If you’ve ever watched COPS, you’ve seen it first hand.
If you’ve ever witnessed a crime, you’ve probably done it.
If you’ve ever been stopped randomly on the streets of New York, you’ve experienced it.
The weird way people act when they can help someone out.
People change when they have information for the cops. They act, for lack of a better word, weird. Not the criminals or the victims, but the witnesses. The bystanders. The onlookers. The people Dane Cook talks about in his classic bit about a car crash:
Officer, I’m sorry, yeah I just want you to know, if it helps in your investigation, I was in my kitchen, and I heard it, so I came out. I will testify in court I was cleaning a dish, I will bring the dish as exhibit A.
Fact is, regular people LOVE talking to the police when they’re witnesses. So much so that they’ll drop whatever they’re doing (washing a dish, perhaps) to talk to the cops. They stand around talking amongst themselves, acting concerned, often until the police actually leave. They want the chance to speak their piece, to feel important.
And it’s not just talking to the cops. On the whole, people LOVE helping out. There’s no better example than Cash Cab. It’s a TV game show in a taxi cab, and one of the “lifelines” the contestants can use is the “Street Shoutout.”
They pull the cab over and literally ask the first person they see if they know the answer to the difficult trivia question. In New York City no less! The people on the street eat it up; they love helping out the complete stranger. Even if they have no idea about the answer, they’re still extremely eager to help.
Businesspeople aren’t any different. We love helping out others too. You meet someone new at a mixer, swap business cards, and get to talking. Pretty soon you mention that you’re having trouble with your widget production, and your new friend says
“O Wow! We had that same problem last year! Let me get the number for the widget consultant we used, she’s awesome!”
The added credibility that your new friend brings to the transaction will help you immensely with your problem. And she feels happy for setting up a deal between the two of you.
My point is that given the opportunity to help out someone else or give information, most people jump at the chance. It makes them feel good.
The trick?
Gathering enough information, talking to enough people, and connecting enough dots to figure out what everyone around you needs. If you make enough people feel good (through good business or referrals), they’ll feel good about mentioning your widget when they meet new contacts.
Most of you have probably heard of Pandora, but for those that haven’t I’ll give you the rundown.
Pandora is an internet radio platform that lets you build stations around an artist, genre or specific song. Founder Tim Westergren and his team of musicians listen to music all day long and tag the songs they hear according to a million different categories. Tags like key tonality, prominence of vocalist, primary instrument, etc.
Similar to StumbleUpon, Pandora adds value by aggregating content around your interests. And just like StumbleUpon, it’s a great way to discover new content. For example:
Say want to build a station around “Is This Love” by Bob Marley. Not only will other Bob Marley songs play on your station, but other relatively unknown reggae artists will as well. They have similar characteristics to the song you already like, so there’s a great chance you’ll like their music too.
It’s a great site to help pass the day at work and discover new music.
Happy Stumbling!
Selling the Show
Even for a professional writer like me, I don’t think of this blog as giving away my writing for nothing. While the internet destroys business model after business model, the smartest musicians live by the axiom “give away the music, sell the show.” I think the same can be said for company blogging.
You can read what I write here and wonder why you’re not paying to read it. After all, these are really the greatest marketing ideas of our generation (*smile*) why should I give them to you for free? Three reasons, really:
- So you can see the quality of ideas I have.
- So you can see how well I write.
- So you can envision me writing specifically for you.
Number 3 is the point of everything. Blogging puts your ideas out there and if they’re great enough, a potential customer envisions having you implement those ideas specifically for her. By giving away some of the “music” (my writing and ideas) I can sell the “show” (personal writing for your company).
Others do this too. Seth releases videos of his speeches. Jason Mraz has a whole concert on YouTube. Is this effective marketing? How do you feel after watching them? Enlightened and entertained, sure, but satisfied?
Not me. I want more.
I want to sit in the crowd and laugh along with everyone at Seth’s jokes. I want to sit in the front row of the coffeehouse and get goosebumps at Jason Mraz when he hits a high note. I want to be there.
An effective blog works the same way. You give people a taste of what you do, and if you communicate it well enough they’ll want you to do it specifically for them. They want the personal experience.
And they’ll pay you give it to them.
Blogging Gives You Personal Two-Way Communication with Customers
Like I was saying in my previous post, picking the most talented firm with the best reputation is only half the battle for your clients. They need to know that working with you will be a smooth and painless process, that’s why the most successful businesspeople build personal trust first, then leverage it into long-term business relationships.
Chambers of commerce know this. After-hours mixers exist to promote personal relationships between members. At VQC we network a lot, and we meet most of our non-referral business personally first, then turn move on to a business relationship.
People do business with people they trust, and trust is most easily won through personal interaction.
Online it’s no different. From the beginning, the internet has been so successful because it connects people.
The first stage of online marketing used About Us pages and employee profiles to “get to know” the company. But it’s tough to get to know someone through a little photo and reading that they enjoy cars.
Blogs serve as the next step in online customer interaction. Your customers get a direct line into your ideas coupled with a personal flavor. A well-written blog will read like one side of a conversation between friends.
Tech-savvy plastic surgeons have this down to a T. Their clientèle needs to trust their doctor on a personal level to feel comfortable. The doctors, in turn, make sure their big smiling faces are all over their marketing materials. If you’ve driven on 581 East recently, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Or look at this site.
A blog post with the author’s face next to it (coming soon to this blog!) shows off industry knowledge while reading like an email from a friend.
The ability to participate in the conversation through the comments is also much more engaging than simple reading. So it can be more than one side of a conversation with a friend. Potential clients can interact with you personally and, perhaps more importantly, with each other.
People appreciate connecting with other people. More than static reading, online readers today would rather
- Talk (or listen) to someone knowledgeable
- Share stories with a group in a similar situation
- Participate in the conversation
Blogs interact with readers, which (if done correctly) turns them into customers.
In the last installment of this series, I’ll wrap up and tell you the most important thing blogging does for your business.
I’ve mentioned some of these things in passing a couple times before, but I think it’s high time for a few posts detailing exactly why blogging is so important for any business.
I have to give credit to Frank from A Personnel Connection for prompting this series. We met at our mixer on Wednesday. I mentioned that I’m the blogger for VQC and we got to talking about what blogging can do for business.
I found myself “pitching” company blogging in person, on the fly, for the first time. It’s amazing what I said, because I had never needed to put the benefits of what I do into a short, concise explanation before. (Try it, it’s exhilarating.)
But I did, and now I’ll share what I said with you. In my mind, blogging is the best (and ironically most inexpensive) way to communicate with your customers. Here’s the first reason your business needs a blog:
Blogging Establishes You as an Expert in Your Field.
No one does business with someone they don’t trust.
Whenever you enter into a contract and need the other party to follow through you’re putting yourself out on a limb. It’s a pretty big risk for a business to pay you a lot of money to do a task for them. Before anything is signed or any money changes hands, both parties must be absolutely certain the other will be trustworthy.
So how does this typically work? How do the majority of people pick someone to do business with?
Research.
If your say you’re an expert in your field, your future client can verify that extremely easily if you have a blog. Your portfolio and previous contracts are helpful indicators, yes, but a blog gives the client a direct line into your thoughts.
She has access to different kind of information to help her make an informed decision about your expertise.
Showing that you know your stuff is different from simply saying you do, and a blog is the best way to communicate your expertise. Everyone says they’re the best, or the premier, or what have you, but are your competitors actually showing through their writing that they know their industry inside out?
Now is your chance to do exactly that. Think about it: would you choose a company with no visible marketing experience to handle a very important channel of your marketing (like a website) over one with a blog that gives you marketing insight regularly?
The great blog will definitely factor in the decision.
But in the end the decision to do business with a company is about much more than professional trust and an predicting a favorable outcome. I’ll talk about that second kind of trust in the next installment in the series.
Have you ever just wanted to check out what’s on a website, but the only way they let you in is if you fork over an email address? Or, better yet, you need to register for a site through a confirmation email, but don’t want to be on someone’s spam list. If either of these things have happened, Mint Email is right up your alley.
Every time you access Mint Email, a fresh email address appears at the top right. You enter it into the website asking for an email address, and keep the window open.
As soon as the confirmation email comes through, the browser window (or tab) starts blinking, letting you know that your confirmation email has arrived. Four hours later your temporary address expires, and any email list you would have been on now has a non-existent address.
I use Mint Email all the time to try new sites out. Give it a shot, at least it’ll stop spam.
Happy Stumbling!
The Creative Meeting
All too often the people sitting around the table come up with awful solutions because they can’t separate themselves from their own perspective.
Say a friend has asked you to be a sponsor at his chicken barbecue. You say yes because you’re friends with him. You then call a meeting with your creative team to see how to get the most out of the event, nevermind that you’re a B2B business and most of the attendees at the barbecue will be consumers (and retired).
At the meeting you brainstorm ways to make the event a success: handing out cute pens, tote bags, T-shirts. Having a raffle for free USB drives, $25 gift certificates, free massages, etc. When each idea comes up, your people look on the bright side (”People would love_____!” “That’s perfect!”)
When they say “people” they really mean “I.” I like that, so other people will too. Because it appeals to me and I make the decisions, by default it’ll be a huge hit.
The Creative Fallacy
Here’s why this approach never works: everyone loves their own ideas. And they love the ideas of people they respect even more. Is Grandpa really going to use a USB drive? Or a furry pen? More than that, why is a B2B operation sponsoring a chicken barbecue anyway?
Instead of making decisions then finding ways to make them succeed, decide on the right channels up front so even if you have a subpar follow-through it won’t be a disaster.
Effective and Ineffective Creative Marketing
The best way to do avoid event catastrophe is to have an out-of-body experience. You and your team need to
- Remove yourselves mentally from the planning process
- Divorce yourselves from your ideas
- Think like the person you’re trying to reach.
Remember a time when you were marketed to inefficiently. It happens to me nearly everyday: I’ll be watching TV with my friends and after a particularly awful commercial that doesn’t relate to me I can’t help but say, “That was terrible.”
Now think of a time when exactly the right thing came along at exactly the right time. For me, that’s usually late-night fast-food commercials. It’s 11pm, I ate dinner an eternity ago, and that Crunchwrap Supreme just looks soooo cheesy and tempting. So I drive to Taco Bell and pick one up.
Succeeding Creatively
You have to recognize your audience and what they respond to. Once you understand that, you can pick and choose where you want your marketing to be. Don’t decide on the channel then try and make it work (like the chicken barbecue). Put being where your customers are the first priority.
Because if you do it right, they’ll appreciate hearing from you.