TheSocialCMO

Cut through the marketing clutter with storytelling


“Oh come on!” the upscale fashion retailer said. He thrust his pointed finger toward to the daily newspaper spread out next to his cash register. “Look here, here, and here,” he continued as he pointed to three different ads by three different “big box” clothing retailers or discounters. “How many ads do I have to buy to get noticed? There’s just so much clutter,” he said while he smashed the paper into a tight crumpled ball and crammed it into the trashcan.

The Problem

The retailer’s problem is the same problem facing businesses of every size. Nate Elliott, analyst for the vaunted research firm Forrester, recently turned his research prowess towards the problem. In his blog post announcing his current research project, he asked, “How can marketers overcome social clutter?” He asked readers, “Do you feel it’s getting harder or easier for marketers to get a message to users through social media?” Readers responded with an overwhelming, “harder!”

The Villain

First, let’s define this villain called Clutter. Who is this black-hatted character bringing companies large and small to their knees?

To air traffic controllers and others who read radars, clutter is “a term for unwanted echoes…[that] can cause serious performance issues…” That’s a definition marketers can visualize, too. You’ll hear communications professionals talk about the “signal to noise ratio.” Everything that’s not signal, is noise—unwanted echoes, clutter.

The Faux Solution

Many marketers attempt to overcome Clutter by buying more ad space or airtime, sending out more direct mail pieces, making more cold calls, posting more tweets or updates. Instead of killing Clutter, they feed the sneaky villain.

The Hero

Squaring off against Clutter is our white-hatted Storyteller. The Storyteller is effective not just because of what he does, but also because of who he is. Through three key relationships he’s empowered to act effectively, slicing through Clutter and delivering wanted signal.

  1. The storyteller’s relationship to the story: The Storyteller believes The Story is a gift that’s been given to him and a gift that increases in value as it is given away.
  2. The storyteller’s relationship to himself: The Storyteller is focused on The Story and minimizes self in order to present the story free of personal interference.
  3. The storyteller’s relationship to the audience: The Storyteller focuses on the audience and their experience of The Story. He is committed to communicating The Story to enable the audience to not only live The Story for themselves but also to co-create its meaning.

The mindset, or heart, of the Storyteller prepares him to take action to cut through Clutter.

Essential Elements
First, you need to know your own core story. Your core story is a narrative example of:

  • who you are and what you stand for
  • who the big, hairy monster is (the villain)
  • what results customers achieve because of you

Second, you need to know your prospects’ core story. Their core story includes:

  • what they want to accomplish (what results do they want in the end?)
  • what gets in their way
  • how they feel when they’re thwarted
  • how they feel when they’re victorious

That means listening and paying attention to your prospects and customers is more important than ever. If you don’t know their stories, you won’t be able to share a story with them that cuts through Clutter.

Stories cut through clutter because, stories

  • connect with people emotionally
  • help us make sense of facts (facts, statements, declarations, and even offers overwhelm us; stories give us a framework to make sense of it all)
  • aid memory
  • aid word-of-mouth (we tend to remember in story; we tend to share in story)

Sharing your story

Adopting the mind of a storyteller, understanding your own core story, and understanding your customers’ core story are the first steps toward conquering Clutter and connecting with your marketplace. These foundational steps will take you far down the path of effective communication and engagement with the people in your marketplace.

Trey Pennington

Dog Days of Social Media… I Don’t Think So!

In his recent must-read post, “The Dog Days of Social Media,” Drew Neisser reminds us that just because Facebook has lost some fans, and Forrester “recommends a cautious approach to Foursquare,” we shouldn’t panic and jump off the social media ship.

I agree wholeheartedly with Drew and appreciate his addressing such a timely topic. “Dog Days,” my ass! We are only scratching the surface here of social media potential! And even if your audience does abandon a platform “en masse”… so what? Scalable social platforms are not going away, migrations will happen — they always do eventually — but if it is not Facebook or Twitter it will be somewhere else you can still reach out, engage your audience, and interact with them.

So we need to keep in mind that, going forward, long-term brand success will not be dependent on a specific social media tool; it will be relative to the depth and breadth of the relationships built using the tool. Building relationships and interacting with consumers is where the commerce of the future is heading. Yes, real relationships = brand interest & loyalty = success (money). In fact, at OpenSky, we believe so strongly in the power of relationships as commerce that we have built an entire platform and business model around it.

Remember, though, that social media is a facilitator of relationships, but it is not the relationship itself. Use whatever combination of ways to interact works best for you and your brand. In other words, experiment! Use Facebook, Twitter, blog posts, and YouTube (don’t forget YouTube!), and use them each in several different ways. Notice what tactics engage your audience so much that they interact not only with you/your brand but with other people loyal to your brand. That’s where the magic happens!

Once you find what works for your audience, drive a truck through that opening. It’s not enough to drive that truck through and keep on going. You need to park that truck, and get out to interact with your audience. “Listen” to your market and you will be able to relate to and engage your customers, evolving with them as they evolve and change. Remember… relationships are never static, so your brand must be able to move along with the relationship or be left behind.

Bottom line: the more responsive you are to your audience, the more responsive they will be to you. Don’t wait for them to make the first move.

Ted Rubin

Listening- a powerful communications tool

It has become very clear to me that listening is a more powerful communication tool than that of speaking (online or offline). I guess that is why we hear the expression we have “two ears and only one mouth” for a reason.

Think about it.

All human beings have the desire and need to “truly be heard”. In addition, human beings seek to be understood, appreciated and connected to others. Many painful times in our lives have come about because we said something we did not mean OR do not say something we should have said. Such situations often cause pain to both us and others. No good!

Does this apply to new communication mediums such as Social Media? You bet it does. In such new arenas- listening is more important than ever.

Missed opportunities for communications growth occur when we fail to further develop a relationship because we do not get to know a person better. In other words, we have “talked” to them a lot but have learned little about them– as we have instead focused on our needs, wants and desires.

The people I enjoy the most, in all parts of life, are those who are the best listeners. Why?

The reason is simple– these people make me feel important. Don’t we all want to feel that way? Don’t we all, whether offline OR online, TRULY want have a meaningful conversation?

Our goal should be to consistently improve our listening skills. And, remember “hearing and listening” are two very different things. Such strong listening skills– will not only make you a better person– but also a better communicator, marketer and leader in all endeavors- online or offline.

What do you think?

Ryan Sauers

Peeling Away The Layers

By nature, I am an analytical person. Growing up, I was that kid in class that was constantly raising his hand, asking more questions and wanting to understand why. I haven’t changed.

Lee Odden of TopRank (a personal favorite blog), wrote a great article this week titled, Why Do So Many Companies Suck at Social Media?

It really got me thinking. It brought back to mind a wonderful metaphor I learned over 10 years ago during Franklin Covey’s Helping Clients Succeed™ Consultative Sales Training program. It goes something like this.

In helping clients, before providing a solution, you need to discover the core of the problem. It’s typically something that is most shielded from view or not yet revealed (the core). As you peeling away each layer (by continually asking, “Why?”), you learn each of the surface issues until ultimately you are led to the deeper truth revealed at the core. The root cause of the problem.

In Lee’s article, Why Do So Many Companies Suck at Social Media?, he identified a number of the issues (layers of the onion):

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Optimizing the Enterprise Website for Demand Generation – Turning Traffic into Revenue

I wanted to share a technique my firm has used for the past decade to drive substantial improvement in converting website traffic into revenue. We have been able to prove this prospect engagement process out over a variety of different industries in both B2B and B2C enterprises. We developed this approach to solve a huge issue every single company we met struggled with: Lots of traffic – very little conversion.

Here is just a little example of some of the results our clients have been able to achieve using this approach are:

80% increase in qualified leads through the web globally (measured by calls to live sales agents). The only thing we measured was calls and inquiries to live agents so that it was directly linked to sales and not “false positives” like website registrations and other questionable lead gen measurements. The process we deployed involved 12 unique global sites in 7 different languages and ended up representing 50% of the total qualified sales leads globally and at a cost of 15% of the total marketing spend for lead gen.

$200K revenue in first quarter from zero revenue the year before (measured by web orders). Focused on three key audiences instead of 10 and designed the entire site around an option-based engagement process. Other results when combined with SEO/SEM were a 300% increase in traffic and a max of 4 clicks to delivering customer fulfillment.

So how did we manage to achieve this?

Well, its a synchronization of several factors that is all based on a single, ultra-powerful principle for human relationships: Everyone, without exception, makes decisions based on emotion which is then justified by logic.

Once you understand (and accept) this principle, you need to begin to develop ways to reach your customers emotionally on both a conscious and subconscious level. As human beings, we are constantly being emotionally influenced at a subconscious level by everything and everyone around us and our brains are designed to process this information subconsciously so as not to overwhelm us. The result is a complex set of behaviors, perceptions and belief systems that governs our decisions on a constant basis- all governed by emotions and justified by logic.

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How to create a content marketing plan — without any content!

When somebody talks about “content marketing,” they’re really talking about “content engineering” — scientifically optimizing documents such as blogs, case studies and white papers to create search engine results and sales leads.

This can be an extremely complicated, time-consuming and expensive proposition! So I started thinking about this in the context of my friends and small business customers who simply can’t afford that kind of effort. It led to this idea: micro-content, or marketing content when you don’t have time to produce content!

Let’s examine ideas about micro-content that even a time-starved business owner should be able to master in 15 minutes a day …

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Creating Multilingual Content on Facebook

English being the de facto standard of today’s communication, building a multilingual presence is quite challenging, particularly in the social media landscape. It takes time, resources and budget to ensure excellent quality.

Traditionally, a company is able to control its online presence by driving its customers and prospects to its corporate website. For over 15 years, companies have been able to host a website, build a community in the form of a message board and customize the online experience for visitors to the max. Personalization actually has become quite sophisticated. Content can be adjusted to a particular audience and language preference is a given – language is determined from the visitor’s browser or selected by users and saved in cookies for future access. Visitors tend to expect the same behaviour on these new platforms.

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The Fuzzy Space Between Vision and Focus

Far too often, somewhere between the visions we conjure and the stuff necessary to realize our game-changing dreams, the magnificent work of the imagination becomes blurry and unrecognizable.

You know the drill. There is buy-in for a vision; goals and objectives are identified; planning completed and resources have been ear-marked.  Then something insidious happens: it comes disguised as a too-good-to-pass-up “opportunity” that demands immediate attention, or (often the case) as an even bigger, better manifestation of the original vision. And once this vicious cycle is set in motion the grandest of visions is almost always relegated to dreams of what might have been.

When it comes to focus, it is an unfortunate and problematic catch-22 that many entrepreneurs, innovators and yes, marketers, by nature see opportunity at every turn. For the glass-half-full leader, the reality is that conceiving a vision plays to a strength; maintaining focus often accentuates weakness.

Add to this the fact that in today’s marketplace good ideas are rarely enough to carry the day, and you’ve spelled Trouble (with a capital “T”) for many endeavors. Better mousetraps and newer/faster/more cost effective solutions are conceived on a regular basis. The few that make it to the market and win are either the byproduct of tenacious focus or pure luck. Ether one is good, but only one is conducive to planning.

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Lockheed Martin Launches Eureka Streams Open Source Project For Enterprise Social Networking

Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] today (July 26, 2010) launched the Eureka StreamsTM open source project for enterprise social networking. Eureka Streams helps knowledge workers make informed decisions by finding relevant colleagues and groups, following their streams of activity, and engaging in conversation. Eureka Streams represents a new communication experience for knowledge workers, empowering them to pick and choose the channels of news, information, and conversation that add the most value to their day-to-day work.

Over the past four years, Lockheed Martin has developed and deployed proprietary social media solutions across its own enterprise based on commercial off-the-shelf software. These solutions have enabled its employees to collaboratively develop and share content through such tools as blogs and wikis. Eureka Streams complements content-focused tools by providing a simple and fast communication experience knowledge workers are accustomed to outside the workplace. With Eureka Streams, enterprises can provide this experience to their employees in a secure environment.

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Does Your Personality Type Affect Your Social Media Success?

We’ve all heard of people described as Type A or Type B personalities. Type A’s are said to be impatient, controlling, ambitious and aggressive. They take their work seriously and stop at almost nothing to get it done. Type B personalities are the opposite: relaxed, easy-going and laid back. (Type As might call them lazy or unmotivated.)

You’ve probably considered your personality type at some point. But have you considered how your personality type affects your social media success?

Type A on Social Media

Type A’s are intense and hard-working people, so they likely approach social media accounts the same way. They may log in at the same time each day to post something thought-out and edited to perfection. They may take a systematic approach to growing connections and networking, adding 15 new Facebook friends every week or responding to 10 Twitter messages each day.

Type A personalities thrive on social media because they take their success seriously. In a world where many social media accounts go abandoned for weeks or even months at a time, Type A’s have no problem putting in the effort to update accounts regularly.
They may be turned off by social media’s casual atmosphere, where not everyone takes time to spell-check their status updates or respond to messages. If Type A’s vocalize complaints, they risk becoming unpopular.

Type B on Social Media

The laid-back nature of Type B’s is both a blessing and a curse when it comes to social media. Type B personalities usually fit right into social media’s casual, conversational atmosphere – if casual conversation is going on. They may also have a hard time getting their message heard.
“It appears that the more aggressive and outspoken you get, the more attention you get,” Frank Reed writes on his blog Frank Thinking About Internet Marketing . “I call this the Rush Limbaugh factor. In today’s world of ‘everyone is right. The bigger the bluster, the bigger the splash.”

Of course, Type B’s may be so laid-back that they don’t care about being heard through the din. Depending on the agenda, that may be fine. But Type B’s should approach social media with some agenda in mind; otherwise, social media may be a waste of time.

The Bigger Picture

Of course, any type of categorization is based on stereotypes. Your own personality – and your social media experience – is probably far more complex than the two described here. Use these insights as a springboard to better understanding your own social media behavior, including what you’re doing well and where you may need to improve.

How has your personality type affected your experience with social media? Or has it?

Renee Warren