Creative Concepts

1. Let’s make this more effective.
2. Let’s make this more entertaining.
3. Let’s make this easier to understand.
4. Let’s solve someone’s problem.
5. Let’s eliminate our redundancies.
6. Let’s thank someone who deserves it.
7. Let’s learn more about our customers.
8. Let’s learn more about ourselves.
9. Let’s ask “why?”
10. Let’s listen.

Photo attribution:

Not every company feels compelled to use social media.  But those who haven’t at least moved to establish their own online presence may be in for a surprise: it’s incredibly easy for someone else to do it for you — and not always with the best of intentions.

Case in point: Michael Werch wondered how long it would take the average corporation to realize that someone was pretending to be them online.  To find out, he began masquerading as the HJ Heinz Corporation on Twitter, mostly as an experiment to test the reflexes of modern business.  The result? Heinz noticed — two weeks later — and Twitter renamed Werch’s account to divest it of any connection to the company.

Werch’s confession in Ad Age has generated an interesting array of (mostly predictable) responses, including:

• The obvious lesson: Businesses must control and protect their online images, even if it means squatting on their own company names across multiple platforms (so enterprising individuals don’t beat them to it).
• The obvious question: Why did Heinz squash Werch’s account, rather than taking it over (or collaborating with him) and building upon the brand goodwill he’d already launched on their behalf?
• The counterpoint: Heinz is the kind of industry leader that “doesn’t need to use Twitter” and other web tools because their perceived impact is so negligible that doing so would be a waste of Heinz’s marketing dollars.
• The counter-counterpoint: Heinz may not need to use Twitter, but imagine the PR headache they’d be facing now if Werch hadn’t been a fan of the brand, but a whistleblower intent on divulging company secrets, questioning their business practices, etc.

Does every company need to use social media?  Of course not.  But just because your company doesn’t use social media, that doesn’t prevent someone else from adopting your company’s name — and, potentially, from damaging your brand.

If your company still isn’t sure about its own intentions toward Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and beyond, here’s a tip: someone in your corporate office should register your company’s name (and all its common derivatives) on all currently-relevant platforms, just in case.  You never have to use them, but you might sleep a little easier knowing that no one else can, either.

(If that tip sounds familiar, it’s probably because someone was telling you the same thing 15 years ago, only the topic was websites, not Twitter accounts.  Same logic, different era, and that logic never stops making sense.)

And, of course, a caveat: if someone really doesn’t like your company, nothing’s stopping them from ranting about you online.  But that kind of vitriol should be spewing from something other than your company’s “official” web presence.  (Plus, if you’ve registered your official presence on Twitter, etc., but your company just hasn’t found a reason to make use of it, there’s nothing like a PR catastrophe to get the engines running — and you don’t want to lose time playing catch-up then, do you?)

Or, asked another way: to whom is your marketing directed?

On one hand, maybe you’re convinced that influencing the influencers is your best bet.  Rather than spending money to reach an audience that isn’t prepared to act on your message, you’d rather focus on the tastemakers, innovators and icons whose behaviors create culture.  And if a person whom that culture trusts is willing to vouch for your product or service, that person’s own audience is more likely to believe your message than if it came from you personally.

On the other hand, some people don’t believe influencers actually exist.  They advocate a more fluid approach, in which your message (or your very product) is released in multiple versions.  Then, by tracking your audience’s responses, you can continually zero in on the version(s) that work best.

Which approach is the right approach?  The one that works for you.

Certain brands perform exceedingly well simply by targeting the tastemakers in the markets they’d like to penetrate.  But those influencers (if they exist) are highly sought-after by all brands, which means you need to stand far above the pack before they’ll ever notice you.

Other companies are experts at casting a wide net and refining their message based on which of its aspects are most resonant.  Yet this approach requires rigorous reporting and analysis of incoming data in order to clarify your own understanding of the public’s perception, as well as a willingness among your team to repeatedly tinker with what they feel may already be working well enough.

Neither method is “right” or “wrong,” but one of them is probably a better fit for you at the moment.  But before you can decide on the direction of your marketing, you need to understand two key facets of your own company:

• Are you more interested in appealing to the tastemakers or the masses?
• Which methodology is your team best-equipped to process and execute?

Once you know who you are, you’re much better prepared to communicate your assets to the people who most need to appreciate them: your customers.

It’s no secret that people learn more from their mistakes than they do from their successes.  Maybe that’s why we’re all so reluctant to share stories about our failures: it’s not that we’re embarrassed about “doing it wrong,” but we’re afraid that someone else will learn from our mistakes before we do.  (As if succeeding wasn’t already hard enough without giving the competition a free education!)

But social media is public media, which means new successes and failures happen every day, out in the open, and anyone who’s paying attention can follow along in real time.  Lauren Litwinka has done such a thing, compiling an insightful (and acid-tongued) list of companies who are “doing it wrong” on Twitter.

In Lauren’s case, “wrong” means “not making conversation a two-way street.”  She believes social media provides companies with valuable access to their customers’ desires and opinions, and squandering that two-way invitation with one-way marketing will alienate the very people you’re trying to reach.

How did these companies lose their way?

• Misunderstanding the way customers use these media channels.
• Failing to discern what kinds of information people consider valuable.
• Setting low or unreasonable expectations.
• Ignoring customer feedback (or lack thereof).
• Not implementing lessons to adjust their approach mid-stream.

But that doesn’t mean each of the companies Lauren cites are lost causes.  On the contrary, now that they’ve been told their execution could improve, they have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes.  And that makes the time and effort they’ve invested up ’til now every bit as valuable as it would be if it had led them to automatic success — and maybe moreso, since they now know for certain what won’t work.

Remember: there’s always value in making mistakes.  Just make sure you’re learning from them (before your competition does).

Hunting is about obtaining food.  Marketing is about obtaining sales.  Either way, you can’t eat unless you first understand how to use the proper tools.

A spear is a distance weapon.  You refine the tip until it’s razor sharp and guaranteed to cut through anything in its way.  Then you attach that point to a long, sturdy staff that’ll hold up under stress.

A spear is designed to be thrown.  It allows you to maintain a safe distance from your target, penetrate its defenses, and then drag your prized kill home to be devoured.

That’s traditional marketing.

A hook is an invitation.  It’s frequently adorned with something eye-catching, to help lure the attention of a passing target.  It can float in the current for a long time before it loses its edge.  And when a target does take an interest in the hook, then you’re able to reel it in.

That’s social marketing.

Both tools work.  Just make sure you know whether you’re hunting or fishing, because that spear might get lost in the river.

The Buzz Bin’s Mike Mulvihill kicks off the new year with an excellent observation about social media: the way companies obsess over “controlling the message” is strangling the industry.  In Mulvihill’s own words (emphasis mine):

I’d love to see a survey of how many of the 91 percent of companies using social media are failing miserably because they still just don’t get the fact that every employee is an ambassador, whether at the supermarket, a cocktail party, the kids soccer match or when active on a social media site. They trust their salesmen to represent the company unsupervised, but can’t trust their employees to use social media responsibly. Seems like there’s still a lot of growing up to be done in 2010.

Social media agencies have lamented clients’ unrealistic focus on “controlling the message” for years now.  (We’ve even chimed in on the topic ourselves, including a quote from Scott Monty that puts it all in appropriately absurd perspective.)  But no matter how many times companies are told that a free-flowing discussion about their business is the best thing that could happen to them, they still seem more comfortable spending money on ad campaigns designed to plant specific messages in the audience’s mind, rather than allowing their customers (and employees) to speak freely.

But what are companies so afraid of?

What could possibly be divulged by your employees that could give the public a worse impression of your business than the knowledge that you refuse to grant your employees the freedom to discuss your company?

On the other hand, when the public sees that you, the employer, value your team’s insights and trust them to behave responsibly, you set a standard that consumers (and other companies) appreciate.  The world is comprised of people, not facades.  And people like doing business with people, not images.

This year, why not grant your customers — and your employees — the freedom to speak openly about your brand?  At worst, you’ll discover some flaws worth correcting.  At best, you’ll learn what you really are doing right — and where to build for the future.

In Andrew Cherwenka’s recent case study, he explains how AT&T used Facebook to defend themselves against Verizon’s claims of a better 3G network,  and how that plan backfired when the very customers AT&T expected to rally to their defense instead fell silent while the conversation was dominated by Verizon fans.  (At one point, 89% of the sentiment on the forum was pro-Verizon, prompting one poster to comment, “You’re basically maintaining a fan page for Verizon.”)

Whoops.

Yet while Cherwenka is correct in surmising that the 2-way nature of the web has eroded a company’s ability to control the messaging surrounding their brand, there is one positive that AT&T should be taking away from this experience:

Now they know what their biggest problems are.

Granted, those problems may be technological in nature (like spotty cell coverage) or they may be matters of negative consumer perception.  That’s up to AT&T to decide (or admit).  But because AT&T has a record of what the public really thinks about its service, they can now choose to fix those problems head-on, OR they can choose to ignore them and hope the public eventually loses interest, which often happens.

Regardless of what AT&T chooses to do, your company can embrace this same lesson.  Yes, your social efforts may occasionally backfire.  Yes, the public may sometimes provide you with opinions and suggestions you’d rather not have to hear.  But this feedback is actually the most important information that you could hope to receive, because this is what helps you understand what you need to improve in order to grow as a company.

The better your product actually is, the more loyalty and evangelism you’ll see from your customers — and the more money you’ll be able to save on advertising to convince people you really are that remarkable.

As TechCrunch noted this week, Facebook has surpassed AOL as the fourth most-trafficked website on the planet.  And while that news may not seem particularly surprising to the millions of Facebook users, here’s the really astounding part:

AOL is still the fifth most-trafficked website on the planet.

Yes, the same AOL that most web-savvy surfers haven’t touched since pre-millennium bug days is still more popular than all but 4 other websites in existence.  That boggles the mind.

It also explodes the notion that online change happens at lightning speed.  Sure, sites like Facebook and Twitter have seen massive growth in recent years, but the numbers AOL enjoys are proof that not everyone is adapting to new web technologies at the same rate.  And if a dinosaur from the Internet’s formative years can still command such loyalty, it’s no wonder that so many businesses — and users — are slow to embrace “new” social media solutions.

So… what does this mean for your web marketing plan?

• Don’t presume everyone can be reached through one access point.
• Don’t abandon useful services the moment a shiny new alternative arrives.
• Don’t expect meaningful change to happen overnight.
• Don’t neglect the audience that’s slow to adapt.

Sometimes it seems like the entire Internet lives at the cutting edge.  And when you’re considering the potential of a new site, a new tool or a new way of doing things, it’s tempting to believe the whole world is right there with you.

Then you turn around and realize the dinosaurs aren’t as far behind as you imagined, and that rocketship you’ve been building has to be converted into a bridge so no one gets left behind.

There’s a great conversation happening on Amber Naslund’s blog, where she asks: What does the next generation of marketing professionals need to know?  The answers from her readers are practical, including:

• Critical thinking
• Storytelling
• Consumer behavior
• How to engage with multiple (and quickly-changing) demographics
• The difference between actual value and spam

All of which I agree with.  But Amber’s question stems from her observation that the field of marketing is changing dramatically thanks to the Internet — which means the rules you’re taught today may result in disaster tomorrow, when the tools you’re using (if not the entire playing field) changes.

So instead of tactics, marketers need to focus on strategies.

Tools always change.  Twitter, Facebook and Flickr were fictional* words a decade ago, and they may be cultural footnotes tomorrow.  Their rise and fall shouldn’t have anything to do with long-term consumer awareness of your brand, but what your brand stands for should.

Demographics always shift.  What the Baby Boomers wanted in the ’60s isn’t what they want today, and Facebook was a college hub before grandma sent you a friend request.  How people communicate may change rapidly, but what they value rarely does.

Make sure your brand is something consumers value, and the marketers will always have something to talk about — regardless of the tools.

* Yes, twitter has long been an actual word, but its meaning has most definitely changed since 2006.

Ever wonder if your messaging sticks with your audience?  Just ask your kids.

When we joined Cindi Bigelow on a trip to her alma mater (Boston College), we were blown away by just how many college students drink tea (we figured college was a serious coffee haven).  But even more surprising than the students’ taste for tea was how they developed their tea-drinking habits: it came from their families.

If you had told us beforehand that we’d find a random wave of passersby (none of the students were pre-selected) and almost all of them would have had a love of tea instilled in them by their parents, we would have said you were crazy.  Why?  Because of sterotypical preconceptions, like:

• Kids don’t listen to their parents
• Kids rebel
• Kids define their own personalities in opposition to family tradition
• College students have horrible eating habits
• College students live off caffeine

And so on.

Yet, if college students are willing to admit that their parents’ love of tea has rubbed off on them, what other bits of wisdom (or, conversely, what other bad habits) have you passed on to your kids?

Thanksgiving is right around the corner.  If you have students returning home from college — or if it’s you who’s heading home for the holidays — take a moment and find out which elements of your (or your parents’) messaging have survived the gap between the backyard and the dorm.  You may be surprised.

And you may learn a thing or two about the kinds of messages that last.