remarkable communication

Relationship Marketing Series #6, Connect With One Person

By Sonia Simone

Even though (with any luck) you're marketing to lots and lots of people, no one wants to be a faceless speck in a crowd.

Maybe it's a result of the industrial age. Yes, we like to be in tribes, but tribes are small, intimate things. A tribe might be 8 people or 80, but it's not 80,000. The greater the scale we have to deal with in our jobs, our commutes, our grocery stores, or even our churches, the more we look for one-to-one relationships.

We're born alone. (Even twins can't manage that one side-by-side.) And we all secretly think we have problems that no one else has. We want someone who really gets us. Someone who speaks to us, and just to us. Someone who listens to our problems and fears, and then makes those go away.

Know Who You're Talking To

Marketing 101 tells you to know your market. Too many marketers confuse that with demographics. "My customers are married women 26-40 with one or two children, who subscribe to Redbook and Parenting, and carry a MasterCard."

Demographics are collections of traits. They come in real handy if you're buying a mailing list or deciding where to advertise, but demographics aren't people. They're just a collection of patterns.

If you have something to sell to that demographic, you need to be thinking about Cynthia (who hates to be called Cindy), who's 33 and a little bored at work, has a four-year-old named Ben and a six-year-old named Ruby, reads Parenting even though it makes her feel guilty and her mom got her a subscription to Redbook but all she reads are the dessert recipes and articles about dieting, and yes she knows that makes no sense but she does it anyway, and yeah she has a MasterCard, because she got mad at the bank that issued her Visa so she cut it up.

Talk to One Person

Whether you're writing a blog or an email newsletter or a set of postcards or a yellow pages ad, you need to be thinking about Cynthia.

What can you help her out with? Why is your stuff the perfect match for her problems? Does your gym offer really great childcare, so she doesn't feel like a rat for parking her kids there for an hour? Does your product respect the fact that she's pulled in 20 directions as a working mother, and help clarify her choices so she can focus on what she needs to do? Does your carpet-cleaning service use nontoxic solvents, so she can quit worrying about poisoning her kids and the dog just so her mother-in-law will quit making that face when she comes over?

What's not working for Cynthia right now? How can you make that work better?

To get started on that conversation, I found a nice resource on a copywriters' forum called the 60-minute naked truth sales letter. Even if you never intend to use any kind of sales letter, the things you'll discover with this exercise will help you find the right messages for Cynthia. You'll get a good, high-level grasp on what you really need to let her know about.

How Do You Find Cynthia?

You'll be able to find Cynthia by paying attention. First, make sure Cynthia loves your stuff. She's your perfect customer. She'll buy anything and everything you have, because your solutions line up exactly with her problems.

If you realized you've imagined a Cynthia who's just not that into you, start from scratch. Your Cynthia needs to be the person who loves what you do and how you do it, can afford your products and services, and is someone you can figure out how to reach. (In other words, you could buy a mailing list of Cynthias, or you can find a joint venture partner who's got an email list of Cynthias.)

Talk to the customers you have, especially the ones who love you. (You also want to pay close attention to the ones who hate you, but that's another exercise.) What's going on with them? What's freaking them out right now? How do they feel about the economic situation? What's going on in their personal relationships? Is this election a big deal for them? Do they think it's going to change things, and if so, is that good or bad, from their point of view?

If you've got a bricks and mortar operation, spend a lot of time on the floor hanging out with customers. Watch them. Listen to them talk to one another. Ask them questions.

If you're online, go to forums where your customers hang out, and listen to what they gripe about. Set up Google alerts about the kinds of problems you solve. Send out surveys, to both existing customers and potential customers.

Make it very easy to give you feedback, and pay close attention. Look for patterns. Try to figure out the underlying problems and worries that are beneath people's words.

Speak Her Language

One great thing about all this paying attention is that it lets you discover the language of your customers. Maybe they talk like Katharine Hepburn, and maybe they talk like Roseanne Barr. You've got to listen before you can find that out.

Use the phrases, metaphors and examples that your customers use. Describe their problems the way they do. When they give you testimonials, don't clean up little grammar errors or odd turns of phrase. Keep as much of the original language as you can. A little imperfection shows that it's real.

Obviously, to make this work, you have to get to a point where that language is natural to you. Parody makes for lousy advertising. If you're Roseanne and your customer is Katharine, find someone who's more like your customer to read through your stuff and help with the tone. You can't make a real connection in a language that's utterly foreign to you.

One giant advantage you have over Coca-Cola or Johnson & Johnson is that you can create a true sense of personal connection with your customers. Not every customer wants that, but you can find the ones who do.

The worst mistake small-business marketers make is thinking their market is anyone with a pulse. Find your Cynthia, and just write for her. (Even the non-Cynthias will respond to this, because your tone will be personal and genuinely friendly.) Have a cup of coffee with Cynthia when you sit down to write a blog post or an email newsletter article. Let her know what you can help her with today.

When you spend your time thinking about what else you could be doing to make Cynthia's life better, you'll start to see some very exciting things happen in your marketing.

So who's your Cynthia? Let us know in the comments . . .

Related Reading

• The Remarkable Communication Relationship Marketing Series

If you found this post useful, subscribe to my free email class on creating better content!

Flickr Creative Commons image by geeknerd99

Email Marketing: How Not to Be a Dirty Rotten Spammer

By Sonia Simone

Do you remember when you were a kid and crossed the street without looking? Remember how mad your mom got? Even if you were within your legal rights and crossing in a crosswalk, it just takes one oncoming car that doesn't see you and you're flatter than Wile E. Coyote.

The "official" definition of spam is unsolicited bulk email with a commercial and/or malicious intent. The U.S. 2004 CAN-SPAM law makes it illegal to send commercial email with a misleading header, without a postal address, without a way to unsubscribe, or if the addresses were harvested in various nefarious ways.

The definitions vary somewhat. But theoretically, if you're sending email marketing to someone who asked for it and you're not defrauding them, it's not spam.

The Aunt Frances guide to spam

Now go ask your Aunt Frances what spam is. "Oh good lord, those annoying messages they send me from . . . . "

You can finish that sentence with any one of a hundred companies. Amazon, eBay, GoDaddy, the Thanksgiving turkey farm, the list goes on and on. Companies that may have legal permission to send her email, because she agreed to it once upon a time, or because she's already a customer.

Aunt Frances might be hip enough to have registered CrazyAuntFrances.com with GoDaddy, but she doesn't know or care about official definitions. If it's getting on her nerves, it's spam.

She won't unsubscribe (because someone told her she'll get more spam if she does), but she will triumphantly mark it as spam. Email providers will start to look darkly on the sender. If a high enough percentage of subscribers mark messages as spam, messages start to go automatically to junk folders even when there are raving fans waiting breathlessly for the latest message.

And some email providers will just throw your messages away.

Sure, the senders are following the letter of the law, but they're still road kill.

If you're GoDaddy, this is a manageable problem. If you're a small business and you just want to send nice stuff to your customers, it is not.

You've got to keep Aunt Frances happy

There are two definitions of "spam." One involves a complex set of legal regulations and loopholes that apply to email marketing. The other is "crappy email I don't want."

If you want to send out email to more than a handful of customers, you need to live up to both standards. Not only do you have to follow the letter of the law (if you don't and you're emailing from the U.S., the fine is $11,000), you have to be better than the law. Just like white hat SEO, there are best practices for white hat email marketing.

Here are a couple of tips for being the Gary Cooper of email.

Make yourself useful

You're already working toward this in all of your communication, right? If everything you send out benefits your readers, they're a lot less likely to get pissed at you and click the dreaded spam button.

Every email you send needs to have something valuable for readers. Otherwise, why are you sending it? Just to pitch your stuff and benefit yourself? That's not going to work, now is it?

(On the other hand, you don't have to be afraid to sell. Unless you're running a list that has a purely philanthropic intent, if you want readers to buy, go ahead and ask them to. Just don't be an ass about it.)

Honor what you were originally given permission to do

Email marketing is permission marketing. The idea is, you convince someone to say, "yes, please market to me." Then you go ahead and do that.

You don't ask permission to send information about auto maintenance, then use that permission to send marketing messages about escort services. Uncool.

And if you promise useful tips and tricks, you've got to make about 80% of your content tips and tricks. Yes, you can sell, but there have to be enough goodies to make the sales message palatable.

Make sure they remember you exist

Just this week I had three promotional emails sent to my Gmail account. If I was a normal customer, I would just have marked them as spam, because I can't for the life of me remember signing up for this list.

The first antidote to this is to mail your list often enough so that they won't forget about you. You must email new subscribers immediately after they sign up, and make enough of an impression that they'll still remember who you are two months from now.

Use your emailer's autoresponder function to get a prompt string of useful messages into every email box on your list. I'd suggest a sequence of at least four or five useful messages to make a real impression. I'm partial to a ten-message sequence, myself.

(This happens to be why I prefer HTML to plain text email--you can use colors and a simple but distinct graphic style to help fix your identity in your readers' consciousness. You can also include your photo, which helps an awful lot. These don't take the place of useful content, but they do help people remember you later.)

If you're still getting marked as a spammer

If you're still having trouble with folks mistakenly marking you as a spammer, go ahead and jog their memory about when and why they signed up for your list in the first place. The king of bulk email providers, Aweber, has a great tip. Create an automatic signature that reminds the person when they signed up, what the list is about, and what to do if they don't want to get it any more. It would look something like this:

You're getting this email because you subscribed on June 17, 2007 to Sonia Simone's marketing tool kit. If you don't want to get these messages any more, just click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the page and you'll be immediately removed from my list.

Aweber has an automatic field with that sign-up date, which makes it simple. If your email provider doesn't, the technique still works fine without the date.

If you're getting a lot of false spam clicks, put that at the top of each message. If you're just getting a few, put it at the bottom under your signature.

That little reminder is often enough to jog Aunt Frances's memory that she did, at one time, want to receive your 101 Meatball Recipes newsletter. And it helps her feel reassured that gangs of email marauders will not come down on her if she goes ahead and unsubscribes.

Lots more free info on email marketing

As it happens, I've been cooking something up for you. I'm putting together a ten-part free email class on creating great content for e-newsletters. (Virtually every lesson applies to blog content as well, so even if email marketing isn't your thing, feel free to sign up.)

I won't clog your email box up with crap, and of course I will never rent or sell your information to anyone. (And neither should you. It's a terrible business practice.)

One more thing: if you've already signed up for my ten-part marketing tool kit, this is a whole new class. There's no duplicated content, so feel free to sign up for both!

Enter your name and email address below to get started. See you there!

(Important note: You'll have to confirm that you want to get the email class or you won't receive it. Once you submit your information, you'll get an email very quickly asking you to confirm.)

Flickr Creative Commons image by uberculture

How to Get Your Employees to Sink Your Business

By Sonia Simone

A certain business guru has written a book about how to terrorize your employees. He's promoting it with glee, chortling about the idiocy of "nice" bosses and the importance of bullying employees into following your orders without question.

I've worked for some variation on this guy a couple of times. Any effort at conversation about alternatives is seen as naivete or, worst of all sins, wimpiness. What these guys did before Tim Allen invented that annoying whuffing caveman sound, I don't know.

(Not that they're always guys. This is an equal opportunity for stupidity.)

These are the bosses who see the workplace as a war. The only thing that works is to beat, brutalize, and belittle the enemy (their employees) until the dumb bastards actually get something done. Employees are an opposing force to be crushed by any means necessary. Employees are a colossal impediment to actually getting any work done or making any money.

Employers who subscribe to this model are right. Their employees are, in fact, a colossal impediment to getting any work done or making any money.

Avoid communicating with people you hate and fear

It should be obvious to anyone who is paying attention that hatred and fear are anathema to success. They make it impossible to see real problems because you're so busy battling fake ones.

They clench your thinking until you're too mentally constipated to come up with anything that makes sense, much less something remarkable.

There are two important reasons the employment-is-war model doesn't work. The first is that anyone worth hiring will promptly leave, leaving you with a bunch of malingerers who are too lazy to find a decent job. The second is that you remove any possibility that someone could teach you something. Which means you start getting stupider.

Very few of us are in a business environment so devoid of competition that we can afford to get stupider.

The fatal mistake of willful stupidity

I once worked for a CEO who refused to use Monster.com because he claimed to have read a Wall Street Journal article that said their algorithms weren't good. Mind you, this is someone whose secretary printed all of his email. He didn't know an algorithm from a peanut butter sandwich. And the odds that he actually interpreted the article correctly are, um, not high.

Attempts to diplomatically point this out to him (at that time, it was really hard to make a decent hire in IT without Monster) were worse than futile. They branded us as troublemakers. We still gave a damn, and that made us dangerous.

We were employees; thus, we were the enemy. It was inconceivable that we could give this CEO any advice that would get work done and make the company some money.

Are you surprised to hear that it took him less than a year to run the company into the ground? It didn't surprise any of us either. Some of us were fortunate enough to watch it burst into flames from a safe distance.

Of course they spit in your food

When you define your employees as the enemy, the ones with any spark of life at all will take you up on it.

If you're lucky they'll call you bad words and quit. If you're not lucky, they'll be rude to your customers, cheat on their time cards, and spend their entire waking hours figuring out how to screw your company. 40 hours a week is a lot of time to think. Enough time to come up with some pretty effective strategies.

If you honestly think you can come up with enough police state measures--enough recording phone calls and hidden cameras and secret shoppers--to confound your employees' creativity, you are the one who is woefully naive.

If you're trying to create remarkable relationships with your organization's customers and you don't create them first with your employees, your gig doesn't stand a chance. Shut it down now and save everyone the trouble.

Some of you might be thinking, Why bother with this message now? Companies don't work that way any more. This is the 21st century, everyone knows now how important employees are.

If you believe that, ask your friends who are still stuck in veal-pen cubicles. Office Space was not a parody. It was hardly even an exaggeration.

If you're employed in an organization that subscribes to this kind of bully boy nonsense, find another job as quickly as you can. (You're probably looking--look harder.)

And if you're in the boss's seat and find yourself tempted to let a guru talk you out of being a "wimp" and into being an overseer, ask yourself, Would getting a lot dumber help this organization grow more quickly?

Then find another guru.

If you want to read about doing it right, the classic management book Peopleware is a fine place to start. You can probably end there as well, actually.

(Hopefully unnecessary disclaimer, this post in no way describes anyone I currently work with!)

5 Recipes for Success (and 1 for Tomatoes)

By Sonia Simone

Seth Godin did a great post on how to read a business book, in which he pointed out that good business books are 95% motivation and 5% recipes for acting on that motivation. My own struggle with Godin's books is that I come out of them motivated as hell, but then I lose steam trying to translate the big idea into a recipe I can act on.

In fact, you could probably classify a lot of what I do as writing recipes people can use to act on the motivation they get from brainy strategists like Seth Godin or Tom Peters.

Anyway, here are some terrific recipes for your own professional and communication success. Plus one for when you have not-that-great tomatoes, because hey, we've all been there.

• Cold Calling: Destined for Failure. If you're doing any cold calling, this great post gives specific suggestions for tactics that will get better results with less pain. It's also an excellent example of how to do a little seat-of-your-pants marketing through conversation, also known as the anti-elevator-pitch.
  
  
• The Pocket-Sized Guide to Blogging. Skelliewag hasn't posted much lately, but she's back with an excellent comprehensive (and succinct) guide to what makes a blog work well. Follow this advice and you will see results in your blog. Nice to see her return!
  
  
• How to Handle Customer Email. Terrific post about the right and wrong way to handle email from your customers. Yes, it's common sense, except no one is doing it. You could be.
  
  
• If you ever have to present information to anyone, allow me to grab you by the lapels and recommend that you pick up the book Beyond Bullet Points. While you're waiting for Amazon to deliver it, check out the slide show How to Avoid Death by Powerpoint, which will whet your appetite and get you thinking in the right direction. You don't have to actually use PowerPoint to use this--it's a killer recipe for any kind of talk, speech or presentation you might make.
  
  
• While we're on the topic of PowerPoint, go see James Hipkin's post about the Thread of Steel. He happens to tie it to PowerPoint, but it's an important exercise for any communication--an ad, a newsletter article, a blog post.
  
  
• You know how you get tomatoes from the store and they look like they will be amazing, and then they're . . . not amazing? The charming and witty food writer Casey Ellis has a solution. The Tomato Wars.

Creative Commons Flickr image by jackie-dee

What Do You Really Do?

By Sonia Simone

Ittybiz is one of my two or three favorite blogs, and one of the few I read religiously every day. She helps small businesses with their marketing, and she has an amazing ability to cut through people's self delusion and help them figure out what they really do.

Naomi gave us five questions to answer--privately for ourselves, and publicly for our customers. So far I've resisted the "meme" phenomenon (IMO not the right word for it, but I can't think of a better one, damn it), but I liked these questions a lot, and answering them did help me see some things more clearly.

If you have any kind of regular connection with customers--a blog, a Squidoo lens, a newsletter--you might consider answering these questions to get to the heart of what you do.

(If you blog these or put them on the Web in some way, let me know with a trackback or a comment and I'll post a link so we can all swing by and get to know you better.)

What’s your game? What do you do?
I'm a shrink for businesses--both big businesses and small ones. I help them build better relationships with their customers by creating better communication.

Why do you do it? Do you love it, or do you just have one of those creepy knacks?
I love it and I have one of those creepy knacks. Somewhere along the line I got good at seeing through to what folks were really good at, and helping them put that into words.

Who are your customers? What kind of people would need or want what you offer?
Folks who hate marketing but don't want their business to die.

What’s your marketing USP? Why should I buy from you instead of the other losers?
The kind of marketing I do doesn't require you to choose between your soul and the success of your business. You can have both--in fact, that's where you find the greatest successes. I can help you with that.

What’s next for you? What’s the big plan?
I'm putting together some products that will help people learn effective, ethical marketing for themselves. Straight info--no sleazy, unethical tricks and no feel-good fluff. My motivation for this has been my notable lack of success in working 48-hour days to keep up with all of the people I want to help.

Flickr Creative Commons image by ehnmark

Oh, Grandma, What Big Lies You Tell

I recently heard a recording of a certain successful Internet marketer. The recording was made some years ago, before he got quite so successful. He was telling a seminar crowd how good he was at the "sincerity thing."

He didn't quite come out and say he was faking his sweet, goofy, ordinary guy style. But let's just say that the fast-talking guy running through his bag of techniques to sell ice to Eskimos didn't exactly strike me as Andy Griffith.

Is it working for him?

It seems to be. The guy is doing extremely well even if you assume he's inflating his income by 10 times (Which I do). People want his product, which is probably perfectly ok. The schtick is working.

Does that mean you should do the same? Study techniques on how to fool people? Learn to be a better trickster and go buy a $1,995 information product (with a follow-up continuity program, of course, so they can keep dinging you for a few hundred bucks a month) on how to create more effective sheep's clothing?

I guess that's up to you.

There's a sucker born every minute
I notice that a lot of the internet marketing folks (many of whom seem comfortable with the title "guru") have started to quote P.T. Barnum as a business mentor. Googling around, I find that Barnum apparently did not actually ever say the quote he is best known for, "There's a sucker born every minute." His business rival did, after Barnum out-faked the rival's fake and drew throngs to pay tickets for a literally gigantic hoax.

Barnum made a tidy career out of tricking the gullible. If that's the kind of game you enjoy, I'm not going to be able to talk you out of it. (Anyway, you probably quit reading this blog a long time ago because I'm such a goody-two-shoes.)

When Godin's All Marketers Are Liars came out, a lot of literal-minded people took him at his word. We all kind of believe that title anyway, right? Godin told us it was ok--in fact, desirable--to sell a product by telling fabulous stories of, say, fossilized stone giants unearthed from ancient burial grounds. As long as people didn't feel abused or angry when they found out it was just a story. (That was the part a lot of folks seem to have missed.)

There's a place for fairy tales
Fairy tales are fine. Fairy tales are nice, actually. They bring a lot of pleasure and sometimes they tell a deeper truth. Fairy tales and stories are what make us human beings and not clever hairless monkeys.

Swindles suck. Cons suck. People who snicker at the stupidity of their customers suck. And in the new wired world, swindles and lies always get found out. When the crowd comes looking for you with the tar & feathers, I won't stand in their way.

I will always encourage you to be storytellers and spinners of fabulous yarns. In the same breath, I strongly discourage you from emulating the crowd of big bad wolves wearing grandma's cotton bonnet. If you keep company with wolves, you'll get eaten up eventually, no matter how much money they might tell you they make.

What a Toddler Easter Egg Hunt Can Teach You About Success

By Sonia Simone

My little boy went to his first easter egg hunt last weekend. Racing around to pick up cheap plastic toys filled with gross candy is his idea of a wonderful time, and he enjoyed himself thoroughly.

As usual, I discovered myself painfully out of the mainstream. While everyone else's parents were mainly there to make sure their kid got a whole bunch of easter eggs, my main goal was to encourage my kid not to steamroll anybody else's kids.

He did fine on the easter egg front--he got four, which when you're 2 1/2 is a great haul. But the whole event got me thinking about how people view success, especially material success.

A lot of us look at jobs, wealth, and material stuff as being like that easter egg hunt. There's a finite number of eggs on the ground. We're surrounded by a large group of amoral, voracious toddlers primed for action. When we get the signal to go, we race around snatching up as many eggs as possible. And we don't take any time to notice who we elbow out of the way, because when they're gone, they're gone.

There is actually another way to play the game.

Make your own eggs
During my little boy's nap, I hid some more eggs around the house. I found some nicer metal ones that he could play with for a long time. (He has long had a weird fascination with easter eggs.) I put better stuff in them, stuff that he was actually interested in.

(Off topic: What kind of idiot puts Laffy Taffy in eggs for a toddler hunt? Note to all you easter egg hunt planners out there: toddlers are not physically able to eat Laffy Taffy.)

When you're freaking out because the good stuff seems scarce--and maybe even not very good--and your competition looks overwhelming, consider how you might be able to step out of the game.

Instead of applying for jobs, make up a job and pitch it. Instead of jockeying with competitors selling the same junk you do, and letting Wal*Mart annihilate all of you on price, come up with something entirely new to do.

Make something no one else knows how to make. Do something no one else knows how to do. Create interesting conversations around that. Develop relationships with customers who become raving fans and bring their friends in for more of what you do.

Laffy Taffy is highly overrated. Its only benefit is to keep your competition busy chewing on nonsense while you make something cool.

Step out of everyone else's game and make one of your own. It's a lot more fun, and the goodies are better as well.

Related reading: Nice Seth Godin riff on this idea from March 31

Flickr Creative Commons image by booleansplit

Are We There Yet?

Have you ever signed up for an interesting-looking freebie online, only to regret it within 48 hours as you were deluged with offers to buy whatever stuff that particular individual was selling?

You know the kind I mean. They make their first pitch, ok cool, fair enough.

Then they follow it up. "Mr. Fancypants, did you get my last email?!?!?!" Three or four times a day you'll get some version of "Did you buy it yet? How about now? Now? Now? Now?"

If you bring this up with the guys who employ this particular tactic, they invariably give you a withering look and tell you, "I do it because it works." And I'm sure, on some level, it does. They've done enough testing to know that the 19th message probably squeezes out an additional 1/16th of 1 percent. For some business models, that's enough to "work"--at least on paper.

However, if you keep talking, you'll find out that your pest-based marketer hasn't tested a real alternative--the gradual development of a thoughtful, trust-based relationship. The marketer hasn't tested talking to customers like they were friends whose opinions he valued. The marketer hasn't tested a sequence that delivers genuine value over time, and not just a one-shot freebie special report or video. The marketer typically has no sense of the lifetime value of any customer other than the 1 percent who, for whatever reason, will buy anything this guy offers if they get hit up often enough.

(I'm not saying that some repetition doesn't have a place. Messages, especially email, slip through the cracks. And almost all of us procrastinate. A few well-timed nudges are a good idea. But apply the road trip test. If you were ten and in the back seat of your dad's car, how tempted would he be to pull over and refuse to drive any farther until you quit whining?)

Are you creating true fans?
Like everyone else in the metaverse, I really like what Kevin Kelly had to say about 1,000 true fans. That's the approach I've been advocating in this blog, in the work I do with customers, in my day job, and in the super secret marketing project I work on in what I laughingly call my "free time." It's the approach I try to take as a parent and a friend.

It's not about limiting your community to some arbitrary number, whether it's 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000. It's about showing yourself to be trustworthy. It's about delivering exceptional value and an exceptional relationship in a way that feels personal and respectful. It's about turning "share of customer" metrics into human loyalty and advocacy and passion.

As people get more and more weary of the clutter and noise, it's going to get harder to squeeze out those last few fractions of a percentage point with 10 or 20 more pieces of spam. Most people won't even unsubscribe, they just send you directly to their junk folder.

If you're running a permission campaign, allow me to make a suggestion. Spend less time on ways to bleed that last percentage point dry, and more time what you can do to create a meaningful relationship with the other 99%.

Flickr Creative Commons image by makelessnoise

Relationship Marketing Series #5: Pay Attention

By Sonia Simone

Remember we talked about my friend Jon's dictum: "Show up, pay attention, don't lie?" I've already talked about showing up; today, I'll share a few thoughts on paying attention.

There's hardly anyone who won't benefit from spending more time on this. It's the cornerstone of at least one major world religion, and the watchword for everyone from mothers of toddlers to The Beatles. The subject is too vast for any one post to cover--I could probably write a daily blog called "Remarkable Attention." (Which would be kind of cool.)

So I'll pick out a few aspects of attention that I think are important, but give some thought to how paying better attention could make your own project work better. Put your focus (attention) on it and I guarantee you'll find something.

It's not about you
Have you ever considered what it is that drives you nuts about your friend who never pays attention to a word you say? What's she paying attention to? If she's making you nuts, I'm betting that it isn't NASCAR or the Democratic primaries or her interprative dance career she's putting all her attention on; it's herself.

We can't stand people who are so wrapped up in themselves that they can't pay attention to us. We want someone to tune into our nonstop mental radio talk show, not their own. Being self-centered is a little like Dorothy Parker's observation about the rich: "I hate almost all rich people, but I think I'd be darling at it." We all think our own issues and concerns and preoccupations are important, or at least endearing, but we can't stand the same self-centeredness in anyone else.

Like it or not, that's what you're dealing with in your customers. If your company is so enraptured with your own policies, rules, challenges, crises, concerns and problems that you're not paying attention to your customers, you are doomed. Wal*mart can probably continue to get away with it--you can't. (Here's a pithy and very low-tech example of the right way to approach things.)

When you get complaints, feedback, and other useful information from customers, instead of immediately launching into all the reasons you can't do that here, learn to SHUT UP AND LISTEN. Remember the cardinal rule of marketing: It's not about you, it's about the people who fund your payroll. Learn how to put aside any defensiveness--whether it's your own or your employees'--to effectively pay attention to feedback when you're lucky enough to get it.

I'm not saying you have to (or are able to) fix every problem and resolve every complaint. But if you don't listen carefully and pay attention to grousing and complaints, even when they're irritating, you'll lose out on the opportunity to make some highly useful changes. And somewhere out there, you've got a competitor who will make them.

Tune in
It's good to get a little obsessed with how your customers respond to you. This means you've got to have some way to measure all of your communication. What percentage of your email list is actually opening your e-newsletter? How many are clicking through? When they do click through, what kind of stuff attracts them? What services or products do your customers respond to most strongly? What kind of language and tone seem to be working best to reach them? What kinds of offers get them out of procrastination mode and into action?

There are a lot of books and blogs and consultants who want to give you all that information without your having to measure it. If you have perfectly standardized customers who are exactly average, that will work well for you. Are your customers exactly average? Are anyone's?

If you get in the habit of asking tons of questions and then figuring out how to measure the answers, you'll start to notice when something works especially badly or especially well. The act of keeping an eye on customer response will naturally provide the right directions for change and growth. Keep tweaking and testing, and keep measuring the results, and you'll find yourself doing more of the right things.

Ask for more information
Whatever kind of organization you have, you can find ways to serve your customers better. One of the smarter ways to do that is to ask them.

Big companies, small companies and microbusinesses can all benefit from creating a regular survey program to ask their customers how it's going. Big companies use fancy, expensive survey companies, but even a tiny business can set up a survey using cheapo tools like Survey Monkey.

How do your customers feel about that nifty (expensive) improvement you just made? Do they even know about it? Does it solve a problem they cared about? How's their relationship with your customer service people? What do they think about your policies? What do they wish you offered that you don't now?

A good survey program measures two major themes--how happy people are with various aspects of your business, and how much those aspects matter to them. So if they don't give your office hours high marks but those hours aren't actually all that important to them, you don't need to put that on the top of your list. Paying attention to what's important to your customer, as well as to what they like and what they don't, will help you prioritize improvements to provide the greatest value.

Paying attention is one of those things (like most of this series) that is easy to say and think about, but hard to do. It's worth it. Push yourself to pay better attention to your customers (and while you're at it, employees, if you have them). I predict you'll start seeing some amazing results in a surprisngly short time.

Related Reading:

• Relationship Marketing Series #1: Create a Human Connection
• Relationship Marketing Series #2: Don't Be a Bad Boyfriend
• Relationship Marketing Series #3: Come Out of the Closet
• Relationship Marketing Series #4: Show Up

Make Compassion a Competitive Advantage

Image by mape_s

CSR is the hot new acronym in corporate PR, standing for Corporate Social Responsibility. Essentially, the idea translates into companies taking care of issues other than their own immediate financial interests--the environment, worker safety, the health of surrounding communities, etc. It's certainly not a new idea, but it's gaining a lot more attention lately.

Like most corporate fads, CSR is typically about 90% spin, but there are companies that are doing important work to make the world better (while making themselves plenty of money). The same techniques that work for giant companies will work even better for small, lean organizations with a commitment to ethical business practices.

What kind of programs can you run?
The simplest way to get started is to donate a stated portion of your income to an organization that resonates with your customers' values. (For example, I donate 10% of my copywriting, consulting and editing income to Smiletrain.) You can donate a portion of your gross, a portion of your profits, a percentage of the proceeds for a particular product, whatever works for you.

You can come up with a little more talk value if you physically engage in something that tells a good story. Build a house with Habitat. Cook a meal for a soup kitchen. Pay your employees for their volunteer time working at charity marathons (hopefully while they're wearing your company hat or t-shirt). If you can imagine photographs of your participation appearing in your local paper, it's a good story. (Speaking of photographs, make sure you capture some!)

You can also pledge your company's commitment to some worthwhile large project--maybe building a library for Room to Read. Or you could sponsor a child or children through one of the many great charities (World Vision is one I like) that do that. Be sure to let your customers know how the project (or child!) is coming along.

Design your program for talk value
Whether you're a large organization or a small one, you want your efforts to be a good world citizen to get talked about. This is a lousy time for modesty. The nice thing is, updates on your charitable work make a great excuse to get in touch with your customers (and the press). And you should feel free to add additional information such as a sale or other offer that brings customers to your door.

Your communication will work best if the effects of your program are concrete and measurable. Look for either a number or a human story. ("Our hybrid delivery vehicles save 40,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions every year.") If they're not concrete and measurable, why are you doing them exactly? It's find to have some "fuzzy" components about respect and values, but make sure you can back that up with results and numbers.

Try to focus your company's efforts on a theme or an individual charity that resonates with what you do. If you're in the construction industry, helping the homeless makes a great theme. (There might even be some good donations in kind that you can make.) If you have a beauty salon, you might consider a charity like Smiletrain that helps the disfigured.

Here's a test of your program's talk value: imagine one of your customers talking with a friend about it. The "My dry cleaner uses silicone-based solvents instead of perchloroethylene" conversation probably isn't going to happen. But "I have a great dry cleaner, and they only use environmentally-friendly stuff" might work pretty well.

Remember to give your customers the language and story points to get out there and talk you up to other people. You'll never say anything about yourself that will be as powerful as what other people can say about you.

It should go without saying, but make sure you're not "greenwashing." It's perfectly ok if your contribution or project is small, but make sure it's authentic and that you feel good about all of the details.

Don't be a nag
Like all communication with your customers, you're here to serve their needs, not yours. It's usually a terrible idea to hit your customers up for donations to your favorite charity. (You can make an exception if that contribution can be used as a payment in full for one of your products.) Contributions are an intensely personal thing. Just do what you do, talk about it in a compelling way, and let the customers who resonate with it respond in their own way. Think of your CSR program as a way to help your customers feel even better about doing business with you, and leave it at that.

Focus on what matters to your customers
Different customers will respond to different kinds of stories. If your customers are women with small kids, find a project that helps poor mothers--and tell your story in a way that brings out your customers' empathy for those women, that puts your customers in the shoes of the people you're helping.

On the other hand, if your clients are CEOs, most of them probably won't put themselves in the place of the homeless--but they may be very receptive to messages about helping the less fortunate. Different story approaches will resonate with different people.

You will, by the way, have at least one customer who will ask "If I don't want to make a donation, can I get a discount?" Smile very nicely and say, "Sorry, that's not how we do business."

Unless you know your customers are very passionate about the environment, you'll usually come up with a more powerful message if your CSR efforts benefit people. Like every animal species, we're biased in favor of our own kind. There's a reason we've reached a tipping point about environmental awareness--it's because so many people can see that global warming doesn't just affect spotted owls. Try to find a human story of individual people who benefit from what you do, and don't be shy about telling that story in vivid detail. (There are a lot of environmental projects that also benefit people--if you want some ideas, visit the WILD Foundation's site.)

Failing that, loveable animal species actually work pretty well too--dolphins, great apes, abandoned pets, etc. Someone should benefit in a way that makes your customers feel good. If your project primarily benefits an endangered centipede, you won't get a lot of customers thanking you for doing such important work.

And of course, consider the political implications of your particular project. Understand who your customer is, what they value, and how they will react to the work you're doing. You should go ahead and do anything you feel strongly about, but don't do it without at least thinking through your customers' reactions.

Feeling guilty about "benefiting" from charitable work?
Get over it. Think of it this way: the more of us who can "do well by doing good," the more attractive it is for others to start pitching in. Leave your hair shirt at home and just get on with it.

Understand that you will almost certainly face some criticism on those grounds. The same argument holds. Doing business without giving back is not morally superior to blending the needs of your business with the needs of the greater society. Not everyone can be Mother Teresa. (Even Mother Teresa found it pretty tough going.)

(This post was inspired by another headline challenge issued by Brian over at Copyblogger. This is a great exercise for sharpening up your own headlines, and whatever you're writing, your headline carries 80% of the impact. As you can see from this post, what you come up with might be pretty far from the original headline source.)