Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

Marketing Roadsigns newsletter

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Yes, I too have decided to launch a monthly newsletter. Since it will be a companion piece to the Roadmap, it will be called Marketing Roadsigns. You can sign up here on the Roadmap and on my website www.getgood.com

First issue will be sometime this week, and it will be archived on the website.

Update: July 2005 issue posted.

Roadmaps Round-up: decision making, pitching bloggers and Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

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Finishing up with my blogroll for this week:

From Andrew Lark, Tomcruiseisnuts.com I needed something light after the news of the bombings in London, and this fit the bill.

Another great post from Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users – You’re emotional. Deal with it. She covers the surprising news (VBG) that decisions are most often based on emotions, not logic, regardless of how we choose to justify the decisions. Of course this won’t be a surprise to marketing folks and most women I know, but news like this just might rock the world of a few tech CEOs.

Tom Murphy has an excellent post that lists posts from PR bloggers on the right (and wrong) ways to pitch bloggers. The post that triggered his, from Anil Dash, on how not to pitch a blogger, closed with an admonition about my favorite peeve: PDFs. About four weeks ago, I ripped into someone (privately) who sent me a pitch about a book with at least 3 PDF attachments plus a huge graphic in the HTML email.

Get a simple website, people, post your information there, and include the links in your emails. If you don’t have the technical ability to do this, find someone who does, like a college student or fourth grader. The people getting your pitch — whatever it is — DO NOT want their email bogged down with tons of attachments that they DIDN’T ASK FOR!!!!! It doesn’t matter whether they are on dial up, broadband, corporate network or a blackberry. They don’t want ’em.

BONUS RESOURCE FOR US FOLKS: If you don’t have your own child to help you with this tech stuff, techstudents.net can help you find a college student to do this work for you.

Also from Tom Murphy, I learned about changes Gartner is making to the infamous Magic Quadrant and a new blog (new to me that is): Analyst Equity.

We’ll have to see how it plays out, but I don’t really see how these "changes" are going to make the whole Magic Quadrant process any less capricious. It still sounds like a "black box" where the analyst doing the Quadrant will decide the key elements based on his or her own opinions and biases, and the companies involved will have a devil of a time figuring it all out.

More on character blogs

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Lots of interesting stuff from my blogroll today. I’ll start with a comment on the July 4th Hobson & Holtz report.

Early in the show, Shel and Neville discussed a query from a listener, Sebastian Keil. Sebastian has a client, a rental car company, that is considering having a character blogging feature on its corporate blog, where the CEO will also blog. The idea was to have an occasional post from a rental car about where it recently went. Neville and Shel discussed the whole character blog thing at some length, and both agreed that it was not a good idea. You should listen to the show for the whole conversation.

It seemed to me that in the discussion about the character blog aspect (a question of form) they were missing the most important element: WHY the company thought this might be a good idea (the issue of content). Because in the WHY was the clue to perhaps a better idea for the company. I sent the following comment as soon as I got home:

As you both know, I am not at all opposed to character blogs in principle. In this case, however, I agree with you both – a character blog in the voice of a rental car is not the way to go.

My advice: I’d focus on two things Sebastian said about the project, first the WHY: they want a way to show all the ways you can use a rental car, and part of the HOW: they plan to put disposable cameras in the cars for the renters to take the pics that would tell the story.

So – I’d go with a customer blog: put the cameras in the cars, and provide an incentive for the renters to tell their stories. Then you post the best ones in the blog. The incentive could be you’d give everyone who used the camera and provided a brief diary of their trip with a custom digital photo album created from the pix and for the ones you actually use, you could give them a free day or whatever discount makes sense. End of day: you get your stories and you increase customer loyalty in the process.

With this format you could do it as a separate blog or on the blog with the CEO, whichever you preferred.

There is nothing wrong with a character blog. It is just a form. But as marketers, we really should look first to the real voices available to us. Odds are, they will be just as, if not more, compelling. Executives. Employees. Customers. Evangelists.

If after evaluating the real voices, you still believe that a character blog is the best choice, by all means, try it. It could be just the ticket. Just remember: it is hard work to make characters real, believable, compelling and consistent. After all, if it were easy, we could all be best selling novelists or award winning screenwriters. And even the best fictional franchises have been known to "jump the shark." 🙂

A character blog isn’t a bad idea just because it is a character blog. But it is a bad idea if there’s a better way.

Public relations – measuring results, managing media. Plus a word on corporate blogging

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Happy Independence Day!

After this post, I am going to take TypePad’s advice and take a blogging holiday over the weekend while they upgrade the software. But I have been holding onto a few things that will be REALLY old by Tuesday. So while they are still sort of blogworthy, here goes.

First, I seem to be on a PR tack lately, and this topic is no exception. A few weeks ago, Sam Whitmore co-hosted the Hobson & Holtz Report, and threw a couple of topics out to the audience for comment. I listened to the show while traveling out of town, and with this and that, haven’t been able to get to my thoughts until now.

The first issue was PR measurement and budget preservation. Sam commented that in order to preserve PR budgets, it seemed that MarComm and PR folk needed to do a better job of quantifying PR results. He also mentioned a PR agency that was in fact promoting its ability to demonstrate ROI.

The key I think is that marketers have got to look at PR as part of an integrated marketing plan, and look at the impact of the PR activities on sales, not just on brand awareness. In other words, count leads, not clips.

When I was at SurfControl, we tracked PR hits against downloads of trial software from the company Web site. After a major hit, downloads increased by a significant factor, for about 2-5 days, depending in the breadth and depth of the coverage, and then returned to normal levels. Proof positive of a definite relationship between  PR  and leads. Now, if I could have only gotten the sales reps to actually ask the prospects where they heard of the product….

The other topic Sam raised was to ask whether professional media training has created executives who are better at managing the media than the reporters are at conducting the interview. He pointed to an example in the tech trades where two pubs ran eerily similar stories about a tech company … down to the same headline … as proof that the executive being interviewed was clearly more in control of the story than the reporters who were covering it.

I could have this wrong, but it seemed that Sam’s point was that professional media training, which has created these execs who stay on message, is ruining the media, making it impossible for reporters, who don’t have the luxury of the same training, to get the real story.  I just don’t think that’s right.

There is a difference between not answering a question (dodging) and staying on message. The company exec (and her PR firm) have a responsibility to the company to tell the story it wants told. They should answer direct questions but as long as they answer the actual question before moving on to their point, it is wrong to fault them for staying on message. 

It is the journalist’s job to conduct the interview, ask the tough questions, get the answers and write an original story. Most journalists of my acquaintance do this. We all understand the rules of engagement, and do our jobs.

If reporters take shortcuts and don’t do their homework, don’t ask the tough questions, and rely too heavily on a press release or company statements, versus their own instincts, they just aren’t doing their job. The one the readers expect them to.

The answer isn’t to stop training company executives to be better communicators. It is to maintain journalistic standards. Perhaps, as Sam suggested, journalists should be exposed to the same communications training that their subjects get. I think that’s an excellent idea; the J-schools and the publications themselves should both explore this idea.

But don’t blame the company communicators for doing their jobs. Of course, media training helps the exec do a better job in the interview. That’s why we do it.  And we aren’t going to stop.

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Over at PR Communications, John Cass has released the results of his corporate blogging survey.

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Finally, it is my birthday next week and my husband gave me my present early. As I went to the store with him last night to get it, seemed silly to wrap it and wait until Tuesday. So anyway, my iPod is off the s*** list and I am loving my new Bose SoundDock. Tomorrow, we’ll be packing up boxes and boxes of CDs for storage.

Happy holidays everyone. Stay safe, and enjoy fireworks and alcohol responsibly (and not together). See you Tuesday.