Marketing Roadmaps

Web Marketing

Good advertising makes all the difference: Ad Club Hatch Awards

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Advertising.

It is often said that consumers don’t like or pay attention to advertising.

Not true.

What consumers don’t like is BAD advertising. Lazy copy. Poor targeting. Offensive stereotypes.

We also don’t like crummy products. No matter how good the ad, it cannot make a crummy product excellent or a dangerous product safe. Regardless of what they say on Mad Men.

We do like — even love — good advertising. Ads that tell a story. Make us feel. Make us laugh. If we’re in marketing, make us wish we’d thought of that.

Tuesday night, I was privileged to  attend the 49th Annual Hatch Awards as a guest of the AdClub and got to see a lot of great advertising without having to watch TV or read a magazine.

There’s no way I can do justice to all the award winners in a single post, but here’s a random sampling of the ones I liked most.

My favorite TV spots were Mullen‘s Bruins Hockey Rules commercials. The campaign won a gold as did this commercial “Date.”

If you want more, I posted all the spots over at Snapshot Chronicles.

I also liked Arnold‘s TV spots for the American Legacy Foundation and Hill Holliday‘s series for Liberty Mutual’s Responsibility Project.

It’s harder to appreciate print advertising in the award show format. You miss the look and feel of the ad in the chosen vehicle. How well it fits (or doesn’t) in the publication. Even so, it was easy to like Mullen’s work for the New England Aquarium and Kelliher Samets Volk/Boston’s newspaper ads for WMBR radio.

Finally, as much as I do not believe in personal branding, I have to commend the silver winner in the personal branding category for the sheer balls of his campaign, malecopywriter.com

You may have noticed I did not mention any of the award winners in the social media or website/microsite categories. Not because the work wasn’t excellent. It was. But my strongest impression was that advertising agencies see, and execute, social media very differently than PR agencies and marketing shops (internal and external) focused on interactive media. Yes, I am about to make a generalization, and welcome respectful disagreement, but the ad agency work seemed to be about production values, not relationships.

In other words, engagement means very different things to the different groups.

Now, I didn’t actually find this surprising. I’ve written before that I have noticed that PR and advertising folks definitely approach engagement through different lenses.

Public relations folks — good PR folks — understand the importance of building relationships with customers. That blogger engagement is a commitment, not a one-night stand. Where sometimes they have difficulty is engaging with emotion and enthusiasm. Their training teaches them to be objective, factual. Storytellers, not promoters. It can be difficult (although not impossible) to shed that skin and engage around emotion and shared values, versus news, facts and benefits.

Advertising professionals, on the other hand, have no problem understanding the importance of emotion in eliciting engagement. Good advertising taps into our emotions to evoke an action. It’s rarely about what a product does. It’s all about how it makes us feel. Where advertising pros can miss in social media is that they don’t dial it down to more personal terms. The message is hype, not human. It’s about producing a slick “viral video,” not about finding a shared value with the customer that encourages her to pass the message on.

That’s where marketing generalists (like me) can help the process. We embrace both approaches – relationship and emotion – and can help organizations best leverage their advertising and PR specialists to develop well-rounded programs and campaigns that truly engage the customer.

Intuit Just Start pulls into South Station Tuesday November 13th

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Intuit, the publisher of the popular QuickBooks software, has taken its show on the road for the past month, holding two day events in NY, Chicago and Seattle to encourage entrepereneurs to just get started.

The campaign pulls into Boston’s South Station next Tuesday and Wednesday.

At the events, entrepreneurs can get business, software and marketing advice from experts.  There’s also a contest which will award $50K in cash and resources to a lucky business owner;  visit IWillJustStart.com for contest details.

I’ll be there on Tuesday November 13th  from 11am-6pm to provide online marketing advice. Drop by if you are in the area.

You can also get a free copy of QuickBooks Simple Start financial software, if the opportunity to see me in person isn’t enough of a draw 🙂

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Getting Web site development right

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Two of the most popular search terms for this blog are "b2b website" and "corporate websites suck." The second due to a 2005 post called Why Corporate Websites Suck and some ideas for fixing them.

But, as I was writing a memo about site development for a client, I realized that I haven’t written about Web development here in quite some time. Since people seem to be coming here for just that sort of information, seems like I should rectify that 🙂

So here’s a step by step outline that covers the most important part of the process: defining the requirements and navigation for the site. I strongly believe that you must have a clear picture of the path(s) you want your visitors to take through your site, to get to the desired result, before you commit one line of code or design a single page.

These are the steps I follow. Every time. New site or redesign.

1. Assemble a team that represents the key stakeholders in the site. You do not need every individual, but you do want to be sure that the representatives are truly cross-functional. In some cases, you will want someone from the actual business area. In others, it may be more effective to have members of your team interview the relevant people. Some of the functions that should be included are sales,  marketing, business development, communications and customer service.

I do not recommend having the Web designers or developers too involved in this stage. You want to keep the discussion at a business level until you have a solid idea of what is needed across the company. Developers often get too wrapped up in how to do something rather than what is necessary, which should be the focus early in the process. Involving developers too early also can steer the discussion toward what the developers can do easily rather than what the company really wants. Later, when you get to the development stage, you may make concessions due to cost or complexity but it is too limiting and undermines creativity to start this way.

2. Once the team is assembled, the first order of priority is to identify the objectives for the Web site. These objectives should be closely aligned with your overall business goals. Some of the questions to ask:
a. Who are you trying to reach?
b. Why?
c. What do you want to tell them?
d. What do you want them to do once they are at the site?
e. What are the priorities of the business now and for the next three years?

It is helpful to pull the web stats from the existing site to better understand what your site visitors are doing. What areas get the most traffic? What are people coming to your site to see and do? It’s okay to let the team refer to areas on the current site that they feel need to be kept or improved, but don’t let them get bogged down in what they don’t like or think does not work. The point of this work is to develop a specification for the new site; rehashing previous decisions, good or bad, is not useful and slows down the process.

You are going to have multiple audiences and multiple objectives – everything from sales to customer service to media outreach to things very specific to your business plan. This is exactly what you want at this stage.

3. Next, you determine priorities. Of all the objectives identified in the previous stage, three, maybe four, will be critical to your overall business objectives. These are the priorities and the elements that should get attention on the highly valued “real estate” of your home page. For the most part, everything else can go on inside pages. Typically, the core priorities fall into these buckets:
* Identify product set and market segments so visitors know they are in the right place;
* Communicate key company news/events/messages to constituents;
* Purchase;
* Customer service.

4. The team should then discuss content. Starting with the existing content. What stays/goes? What should be improved? What new sections do we need? What data do we need to capture from our visitors? How will we let people search our site? Keep the team focused on the desired result, not the technology that might be used to get there. And don’t worry about writing the content yet; that comes later.

5. One or two team members should be deputized at this stage to develop a straw man home page, home page navigation and inside navigation. Their job is to synthesize all the discussions into a cohesive navigation. You still should not be thinking about design or functionality. Keep thinking content. The key questions:
a. What action do we want or expect to visitor to take?
b. How can we drive the visitor through our site to accomplish our priority business and site objectives?

As mentioned above, you need to stay focused on the visitor. How does she use the site? What did she come for? Every click should move the visitor forward to accomplish her objective. The goal as we develop navigation is to ensure that she is never more than one click away from the next thing she wants.

This is just about the most important part of the process: Making sure you have defined a clear path through your site for your users so they get what they came for.

Never assume that the visitor will figure it out. If you want him to do something, make that the attractive option. If he wants to buy something, make sure he can do it easily and quickly.

So, if we sold apples, our home page would make it clear we sold apples, and perhaps the range of varieties. Within one click, the visitor could get more information on the specific varieties (product page). One more click gets him to the order page, or perhaps the dealer search page if we don’t sell direct.

We can offer more information about our apples, but we have to make the desired path crystal clear. Otherwise our visitors get lost.

Typically, the home page has its own navigation, and the inside pages have two levels of navigation: a top line navigation which contains all the items that are common throughout the site, and not that different from the home page navigation, and a side navigation, which contains all the navigation items for the specific section of the site.

6. Once you have your straw man, the team reviews it and the straw man is adjusted accordingly based on feedback. Continue the review and revise process until you have a defined home page and navigation that meets the approval of your key team. This should all still be in outline and very rough graphic form “FPO.”

Now it is time to involve the Web developers and designers.Whether you are putting the project out to bid or using an inside development team, I always recommend that the marketing team and key stakeholders get a clear picture of what they really want from the Web site before involving the techs.

I also stay away from delivering a “spec” to the Web team in the first pass. I find it more useful to present what the site needs to achieve from a business and customer perspective to see how the vendor(s) respond. You may discover that some of the things that you’d like to have require more funds than you have budgeted. This is where the priorities developed earlier come in so handy. The budget needs to deliver the priorities first, and the “nice to haves” come after.

The goal is to develop a scope of work that delivers as much of your core needs as can be accomplished, along with a plan to incorporate any additional elements as time and budget permit.

7. You then move into the development stage of your site which typically will have three main areas: Design, Development and Editorial. Your Web developer will probably offer both Design and Development (functionality, coding) services. Editorial, ie writing the site, is best project managed by someone in-house using a combination of internal and external resources. If you spend the time upfront as I’ve outlined, the actual development project will be far simpler and smoother than you perhaps have experienced in the past.

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Summertime

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"Summertime and the livin’ is easy,
Fish are jumpin’, and the cotton is high.
Oh your daddy’s rich, and your ma is good lookin’,
So hush, little baby, don’ yo’ cry.

One of these mornin’s you goin’ to rise up singin’,
Then you’ll spread yo’ wings an’ you’ll take the sky.
But till that mornin’, there’s a-nothin’ can harm you
With Daddy and Mammy standin’ by."
(Summertime, from Porgy and Bess, Gershwin, Heyward and Gershwin)

This past week has been pretty busy, and I really didn’t have all that much to say, so the blog went a bit silent. Lots of client work right now, so this state of affairs may continue until Labor Day, with maybe one post per week. Never fear, though, I will be back come September …

I did want to share one truly amazing thing that happened last weekend. I took my mother and son up to Boothbay Harbor Maine for a long weekend (while my husband enjoyed his two-day golf school at home). Boothbay Harbor  is a lovely place, and I highly recommend it. But that’s not the amazing thing.

We were eating our lunch outside on the 2d floor deck at this small cafe. Unbeknownst to us, the deck was actually over the water. My son was playing with a couple of plastic cars he had just bought, with his own money, when one rolled off the table, off the deck and into the drink. He was pretty upset and no amount of telling him that we could go buy another one would console him.

Here’s the amazing part.

A man at an adjoining table who had just finished his lunch asked if the car was still floating, When Douglas replied Yes, the man proceeded to go down on the dock, asked the manager of an adjoining restaurant if he could borrow their little row boat, poled over to the car and retrieved it.

There is a lot of unpleasantness in the world. And occasionally an unexpected act of kindness like this that restores your faith. Whoever, wherever you are, thanks again. You made our day.

———————-

Shel Holtz has assembled the thinking from a number of folks this week about blog monitoring on a list at the New PR wiki. Check it out. Add your own thoughts.

Lots of people commenting on Google’s nastygrams about the use of its trademark "Google" as a generic. I expect Google knows it can’t prevent the use of “Google” as a generic, but they have to make these efforts to defend the trademark to keep it from passing *legally* into the generic. If it does that — becomes a legal generic — the word could be used inside someone else’s product name, and Google’s brand value literally stolen. You cannot trademark a generic term. Robert Scoble gave the best example: Google wouldn’t want to see a new product called "Microsoft Google," would they?

So they make these “good faith” efforts to defend the trademark against improper use. They have to use the proper legal language and so on to make the case strong that they defended the mark in case they ever need it in a full-blown trademark defense. No wishy washy or nudge nudge wink wink letters.

I doubt they really want to prevail and stifle the word of mouth branding they get when we talk about "Googling" something. Think about it, the only way to “win” this battle is to lose the dominant market position so that you no longer define the market. I haven’t heard the term ‘Xerox’ in reference to photocopies in a long time. But ‘Kleenex’ for ’tissue’ is still going strong. Did Xerox do a better job than Kimberly-Clark defending the mark and getting us to switch to the actual generic term ‘photocopy’? Doubt it. Reality is: Xerox no longer defines the market for copiers, so the mark no longer works as well as a generic.

It is quite schizophrenic really — you achieve the goal of becoming the definition of the segment, and then you have to spend time and money preventing people from using you as the definition of the segment. Catch-22.

I’m sure Google would rather be Kleenex than Xerox.

(Some of these Google thoughts were originally posted as comments on Sherrilynne Starkie and Neville Hobson’s blogs.)

Oh, and the lyrics at the beginning of this post? I Googled ’em.

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No more 2.0

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After 20 years in high tech, most of them in the software industry, I have definitely internalized the concept of versioning. It’s one of the reasons I dislike the term Web 2.0. In a software release, a major release – signified by a number to the LEFT of the decimal – means new/enhanced features. While I suppose that’s true of the tools and services that are being lumped into the Web 2.0 label, it also means something finished. And that isn’t true of the Web.

I’m going to start using the terminology Doc Searls used in the presentation I saw at Syndicate — Static Web and Live Web. In Doc’s construct the Static Web, we consumed information from Web sites. Yes, the Web was connected, but most of us were passive users of sites developed by others for  information, enjoyment and commerce. In the Live Web, we are all producers — of blogs, podcasts, vlogs. Even Web sites. And the connections are alive, influenced by the audience as well as the original creator. There is no "audience" per se — we all are simultaneously audience and creator. How are we building this Live Web? With social media tools like blogs and tags and wikis and photo sharing tools and podcasts and so on. But these are all just tools that facilitate the connection. The secret sauce? It’s people talking to and learning from one another.

So, Hell no, no more Web 2.0 for me. I’m going with Live Web and social media.

And before I forget, the term "PR 2.0" must go too. For similar reasons. The fundamental practice of PR is still the same as it ever was — it’s all about connections and information and relationships. The tools are just how we accomplish the work. They are NOT the work.

And please don’t get me wrong — I LOVE these new tools. But I don’t think they are the be-all and end-all. They are just tools. Learn how to use them, they’ll make your life and work easier. Better even. But we have to get the fundamentals right first. Otherwise, it’s like putting lipstick on a pig. You know — it’s still a pig. Crappy press releases will still be crappy, even if they have del.icio.us pages. Poor pitches aren’t better because they use tags. Blasting a press release to a big list without bothering to verify the list or the interest of the recipients is still borderline spam.

All of this focus on tools reminds me somewhat of a phenomenon from the distant, pre-Internet past. Most of my career, I have been responsible for lead generation at the companies I worked at. One of the hardest jobs is lead tracking — knowing where the leads came from so we can allocate marketing dollars appropriately.Why so hard? Because we rarely have the tools to capture the information we need. Way back when, the top lead source reported by reps nearly everywhere I worked was "Phone." Apparently, it was too damn hard to find out the actual impetus for the inbound call. My response? "Tell them to try and find out or we’ll just spend the marketing budget on new phones and be done with it. No ads. No direct mail. No trade shows. "

Now, the new top lead source tends to be "Internet." Yup, same basic problem. Confusing the tool with the motivation.

We do the same thing when we focus on the social media tools we use in communications and forget about the fundamentals. I’ve had some back and forth with Todd Defren from SHIFT about his social media press release, both here and on his blog PR-Squared. I don’t dislike the format, but I do think it, like the focus on the term PR 2.0, may have unintended, unfortunate consequences.

 In our recent exchanges on his blog and in email, we’ve agreed to try and pull together some sort of panel or workshop or something (wine dinner? Parmet?)  to pull together all these threads and hopefully move the conversation forward. 

But it won’t be called 2.0 anything. Trust me 🙂

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