Kiss Me! Keep It Simple, Silly Marketing Expert

July 31, 2009 By Jeremiah Staes 1 Comment

Let’s make our jobs a whole lot easier by being proprietors of the simple.

Stop the Twitter giveaway campaigns with three steps in different places to enter. Just let people tweet with their own creativity, and no, not every message is going to be perfect branding. I have one cold word for you with it if you want success: Deal. This is the nature of the social web.

As they well stated in 8 social media sins, there aren’t throngs of people lined up to make a video for you. It’s just too difficult, unless the prize is great enough (and tangible, like cash, and a lot of it).

Same with products. Selling complicated products or services online is at best an information support, public relations and/or customer service role (not bad things, but it’s important to know the limits).

The Winning Tickets Online

If, however, you have:

  • A simple, inexpensive product or service
  • An introductory product people can easily buy that then steps them up to the bigger item or..
  • An easy to understand monthly service

That’s a winning ticket.

Don’t Change Your Value Equation After People Have Made The Decision To Buy

Another pitfall we see commonly is pricing, or perceived to be misleading pricing. We recently ran across a site that says it’s $19.95 per month to join – with no mention of the fact they want 3 months up front until you’re in the cart. That’s a sure-fire way to abandonment – keep the barrier to entry low and even though it’s still $19.95 a month, consumers feel betrayed when they’re presented with something different because you’ve convinced them to spend around $20 at the time, not $60 (or $59.85, my beloved math nerds). You can exchange those numbers for almost anything, the same principle applies.

Changing that in-brain value proposition and asking for three times the amount basically obliterates your conversion percentages (you’ve turned a simple decision into a difficult one, because you’ve set an expectation, or trust level, in the consumer’s mind that you’ve already broken before they sign up – not good).  And if you have a digital product, there is no excuse for that behavior.  Your cost is almost free.

Ask Questions!

Which leads me to motivations for these crazy “strategies.” Decision makers have this propensity to live in a bubble – how THEY would buy it. What THEY think the market is.

Think about your customers – ask them. Ask those who aren’t your customers. Reach deep. Don’t think because that’s how you’d do something that’s how everyone would.. or that logical factors have something to do with a purchase. Remember, a large percentage of people don’t even know what a web browser is.

Some of the most successful businesspeople I have met are people who see market needs and fill them at the price the market is willing to pay. That’s it. No flashy business plans, no fancy venture capital money. Find a real need, meet it at the right price, and get paid.

Just keep it simple.

What are your tips for getting paid online? Things you’ve found that work – or don’t work?

Filed Under: Business, Love Your User, Online Marketing Fundamentals, Rant, Social Media, Tips

Intern Social Media PR: Russian Roulette With Your Company

July 27, 2009 By Jeremiah Staes 4 Comments

Dear Miscellaneous Misinformed Company,

Your company has a message in front of thousands, if not tens of thousands of prospects and clients a month.  People who are in-market for your service, or eyeballs you’ve paid for through your Pay-Per-Click, traditional advertising, or organic search efforts – and they visit your blog and site.

But, that biggest of direct customer and prospect touch points, your blog, your Twitter, your social media presence, is handled by someone who has a month or two of real experience and has the assignment because they have a Facebook page.  By doing this, you’ve decided that in a first meeting with your biggest potential client, you’re going to stick your intern in front of them.

Meanwhile, you’re spending thousands of dollars on professionals and professional services to write and distribute press releases that reporters increasingly ignore and customers simply don’t read or care about.  Journalist coverage is important – but more and more (upwards of 70%), journalists are turning to blogs for their information about companies, too.

You’re playing russian roulette with your company and brand by hiring an intern for such a customer- and media-facing task. Do you really want people who are just learning how to communicate doing so with your brand name?

Some Pitfalls Of Interns Being Your Company Face

Miscellaneous Misinformed Company Marketing Director, I like you. Enough to warn you.

  • Social media is about relationships and nurturing those -  there’s a good chance the intern will be gone in a few months.
  • Inexperience around what is appropriate to talk about to your audience (I’m sure you remember the mistakes you made at 21. I do. Wowsah).
  • Inability to use the tools properly, including having an understanding of Search Engine Optimization to help the site rank better
  • Lack of understanding of how to implement audience-appropriate, effective calls to action
  • Topics have lack of focus, no story arc or editorial calendar (we’ve found they need to be taught what one is)
  • Legal Liability (for instance, loose lips sink ships! You should share, but knowing the line between sharing and company secret is important).
  • Many times interns do not have adequate language skills, making the company look childish – especially if they’re not from a discipline that involves a lot of writing
  • Shows community how much you value them – and that’s not much, since you’re going to have someone who doesn’t even get paid deal with them
  • Lack of passion – although interns may be excited, it’s always better to have people who are truly passionate about the business, technology or topic blog, or even use an outsider’s perspective through a corporate reporter.

What do you think? Should companies trust their message to interns? Do you have additional pitfalls or benefits (other than cost?)

(Author’s Note: I was going to call out some companies. I decided against it, as professional courtesy, because I don’t want to do damage to them).
Filed Under: blogging, Business, Love Your User, Online Marketing Fundamentals, Rant, Social Media Tagged With: blogs, interns, PR, press releases, Social Media, twintern

Your Weak Password Is Putting Your Business At Risk

January 8, 2009 By Jeremiah Staes 1 Comment

There’s been a string of reports of various hacks of web 2.0 services, or individual services.  Whether it’s Twitter, Ning, etc, I’m hearing many reports that, as I had in a Twitter conversation with @kenburbary, It’s “the year of the miscreant.”  (By the way, if you want tips to avoid Twitter phishing, jump here to his blog).

So let’s get very serious about passwords BECAUSE 2009 IS the year of miscreant.  Deadly, business serious, and I’m going to sound tough but the message HAS to sink in.

With all of this sharing comes a responsibility to yourself.  I know, it stinks you need to have a more difficult password, but here are some facts:

1) If your password is ANY word in the dictionary or a name alone, it is much easier to be hacked.  There’s a thing called dictionary attacks where robots/scripts/etc try every english word.

Knowing this information now, you are being negligent to your business if you use a dictionary word password (especially without anything to mess it up, like numbers or special characters interspersed) and putting your business and your personal brand at risk of hackers; not to mention the time to re-create any assets that live there.

2) Depending on the age or software of the online service, some passwords are case sensitive, some aren’t.  If you can, USE CASE SENSITIVE passwords as well to increase your security.

3) The longer your password, the better.  Seriously.  Do nothing under 8 – nothing we have is less than 16 characters.  Mission critical stuff is 64 characters (we have a CD for that – after all, if a hacker/miscreant has physical access to your machine, you’re probably toast anyway).

4) User gibberish.  It’s hard to remember, but like a bank account number, you’ll eventually get it.  Go to http://www.grc.com/passwords and get yourself a unique, up to 64 character one.

5) Don’t give out your password to anyone.  I don’t give out my password to any of the Twitter services; sure, it’s just Twitter, but it’s a very bad habit.  Some of these things could easily be started knowing that many times, people’s passwords are the same for everything they do, including more serious things like their online banking.

6) Every time something wants a password, question it, even briefly:

  • What is this service asking for my password?
  • Why is it asking for it?
  • Is it really the service or program I think it is?
  • Do I trust it?  And how do I know I can trust it?

Unfortunately, even with all of this, you not alone can prevent these things.  As the hack of Twitter showed, bad security practices are done even at the top level of many sites.  Listening to podcasts like Security Now! (where many of these tips are adapted from), I’ve learned that some banks, because their websites are only web front ends to an ancient mainframe, are only 8 characters, non-case sensitive, even if you put in more!

But doing some practical things, like outlined above, can significantly reduce your chances of being hacked.  Compromising sites today is less about technology and much more about social engineering and taking advantage of the trust we seem to have.

Filed Under: Advertising, blogging, Business, Love Your User, Online Marketing Fundamentals, Podcasting, Rant, Security, Social Media, Tips, Web Sites Tagged With: password tips, prevention, Security

Provide Flat Customer Experiences

December 28, 2008 By Jeremiah Staes 1 Comment

I had a great conversation with a really smart guy from San Francisco last week that I hope to make a colleague for a project.  And why?  Because “he got it.”

Here’s the crux. Customers don’t care about your hierarchies.  It’s all one thing to them.

They don’t care you need to go to your boss for approval, they don’t want to wait for you to find the “right salesperson for your region (I was shared a story where a prospective customer sat on the line, credit card ready to drop thousands of dollars with this software vendor, and they were made to wait 20 minutes for the “right regional sales rep.”

If you want to look under the hood (to use a Detroit analogy) and figure out what makes companies like Zappos and Mosso tick and turn over their industries – it’s their killer customer service.

Make sure your website is customer friendly and not confusing for contacting your organization; and at the very least, externally, all major companies (or those companies with designs on growing their business) need to at least have basic online and social media presences aimed at customer service, and then follow through with it by answering questions and resolving issues.

Welcome to the future, which is now.  There are no territories; customer service needs to be a seamless situation.  The sooner your company becomes flat when it comes to treating the people who keep the lights on, the longer your lights are going to stay on.  And maybe, it means you take a risk and charge an appropriate amount to cover that service cost.

Because if your customer experience stinks, it doesn’t matter how much marketing voodoo you do; you may get a short burst but few long-term effects.

Filed Under: Business, Love Your User Tagged With: customer experiences, customer service, flat, Social Media
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