How my past caught up with me

I happened upon Mac McIntosh’s blog post B2B Ads From the Past, and out of curiosity, started browsing the Vintage Ad Browser he mentions in the post (great site for nostalgia, especially for someone like myself who has written B2B copy since the mid-80s).

Lo and behold, I even found myself there! I wrote this trade magazine ad for the Finnish Valmet Aircraft Factory’s turboprop trainer L-90 TP Redigo back in 1987. The aircraft was somehow jinxed—the prototype of its predecessor L-80 TP crashed through ice on a test flight, killing the pilot, and the L-90 TP (the very plane that’s pictured in the ad) crashed at the Farnborough Air Show on August 29, 1988, also killing the pilot. Ironically, Farnborough is mentioned in the headline of the ad, published a year before the accident.

The manufacturing rights were subsequently purchased by Aermacchi of Italy, and the aircraft is still in service with the Finnish Air Force, the Eritrean Air Force and the Mexican Navy.

The most read posts on The Marketing Communicator in 2009

I was interested in finding out what caught the eyes of my readers last year. Even though this is (yet) another top list, here are the most read posts from 2009:

1. About me
I’m humbled to see so many people interested in my person. I hope you found your way into other content I’ve written during the year

2. Fixed fees or hourly rates
I addressed this post to the world’s freelancer community to discuss billing strategies. Many freelancers get stuck with an hourly rate, which may cause difficulties in both adjusting price levels later on and justifying the rates to clients to begin with.

3. Social media as a B2B marketing tool
I know, I know, the writers touching upon this issue must come thirteen in a dozen. Perhaps you would like to take a look anyway?

4. Why the small b-to-b company needs online presence
I was astonished to find research showing that “only 44% of small businesses have a website”. Contrast this with the fact, corroborated by other research, that “more than four out of five industrial buyers go to search engines (83%) or specific company websites (85%) at some point in the buying process” and you’ll see why this post was written. Maybe there’s something for you, too?

5. How to handle your advertising in-house without the downside
An Ad Age article discussed the pros and cons of bringing your advertising account in-house, a topic that I can imagine interested many companies grappling with the economic downturn. While the article only talked about ad agencies vs. in-house advertising departments, I wanted to present a third alternative that combines the best of both worlds.

How Santa’s boots destroyed an ad campaign

Years ago, when print advertising was still going strong in the B2B arena, there was an advertising agency working with a client, a paper machine felt manufacturer, who wanted to run a Christmas campaign in the US.

The agency was in Finland, the home country of Santa Claus (although I’ve also read a claim that he lives in New Jersey—obviously an uninformed source). Santa in Finland wears felt boots, which sparked the visual idea of connecting his felt boots and the paper machine felt.

There wasn’t too much time available, so the agency advanced on all fronts simultaneously. The idea was presented to the client while copy, visual and photography were being done simultaneously to meet the deadline.

Everything went just fine until the layouts were shown to the client’s US sales office. The first thing that happened was that everybody stared at Santa’s boots. You see, the American Santa wears leather boots.

So, everything—the copy, visual and photography—had to be redone. You can imagine the extra work and cost.

All is well that ends well, though. The media deadlines were met, the now leather-booted campaign (with totally remade copy, of course) ran as planned and everyone was happy. I just have to hope the accounting departments of both the agency and the client managed to work out how the cost was divided.

Moral: Be attentive to detail when communicating to a foreign audience. A seemingly minor issue may trash the best of intentions.

Prime example of excellent customer service on Twitter

To make a long story short, this is what happened.

I read a tweet by someone I follow on Twitter introducing Readability, an application that essentially removes everything else on a web page you’re viewing and only leaves the text visible. It works by first selecting a couple of settings, then dragging a bookmarklet into your browser’s bookmark toolbar. Whenever you encounter a page whose content—as opposed to all the blinking things swarming around it — you want to read, you just click on the bookmarklet and can see the page’s textual content uncluttered.

Here’s my friend’s first tweet:

This sounded interesting, so I added the bookmarklet to my bookmark toolbar. I tried it on my own website and noticed a glitch. I replied to my Twitter friend:

I was very pleasantly surprised to find this in my feed within only a couple of hours:

Now that’s customer service! Chris obviously had taken the trouble to also take a look at what browser I’m using, what my website is and probably also tested how Readability works there. I felt compelled to acknowledge this:

Kudos!

FOLLOW-UP Jan 01, 2010:
They kept their promise, too. Just tried anew yesterday and now it’s working fine!

Posted via web from Unorganized thoughts around marketing

Freelance writing project in the cloud?

If you’re a freelance writer like me, I’m sure you’ve come across these problems when working on a project with a client team:

• How to keep your draft copy in one place
• Allow every project participant view it, make amendments and comments
• Get rid of endless e-mails concerning the copy
• Stay on top of the amendments made by the team
• Do all this without investing in proprietary software or paying monthly fees

Let me propose a solution: Writeboard by 37signals (yes, the makers of Basecamp). Let me also point out that I’m in no way affiliated or compensated by 37signals, I’m just someone who finds Writeboard an excellent solution for my needs.

What you get

With Writeboard, you can create as many Writeboards as you want and invite as many collaborators to each of them as you like. Each Writeboard is assigned a name and password of its own. The only snag is that you will need to keep track of the names and passwords, although there’s an option of sending a message to the service to retrieve the names and passwords of all the Writeboards you’ve created by e-mail.

The way it works is that you either write your copy in the application or copy-paste it from a word processor/text editor. You can add rudimentary text enhancements, such as headings, bullet points, indented paragraphs etc through wiki-style markup.

Everyone you’ve invited to collaborate can edit the file and save a new version of it. The system keeps track of all the versions and allows comparison between two versions of your choice, showing what was deleted and what was added. You can also attach comments to the file, each comment notifying you which version the comment relates to.

There’s the possibility of exporting the file in TXT or HTML format, should any of the team members want to download it to his or her own computer for review and editing.

What you don’t get

Writeboard is a subset of the Basecamp package, so don’t expect automatic e-mail notifications to participants about changes or any other of Basecamp’s project management features. Writeboard is sharable text, that’s all. Also, all participants have full rights to edit the document, you can’t assign different editing rights.

Why Writeboard, then?

True, you can achieve the same with other free online apps, such as Google Docs or Adobe’s Acrobat.com, both of which, however, require that users sign up for an account. In my experience, clients generally don’t want to sign up for anything just to work with a supplier. With Writeboard, you just invite whomever you want. You can create unlimited Writeboards, so provided you can keep track of them, you can create a new Writeboard for every new project.

I’ve probably missed some of the features here, but I hope this will help you. If your needs grow, you can always migrate to any of 37signals’ paid subscriptions giving more options and features.

Posted via email from Unorganized thoughts around marketing

On metrics, optimization and quantification

Reading the New York Times article Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception started me thinking about the enthusiastic attempts to measure everything that permeates the social media world in particular. From there, it was only a short jump to wondering whether and to what extent is it necessary to optimize everything, from website content to how much and what you eat. Read the NYT article for more shining examples.

Measuring is difficult to get right. You may have a perfect tool for it, but there's always the danger that the basis of your measurements is somehow skewed, for example, not taking into account components that would affect the inferences. A case in point: social media ROI has been a hotly debated topic for some time, yet there seems to be a wide difference of opinion about what and how actually should be measured.

Another aspect of measuring is that it is, necessarily, based on what happened in the past. Drawing conclusions from history points you in the right direction most of the time, but as investment brokers are obliged to say, "past performance does not guarantee future results".

Optimization is another double-edged sword. I hate waste and unused opportunities as much as the next guy, but you should also think about the return on effort, to coin a new term. An example: it may take you 15 minutes to write a blog post, but to optimize it from all angles easily takes you an hour, even more. Is it worth the resource investment?

If you're producing a reasonable volume of quality content, it will probably appear in search results anyway. There's a saying in Finnish: best is the worst enemy of good—meaning that if something is working all right, the effort to make it work perfectly may take so much effort as to make the whole exercise pointless.

Quantification, it seems to me, is being applied to almost everything. Again, it certainly increases our understanding of what has happened and is happening, but it is impossible to attach a numerical value to everything, particularly if it is supposed to relate to the future. Take philosophy or inventions: how do you predict the "performance" of a thought or an idea?

Now I have probably annoyed some metrics proponents, but that's fine. I'm looking forward to having my thoughts poked full of holes. Go ahead. Just click the Comments link!

Posted via email from Unorganized thoughts around marketing

Social media popularity bubble

In the context of social media, I’m seeing a lot of talk about how this or that is now catching on like nothing before.

Not long ago, reports began to appear that the business-to-business world is turning to online marketing methods and increasingly planning to invest in social media marketing. Just today, I read an article on how video is “the fastest-growing media platform in history”. And this in B2B.

What proof is rapid growth of anything?

When B2B’s are “planning” to “invest in” social media marketing, what does it really mean? To a cynic, it sounds a lot like “we have no idea what it is and how it’s going to work, but it’s fairly cheap, so what the heck, let’s put some intern on it and see what happens”. Or, in the case of video, if you start from zero and produce one video, you have an indefinite growth rate. Wow.

I’m throwing down the gauntlet.

First, I would like to see those who tout social media marketing as a panacea to companies’ slowing performance in a stagnant economy somehow proving that those B2B plans to invest in social media have a chance to live. Success stories, please – something on a larger scale than selling envelopes in bulk to the corner stationery store (which is essentially a single decision-maker market that works just the same way as the consumer market). Or even viable plans.

Second, I would like to see a credible model for B2B’s to successfully use video for marketing. I’m not talking about “live user manuals” or anything in that vein, it’s been done for decades already. Do you really see a CTO of a mid-sized company putting on his headphones, turning on the sound on his computer and watching an 8-minute marketing pitch? Please.

So, am I just hopelessly old-fashioned, ignorant, fixated in traditional marketing methods? Rip me apart. The comment link is right there.

Social media slowly maturing as marketing vehicle

It seems that among us marketers, a shift from enthusing about social media to taking a more sober look at it is taking place.

Just today, I read two blog posts that seem to give evidence to this.

In his blog {grow} Mark W. Schaefer asks Will economic recovery pummel social media? His main point is that as the economy is picking up again, people will have less time to spend on social media. First, they will be busier attending to customer needs, and second, many workplaces limit the use of social media platforms. Mark also provides an interesting hypothesis: there might be a shift of some advertising budget back to traditional media as people, for the above reasons, are less exposed to online advertising.

Christina Kerley writes in her CK's Blog how Social media gives people more control over brand messages but marketers (still!) ultimately influence what those messages will be. She alleviates the fear of many corporate marketers that they're losing control over their message out in the cyberspace by pointing out that "your company is wholly and fully in control of the quality of its brands, customer care efforts and marketing programs".

All this is good. What we need is not social media hype, but viable ways of putting it to work for us. After all, as many people before me have pointed out, social media is only a platform, it is up to us how to best use it.

What's your opinion?

Posted via email from Unorganized thoughts around marketing

Finnish employees want clear guidelines for social media usage

Hill & Knowlton Finland and the research company MPS today published the results of their survey How employers and employees meet on social media, conducted in October-November this year.

Main findings:

The opinion of 20 percent of employees was that they can criticize their employees in social media, but 73 percent are careful how they speak. Loyalty to employers is strong.

Almost 40 percent of employees were of the opinion that their employer's guidelines on social media behavior can bind them on their free time. However, 72 percent of employees say they have no guidelines for social media behavior. Every second employee says they would like rules for online discussions.

One interesting fact was that many employees were prepared to look for a new job through social media, but employers are not meeting this need.

The survey included about 700 employees and 500 employer representatives from both private and public sector organizations.

If you can read Finnish, you can find the original article here.

What is the situation like in your country?

Posted via email from Unorganized thoughts around marketing

Choosing your social media participation mix

With the abundance of existing social media platforms – and new ones appearing almost every week – it is difficult to put together a mix of them that works best for you.

Just in case it might help someone, here's my system:

1. My blog: allows me to share content and comment
2. Twitter: daily follow-up of what's going on, one-to-one conversations plus driving traffic to my other "hangouts"
3. LinkedIn: discussion on topics that interest me in Groups plus a reserve of both talent and prospects
4. Posterous: low-threshold way of publishing content and opinion, allows cross-posting to other sites (I'm presently sending to Twitter and my blog)
5. My website: an information repository for those who are interested in the details of how I can help their marketing (I link to the site from all the other places I use)

I just looked up some of my business acquaintances on LinkedIn and was amazed at how few are really using it. There are many who obviously have signed up out of curiosity but then left the site alone. LinkedIn won't be of much use if you have one connection (probably the person who alerted you to the site's existence) and haven't updated your profile or anything else for months.

Then again, with something like an average 5-10% uptake of social media platforms among businesses, perhaps it's no wonder. Content/engagement marketing is a relatively new phenomenon and requires quite a lot of work. Besides, if the traditional marketing methods are producing satisfactory results, many people may not consider extra participation all that necessary. On the other hand, maybe they should gradually start to learn how to put social media to good use.

Coming back to my own social media mix, I've recently considered adding Slideshare and Scribd to it, not least because of the additional exposure they will provide. I'm a little worried, though, about search engines penalizing for duplicate content.

Any views?

Posted via email from Unorganized thoughts around marketing