bwagy, the blog of Ben Young

The world is full of interruptions, facebook, email, twitter, mobile, mail, tv.

They all rely on one thing that we give them.  Attention.

We can also take that away.

Attention is at the consumers disposal.  It always has been.  In the 21st century our attention is becoming increasingly scarce.

So you need to get permission.  Permission to send us a txt, permission to be in my twitter network, permission to send me an email.  

Guess what? I will only give you long term permission if you send me personalised and relevant experiences.

This is all about you, you are doing what you do, you know you can do better, but need some ideas that you can take the ball and run with.  

This is what I do all the time, it is second nature, it is automatic, so it’s my pleasure to share it with you.

(Note since this is possibly my longest post ever! I have got a pdf download so you can print it out)

1. Fundamentally you need to realise (and always focus) it’s all about people.  People like you and me. Telling others and ourselves stories.  
2. A good story enhances status, creates enjoyment, and benefits both the storyteller and the receiver.  It is not zero sum, a good story everyone benefits.
3. Word of mouth is the best referral a consumer can get.  No really, the BEST!
4. You are a storyteller, whether you want to be or not, in what you wear, how you speak, how you walk.  You are communicating to someone at some stage something.  (Stop and reread this).
5. Forget about parasite marketing, sustainable businesses are built on building products that help the purchaser.  If you can help your clients enough to create a worthy story you have an endless chain of word of mouth.
6. We have all heard, a bad experience results in 64 people hearing about it, a good experience leads to 8 hearing about it.  Sounds out of whack right? Wrong.  If I have a good experience with you I will repeat my purchase, if you keep looking after me, i will keep telling 8 people forever…. and everytime I make a purchase.  Marketing & Business is all about the long term.  If you can get a customer and keep them forever they will sell your products for you.  Easy.   Never forget this.  A good customer experience compounds over time.
7. Expecting a sale on the first interaction is short sighted.  Consumers like to wooed, taken for a dance, candlelight dinner.  If you can expose them to your brand several times in different avenues you are more likely to build a satisfied customer.  Remember every exposure is an opportunity to help explain your value proposition.  (Now reread #6).
8. Put yourself in your customers shoes, what am i gaining from this? what is the story i am telling myself? why am i motived to talk to others about your story? 
9. If it doesn’t feel right it often isn’t.  If you are too ashamed to tell those around you what you do, or people you admire, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.
10. People like you, people like the team behind your products, your loyal customers actually want to be their friends (although they realise they can’t) but utilise that.  Get your people to talk with customers, over the phone, twitter, blogs.  Expose the people behind the scenes.  The cross pollination between customers and staff is only going to benefit both parties.  Hint: it also creates a new ‘exclusive’ story for each of those loyal customers.
11. You are always wrong, you just need to be less wrong than your competitors.
12. Forget magic answers, they don’t exist, you know what you need to do.  So do it.  Obsess about customers, drive insane value, your marketing is sorted, now collect the cheques.
13. Cut back, you don’t need 20 channels, cut back to what you do exceedingly well, then get better at it, being the absolute bleeding edge best is far more important than scrapping a few extra dollars.  You will doubt yourself, but hang in there.
14. Bring the whole team together, encourage diversity, open discussions, new ideas, get them to take listening courses, involve them in strategic visions, they define your company to the outside world, so make sure they know what they are defining.
15. Mass advertising builds subconscious brand recognition, but word of mouth demands a purchasing decision.
16. Chase things that scare your organisation, chances are they scare your competitors too, that is signal enough that you at least need to explore it.

I am a fan of the cafe, constantly hold meetings there, nice atmosphere, food, drink.

A strong message at the moment I keep talking about is using your existing organisation to sell yourself.

Cafes are a great example of this, some staff are proactive can recommend something nice to eat, the daily special, maybe they can make you what you want.  Majority of them though, stand behind the food, dish it out, then process your payment.

The difference here is, some staff are sales people, taking initiative to help the business.  The latter are like cogs in a machine, follow the system, collect the paycheck.

I have good news, the latter can be trained! Give them some sales training, reward sales or increases in customer satisfaction.  Your employees know your products / services better than most, remind them that helping produce sales is a win/win for all.  

The same goes for clients & users.  All three should be your top sales channels.  They COULD be selling for you! but only if you help provide the tools for them to do so.

1. Look at how you generate sales now.
2. Then look at where you could be selling, give them a test.  

You’d be surprised at how effective alternative channels are.

The term Internet Marketing is dying.  

Not quite but that is where it’s going, Internet Marketing will be the cornerstone of the Marketing mix, in fact it is going to be the defining characteristic of companies built from this point in time.

Don’t believe me? Talk to me in five years, remind me I’m wrong.

We won’t be referring to Internet Marketing it will just be Marketing and of that they internet will be a key component.

Do not just suffice with communicating good value for money.

You need to communicate INSANE value.

Where your customers go this is crazy how can they offer that? Now i’m not saying inflate values with ponzi values, offer genuine value.

If you can offer insane value each and every month your customers will never leave.

Relative spheres of influence are changing. And rapidly.

They are becoming fragmented, diverse and often a group provides a sphere of influence rather than an individual.

Traditionally it was friends and family who influenced your decisions, whether they be purchasing, career or clothing decisions.

Instead we had become much more transparent.

Suddenly your favourite blogger is providing you with business advice, your purchasing decisions are judged by average ratings on IMDB, your clothing is dictated by international fashion rather than local.

Firms have yet to wake up and realise this.

Some get it.  Others still struggle.

People exist in multiple spheres or Pods as I’ve discussed prior so can in turn be influential in multiple pods.

The good news is you can reach them, they will listen, if your worth listening to.

Now how do you reach these spheres? By being proactive online, building a blog, developing a local twitter presence, making your own iphone apps.

As the talkers are out there and they would love to hear from you.

The Best Ideas are Free we know that.

But often in a business scenario to stimulate the idea generation we need to part with some dollars.

A few crowdsourcing sites have popped up, the idea is to tap into a large crowd to generate ideas for marketing, business and general problems.

Fantastic model.

Yet for Marketing I think its slightly overengineered and appeals to a slightly lemon market.

That is those that have the time to invest in the site may not necessarily be that savvy (exception to the rule is those that commit time to invest in it strategically).  

Typically the target market are very time poor and do not have the time or resources to invest into yet another social resource.

I think a simple email list suffices.

Create a list of interested parties, email then occaisonally with a marketing problem, provide them with a bounty.

Keep it simple.

Twitter is a great platform for conversation. 

However how could you run a marketing campaign on it?

Criteria would be:

• Remarkable content
• Idea worth spreading
• Of actual benefit to those who consume it

If you were to fulfill these, how could you spread the word?

Same as any strategy, plan, line up your chess pieces and execute.

My strategy would be around:

• Have a series of tweets, to provide background information or arouse curiousity
• A follow up tweet with the actual subject
• Stimulate discussion tweets.

Then target 5 users in your niche to engage in it, with slightly different variations of the tweets.

An example would be:

1. bwagy: checking out this cool video @bwagy sent me
2. bwagy: hilarious, check out this video from @bwagy http://blog.local
3. bwagy: what did you think? watch it here http://blog.local retweets appreciated

Of course this only works for the criteria above and with people you have solid relationships with.

It’s more of an initiative to maximise coverage of your first and second tier networks of your offering.

The next step would be to do multiple timezones within a 24 hour period to ensure global coverage.

You can then directly measure through tracking webpage visits and tweets (using search.twitter.com).

That’s what I would do if I was to try and get a message out over twitter.

This information is worth thousands to the right person so help spread it for me as its free 🙂

Update: Tweet this to share:

Running a campaign on Twitter http://tr.im/2j8k by @bwagy [make sure to add your comments when you tweet]

Probably a couple of times a month I get a job description or two across my email, to forward to friends, field interest etc.

I always have a flick through and to be honest I don’t think they ever put enough effort into a job description.

A job description should communicate a story;

• This is the story we want the employee to make happen in our organisation
• The story as to why you should work for us
• A story about the ideal candidate

Honestly if you have an uninspiring job description with mediocre (more often than not) copied/pasted descriptions your going to get average employees.

Few start ups have videos, showing the team, where you’d work, what you’re expected to do, sure I bet the results are lower but the quality would be much much higher.  That’s a story that will be perfect for one employee.

So if your looking to bring someone on board, remember its as much a marketing decision as a culture, strategy and organsiational one.

Have you ever been put off a job just by the description?

The bus driver can’t hear you. He has already driven away.  

He couldn’t care less, you should have been on time,

You should have been there when he cared, when he had time to give you attention.

Dam.

Oh well the next bus is 10 mins away?  Wrong.  It could be 5 mins away or 25 mins away.

You don’t know.

You know it is coming, but when?

The point is, in the meantime you’ve missed out.

Communications is rapidly changing and has been doing so for years, the bus has come and gone many times, each time it does, you miss out!

So when are you going to be on time jump on board, and give it a shot.  As hey one day its going to be lonely at that bus stop.

What is personality?

Google ‘definition of personality’ returns “the complex of all the attributes–behavioral, temperamental, emotional and mental–that characterize a unique individual; “their different …”

Essentially personality is what makes us different and unique.

Big businesses try to stamp out personality to keep regimented systems for franchises, to reassure customers, to get the right cogs doing what they need to.

Yet more often than not a loyalty between organisations is between people, not the brands.

It’s people behind every company and every interaction and with people comes their personality.

We shouldn’t shy away from that, we should embrace it, what are the personalities behind our business? and how can we leverage that? (and in term keep them happy).

I was thinking this as I bought a coffee from Cafe Monet, in Newmarket.  

I wandered in and 3 people were in there and they all said hey anton, morning anton, etc to (as I instantly became aware) Anton the barista.

Anton looked up and said ‘hey buddy’ to me, and carried on talking to various people, within 30 seconds you could tell he was the personality behind the cafe and the reason people kept coming back.

It was like everyone was friends, a real sense of community.

I daresay his 10% extra effort with every customer leads to 80% (or higher) return rates.  

I’ll definitely be going back to say hi to Anton and grab a coffee (plus the coffee isn’t half bad).

The question is, what personalities do we have? and how can we embrace them?

Not many rules I follow.

However 80/20 rules is one that I pay attention to.

The argument is 20% of causes lead to 80% of consequences.

(Note: its not strictly 80/20 it can be 90/10)

Examples are:

• 20% of streets cause 80% of traffic jams
• 20% of your clients derive 80% of your profits
• 20% of faults make up 80% of your replacement costs

Smart thinking.

I always throw this around every few months, see what else I’m doing wrong, or where improvements can be made.

Some examples i’ve found:

• 20% of our Marketing Exp lead to 80% of our revenue.
• 10% of my calls derive 90% of my mobile bill
• 20% of my clients derive roughly 85% of my revenue (fluctuates a little bit)
• 13% of our content drove 95% of our traffic

Once you’ve identified a link, what can you do to improve that 20%? How can you look after your clients that drive 80% of our profit? Can you modify your call behaviour to lower the 10% that make up 90% of your bill?

Give it a shot, it’s not only fun, it’s quite interesting to see the results.

Have you already done it? share your results I’m always intrigued…

Assume everyone who reads your content has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Which means

• Keep your message clear
• Break it up & segment it
• Into small digestible bites

Increase readership, retention, referrals.

Succeed.

I don’t need to tell you that attention spans are increasingly shortening… as you’ve already stopped reading by now (see what i mean).

Here in New Zealand we have a (controversial) rule limiting how politicians finance their campaigns.

The idea was to limit wealthy supporters buying elections.

The part I want to focus on is what a private individual can do without having to register.

The Act makes it illegal for anyone to spend more than NZ$12,000 criticising or supporting a political party or taking a position on any political matter, or more than NZ$1,000 criticising or supporting an individual member of parliament, without first registering with a state agency, the Electoral Commission. [Wikipedia]

looks like private individuals have to register if they want to spend more than $12k.  So what do they do now? They get creative…..

So what could $11,999 nzd buy you if you wanted to support your political party (or any other cause):

• At $0.075 cpm on Facebook you could buy 159,986,666 ad impressions targeted at a kiwi audience. (Would blanket every Kiwi user on Facebook multiple times).  Simply send them to your Facebook page where they could become a fan / spread the word / make a donation to the party / share their views….endless.
• At $0.05/click you could buy 240,000 visitors to your favourite political parties website.  Even at $0.50 you could buy 24,000!
• Smear campaign? Buy advertising on Google when people search for a party show your advertisement for the opposition…
• You could create a social network on Ning.com and spend $11,999 on search engine advertising sending visitors there to create a thriving community.
• You could spend $11,999 on search engine optimisation to have your party show up in search engines no matter which party users searched for.
• Spend $11,999 on paid blog reviews from local bloggers
• Hire a student for $11,999 of time (@ $15/hour say 800 hours or about 20 weeks) just talking and partaking in political conversations online.
• Or a mix of the above, get some volunteers to create a social network on Ning.com, spend money advertising it on facebook/google, pay someone to develop an internet marketing strategy and use volunteers within the network to execute this campaign.  Leverage the power of loyal fans to deliver a campaign which may have cost millions on the open market.

I think you get the idea, being creative and utilising the internet as a platform to spread your story the possibilities are virtually unlimited (even on a tight budget).

Oh and if you were a political party receiving this kind of support, do what Barack did and setup a way of providing micro donations on your website, then your supporters can help push donations through.

(also handy if you provided free graphics, videos, documents for your fans to share online)