Obfuscate clearly!
Quite frequently — sometimes even in so many words — I find myself compelled to give clients some classic advice from Strunk and White:
Obfuscate clearly!
Actually, I have not succeeded in finding the edition in which I recall seeing that phrasing. Probably it was the second, which I presume Paul Kedrosky also had. But in a a subsequent edition somebody (presumable White, as Strunk was long deceased) wrote similarly in their name:
Be clear.
Clarity is not the prize in writing, nor is it always the principal mark of a good style. … since writing is communication, clarity can only be a virtue. And although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one. Even to a writer who is being intentionally obscure or wild of tongue we can say, “Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!” Even to writers of market letters, telling us (but not telling us) which securities are promising, we can say, “Be cagey plainly! Be elliptical in a straightforward fashion!”Clarity, clarity, clarity.
What makes me think of this dictum most often is not marketing collateral per se, but rather product naming and description. Worst of all can be the names of particular portions of a marketecture diagram. Now, I am on record as believing that all product category names are flawed. But while some vagueness or ambiguity may be unavoidable, there is no reason for names to be meaningless or downright misleading.
| Categories: Marketing theory | 1 Comment |
Five kinds of public relations
I comment about public relations from two different standpoints:
- As a consultant to the technology industry
- As a target of public relations myself
Sometimes these discussions are very fruitful. But other times they are “Head, meet brick wall.” Perhaps this post will help.
This post actually started as a set of specific tips, the biggest of which is uncouple your PR from your press releases. I’ll put the others below — but first, I’d like to cover a little theory.
There are (at least) five different things you can try to do via public relations:
- “Sell” to the press (and bloggers and so on), by which I mean that you try to induce stories, and you probably measure success by a count of stories written (presumably weighted by the quality of the publication, the favorableness of the mention, and so on), and your activities are focused on contacting the press in pursuit of that goal.
- “Market” to the press, by which I mean that you try to create a favorable disposition toward having them say what you’d want them to. This can be measured in the same ways as “selling” success, but usually on a more long-term basis.
- Market through influencers to your end customers and prospects. Here I’m saying “influencers” rather than “press”, because social media, pure word of mouth, and so on can also contribute to success.
- Market through influencers to other influencers. It is now a regular consulting exercise for me to walk clients through the whole chain of which influencers listen to which other influencers. (If you want to work that kind of thing out for yourself, social media observation is a good way to start.)
- Market to potential buyers directly. This has become increasingly realistic as the internet has matured.
| Categories: Analyst relations, Marketing theory, Technology marketing | 2 Comments |
Sarah Dopp re social media expertise
As I’ve previously noted, the concept of “social media expert” is problematic at best. Still, people are constantly trying to figure it out, because … well, because they want to get paid for their “social media expertise.” Sarah Dopp offers an interesting take on social media expertise, which I shall herewith quote at length. My comments are in italics.
1) Since having a social media presence is about reputation and relationships, it needs to be personal to the individual. … The approach needs to be custom-tailored to fit the client’s personality and worldview, and the client needs to have a lot of say in the development of this fit. … Agreed.
2) Having an effective social media presence is different from traditional marketing, and it’s also different from the ways we’ve been using the internet in the past. True but overstated. There are three golden rules of social media marketing:
- Make your messages robust.
- Train and trust many of your employees to deliver the message, implicitly and explicitly.
- Trust your employees to show their own personalities without hopelessly undermining the “personality” of your enterprise.
The first two have actually been good management practice for decades, and the third one frequently worked as well.
3) Developing a social media presence has to be done gradually. A client has to pay attention to what’s working and what’s not, listen to feedback from the community, and constantly refine their approach with little changes. Agreed.
4) The social media consulting model is in contrast to the web development consulting model, where you just build something and walk away until it needs to be updated. It’s also in contrast to the idea that social media consultants exist to give expert advice — if clients think of them that way, they’ll only go to them with the big questions, and try to answer the little questions on their own. But social media success is in the details, and it’s the little questions that will make or break an online presence. Agreed. I have clients who ask me to review a large fraction of their individual blog posts. I think that’s a great use of my time … but then, I think the same thing about press releases.
| Categories: Marketing theory | Leave a Comment |
The horns of the “social media expert” dilemma
Skelliewag correctly observes that the concept of “social media expert” is silly in the first place.
Most people are looking for an expert to solve a very specific problem. Some examples from within social media:
- They want to learn how to create content that compels Digg users to vote, which will in turn bring them more pageviews and ad revenue.
- They want to use Twitter to build a bigger profile in their field.
- They want to create a blog that turns readers into customers.
Who are they going to hire, all things being equal?
- The expert in creating and marketing Diggable content for pageviews, or the ’social media expert’?
- The expert in creating super-accounts on Twitter, or the ’social media expert’?
- The expert in business blogging for conversions, or the ’social media expert’?
On the other hand, people with such narrow expertise are (in most cases properly) pigeon-holed as low-level tacticians. As I recently noted, social media should not be done in some kind of silo, let alone in a whole collection of silos.
Only the largest or most aggressive consumer marketing organizations will be able to afford and make proper use of the range of expertise Skelliewag suggests.
| Categories: Marketing theory | 1 Comment |
Paul Gillin on influencer marketing
Paul Gillin offers a pair of posts that in my opinion are spot-on about influencer marketing. Highlights include: Read more
| Categories: Analyst relations, Marketing theory, Technology marketing | 1 Comment |
Social media done in a silo is social media done wrong
There are tons of self-appointed “social media experts” out in cyberspace. There’s also a growing backlash against same, usually focusing around ideas such as:
- Many of these so-called “experts” greatly overstate their expertise.
- A lot of what passes for social media “success” just amounts to these “experts” getting attention from each other.
I wouldn’t go out of my way to argue with all that. 
But I think there’s also a more fundamental reason why specialized social media “experts” should not be taken very seriously:
Social media done in a silo is social media done wrong. Read more
| Categories: Marketing theory, Technology marketing | 3 Comments |
Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics explained
Below is a three-year-old post of mine from a long-dormant blog, quoted in its entirety:
Maria Winslow notes that “Open Source” is an example of
Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics:
Bad jargon drowns out good.
Now, I won’t pretend that’s really original with me — but then, it’s based on Gresham’s Law, for which Sir Thomas Gresham apparently doesn’t deserve the credit he gets either.
The idea behind the “Law” is this: If a term connotes some kind of goodness, marketers scarf it up and apply it to products that don’t really deserve it., making it fairly useless to the products that really do qualify for the more restrictive meaning.
“Predictive analytics” sounded cool, and now covers a fairly broad range of statistical analyses, most of which don’t involve any kind of explicit prediction. Some “native” XML data stores are dressed-up tourists from either the relational or object-oriented worlds, while a lot of “thin clients” actually do their shopping at Lane Bryant. “Transparent” connectivity layers tend to be cloudy, and “portablilty” commonly involves considerable heavy lifting.
By the way, Monash’s Second Law of Commercial Semantics is much more technologically oriented: Where there are ontologies, there is consulting. I first said that at the Text Mining Summit, and it seemed to win immediate, widespread agreement.
| Categories: Marketing theory, Technology marketing | 5 Comments |
Strategy should be complicated, but tactics should be simple
My approach to marketing strategy is often a quest for completion. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. For want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of a horse … and so on. The layered messaging model is a prime example of that.
But while strategy often needs to be made more complicated, tactics often need to be simplified. This hilarious video — hat tip to my favorite web designer — tells the story.
| Categories: Marketing theory | 1 Comment |
Always be marketing
Guy Kawasaki argues that you should always be selling. Specifically, he suggests:
Creating a successful business requires effective persuasion. This study shows that great persuasion sometimes occurs when people don’t expect it. This means that you should always be selling—you may persuade people when you least expect it. This is also a good argument for the potential power of tools such as Twitter and blogs. These new approaches can open doors for people who haven’t thought about a new concept.
If you think about it, what Kawasaki really means is: You should always be marketing.
Looking at him briefly from afar, I’d guess that Kawasaki’s priorities are something like:
- Keep building awareness.
- Stay on message.
Judging by the recent election season, most political campaigns would agree. In enterprise IT, however, I’d tweak and flip them, to:
- Stay on one or more of your messages.
- Build awareness in the right audiences — prospects and influencers alike.
| Categories: Marketing theory, Political marketing, Technology marketing | 3 Comments |
Do influencers think along the lines of the layered messaging model?
I originally came up with the more techie version of the layered messaging model
Enterprise IT product (sustainable-lead messaging stack)
- Tangible benefits
- Technical connection
- Features and metrics
- Technical connection
- Fundamental product architecture
because it’s a pretty good representation of how I think. But what about other influencers? Do they view things in somewhat the same way? Read more