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August 03, 2008
July 16, 2008
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.
Flickr Creative Commons image by uberculture
July 08, 2008
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 (keep reading »)
May 21, 2008
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
April 23, 2008
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
April 15, 2008
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
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.
March 25, 2008
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
March 12, 2008
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
February 26, 2008
February 07, 2008
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.)
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