE better again? I'll remember the ad though, and may look behind me when I purchase motor oil again.
• Energytomorrow.com - An effort by the oil and gas industry to generate support for drilling. I think this one fails the sticky test. No stories that generated emotion or involvement. Nothing unexpected, just a nice lady telling me why it's important for America to be independent and how many jobs her employers provide. Nice info, but very forgettable. Certainly not powerful enough to take back the conversation from "green" advocates.
• Wal-Mart: Better Homes and Gardens Collection - Devoid of any stickiness. It's like Pam anti-stick spray was used on this commercial.

After actively paying attention to maybe 12-15 commercials this morning, it's quite amazing that the vast majority of commercials don't pay one whit of attention to the Heath Brother's elements of stickiness.

How about you? How does your messaging stand up to SUCCESs? It takes some practice. I'm going to go throw some honey on the mythologymarketing.com web site right now...

What IS the Future of Advertising?

I read an interesting post recently on www.widgify.com on "The Future of Viral Marketing: Service-Oriented Advertising." The author proposes:

I call this concept Service-Oriented Advertising. People will pay to have their messages delivered across services.  It’s a bit geek-shique, but the idea is that marketers will seed the delivery of their message through multiple web services, or channels, and pay for the enhanced distribution of their messages on a performance basis.  There are some primitive versions of this that exist today.  The CPI, or cost-per-install, model for widgets is a subset of this paradigm.  People pay for their message (widget) to get distributed across a subset of channels (social networks) on a performance basis (install on a page).

It's been a mantra over the last several years (with philosophical underpinnings from the Cluetrain Manifesto) that marketing must morph into a conversation, a collaboration between vendors and their constituents/customers. While many companies still react with "Huh?", others are blazing trails on what exactly this looks like.

The conversational approach has great emotional appeal, but marketers have struggled with how to measure it, how to manage it and how to profit from it.

Whether it looks like the "pay for propagate" model as Hooman suggests, I'm not sure. But as word-of-mouth influence continues to challenge television and traditional media as THE source for new product/service information, it's clear that rallying your tribe is of utmost strategic importance.

The keys seem to be:

• Is your tribe made up of the right people?
• Is your tribe truly influencing people down the purchase funnel?
• Is managing the tribe really more efficient and effective than traditional marketing?
• Can you convince your boss of all the above?

Loyalty Program Members Drive Word-of-Mouth

Relationship marketing and loyalty programs were the rage in the Nineties, but the rapid advent of social media and online communities have shifted the attention away from - or at least changed - their focus.

"Word of mouth" (WOM) is all the rage, and for good reason. WOM is the most influential channel of communication for convincing people to try a new product or service.

A new study by Colloquy called "The New Champion Customers" demonstrates a compelling link between traditional loyalty programs and WOM. It found that rewards or loyalty program members are 70% more likely to be WOM champions, defined as those customers who actively recommend a product, service or brand.

Loyalty programs tend to draw in those customers who are most likely to be fans of the brand. 55% of loyalty program members indicate they are WOM champions, while only 32% of non-program customers are self-described WOM champions.

Many organizations captured a great deal of customer contact information since the advent of email, but it sits idly in their databases unscrubbed and unmonetized. It's a smart thing to evaluate how you could activate these contacts by crafting a low-cost, high-yield loyalty program and connecting it to a social community. 

What are the Marketing Implications for Microsoft's Tag Mini-App?

Good to see my old company Microsoft generating some buzz with their second iPhone app called Tag. It's also good to see my old company building code for competitive platforms.

Tag "transforms traditional offline media into live links to online information and entertainment" by rendering an image that can trigger an action, such as launching a web site, when it's read by the iPhone app. Check out a little video here for the concept.

The integration of offline with online has been the holy grail of advertising and marketing circles since the Internet took hold in the Nineties. Tag brings together mobile, the web and print in a unique way.

For a quick example of how it can be used, download the Tag app for your phone and snap our first Mythology tag:

 

At Mythology we're planning on piloting some viral marketing efforts using this technology. Give us a shout at [email protected] if you're interested in brainstorming some ideas for your organization.

Just How Much do Online Reviews Influence?

I've always been a Malcolm Gladwell fan. Partially because his books make you think, but not too hard because he simplifies, summarizes and references scientific research and case studies in a brilliant way. But partially because I've met him a few times and he's a genuinely kind, generous human being who happens to be pretty darn smart.

So I've been looking forward to his latest book, Outliers, about the nature of success and the factors that make becoming an "outlier" success possible and even likely.

I usually check out the reviews on Amazon.com. Sure, some of them might be plants from a publicist. But many are thoughtful and well-written, and they normally give me an idea of a book's strengths and weaknesses.

In the case of Outliers, I noticed the vast majority of ratings in the 4 and 5 range - so far, so good. But then I read the first review by a poster named "Nathan." Nathan had some big problems with Outliers, and he laid them out in devastating detail. I have to admit, Nathan's comments put a damper on my pent-up Gladwell purchase.

Why did Nathan influence me more than the majority who gave Outliers a 4 or 5 rating? Is his post, combined with a few other anti-Gladwell posts, the beginning of an anti-tipping point for Gladwell and a Blink backlash?

And how do online product or service reviews influence most of us?

It's been demonstrated frequently that online reviews have big influence on offline purchase. According to Comscore in a 2007 study, nearly one out of every four Internet users (24%) reported using online reviews prior to paying for a service delivered offline.

But what about reviews influence us? Certainly the percentage of positive-to-negative posts and ratings can build a case for or against a product. But sometimes its more than that. It can be the credibility of the poster demonstrated in the form of thoughtful writing and in-depth analysis. It can also be the placement of the review; which one did you read first? Not all reviews are created equal.

In today's marketplace, there are no secrets. But there are influentials who guide others on new ways of thinking, both positive and negative. It's even more critical to cultivate influentials who may be able to sway opinion and take the conversation in a different direction when something negative gets posted about your company or product.