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Weekly round-up

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Just a few things still in my "to write about" box for this week.

Great post on Brian Carroll’s B2B Lead Generation Blog: Tips for better webinars. His advice is terrific. Two key takeaways:

  1. Webinars and webcasts are part of the overall marketing strategy, not standalone events. They work well when they are integrated with the program, not when seen as some sort of quick fix to a lead generation problem.
  2. Web events are great for prospecting, lead nurturing and building an expert reputation for your firm. They are NOT a source of hot leads that will close tomorrow, so set the right expectation for your sales team.

Part 7 of Christopher Carfi’s Business Blogging Field Guide, the CEO Blog. Be sure to go back and read the whole series, very well done.

Lastly, congratulations, Ellen MacArthur: Englishwoman Sails Globe in 71 Days, a Record

Some people get it: a good example and some good advice

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The example: From Diva Marketing, Corporate Blog Strategies: Toby writes about three blogs developed by marketer Rick Short—one for his company Indium and two personal. This is a great example of how the blogging "medium" can be used in different ways for different purposes – Rick has developed an authentic corporate blog for his company, and also created his own personal blogs, each with the style appropriate for the purpose at hand. Kudos to him!

Rick’s personal McChronicles site

The advice: From Jeff Nolan’s blog: The Dawn of a New Age – Marketification I found Jeff Nolan’s blog from a link on another blog, and I don’t even remember whose. Jeff is a VC and writes about all sorts of things. I don’t know him, but I like his blog because he is often VERY funny. His article offers some of the advice you’ll read here, and on many other marketing blogs, about how marketers should be monitoring the blogosphere. So, if this is the same as you’ll read elsewhere, why do I think it is such good advice? Because Jeff is not a marketing, advertising or communications professional – he comes at this from a different perspective, and we marketers should pay attention.

When is a blog a “fake blog?”

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Lots of conversation today about fake blogs, which got me thinking, just what is a "fake blog?"

The McDonalds fake french fry (FFF, also stands for fake fast food) blog is a creation from McDonald’s ad people, but it was supposed to be poking fun at the "whole food that looks like dead people phenomenon." So is it really "fake?" Or should we criticize it not for being fake, but simply for being lame.

Pepsi Girl blog wasn’t covertly sponsored by Pepsi, so not "fake" in that sense. According to the latest info from AdRants, Pepsi apparently had nothing to do with it, but it was developed as a joke. So it wasn’t authentic, or "real" as we have come to expect of blogs. But does that make it fake?

Here’s a round-up of the fake blog opinions I read today:

Jim Logan ; Matthew Oliphant/BusinessLogs (you’ll find the links to the mentioned blogs in this post); BL Ochman’s original post on the Pepsi Girl blog ; InsideBlogging ; Dan Gillmor ; courtesy Dan, I found Kevin Dugan’s Strategic Public Relations blog and his review of the FFF blog as well as a later post Fake Blogs Should Sponsor Real Blogs ;  Andy Lark

So what’s a fake blog?

On one hand,  I agree with Andy Lark — these were jokes, and perhaps we should lighten up a bit, like ’em/love ’em/hate ’em, have a laugh and get back to something more interesting than a styrofoam french fry that is supposed to look like Abe Lincoln.

On the other hand…. we need to figure out how to tell a blog that has the reporting or opinions of a true live person (whether we think they are a wing nut or not) from a blog that is an invented piece of fiction (funny or sad, effective or lame, it doesn’t matter). Why? Because we rely on blogs to be the voices of real people, people like us with whom we will agree some of the time, and disagree others. People we can respect and trust.

So I’ll make a suggestion… if you want to write a fictional blog, go ahead. Just tell the readers somewhere … like in the "about this blog" link … That’s what we do with books, right. We tell the reader whether they are reading Fiction or Non-fiction 🙂

Now, the big brand marketers are definitely going to continue to try and manipulate blogs. By creating fake/covert ones, or by trying to pull the wool over our eyes about the "buzz" something has (example: the recent Ogilvy-Mather stunt for client American Express. For details, BL Ochman summarizes it here.) And it will probably get more subtle, even as we get better at sniffing out fakes. They just won’t be able to help themselves. In the end, they probably won’t do much damage to their brands.

But, of course, they won’t do them any real good either, and that’s the point that they miss: done right, real blogs can actually help build the brand.

Of more concern to me is the smaller firms who follow in the fake blogger’s footsteps. Their brands likely won’t be strong enough to survive a serious mis-step in the blogosphere. They have to get it right the first time.

Which is why I was so pleased by the news out of NY PR firm CooperKatz today. As covered in MarketingVox: Congratulations Steve Rubel: CooperKatz Makes Blog PR Practice Out of Exec’s Blog.

Steve’s own post at Micro Persuasion provides more detail. CooperKatz’s approach, and public commitment to "doing it right" is a much better example for companies trying to figure out the blogosphere than some of the other examples we’ve been reading about this week.

Do you want fries with that?

Today’s Roundup of Interesting Posts

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It is almost the weekend, so here’s my final round-up of articles that caught my eye this week.

Excellent advice from Dave Taylor at intuitive systems: Why successful startups never outsource their business plan

FusionBrand: Branding’s Black Hole This is a favorite topic of mind: measuring marketing and sales results. My previous comments here and definitely expect more in the coming weeks. The issue of lead tracking and ROI has circled back into my radarscope this week for many reasons. 

public(MIND) — overall, an interesting blog by Hans Henrik H. Heming with a definite inclination toward issues surrounding creativity (and that’s not really the right word) but just check out his blog for a different perspective. Full disclosure: I’m also partial to Hans because he was one of the first readers to subscribe to my blog on Bloglines. Thanks Hans!!

Great post by Dan Gillmor: Where Newspapers can Start the Conversation. Gives specific examples of how newspapers can do what I talk about in my earlier post today: reach out and engage with their readers (customers).

Think of all the things we could discuss: Engaging with Customers

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If we could talk to the animals, learn their languages
Think of all the things we could discuss
If we could walk with the animals, talk with the animals,
Grunt and squeak and squawk with the animals,
And they could squeak and squawk and speak and talk to us.
— Dr. Doolittle, If I Could Talk to the Animals

In a post today at Creating Passionate Users called Users aren’t dangerous, author Kathy Sierra opens with the statement that many firms treat their customers like they have some sort of contagious disease. They do their level best to avoid coming into any contact with them. She’s absolutely right.

I have recently begun to wonder if the reason for this is that on some level many companies are afraid of their customers and what they might say. The image that comes to mind is that customers are like the animals in the zoo — we like to visit them, show that we are interested in them, give lip service to understanding what they need, throw them a few peanuts, and then go home. To actually engage with them — no way, too scary. What if they bite us?

Hence, my citation of Dr. Doolittle, who, if any of you remember the original 1960s film, was pretty much ostracized from polite society for talking to the animals. For trying to understand what they wanted. For seeing another point of view.

It’s time we all started thinking a bit more like Dr. Doolittle and a bit less like the bad guys in the film (and I can’t even remember who they were, but I can still see Rex Harrison singing to a pink conch shell, do not ask me what that means about my psychosocial development). I digress.

The point is: Let’s start talking with our customers, not just talking AT them. Let’s make it easier for our customers to talk with each other.

I think of this as shifting from a model of absolute control to one of controlled, or managed, engagement. IOW I am not proposing that companies open up everything, just what is necessary to allow participation of customers at an appropriate level.

So why DON’T we do this already?

Many companies will swear up and down that their product development teams talk to customers all the time. Conversations, surveys, etc. etc. The reality? Many, if not most, of the communications are designed not to find out what the customers really think, but to validate a decision already made. Some of those decisions are of course right, but sometimes true customer input would dictate a different approach. By then, of course, it is too late. So one reason we are afraid of our customers is they might not agree with us. Ouch. Not a good sign for future health of a business.

Our other fear? We are afraid to let customers speak freely outside of the strictly controlled confines of public relations and prepared case studies. What if they don’t like something, or say something negative, or even just wishy-washy. Well, the bad news is, your customer will find an outlet for his criticism, so isn’t it better that you are the outlet? So you can DO something about it? And funnily enough, it has been my experience that when you invite a customer to the party, even if she is disgruntled about something, the simple act of soliciting the feedback goes part way to improving the situation. Soothing the savage beast, to go back to my animal analogy.

So, how do we get over this fear? As Dr. Doolittle says, I think we just have to talk to the animals. And not just our sales and marketing teams. Product managers, developers, quality assurance, executive management, operations, support, even finance. And we have to take the conversations out of the predictable patterns, to really understand the customer’s business problem or social desire, or whatever it is that prompted them to engage with us in the first place.

This is one of the reasons I am so excited about the potential of blogs for customer engagement. In my opinion, the blog format is more suited to scaleable and active company-customer engagement than any other tool we currently have at our disposal. Nothing can beat a face-to-face conversation or telephone conversation or meaningful one-to-one e-mail exchange. But these are not scaleable, nor do they reach out to many at once. Websites are both scaleable and have reach, but they are static, so it just ain’t a conversation. Blogs combine some of the best attributes of conversations and Websites, and that’s what makes them so suited to "talking to the animals."