Marketing with Mike Volpe

To catch up, read the article Why Pampers Diaper Fail is a Lesson in Marketing Transparency to get the back story and the updates in the article Pampers Steps up Digital, Social Media Efforts.  Here are my thoughts...

Pampers does not have a communications problem as much as a product development problem.

• Change is BAD for products with a high emotional quality to them, and diapers are for babies and people are very emotional about babies.  There is a huge risk in changing products for babies, even if you improve them.
• You can't tell people what to think anymore in TV ads about your product or even by getting 3 magazines to endorse your product.  You can't fix a poor product with good marketing anymore.
• P&G's product development cycle is famous and studied in business schools.  But, it was developed in the era of one-way broadcast media.  Customers were told what to think by a few TV stations, and had no way of communicating effectively with each other and product ratings and feedback didn't exist.  The P&G product development process is no longer relevant in an age where things move much faster, and customers have much more control and are much easier to involve in your development.

What should Pampers / P&G do now?

Change their product development process.  Get rid of the 2-3 year cycle.  Get rid of the focus groups.  Create "P&G Labs" which works on experimental products.  If people buy them, they know they are experimental and might be cool or might suck.  Bring customers into "P&G Labs" and co-develop products with them.  If you get customers feedback really early, and be more public about the process, people will respect it, and get more involved.  They will also become advocates.  Then, after the product launches and leaves P&G Labs, if someone says they don't like the product, all the customers involved will tell them they are crazy and tell them the 20 reasons why this product is better.  And P&G won't have to say a thing.

If they had done something like this, the launch of Pampers Dry Max would have been very different.  

I am a guest speaker on a webinar (right NOW) with InsideView and Customer Think and "Customer 2.0" and the role of inbound marketing with customer 2.0.

Slides are below and you can tune in here.

 

 

This is a guest post by Nick Gundry, who is a co-founder of Smartagious.com, co-founder of Social Media Club Fresno, web strategist and social media enthusiast. He has been working professionally in the web industry for over 12 years in various positions round the world and is currently residing in Fresno, CA.

It's clear that over the past couple of years Twitter, the darling of the tech and media industry, has taken the tech world by storm. While it's not the giant Facebook has become, it's importance in the evolution of social media and the synaptic web has been cemented forever.

I signed up for Twitter on November 13, 2007. I'll be honest it took me a while to see the value. In those first few months I sent very few tweets. That all changed the day I loaded up a Twitter client on my Blackberry and connected my Twitter profile to my Facebook account. As soon as I was mobile I found myself sharing thoughts and perusing my social stream in moments where I had a few minutes to kill — boring meetings quickly became a favorite.

Making Connections, Building Relationships

For me there was always a problem with social networking. I'm inherently shy, it's something I have struggled with all my life and why you'll normally find me hanging back in the corner of the room at public events *pretending* to be reading my emails. Until fairly recently this also extended to the online world, but my use of Twitter had me starting to poke my head out a bit more and connect with people I really didn't know.

In the summer of 2009 I attended Inbound Marketing University (IMU) with my colleague and friend Lisa Alvey (@lisaalvey). It was a series of webinars hosted by Hubspot with some amazing speakers. The value of the content was amazing but more valuable to me was the backchannel happening on twitter during each session. It took me a while to get going and jump into discussions with strangers but I learned a lot by watching Lisa, who's a natural conversation starter. By engaging rather than just listening I made connections with many new professionals working in social media and online marketing. The discussions and new friends made during those sessions still count today. Most of the people I connected with on the IMU sessions are still "friends I've never met". It's a new type of friend for me but I guess it's been around for a long time if you consider pen pals.

Forgetting about Twitter

Twitter is only as good as the skills you develop and the connections/friendships you make while using it. The same goes for Facebook and any other socially aware tools that we succumb to. There's no questioning that the company has produced a market shifting product, ultimately driven by their willingness to open up their platform to developers. The openness that we see echoed in public replies and the random thoughts injected into this world has fundamentally shifted the way we communicate online. It's this openness that's the reason reason Twitter has been so successful. It has allowed us to re-engage skills we forgot about while we were too busy doing "real work". We are re-learning how to communicate freely with people everywhere, in any industry of any stature. We are forging meaningful relationships and learning to break down the walls. Twitter has allowed us to be human again, to be social. Instead of battening down the hatches my metaphorical front door is now permanently open and anyone is welcome to stop by for a chat.

As society focuses on building gated communities and protecting our property there's a significant group of people helping to bring down the walls. Together we are using online tools to build real world relationships via Tweetups, coffee klatches and even real time events driven by location aware apps like Foursquare and Gowalla.

In this hybrid world we are required to be as responsible selecting our relationships online as we are offline, and we have to learn skills to converse and create meaningful friendships and associations for business and our personal lives. The good news is that these new tools allow us a better view of other people's lives, their thoughts, their dreams and that helps us make better decisions about how we present our own relationships and personal branding.

History shows that many of the cultural shifts have been driven by advances in technology and tools. But let's remember that these advances have always been made by groups that understood how to use tools to leverage the power of people (for good or bad). 

That's why I say forget about Twitter and the hype. Change the focus from the tool to the conversation. Learn to leverage tools like Twitter to build communication skills, spread brilliance and provide value to the community we belong to - online and offline.

Today I had the pleasure of delivering the keynote address at W00t! Con in Bakersfield, California.  I used my new iPhone 3Gs to stream the presentation live on Qik (my old phone was just an iPhone 3G and did not do video).  You can watch the presentation in full (until my battery died during th Q&A) or just see the slides.

 

Inbound marketing keynote presentation by Mike Volpe, VP marketing at HubSpot at www.WootCon.com on 22 Feb 2010 in Bakersfield, CA. The presentation covers inbound marketing, online marketing, internet marketing, SEO, social media marketing, lead generation and small business marketing.

This is a guest post by Jeff Ogden is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, a lead generation company, which helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers. 

Seth Godin, author of best-selling books on marketing like Purple Cow, Meatball Sundae and Permission Marketing and his latest book, Linchpin talks about the need to develop remarkable content. What is remarkable content? Seth says it is "Content the reader finds so interesting, people remark to each other about it."

How can marketers create content so interesting to the reader that people start talking to each other? That seems, to most B2B marketers, a bar set too high. They certainly grasp the concept, but they struggle to put it into action. The goal of this article is to give you specific ideas of how to put Seth's concepts into action.

How can our content deeply engage readers and earn their permission for continued communications?

In order to answer that question, we need to move to an area where most of us have little experience - publishing. Specifically, we're looking at great story-telling - that engages readers on an emotional level. Don Hewitt, the late creator of 60 Minutes, described the continued success of that show as being due to their ability to tell great stories. Look at the young girl in the picture above - she's obviously engrossed in a book she finds of great interest. She's emotionally engaged. But how might you do the same thing in your B2B company? I think the best way to examine this challenge is to look at what makes - and does not make - a great story.

What does NOT not make a great story?

• Information about your company, your products or how great you are.
• Technical and obtuse terms - your speeds and feeds
• Company history and awards

What does make a great story?

• An engrossing plot with surprises, twists and turns. In the B2B world, it may be as simple as a yarn of how companies can move from a business problem to stellar results. But it's got to be a great story.
• Short chapters with images that support the story. Pleasing graphic treatments that engage the mind.
• Each chapter ends with a "hook" - a tease of what is to come in the next chapter. That keeps the reader flipping pages and looking forward to the next installment.
• The ability for the reader to direct the story. Let her move back and forth - look at an earlier chapter, for instance. Readers want to be empowered.

Lastly, once you have a great story, pleasing graphics, "hooks" end every chapter and you're ready to go, you need to take another page from the publishing industry and promote your story. Ask influential bloggers to read it and comment. Get your Twitter followers to tweet about it. Write about it on your blog.  Perhaps you are thinking "Hey, Jeff. This is a great idea. But I'm not a writer." As Brian Halligan, HubSpot CEO and Founder pointed out in a recent webcast - there are plenty of journalists and writers looking for work. All you have to do is go out and look for them.

This is a guest post by Marijo Tinlin, who is the principal at Sunrise Business Consulting (@SunriseBusiness) which helps small and emerging businesses and entrepreneurs get traction in business, sales and marketing. Her specialities include all facets of marketing including inbound marketing, content marketing, database marketing and search engine optimization.

Just as you may have a personal Twitter account and one for your business, you may want to separate the Twitter feeds for your company to specifically address certain parts of your business.

This could mean that you separate out the Customer Feedback feed from the Company News feed. Or if you are a technology company, you might want a Tech Support feed so your corporate feed doesn't need to address technical issues.

There are several advantages to this:

1. You can serve different audiences easily, by interest or by geography (include foreign offices)
2. Your readers can set up mobile notices for just the information they want from you
3. You can help your search engine rankings by the sheer volume of your brand being out there because the search engines search Twitter in real time. Here's a link to an example of how this works from Andy Beard @AndyBeard .

Zappos is a perfect example of addressing different customer and employee needs through different Twitter feeds. There are almost too many to list here but besides CEO Tony Hsieh's famous feed on @zappos, they also tweet for the following:

• Inside Zappos @inside_zappos
• Zappos Help Desk @zappos_helpdesk
• Zappos Service @Zappos_Service
• Zappos Pipleline @Zappos_Pipeline
• Zappos Tweetup @Zappos_Tweetup
• Zappos Kids Team @Zappos_KidsTeam

In addition, specific employees tweet as well, including the COO. So you can see they get granular about how they address the needs of customers and employees.

Keep in mind that once you have a customer service Twitter feed, everyone who follows that feed can see the back-and-forth conversations you are having with your customers. In the new paradigm of real-time customer feedback, as a company, you must be prepared for what you'll see and use this feedback to get better, not defensive! Happy Tweeting.

I found this post "The Marketing Hipster Dictionary" by Craig Rosenberg (aka The Funnelholic) and enjoyed it.  (Yes, I found it through a vanity search since he mentioned me... but Craig is a good guy, already in my RSS reader and I've done a webinar with him before.)

Craig mentions a number of concepts in this post, but one intrigued me because it hit home - "Maven Marketing".  Craig says:

"Maven marketing: I just made this phrase up too, and I'm hoping it sticks. Today's marketer does two things with mavens:  (a) Courts and/or works with mavens to create helpful buyer materials that don't necessarily ever mention their product - that's right. Mavens get more downloads than you and are TRUSTED. Today's buyer trusts two people: their peers and their mavens. Those two groups far outweigh the vendor.
(b) Creates mavens from their organization. Here's one for all those people with social media budgets. Start by creating an internal maven. Here's an example from the marketing industry: Mike Volpe (@mvolpe), VP at Hubspot, has 15,872 people who follow his every move on Twitter. They read him, respect him and re-Tweet him. That's hipster marketing."

What I find interesting is that is isn't just me at HubSpot that we use as a maven to build community.  That would not be scalable, and would not be a smart way to build the company.  We're developing lots of people in the company as useful (not salesy) resources for the marketing community.  Some examples (and I left out a LOT):  Dan Zarrella, Kyle James, Rick Burnes, Ellie Mirman, Beth Dunn, Karen Rubin, Peter Caputa, Jeanne Hopkins, Rebecca Corliss, Prashant Kaw, Pamela Seiple, and many, many more.

What do you think?  Does your company develop mavens for your market?  Leave a comment...

Recently an industry guru who is compiling a study/book on transparency emailed me and asked "What are the practices that you think an agency should follow when it comes to transparency in writing content for a client's social media channels?"  This is what I emailed back:

I think if it is for the brand/company, then it is fine to just go ahead and post as the brand and not disclose exactly who the post is coming from. Just like a number of different employees might post on behalf of the company, you might also hire an agency to do so. And there is not that much difference between the agency and the employees, especially in today's world of contractors, part time workers, outsourcing, etc. People who see posts coming from a brand should understand that it is a person or a team of people posting on behalf of the company, and they need to consume the communication in that way. Just like you might get an advertisement or letter or email from a company and it is not "signed" by the marketing person or agency that created it, you might get a Tweet from a company but not know who exactly wrote it.

Now, in the case where you might be posting on behalf of a person, say the CEO of a brand/company, then I think complete transparency is called for. People deserve and expect to know if they are actually speaking with Marc Benioff or someone posting on his behalf, because there is a real person in the conversation. By the way, this does not mean that it is bad to have people post on your behalf. I think Guy Kawasaki on Twitter is a great example that being interesting is much more important than posting everything yourself.

What do you think?

I've gotten a bunch of questions recently about etiquette on Twitter.  There really are no formal rules, because lots of people use Twitter differently.  I know lots of people who have rules that are different from me, and that is fine.  Their personal style may be different or maybe they use Twitter "better".  You can use twitter however you want (and don't let one of those "social media experts" tell you differently).

While I do not think there are any formally established etiquette for Twittter, I thought I would share how I use it.  Let everyone know in the comments if you agree, disagree or have other ideas for what twitter etiquette should be.

My etiquette for reading tweets - You cannot and should not read all tweets.  There is just too much volume on Twitter.  Twitter is not your email.  I snack on Twitter a couple times a day for 10-15 minutes at a time.  I read all of the @mvolpe messages and I try to read all my direct messages (DMs).  I do not have any messages or DMs sent as text messages because I don't like to let Twitter interrupt my day.

My etiquette for following other people - I follow people that say something interesting to me, seem to have a high value to tweet volume ratio, talk about me or my content or retweet me, or people I have met in person.  None of these rules are set in stone, but the more of these things that apply to you, the more likely it is that I will follow you.  If you feel like you are left out, just ask me by sending a message like "hey @mvolpe - I love your tweets!  Would you mind following me back?"

My etiquette for following people back - I do not automatically follow people back because the follow me.  I used to, and I found that I got even more DM spam than I do now, and a lot of the following was coming from robots, so I stopped.  I figure that if you followed me and I should follow you back, one of the conditions above will eventually apply to you and you'll get followed that way.

My etiquette for direct messages (DMs) - People who have a lot of followers and follow a lot of people (more than 2,000 of each) get a lot of direct message spam - do not assume they receive or read all of your DMs.  I can't and don't.  I do my best to read them all, but honestly many good messages get buried in there.  Sorry.

My etiquette for retweeting - If I know you well (in person or virtually) and you ask me to retweet something, if it is good I probably will do it.  If you say something remarkable, I might retweet it without you asking.

Download video for iPod and iPhone.

A new question: What are the marketing goals of blogging?  I think some of the goals for launching a blog are:

• Improve SEO performance - blog articles help with SEO a lot by increasing your presence on the web and attracting more links into your website
• Build thought leadership and bradn - if your blog has interesting content, it can build your brand as a thought leader in the market
• Increase social media performance - you are a lot more interesting in social media if you are writing and then promoting interesting blog articles (instead of telling people what you had for lunch)
• Get more leads and sales - by adding calls to action to your blog, you can get blog visitors to convert into leads and customers for your business

Download video for iPhone and iPod