When did we, marketers & brands, lose touch with humanity and thus reality?

When did we stop stop putting the needs and concerns of our customers first?

When did we throw common sense out the window?

Perhaps some never have put customers needs first, or maybe they did at one point but lost their way. A lot of the marketing that I see now is still centered around what the company wants consumers to think about, feel, or do/take action on. That worked for a long time (before social technologies leveled the playing field) but just doesn’t cut it anymore. This isn’t news to many marketers (in theory), and yet there are still so many brands and companies that haven’t yet begun to embrace helping customers and prospects instead of trying to get them to listen to the brand message. Your brand message should be:

I’m here to help make it easier for you to work with my brand

I recently presented on this topic at the Midwest Digital Conference because I believe there has never been a better time for brands to change their approach, and realign their efforts with customers expectations. The interuptive messaging of advertising continues to be less effective. Yet so many brands continue to sit on the sidelines, bury their head in the sand, and ignore the alternatives available to them. News Flash:

The problem isn’t going away because you are ignoring it

We’re in a new era. The social marketing era. An era of new expectations for brands, new rules for interacting, and new methods/techniques for reaching customers. One of the best things about this new era is that you don’t have to guess anymore about what your business should focus on. Why not? Listen to your customers and they will tell you what is wrong, what they need yet aren’t getting from you, and what direction to focus on moving forward. A well planned, ongoing listening program will unearth this info for you. No more guessing. No more well-planned focus group projects. The internet is your on-demand focus group, providing real time feedback every day. All you need to do is harness the tools available and be open to hearing what people are saying. Make no mistake about it, customers are talking!

Taking the next step

Once the needs are identified, deciding what to do next is easy. Solve customer problems! Build a product they are asking for. If you’re a service provider, then use common sense and be helpful! Social marketing offers a tremendous way to do this. With it, big companies can get smaller, by offering individualized, helpful interactions. Small companies can get bigger, enabling them to increase their reach beyond their physical and/or geographic limits.

If you’re planning a strategy to reach consumers online, consider these tips:

1. Offer value - Use common sense, provide customers and prospects with value, not messages.
2. Feelings matter – People remember how you made them feel, not what you said. Plan accordingly.
3. Think holistically - Focus on every touch point a consumer has with your brand. Consumers interact and form opinions of your brand on web sites, social networks like Facebook & Twitter, communities, support forums and video sharing sites. Every individual counts. Everyone is an influencer.
4. Be sincere – You need to genuinely care about helping your customers and prospects. Fake it, do it half heartedly, and they will notice. Don’t dilute your interaction by taking their loyalty for granted. Wake up each day assuming today is the day you will earn that customer’s loyalty. Difficult to gain, easy to lose. As @Garyvee would say, HUSTLE!
5. Ask questions – Once you have identified the problems, objectives and established relationships, ask questions. Lots of questions. Relentlessly inquire about what your customers think. And constantly remind them you want their input and involvement. You will be rewarded with ideas and suggestions the internal product development team can’t produce on their own.

Is any of this groundbreaking? No. In fact, it’s common sense (or should be). Common sense is often one of the trickiest things. My colleague Len Kendall reminded me today how difficult this all can be, with this quote  “We know our common sense is right, most of the time we just find it hard to prove it”

Hopefully the path to proving it got a little bit easier with this reminder.

For those who aren’t regular readers of StickyFigure (if you’re not, you should be. Check it out), Steve Woodruff has been consistently churning out great discoveies with his Five in the Morning series. Five in the Morning is basically a blog post that highlights 5 of the most interesting and well written posts throughout the blogosphere.

Lately Steve has been inviting guests to add some new perspective and fresh content to the mix. When he approached me about being a guest author, I immediately said yes! So without any further ado, here is your daily dose of Five in the Morning:

Digital media continues to blur our online and offline lives. Spruce up your presentations and educate your colleagues with this fantastic list of 49 Amazing Social Media, Web 2.0 and Internet Stats, compiled by Adam Singer on the FutureBuzz blog.

Learn how to use a often overlooked feature of Twitter, “favorites”. Darren Rowse and Ari Herzog put together an excellent post on the Twitip blog that reveals how to use favorites, why you should use favorites, and illustrates how other people are using them.

It’s early, but one of the themes of 2009 seems to be “stop talking. start doing”. Shiv Singh, of Avenue A Razorfish, reminds brands of this and says Brands Must Do! Start doing by listening to consumers. It’s not done enough.

The ultimate do-it-yourselfer Marshall Kirkpatrick has outlined how to Build the Ultimate Social Media Cheat Sheet. Use it to get you up to speed on the social media activity in your market.

And finally, take these tips from The Difficult Art of Cold Pitching by Jon Burg, and apply them to avoid any mistakes when reaching out with a request to a community of people you have a weak relationship with. Chris Brogan even chimes in with his take.

Subscribe: Ken Burbary’s Web Business blog / Steve Woodruff’s StickyFigure blog
Follow on Twitter: Ken Burbary / Steve Woodruff

I found this excellent presentation, put together by Paul Isakson, on slideshare.com. It does a fantastic job of painting a picture of what advertisers and marketers should be thinking and doing NOW to engage with consumers. I won’t do it justice by trying to write a thoughtful explanation, just view the slides below. Enough said.

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This is an entertaining parody, by Microsoft none the less, that illustrates the problems between advertisers and consumers today.

I came across interesting data on AdRants: and MarketingSherpa that is based on a survey given to marketers who attended AD:Tech in 2007.

The survey questions internet marketers about how effective various online marketing methods are, namely what works, what doesn’t, etc…

Here’s a breakdown of the results, complete with charts. We’ll give you a quick play-by-play.

ROI winners:

o SEO
o Email marketing from house lists
o Behavioral targeting
o Paid search (according to 34 percent of those surveyed, down from 49 percent in ‘06)

Lowest ROI generators:

o Rich media
o Banner ads
o Pop-ups and pop-unders — awarded the “worst Web ad of 2007″: No marketer said it provided a significant ROI

Budget Plans:

o Pay-per-click (PPC) and behavioral ads get a bigger cut of marketing budgets

New Tricks for the Old Dog:

o Viral marketing
o Advertising on mobile phones
o Online video sites
o Virtual worlds

The data was based on 421 responses from ‘net marketers that attended ad:tech in ‘07.

To be an effective community professional, you need to walk the talk and use the tools

Google is not a search engine, it’s a reputation tracker

Sean scored high on search engine results for Microsoft Support after a bad story was on Digg.com

Admits there are many buzzwords, yet many forget to look at the bigger picture

Rather than focusing on the Techcrunch/Scoble “Shiny Diamond” to develop a social media strategy

The 5 P’s of Social Media: People, Places, Process, Platform, Patterns

Process is potentially the most important P –but often overlooked

There are more smarter people about your product outside of your company

It’s good and horrible news that it’s easy to publish. Many fractures due to lack of strategy.

Google is the enemy of brand loyalty, if I can find the answer to a question not on your corporate property

Most advocates and influencers are not
helping to help a brand, they are helping other users.

“Pay it forward” a good model and metaphor how a community works

Participation:

Impacts to busienss: Customer Service and Support, Sales and Marketing, Innovation and Product Development

You can’t own the message and the audience is going to change it on their own

Word of Mouth has been a key driver why people buy what they buy, now with access to information through social tools greatly impacts this

Engagement is about brand inclusion, making sure people have their voiced involved

We’ve all seen ugly babies but never had one. We’ve strong attraction to our own products. Uses a MS open source as a case study

Beta is not early enough to get your community involved

If you want raving fans, get affinity, talks about Harley Davidson

Influencer Framework in Web 1.0: Envision and develop, test and release, and sell and support

Suggests that social aspect of employees were only in sell and support aspect, not other areas

Sean had an executive champion, Steve Ballmer

Social graph: as a business strategy we should think about it as\

Notes from SAP Salon: Social Media and Online Communities

A modest proposal: Before a project starts, the creative team needs to go into a room—their literal Black Box—and close the door. They need to write these four questions up on a whiteboard and then do some soul-searching. If “no” is the answer to any, they should put the brakes on, and everyone—the account team, the client, and project management—should head back to the drawing board. Here are those scary questions:

1. Are we aiming high enough? What is truly new-to-the-world about what we’re doing? Is the thing we’re about to advertise or design truly meeting a customer’s unmet need, or are we just designing an “also-ran” or putting lipstick on a pig?

2. Are the right people in the game? Is our concepting team genuinely multidisciplinary? Does it include profound input from industry experts, brand strategists, consumer insight specialists, technology wizards, information architects, and copywriters?
3. Are we willing to fail—quickly? Are we prepared to be wrong a few times before we are right? To be really, really uncomfortable? Are we willing to throw out our tried-and-true process and all of our favorite creative tricks—even though they work—in order to create a real breakthrough?

4. Is there a story here? Are we designing a page or an experience? What is the beginning, the middle, and the end of the brand story we are creating? Does it move—and are people moved by it?

Creative people will always represent something of a Black Box within their agency or for their clients, because anagement is overwhelmingly left-brained, analytical, and linear in its approach to problems. And creatives are, well, the opposite. This is not a bad thing, but it goes a long way toward explaining some of the blank stares that both sides give one another when they are talking to each other. The point—now more than ever before—is not that creatives have to be more assimilated, or learn how to use a spreadsheet, or care less about perfection. It’s just that it might be time to put some new furniture in the Black Box and then invite people to come inside for a visit.

Clipped from From Avenue A / Razorfish, Digital Outlook Report 2008 (Download full report here)

It’a about time! That’s what some friends have said when I mentioned I was finally going to take the time to establish a presence online and start blogging. I’ve been involved in web development, interactive marketing, and pretty much anything “web” for so long now that this should have come much sooner. The thought to start writing a blog has crossed my mind more times than I could possibly recall over the years.

Where to start? I plan on covering a variety of topics, but the general theme will be interactive marketing including but not limited to the key areas of it: business strategy, technology, project management, and web analytics.