I Have 100 Pounds Waiting for You!

Branding can be described as the “feel” that develops around a company or a person. Once a brand is forged in a person’s mind, it can be a time-consuming challenge to change that feel. Just consider the correlative affects of branding to understand why it is important to get it right.

Pick a brand - any brand - and consider what it brings to mind. For me, if you mention K-Mart, I think of grade school in the 1970’s when saying “Your mom buys your clothes at K-Mart” was an insult of the highest degree. That was memorable for me.

If you mention Applebee’s restaurant, I get a knot in my stomach, along with an ugly flashback of the last time I ate at Applebee’s. On the other hand, if you mention McDonald’s, I may nod my head and think to myself “yeah, I really do deserve a break today.”

You can apply the same principle to many of the people you know. During your use of social media, you have probably developed a view of certain people. As an example, there’s probably a lady who loves her cats - a lot, and maybe a guy that brings to mind the smell of dirty socks. In my case, there is a sizable crowd of people who post funny bacon-related content on my personal Facebook profile. If they think of me when they see bacon, I’m calling that a huge win! Go ahead, show me your bacon.

The “feel” you get about a brand can often extend far beyond the basic facts you know about the person or company. The stronger the brand message becomes, the more it creates a subconscious overall picture in your mind. You’ve surely experienced this, right?

Preemptive Branding and Brand Defense

A brand will not always have a positive correlation affect on us. Creating a strong positive brand message early, and consistently working to build upon it can help minimize a need for defense. It can also minimize long term damage. Make no mistake - every brand is subject to damage.

Strong brands can overcome adversity. For example, when you think of Ford Motor Company, you probably don’t think of their disaster with the Ford Pinto that was known for blowing up if it was hit in the rear.

Additionally, you probably don’t give a lot of thought to cyanide when you take a Tylenol - but that was a different matter in 1982.

Time and continued brand-building has healed those brands. Their previously favorable brand-status was a huge asset to pull them through.

Of course, many companies don’t have time on their side. This is especially true of smaller or newer brands. NetFlix may or may not have enough time to recover from the huge 2011 media blows to their brand. Their stock dropped to less than half its previous value. It happened quickly and with a lot of attention. They have recently reported big gains, but you can bet those gains would come a lot slower if they didn’t already have a positive and widely recognized brand.

Brands Evolve, But Should Never Be Left to Luck

Many companies are apprehensive about carving their brand in stone. The stronger you build your brand, the slower it will change - for better or worse. This makes it important to get it right, but what should be even scarier than getting it wrong is to leave it up to the luck of the marketplace. Even if you only get it 90 percent right, it is better than neglecting it.

The wrong brand message can be polarizing. The good news is that the right brand message can be polarizing, too. Just look at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft for examples of companies unafraid to polarize their audience.

I often harp on this fact, and I’ll say it again: “Everybody” is not your target market! If your marketing is focused properly, you must be willing to exclude some people. It doesn’t mean you should insult them, but you also don’t want to waste your resources trying to reach them.

Branding Identifies You, And That’s Okay!

We don’t all think alike, and we don’t all respond to the same things. In my brand instance, I’ve stated that my job is to help brands become more exciting … somewhere along the lines of sex, bacon, and fast cars. Thus, my personal brand is often identified with bacon, sex, and race cars. That works for me, and my audience can appreciate these things.

Sex, bacon, and fast cars may not work for you, but you have your own brand to work with. Your brand grows all around you, even when you’re not looking. It is best to have a good understanding of that brand picture you’re building - and embrace it. You should never be too passive about your brand, or it will tend to fade and lose value - and suffer the wrath of the market.

This may give you a nauseous feeling as you hear the sound of the whole world as you know it collapsing around you, but I’ve got to share a bit of truth. There is almost certainly a person sitting at their computer right this moment who does not like bacon, nor sex, nor fast cars. In fact, those bits of my brand message may completely turn them away. Some people will be less than enamored by your brand, too. But that’s OK!

On the other hand, if you just threw something heavy across the room and screamed about how crazy this ball of rock and water called Earth has become, you’re my kind of person - passionate, wise, and perhaps a just bit nuts. Bacon, sex, and fast cars are staples. Some things are just better than others, and we realize that fact.

Some people are better, too! That whole notion of people all being equal sounds fantastic in theory. Sure, I guess you can say that we’re all equal in some ways, but some will just never be a good singer. I’ll demonstrate if I really must, but you’ll want to turn down your speakers. Better yet, you may want to unplug them. I’m really terrible at singing, but like anything else, mastering a talent takes practice.

Some people will be great at making a brand stand out against the backdrop of a squillion others. That’s my gig. It’s what I studied while the rest of the world was apparently taking vocal lessons to embarrass me. Now, the next time you’re thinking about bacon, race cars, or sex, I want you to remember what I said about branding. Practice can help a lot. Embrace your brand - and practice it!

Oh heck, I just hijacked your favorite food, your transportation, and your sex life. You can hate me later, but at least you’ll have a leg up on the competition!

100 Pounds of Free Bacon!

Just to be sure we’re clear on this, I want to offer you 100 pounds of free bacon!

I’m currently in the hunt for a new job. I’m seeking a company that wants a stronger brand, and a better marketing return on investment. They can’t have my brand, but I will work hard to understand and create their best brand message.

If you introduce me to that company, I will reward you with 100 pounds of free bacon. In fact, I’ll even buy you a new freezer to keep it in. That way, every time you enjoy that amazing bacon smell filling your kitchen, you can think of me.

How’s that for a way to build a brand picture? I’m happy with it!

More Thoughts on Branding:

• Marketing and Brand Consistency: Check Your Gargoyles
• “Everybody” is Not Your Target Market!
• How To Sell Paper Clips: A Closer Look at Marketing
• Polarize Your Audience and Stop Making Everybody Happy
• Building Equity in Social Media vs. Interruption Marketing
• Influence Marketing: Reach Your Market Through Their Influencers

You Cannot See Success Without Vision

Consider something as complex as a space ship for a moment. Space ships don’t always launch as planned, but they have an overall good record, considering their challenges. That’s because of careful planning. It has to begin somewhere, and it begins with a vision.

It is more than a coincidence that most successful companies have a vision statement. Those visions can change, but there should always be a vision. Vision is what guides people and keeps them on the right path to achievements.

You have undoubtedly heard somebody express the importance of setting goals and envisioning the outcome you want. It can sometimes sound far-fetched, and even a bit hokey. If you reverse-engineer this notion of having vision, the reality may not be as you expected.

I want to explain why those people who talk about having vision are not just promoting a dream world filled with unicorns and cute kittens. It is not just about dreaming up a hallucination, either.

The reason it is important to have vision, whether as a huge corporation or as an individual, is that it becomes a basis for your goals and expectations. With vision, you will begin to do the things that bring you closer to the desired outcome. Your vision is what helps you to develop a subconscious reflex to do things to affect the results you want.

Vision Doesn’t Work for Skeptics

There are a lot of skeptics who may consider the value of vision as hogwash. We are each skeptical at some point, and to varying degrees. Being a bit apprehensive about a positive vision and creating goals is what preserves us from failure. If you don’t hope for much, you are less likely to be let down. That kind of apprehension also preserves us from success.

I believe that lack of vision is one of the greatest causes for failure in business and personal pursuits alike. The fear of creating a vision and doing what it takes to follow that vision is simply more than some people can overcome. I have witnessed this for decades as a marketing consultant.

To a skeptic, the people who talk about vision are often the ones who somehow “got lucky”. They hype the whole idea that everybody should have a dream for their life. It must sound totally crazy to a skeptic. For the skeptical type, the very notion of “vision” as it applies to getting what you want probably sounds like some kind of mystical new age idea complete with smoking the wrong stuff, waving a magic wand, and other hokus pokus that makes people want to go chase unicorns.

I’m talking about the real world. This is not about some fancy notion that if you can dream it that the obstacles will magically fade away and you’ll get everything you ask for. That’s usually not going to happen, but you can definitely get a lot closer.

Let's See About Improving Your Vision

A True Story of Vision

There was a time when I was not expected to make it very far in life. I was frustrated with school, and my grades showed it clearly. I was bored to tears, and I hated sitting in a classroom to be drilled with the same information, over and over again. I had previously been a top student, but my teenage vision obviously did not include my grade point average.

This was hard for my mother. Despite her previously high hopes and continued business mentoring, my future was falling apart. I was becoming an outcast, and a disappointment. She was giving up on me. All of the sudden, I was not just letting myself down, it was tearing my mother apart. I did not feel good about that.

When I was 15 years old, I left school to start a company. Throughout my earliest career years, I was a bit fixated on somehow making my mother proud. It became a very clear vision for me. I imagined how it would be for her to not look at me as her biggest failure. Of course, at 15 years old, I only really knew one way, and that was to prove my lack of formal education would not hold me back and I could be successful in business.

My vision took me far beyond expectations. I did very well in business by fixing under-marketed companies in exchange for ownership equity. Ten years after leaving school, I was comfortably retired and enjoying Mother’s pride … and a bit of my own. My vision was complete.

Caution: Completed Visions Are Like Poison

Once my earlier vision was completed, I became a 25 year old retired bachelor with no vision of my future. I dated the wrong ladies, I made the wrong investments, and I connected with the wrong business partners. Things pretty much fell apart, and I needed a new vision to get back on a good track.

I discovered that without a continued plan - without a vision - life simply would not take me where I intended. It became obvious that it would be impossible to get what I wanted if I couldn’t define it.

I eventually became inspired again. My new vision came in the form of another lady. Call me a ladies man. She wanted to quit her mid-level job in the banking industry to grow her sideline Internet services company. We merged companies and I went back to work with a vision. There was nothing easy about it. It took a lot of time and effort, but the vision came to life.

This vision worked, because there was a goal. We expanded the goal as needed, and our vision was flexible. It turned out that we took a website development company and spun it into one of the largest wholesale providers of Internet access and web hosting in the world. Yes, a high school dropout can have a successful vision, too!

Visions Should Be Flexible and Failure is Always an Option

Years later, I had a vision of sports car racing. I bought some brand new Corvettes, spent a quarter million dollars per year, and invested countless of hours hard work and training in that vision. It was very important to me. I got quite good at it, too.

When I consider all of the things in my life that require vision, auto racing has got to be on the extreme side. It would be nearly impossible to make it around a two and a half mile race course with 14 turns in under a minute and forty seconds without a vision.

Since the vision of our Internet company was as developed as we thought it would ever be, we created a new vision of selling the company and opening an upscale bed and breakfast and racing school. It was a mutual vision to pursue our culinary talents and my racing passion. Indeed, my business vision had led me to a full-time career in automotive racing. But there was a curve in the road!

The crash of the economy was not good to us, and it changed our vision. Change can be a good thing, when you have vision. Following my wife, Peggy’s culinary passion, we opened a wildly successful bakery, Mad Eliza’s Cakes and Confections.

Racing ran off the track for a while, but guess what? The vision is still there!

The Best Visions Bend, But Don’t Break

With a well-conceived and longer term vision comes flexibility. By its very nature, vision should be flexible and open to changes. It is not a formula for instant success, but rather a guideline. The best vision will create an overall look at what is to come, but it is not a predefined paint-by-numbers view of the future.

What got me thinking about the importance of vision today is because I’ve noticed my long-term vision coming clearer, almost without even consciously recognizing it. My earlier vision began to drive me to focus on what I really want.

In December, I announced that I would stop accepting new marketing consulting clients in January. That was because I decided to stop trying to be great at everything, as a CEO, in order to focus on my best talents and the things I am most passionate about.

I realized that my refined vision is to work for a company I will love. I started imagining how it would feel to settle into a new job with great coworkers and a new home in a new city. Then I imagined how amazing it would be if that company was one that fits into my overall vision. That means a company that is involved in racing, has a race team, or would have a good case to sponsor a race team if their marketing success - based on my hard work - could justify it.

The vision involves racing, and it involves marketing. Those are the two things I’m certain about. I’m not shopping for my next race car just yet, but with vision on my side, it’s definitely in the works.

Almost without even realizing it, my efforts began to focus on companies that I could believe in and where I could improve their vision and feel proud to bring them success. I found myself researching companies based on their vision, and how it would fit with mine.

I’ve developed my vision, and I’ve noticed that I am making many renewed efforts, both consciously and subconsciously, to make that vision come true. It may sound pretty lofty to some people to find a job they love with a company where they can feel devoted. What I know for certain is that without a vision, I would fall short of my best outcome.

My vision may not come out exactly as planned. It is flexible - and negotiable. Then again, I was somehow able to make my mother proud. So I’m going with it.

Great Visions Are Shared

When you have a vision that others can share, it builds synergy. The vision becomes larger than its individual parts. Sometimes the hardest part is to share your vision with others, for fear of being shot down.

You should feel proud of your vision. Some people simply don’t have any. You may be amazed by the outcome of sharing your vision with others. If you don’t feel good enough about it to share it with others, it probably just needs more development. Even if this is the case, vision is always best when it is shared.

So now I ask you, what is your vision? Please share it.

Photo Credits:
Through the Glass by GoRun26 via Flickr
Seeing Truly by Joel Penner via Flickr

Watch Your Language Around Grandma

My grandmother will turn 95 years old in a few weeks. In honor of my dear Grandma and other real-world people like her, I’m here to deliver a valuable reminder about effective marketing communications.

Let’s consider Grandma for a moment, and imagine how she communicates. She talks like a real person. She thinks and communicates in logical phrases. Grandma uses plain and simple language to make herself clear to others. Most people are a lot like Grandma in this respect. Most of them will also find themselves indifferent and even insulted if you try to talk over their heads.

I want to give you some yummy food for thought. That’s because “yummy food for thought” is more appetizing than “palatable incentive for continued exercitation of intellect”. Got it? Great … let’s dine!

What really got me thinking about this is my long and tedious research in the hunt for my next employer. It seems popular for companies to drone on with wordy hyperbole in their job descriptions. I suppose many people do that in their résumé, too. It is just one of those awkward formalities that has not adapted to the modern world quite yet.

Wordiness is like a dance to see who can sound smarter. Just read an average job description to understand why unemployment is so high. According to most job descriptions I’ve seen, it seems that companies can barely write a paragraph without floating in an extra 30 words of fluff to throw people off the real meaning. Here is an actual example of a job posting bullet point that I just found without looking very hard.

It seems that all they said was “We want an organized person who can keep up with a lot of things at once. They need to think fast, work fast, and prove a history of it.” Does it actually say anything more than that? If so, please explain it to me. They said it in 62 words and 399 characters, but my “less intelligent” version trimmed it down to 29 words and 136 characters.

Are you ready for the irony? This particular job listing is for a Marketing Director at a marketing company. This kind of language reminds me how often I see similar diarrhea-like communication in marketing.

Stop Abusing Grandmas!

Grandma and all those many people like her do not like it when you try to baffle them with frivolous words and phrases to try and seem smarter. If you want Grandma to like you, it is better to make her feel smart because she clearly understands and can relate to your ideas.

If you cannot make it easy and comfortable, Grandma is not going to become your biggest fan and brand advocate. It is also very unlikely that she is going to speak up and let you know what you’re doing wrong. After all, you have already done your best to show that you know it all.

I think the reason bad marketing communication makes grandma want to turn ninja is that while you may sincerely believe you are “proficiently communicating in a manner that is consistent with sound business practices and expected protocols”, you are actually talking down to her. If you keep it up, you will grate on her last nerve and the outcome is bleak.

Don't Speak to Grandma Like That!

Bridle Your Verbose Hyperbole and Expedite Your Simplicity

Let me give it to you straight. If you are “excessively verbose and embellish your communications with gratuitous hyperbole”, you will ignore and alienate the majority of any market.

It is even true in the most intelligent circles that if you make it easier to read, more people will pay attention. If you communicate with people as if they are idiots and you are a brilliant word magician, you can save your breath. It often creates quite the opposite outcome and shows that you’re not smart enough to put things into terms people care about or respond to.

If you want to show off your intellect, try taking your complex concept and making it easy for people to understand. That is a much better measure to show off how smart you are.

The Solution: Make it Readable to 8th Graders

The best advice I can offer about marketing communications is to make it easy. I understand the temptation to use big words or complex phrases to make a point. Maybe you even talk like that when you are having beers with your buddies - but I doubt it. Let me make another example. I’ll let you tell me which one you think is better.

A.) What I wish to express is that when you use big words and complex phrases, you not only alienate people, but also stand to lose their attention.

B.) If you make it harder to read, you’ll lose people.

You can criticize me for my lengthy writing. I’m guilty of this “crime against Grandma” at times. There is a time and a place for it, though. Knowing when and where to use your wordiness is worth consideration.

If you are not already familiar, I encourage you to take a close look at popular readability formulas such as The Flesch formulas, Fry Readability Graph, or The Dale–Chall formula. It should not be shocking to find that they were each designed to be very easy to read and understand.

I’m back to my job search now. I’m hopeful there’s somebody out there who wants a real-world marketing executive that grandmas everywhere will understand - and love.

Related Rants:

• Director of Social Media Instrumental in Blunders
• Grammatical Reasons They’re Taking Their Business Over There

Photo Credits:
Ninja by Jeyhun Pashayev via Flickr
Visiting Portage by Jeremy Bronson via Flickr

I (Will) Love My New Marketing Job!

I consider myself lucky to be looking for a new job in marketing. That may sound completely insane to millions of people looking for work these days, but I’m inspired by it. I’ll tell you why.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again - I’m not good at everything, and I don’t want to be. I am good at marketing, and that’s where I want to focus. It is best to have focus in any career, and perhaps this will get you thinking about a closer focus on your best assets and interests, too.

I’ve been the CEO of companies for a very long time. It is not because I am good at everything to do with a business. It is because I did an exceptional job of marketing communications - enough to build a successful corporation.

Some people have questioned why I would ever want to make a career change, but I have some excellent reasons. Being at the top of a corporation has its perks, but when it comes time for the tough decisions, they often land on the CEO’s desk. For example, in 2009, when suppliers began to falter and it was time to decide whether to pump my own money back into the company to preserve many people’s jobs a little longer, I did it. I made the decisions that a “better” CEO would never have done … and it cost me millions. I don’t want those decisions, because they hurt me, and they don’t focus on my best assets.

I guess I could call this writing my occupational therapy. It’s helping me to further define where I’ve been, and where I’m going. It’s forcing some of those tough questions that I never really put my finger on before. I believe it will even help me with better direction when I go to interview those lucky folks who seek to hire me. If I do this right, it may get you thinking about what you love about your work, and what you would rather leave behind.

Here is my list of seven things I love about my next job in marketing. I will begin with the three things I will be the most joyful to dismiss from my current role in marketing. This is not intended to be negative about my current work, but rather a forward look at what I will love about my next job role. It adds emphasis to why I made the decision to seek a new career adventure.

Love Comes in Many Forms

Number One Love About My Next Marketing Job: No More Apathetic Clients

As I make my move away from providing marketing services as a consultant, leaving apathetic clients in the past is my biggest relief. I will never - and I mean never - subject myself to explaining the benefits of marketing to another person who is any of the following:

• indifferent about their business objectives, or refuses to define their business objectives.
• too paralyzed by fear to make good business decisions.
• convinced that marketing is an expense rather than an investment.
• a big talker who is actually flat broke and trying to impress or mislead me. Only real data is allowed here.
• wasting my time. I am entirely done with that. My time is worth a lot of money, but its value is greatly diminished when I waste it with people just because I’m nicer and more considerate than they are.

Number Two Love About My Next Marketing Job: Ignorant Clients Be Gone!

I think I may whistle and skip my way into the office an hour early every day for this one.

I will never be asked to speak to somebody who has not already been vetted and prepared for the valuable information I will share with them. I will never have to entertain the bottom of the barrel. That’s because my new employer will realize I’m far more valuable to the company when I’m not trying to slit my wrists with paper cuts from the 45 page proposal that I spent three weeks researching, or thrusting forks into my eyeballs when I look across the table at the zombies who just didn’t get it.

If dealing with apathetic clients is like setting me on fire, then ignorance is like throwing tequila at my flaming corpse and calling it a party.

I have often said that when it comes to marketing, there are no innocent victims … just ignorant ones. Nearly anything a person could ever hope to know about our world is on the Internet. Yet, I find that many people will still try to hide behind their ignorance as a shelter. Who are they fooling, anyway?

What’s worse is that in order to be ignorant in this great era of information, a person has to be apathetic, too. If they actually care to know enough to save their own skin, they can pick up a mouse and know it in an instant. The trouble here is that so many want-to-be clients don’t comprehend the value in paying somebody who knows the right questions to ask … so they hide under their ignorance blanket.

Here are some of my most polite answers for those ignorant people:

• No! You cannot increase your return on investment without an investment. Please slap yourself for me.
• No! It is not a good idea to spend more on telephone book advertising than on the Internet.
• No! You should not use a personal Facebook profile for your business. It is foolish and will eventually get your account deleted.
• No! Becoming popular on Twitter, alone, is not a marketing strategy. Twitter is not a magic wand.
• No! Marketing online is not a technology job!
• No! I will not choke you until you turn blue for being ignorant, but mostly because I don’t want that on my résumé.
• No! You may not have another free consultation. Do you swipe the whole tray of free samples at the grocery store, too, deadbeat?

Number Three Love About My Next Marketing Job: Dishonest Clients Turn to Dust

I will never be ripped off for the value of a new luxury car again! Oh yes, that actually happened in my former professional life.

I guess I can sum this one up pretty quick with the words “Suture Express“. That’s the name of a company where the CFO (now CEO), Bryan Forsythe, claimed the check was in the mail (for weeks) and ripped me off, but then tried to pay me off later to take down what I wrote about them because my marketing was too good. Marketing Lesson Learned: Don’t hire the best marketing guy you can find, but then rip him off when it’s time to pay the bill. Even the best reputation management cannot make up for decisions that bad.

This one is a case study in what not to do if you ever want to market a business online. Just see how many nice things show up in the first page of Google when searching their company name. When I say this one is a case study, it really is, and it’s been referenced in keynotes at industry conferences. It is a case study that I will never need to address in my next marketing job - not a chance!

Number Four Love About My Next Marketing Job: A Great Team

I feel fortunate for my knack at finding the right people for the job. Knowing how to recognize and delegate to the best people for the task at hand has served me exceptionally well in my career. They don’t always need an MBA or a perfect résumé. They have to be right for the responsibilities they are given.

The think tanks are built in! A skill that I very often embrace is putting together think tanks of bright and talented people who can imagine the right questions and think their way through to solutions as a group. Ideas are fun to produce and shape into works of art. Thinking and being with thinkers creates great passion for me.

I look forward to working with a team where I can make magic happen and we can be glad to see each other every morning. That’s worth more than money alone, and that spins my turbines!

My new office will come complete with thinkers to put into the tank, and will also enjoy the benefits of my existing network of great thinkers.

Number Five Love About My Next Marketing Job: They Will Love Me, Too!

I am a highly dedicated person, and I take a lot of pride in doing things the right way. When I consider my new adventure, it is important that my new employer recognizes my dedication to their success. Likewise, they will be dedicated to my success.

I don’t just skip around to the next great thing in my career. I have three more kids and many more years of experience than I did the last time I changed jobs. I am not wishy-washy about my work, and I don’t plan to leave anytime soon.

My next employer will appreciate my dedication, and they will notice very early that “This Murnahan guy doesn’t think like those other applicants. He has something special in mind.” They’ll be right, too. I have some very special ideas in store for my next employer - and they will love it!

Number Six Love About My Next Marketing Job: The Location is Amazing

As I discussed this with my wife, we realized that the location of my next marketing job will be incredible. We will enjoy a great city that is mostly new to us, and we will discover many amazing things to do as a husband and wife with three brilliant kids. We will see our new adventure with amazement, and we’re each very excited to know where it will be!

Number Seven Love About My Next Marketing Job: I Get Paid for This!

With all the great things that come with my next marketing job, I’ve got to say that getting paid for doing what I love is fantastic! I’ll probably be paid a whole lot. It will not match my previous seven digit earnings, but it’s going to be a nice income for doing the job I would choose if all jobs paid exactly the same thing.

There you have it. That’s the list of seven things I love about my next marketing job. Do you have a list burning to get out? I know I could sure go on with a Top 100 list. For now, this one feels like a great start. I hope it will help you to think about your own list.

I have just one more thing to add. If you have a good lead for where I may find my next marketing job, please introduce me or pass this along to others. Perhaps it will eventually land on the right desk of that one special person at that one special company for me. Thank you kindly!

Photo Credits:
LOVE Park sign by Brandon Weight via Flickr
punks in love by Patrick via Flickr

WANTED: A Glass of Water

People really are friendly. At least that’s my view. They may not always have a great day, and they may be disappointing at times, but I still love people. It feels great to express it, too. Most people really do have a kind side. As long as that’s the side you’re appealing to, the result is like magic.

Even when you doubt them, sometimes you’ve just got to take the plunge, and believe in people.

I want to share something I find fascinating about the nature of people. I also hope that since my blog is about marketing and business, you will relate to how this applies to your business. I’m even going to point out what I believe is the most popular thing on the whole Internet - even more popular than sex and bacon - and I think you’ll agree with me.

Stop and Smell the People … Err - Roses

None of us would be very good without the others around us. I imagine that same need for people is a strong reason social media is so popular. We get to connect, share, brainstorm, encourage, and gain a connection with more people - awesome people. So, I’ll repeat it - I love people - even the disappointing ones who are having a bad day.

People may not always realize exactly why they do it at the time, but being good to others makes them feel good. I believe it is a baseline reflex that is built into each of us, and those who neglect that reflex do so at their own peril.

Even when there is not a large perceived personal benefit, and sometimes especially because there is not a large perceived personal benefit, people move together for a common action. I’ve witnessed it my whole life, and it still amazes me every day.

Making others feel good spreads far and wide. In fact, I’d like to challenge you to find anything more “viral” on the Internet than a smile. If you doubt it, just consider how many times you’ve seen this:

Job-Seeking Taught Me a Lesson

What brought this to mind for me today is the friendliness of people when I recently asked them to assist me in a very meaningful career endeavor. I reached out to a small handful of people for friendly advice and assistance to reach Steve Phelps, Senior Vice President and CMO at NASCAR. I humbly asked a circle of friends for introductions to others who could provide me with even more friendly advice and introductions. I didn’t ask for a large sacrifice, or a huge piece of their time, but I was amazed to find them giving their time freely, and without seeking a return.

You see, I’m a marketing guy with a passion for racing. It makes sense that Steve Phelps received the very first résumé and cover letter I sent in what seems like a squillion years. People knew it means a lot to me, so they gave freely.

It was as if I had simply asked them for a glass of water, and they were delighted to help.

For those people, the greatest return is perhaps just my sincere thanks, and a smile they can spread to others. They made me feel good, and knowing how it feels when I do something similar, I know it made them feel good. I’m not selling anything here, but I even wrote a book that focused on the great benefits of being good to others … and imagine what happened … it made me feel very good!

The Pursuit of Meaningful Work

I’ll back up just a bit. In December, I decided that I would stop taking new marketing clients in 2012. I announced it, but I said I would have another announcement to come. On January 2nd, I solidified it, and officially bid sayonara to mediocrity. Today’s announcement is where I’m going next.

I’ve heard it surprised some people when I stopped taking clients. Those who know me probably did not imagine where I decided I wanted to go with this career. That’s because it sounds like a step down … and it is, in some ways. I’ve run a successful corporation for over a decade, and before that, I was retired for a while and resting on the good fortune of a previous endeavor. Some people would ask what in the heck a guy like that wants with a job working for somebody else. I’ll tell you just that.

I’ve been a CEO and business owner my entire adult life. I’ve participated in board meetings and advised corporations since I was a teenager. I’ve seen a lot, done a lot, and enjoyed a lot. I’ve also been the guy who is handed many of the hardest decisions. I’m good at decisions, for the most part, but one I battled with for a while is to change my career and stop being the guy who is supposed to be good at everything. I want to focus on the things I am the best at, and that’s marketing. I feel it is a healthy and productive change for me, and I’m prepared to go “both feet in”.

Maybe this will encourage you, too. I hope it will.

Going “Both Feet In”

I’ve witnessed many people who want a lot in life, but are afraid to ask for it. I think that kind of fear affects each of us on some level, at some time. Asking for something simple from a few of my inner circle of friends has reminded me that it is important to ask for what you want, and recognize that many people will go out of their way to be helpful. I teach this principle, and I do it for clients every day, but it is easy to neglect even my own good advice.

I don’t often ask a lot from people around me, so this was a really great reminder to practice what I preach. I hope you will take this good advice from me. Ask for it! Have a call to action! If you don’t, you’re missing out on most of the best results.

You will not always get it just right, but if you never take a risk, you may never know what you’ve missed. I don’t want to live with those doubts, so I believe there are times to go “both feet in”.

Here’s a little Racing 101 course that you can apply to your marketing.

The term “both feet in” is a term used in racing when you’ve tried to recover from a slide and the car is not in agreement. You let go of the steering wheel (before its rapid spinning breaks your hand) and put both feet to the floor - one on the brake, and one on the clutch. It’s a thrill ride, but not in the way we drivers prefer it. It slows us down, and hopefully keeps us off the wall. It quickly resets our objectives.

That's one of my Corvettes, after I drove with both feet in on a practice day.

This happens when you know that steering and throttle alone will not correct the car’s angle, and it’s time to save what you can of the car and your safety. All the while, time moves slowly, and you just want to get back in the race.

For experienced drivers, this only happens once in a long while, and preferably only in practice. As out of control as it may sound, it’s often well-calculated and happens when we’ve decided to lay on the gas a bit harder and earlier as we come out of a turn. Sometimes you have to push the limits to know the limits, and sometimes you have to take a risk. That’s how you get big speed on the straights, and that’s how you win races.

I love racing. I even love analogies about racing, so I’ll give you one. I believe today is a great day to push the throttle hard and risk a “both-feet-in” ride. I’m pushing the throttle on a new career directive, and I hope you can offer me a friendly hand to exit the turn with more speed than ever.

I’ll describe the race course, and I hope you’ll find it as easy as a glass of water. I also hope you will find inspiration in seeking a glass of water for yourself.

How About That Glass of Water?

My “both feet in” moment is when I ask you to help me reach the right person with my message. Here’s the simple “glass of water” I’m seeking:

• If you have a friend, colleague, or know a company that you believe can benefit from my skills of 25 years in marketing, please introduce me.
• If you have a connection with anybody at NASCAR, BMW, Porsche, Mazda, Ford, Audi, or any other automotive, racing-oriented, engineering, or high-technology companies - or recruiters for such things - please introduce me. I’m not married to automotive, either. Like I said, I love people, and the people and culture of the company will matter more than the industry … or even the pay scale. Most importantly, they must appreciate the difference between just doing something, and doing it well.
• Take a look at my résumé to find out what I know about my area of expertise, and get to know a little more about me. I have extensive experience in marketing and business consulting. I want to share that experience for the benefit of my next employer.
• Let’s brainstorm. I’m an analytic guy with a lot of imagination. I may have some good ideas for you, too. I’m not selfish with the thoughts that race through my mind, and I’m usually happy to share some inspiring ideas.
• Please spread this message and help me with my goal of finding the right match in an employer. That would mean a lot to me, and you have nothing to lose. Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are some great places to start. Anything is appreciated.

It will not cost you any more than a glass of water to help me, and it will most certainly make somebody smile … and probably more than only me.

Does that sound self-serving? I guess maybe it does, but if you know me at all, you know I would do the same for you and I would smile the rest of the day just for feeling helpful.

YourNew.com Racing Corvette Z06: Driver Mark Aaron Murnahan

Photo Credit:
Glass of Water by Michael Hamann via Flickr

Check Your Branding Gargoyles

Your gargoyles say more about your brand than you may think. They are your front line. If your marketing doesn’t match, you’re asking for trouble.

I recently responded to a blog article written by Kay Ross, who wrote about the faces we put forward in a marketing message. Kay’s article is titled “In Your Marketing, To Thine Own Self Be True“, and it reminded me of many observations I have made about the overall feel of companies during my career, and personal encounters.

That “feel” of a company is what makes up a brand, and when it’s done well it involves every aspect of the company, and extends far beyond the marketing department. I want to share some thoughts about your brand, and I believe you will be able to relate to this from both a consumer and business viewpoint.

The topic which was addressed in Kay’s blog came from one of her subscribers who asked the question as follows: “Which is more important when communicating with your audience: say things you really want to say, or say things that people want to hear?”

Should there really be such a disparity between the two? If the marketing is reaching the appropriate audience, it should not have to be one or the other. The way I interpreted this question, it led me to imagine the question as whether it is acceptable to fake it in your marketing. If you know my brand at all, you can place your bets now about where I stand.

Let Them Love You, But Realize You Cannot Force Them

As I read that question, I immediately thought of something I once wrote titled “Polarize Your Audience and Stop Making Everybody Happy“. In that piece, I used examples of companies like Apple and Google, who understand their brand enough to stand behind it.

You will never make everybody love you - so don’t even try. Trying to be everything to everybody will only serve to dilute your brand integrity and create a “wishy-washy” brand message. People don’t like that in politics, and they don’t like it elsewhere, either. That doesn’t mean ignoring anyone or treating them badly … but you should realize there is always a good, better, and best customer for any company.

Instead of creating a false brand loyalty, I suggest looking closer for the ones who will find a connection with your brand, before you assume you should re-brand. You’ve got one brand to work with, so you should understand it well, and embrace it. Kay and I agree that it is important to know what you are about, and stick with it. I think most people would agree with that point, once they give it a little consideration.

Don’t Make it “Us Versus Them” … Make it “Us With Them”

Many companies struggle to strike a perfect balance between what others want from them, and what they are willing and capable of delivering. This means there is a gap between the two parties - the company and the consumer. In most cases, there is a huge gap, and it’s why you would be wasting your time to try and sell me knitting needles. This is exactly why it is extremely important for any company offering anything to anybody to realize the message I shared in an article titled ““Everybody” is Not Your Target Market!” Please feel free to read that thought provoking piece. This one will still be here when you get back.

Gaps Between Companies and Consumers

Shrinking that gap between the company and consumers is extremely important, but try to imagine it like another kind of relationship for a moment. When I was a single guy, I tried to make myself more attractive to ladies - but not just any ladies. I wanted a certain type who would want what I offered and understand my vision. I could have let it change me completely, but wouldn’t that eventually fail?

Try a Friendlier Gargoyle

I fixed my hair just right, I shaved extra close, and I adapted to things like closing the bathroom door. That’s right - when I met my wife, Peggy, I would close the bathroom door if I needed to stink the place up. That doesn’t mean I’d go out of my way to hide the fact that I stink the place up sometimes … I just kept it a bit more courteous. I didn’t fart at the dinner table, either … I waited until we made it out the restaurant door.

Now imagine if I just held it until she left. Can you imagine how much gas and poo I would have held back? Then imagine if she had married me for all my amazing (but fake) charm. I mean, can you imagine finding a non-pooing, non-gaseous guy? She would have surely loved me even more, but what if I had sealed the deal based on that fakeness?

Wouldn’t she be disappointed later, when she found out that I can curl the bathroom paint? Wouldn’t she have really hated it once she realized that each of our three babies poo, too?

Now put that in terms of a company brand message. Even pooing companies with gas are charming and “perfect” to somebody. In the case of marketing, that usually means a lot of people. By reaching that perfect segment, you can encounter something I’ve said many times, and that is as follows:

Perception Shaping Versus Waiting to Poo

Shaping the perception of consumers is important, but letting your integrity slip just to tell them what they want to hear is not the right answer. I believe that each and every company can do a better job of closing the gap between the company and their ideal consumer. It requires research and paying close attention, and when companies can get out of their own way, that market research and paying attention serves them very well. What I refuse to advocate in is glazing over the things that make the company what it is, and creating a false perception that can later be discovered as such.

In the article by Kay Ross, she cited something I said in a piece titled “Great Marketing is Not About You … Hogwash!” In that article, I explained ways that is really is about you, and that the people of an organization are what makes it special.

About Those Gargoyles …

I want to share what I wrote in my response to Kay’s article. I’ll paraphrase, but I invite you to see her original article and the comments there, as well.

Is This Your Gargoyle?

My take-off, based on the article, was to address how company cultures spread throughout the company, and how valuable or destructive that can be. I based it on things I have seen over a long period of time, as a marketing consultant, a corporate officer, and a consumer. I suspect you can find instances where something similar has created an impression with you, about a company.

In my experience, if a company has a mean gargoyle as their gatekeeper, it is easy to expect it throughout the company. On the other hand, if that gargoyle is helpful and friendly, it is often a sign of the company’s culture - their brand. If it is faked in the marketing, it becomes obvious very quickly.

You can experience this right now, by simply considering how you feel about any given restaurant, retail store, doctor’s office, cellular provider, or any other brand experience you’ve had. Somebody set the brand feel in motion from the very start. Whether that came directly from the marketing department or elsewhere, it begins to forge your view of the company. If that brand message is inconsistent with your experience, it is easy to become very critical of the company. It can also become very enticing to share that feeling with others. Thus, it is wise to know your brand and not waiver from it.

Here is my longer answer, based on Kay’s blog:

In summary, please consider this: If you stray from the things which make up your brand just to make your marketing appealing, it is best to revisit those gargoyles and get them in shape, first.

The value of “human collateral” should not be neglected. The people within your organization make up a huge portion of the brand, and it is nearly impossible to convincingly change it without changing the people, themselves.

If you project a brand message that is not consistent with the consumer’s experience, they will see through it. When they do, the outcome is not favorable, it is best to get it right from the beginning.

Photo Credit:
Gargoyle by Jeff Egnaczyk via Flickr
Friendly Gargoyle by Michael Napoleon via Flickr
Scary Gargoyle by Andrew Barden via Flickr

My First Press Exposure - 40 Years Ago

I turned forty today. I’m happy about it, too. It doesn’t really feel like forty quite yet, but I’ve done it! I have lived long enough to have some well-earned gray hair, and a good amount of wisdom that comes with it. For such a young guy, of course.

My forty years have come with a lot of lessons. Having spent well over half of those years as a marketing professional and business owner, I’ve learned a lot about marketing. I’ve shared large volumes of my experiences here on the Internet, and I feel great to say that I’ve helped a lot of people with that experience.

One of the things I learned about marketing is the value of brevity. Keep it short. Keep it easy. Don’t get too confusing with all of your wordiness. I learned it, and then I threw it out the window for the purpose of this blog. Brevity matters when you are selling something, but I am not. If you can embrace some blatant verbosity today, I’ll reward you with some valuable real life marketing lessons.

Did you get that? It’s my birthday, but I’m trying to give you a gift. I guess that’s lesson one. When you give more, you receive more, and it’s an important principle of marketing. It’s a principle that is far beyond most people’s patience threshold, but to the ones who get it, it is invaluable.

I’ve shared a lot of helpful principles and practices of marketing on this blog. Much of it comes directly from things I learned through decades in the marketing profession. I feel good about that, and I know I’ve made an impact. I’ve helped a lot of people reach their goals, both business and personal. I plan to continue that work, but in a different way.

The Announcement That Changed My Life: Sayonara Mediocrity

At forty years old, I decided it is time to change things up. I intended to be fully retired by now, and a few years ago, I was actually well-prepared for it. I had plans to race cars full time, and my work was going to focus only on things I love. My bank is not as big as it used to be after somebody screwed up the world’s economy, so I’m still working. That should not keep me from pursuing the work I love, so I’m doing it … I’m making one of those scary changes I’ve encouraged so many others to make.

As I announced a few weeks ago, I stopped taking new clients (of course, that is unless somebody with really big goals and a ginormous budget comes calling). It’s very liberating. Now I feel even more free than ever if I need to call somebody out for being an apathetic bonehead. I’m also inspired to believe that if I tell you something, you’ll feel confident there is not an underhanded agenda just to sucker you out of your hard-earned money.

A challenging fact of marketing is that the best marketing consultants will never receive as much benefit as the client. It’s why many independent marketing consultants have their own products or services to market, outside of the marketing industry. The best marketers know that marketing is an investment rather than wasted money, and that if they build their own business, they will always be paid far more than by boosting a client’s return on investment.

Sometimes clients will find themselves skeptical about who receives the greatest benefits, but it is the client and not the marketing consultant. I explained this in an article titled “Find Good SEO: Why Good SEO Don’t Seek Your Business“. Being regularly at odds with that inherent negativity and skepticism in the market is why I’m changing things up and creating some significant career moves. No, it’s not because I’m not good at it … I’m just ready to move on to something more positive and inspiring.

Today, more than ever, I hope you will listen up and take some good direction. Give this gritty old marketing guy a chance to help shape your perceptions and understanding of marketing. I serve some pretty good food for thought about marketing, and many easily actionable tasks that you can put to use in minutes. In fact, here are six ways to improve search engine ranking in under one hour. There’s one caveat: they are only useful if you use them.

I have no reason nor desire to lie to you or mislead you, and I cannot recall a time when I intentionally misled anybody about marketing. So slow down and stop worrying about the next thing to click.

Velocity is Great in a Market, But Sometimes You Must Slow Down

Rushing around the Internet looking for the next bit of marketing enlightenment is not where you really want to find yourself in another 15 minutes or half hour … or three months … or next year. That’s what everybody else is doing, and if you think searching the web and looking for the next bottle to rub and hoping a genie will pop out is a better option, you’re likely to get pretty average results.

Settle down and look for the greater benefits. A mathematical fact of the online marketing space is that an average result is abysmal. It’s true! Most companies really stink at reaching an online market, and never get much out of it. I find that it is very often because they don’t slow down - breathe - get some oxygen in their brains and pay attention. They don’t pay attention to their market, and they don’t pay attention to things that can help them to reach their market more effectively. They are often all mouth and no ears, and rushing too hard to get things right that they get it all wrong. That’s them, and I hope you will make the choice to not be one of them.

Honesty in Marketing: It’s Not All Evil!

Marketing is often viewed with a sizable dose of skepticism. If somebody will gain from it, there is a frequent perception that somebody also loses. It’s not true, but this skeptical belief often hurts people in their own marketing, based on how they view marketing as a whole. If I am introduced to something as a result of marketing, and I trade my money because I wanted it, did somebody automatically lose? I got the thing I wanted, and the company marketing to me got what they wanted.

Yes, there are a lot of dirty scoundrels who will lie to you about marketing, but in the big picture, dishonest companies just don’t make it very long. It reminds me of a principle I implemented to create one of my most successful business endeavors, and it was a single word. It came to me when I asked my wife and business partner to summarize what made us stand out from the crowd, and what made us better than the competition. She said “It’s easy, Mark. It all comes down to a single word … Integrity.” That moment will never leave me, and it has provided me a great amount of success.

Marketing Wisdom: It Only Appears Simple

Even today it feels strange and almost surreal to say that I’ve been in marketing for 25 years … but I have. I was raised into marketing, and I was sitting in boardrooms offering my opinions from the time I was a teenager. I started my first company when I was so young that my mother had to sign the legal papers … for years.

It took a long time to make good sense of it all, in business. In fact, I still utterly stink at some points in business, but the part I do understand is marketing. I know from many years of running successful (and some not so successful) businesses that marketing will make or break a company. They don’t make it easy to understand, either. Even in the best universities, they often talk about a lot of theories and concepts, but where the fork meets the food, it takes some stomach-churning hard work to see real success. I know, because I’ve done that, and if you ask me, or any of my peers who have earned anything more than six-digits per year, you will find very few of them who came by it with simplicity.

Stop buying into people’s notions that it is simple. If it was really so simple, it probably wouldn’t be very profitable.

TAM, SAM, SOM, ROI, SEO, SMM, and PECKERs

There are enough acronyms and industry buzz phrases to bring my lunch back to the top of my throat. Some of those acronyms really matter, such as TAM (Total Available Market), SAM (Served Available Market), SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market), ROI (Return On Investment), and many others. These matter in huge ways, but they are very frequently misunderstood or overlooked because of shortsightedness, which often comes from a frightened accountant who knows little about marketing or how the company actually gets the money to pay their salary.

In small businesses, it is often because, although the person in charge was good enough in their field to start a company, they were not good enough at business to understand that being good at a trade does not mean being good in business. Being good in business means knowing where your weaknesses are, and knowing how to fill those gaps with people who are as good or better at their field of knowledge than you. That’s right, the best business leaders learn to effectively delegate what is out of their league. It’s why I don’t handle my own bookkeeping, and why people in other trades are usually let down when they try their hand at marketing.

Other marketing acronyms are beaten to death, like SEO (search engine optimization) and SMM (social media marketing). These buzz phrases are so popular these days that dishonest people use them to fool companies. In online marketing, they talk about building more website links, but they throw out good ideas of why somebody would actually want to link to their website … and they often hold the absurd notion that more links is always a good thing. The really misinformed marketers will lead you to believe that social media marketing is all about networking and socializing.

This kind of shortsighted and misinformed thinking is why I created my very own acronym for 2012, and I welcome you to read why I’m very proud to call myself a “PECKER” (Profit Engineer and Competition Killer with Extraordinary Resources).

Advertising is Only a Very Small Part of Marketing

I find that a lot of people imagine marketing to mean advertising what they offer for sale. This is only a small part of what makes up marketing. Marketing addresses many other things, including a whole lot of math, creativity, strategy, and so much more. An easy example is to look at anything you have for sale, and answer the question of why you priced it at the level you have. Is it because of its cost to produce? Did you leave it up to the competition to decide your price? Did you ever actually do the research to know what it’s worth - and not just that - to the right audience? Did you get that research just right, or is it really so impossible that you made some costly mistakes by using guesswork instead of basing it on the right factors?

The ways that marketing influences a business are far too numerous to list in a single blog. I hope you’ll think about some of those things you may have overlooked. I welcome you to my blog archive to help get the wheels turning. There are hundreds of articles there, and I think you’ll find them very useful if you slow down.

Throw Out Your Sandwich and Make a New One

I hear a lot of people regurgitating the last thing they heard or read about marketing, and how fresh the latest idea is. I guess maybe it was fresh sometime before it hit a squillion blogs, but now it’s like a day-old tuna sandwich sitting out in the sun.

Great marketing is seldom a matter of seeking the latest and greatest thing. Following trends is important, but following them too closely that you follow the mistakes is often a train wreck in the making. The things that work are not just following what everybody else fervently exclaims will work. Great marketing requires research, testing, and discovering what works - really works - for your company, and being the one all of those trend-talkers are talking about. It is not about tweeting, Facebooking, Flabunctuating … or whatever the next big trend is.

I’ve written volumes about social media, including hundreds of thousands of words, and even a book. I marvel at how many people think it is something new. Did you think social media is new? It’s how I met my wife, well over a decade ago … and many close friends years before that. Social media helped me to grow several of my companies quite abundantly, too, but social media is not a unicorn net or a leprechaun trap.

One of its greatest uses is to listen and learn about what makes your market tick … and then use that information. Many people are too short-sighted to take things to a new level of analysis, and understand what to do with a good analysis. Most are unwilling or unable to dig deep into their creativity and find ways to make their brand stick out like a sexy model passing out free bacon sandwiches and all expense paid trips to “Available-Sexy-Model-and-Free-Bacon-Sandwichville”.

I witness many scared companies making scared decisions, but I’ve watched a lot more scared companies fail than I care to count … and that’s because they don’t count. The ones that count are the ones willing and fearless enough to do what it takes to be more like you want your company to be. Not like the bottle-rubbing, instant-enlightenment-seeking, one shot wonder at the competitor down the street - like you - or at least your vision of you. So stop being scared! Go out on a limb. That’s how people succeed in the real world of business.

Fear of Failure Destroys Marketing Efforts

I know the extreme power of fear. I have witnessed it throughout my career, and I’ve even allowed myself to be a casualty of fear at times. There is nothing easy about making the kind of commitment it requires to be successful. This goes for anything you really want in your life, whether it’s a spouse, a family, a new home, a new car, or an improved bottom line in your business. It takes a leap, but it doesn’t have to be simply on faith.

If you think about your marketing as a foundation of your company, which it really is, you will find yourself on a much stronger path. I know, it’s easy to try and argue the point. The accountants think accounting is the foundation, the attorneys think the legal structure makes the foundation, and the people who created the company think it’s all about the product or service … but that’s really not true.

Businesses simply do not work without being marketed. Even in the most obscure and complex examples you can throw out there, the biggest factor between success and failure of two equal companies really does come down to how well they are marketed.

I Believe You Could Do Better With Your Marketing

How could I put this any more clearly? You can do better! Failure to control your fear impulses and continuing to worry about what will not work is a fast track to failure. Try thinking more along the lines of what you stand to gain, instead of cowering to the fear of what you stand to lose. Then consider what you continue to lose effortlessly because you’re waiting. There is a steep cost of missed business opportunities. In fact, it is often the worst scenario of all. Getting out of your easy chair to face your fears is a huge factor in success, and I know it from experience.

I turned ideas into millions of dollars within only a short time after completing my 8th grade education. It didn’t take an MBA, or however you spell those fancy degrees hanging on the “smart guy’s” wall. It took research, creativity, and a good supplier of balls. I said balls, and you can call me a bad marketer for that … but if you want to know about selling balls - or selling anything else - read this article to get your thinking up and bouncing: “SEO, Social Media, and Marketing Balls”

Stop worrying about the cost of marketing done right, and start focusing on the positive outcome if you do. There are plenty of chickens out there, and I hope you aren’t one of them … and if you are, I hope you’ll make a commitment to change it.

Some Personal Lessons I Learned About Marketing

When I consider why I advocate for people to take their marketing more seriously and stop waiting for “something” to change, I look inward at how it has changed my life. I imagine the things that would never have happened without marketing, and I’ll give you a glimpse.

I have no intention of explaining all that I have learned about marketing in a single blog article. That would be impossible. I hope that you will be willing to take a good look and accept some useful tips from a guy who has been around the block. I hope you will bookmark my blog archive and keep coming back to feed your brain with some useful marketing advice. I also hope you will subscribe for more to come soon. Don’t miss the point that it will make a lot more difference to your business than it will mine.

I also welcome you to get to know me. I’m a very approachable guy who loves the field of marketing, and I’m always delighted to be helpful.

Oil is a Commodity, Marketing Is Not

If you’re in the field of marketing, get over yourself. You’re a commodity. At least that is the way a lot of people will see it, even if you actually are as awesome as you say you are.

Looking at marketing as a commodity is something people can understand. That’s because if they see it as all the same, it just comes down to the dollar amount, and that is what feels the safest for most people.

As it applies to the majority of people buying marketing services, the dollars which are easiest to concentrate on are the dollars going out, but without adequate forethought or examination of the incoming dollars the marketing produces.

It seems that a lot of people think of it like throwing those dollars to the wind and hoping some of them will float back.

That’s not the way it works when marketing is done well, but it is the easier way to digest. In the real world of business, marketing should be based on qualified mathematics, demographics, psychographics, and other principles of qualified market research and forecasting, but that is enough to make most people’s head explode. That kind of marketing comes with an investment and a commitment beyond commodity-style thinking about marketing. Many people confuse that as a risk, while the real risk is when marketing is based on guesswork and crossing fingers.

I’ll describe how the trend of “commoditized marketing” goes completely wrong. I hope you’ll take some qualified advice from somebody who has been around the block, and no longer wants to accept your money. In fact, this is my formal announcement that I Quit.

I have made my 2012 New Year’s resolution, and that is to stop offering marketing services for hire. I’ll give you some good advice and try to help you, though. The only things I would like to ask from you are your friendly wishes on my new career path away from providing marketing services for hire, and maybe a little discussion.

What Do You Want to Do With Your Life?

What Do You Want?

I believe that everybody should periodically ask themselves the question: “What do you want to do with your life?” That’s a tricky one, isn’t it? At least it is for me.

I’ve been asking myself this question a lot recently, and I’m seeing some things with much greater clarity. It’s still a bit blurry to me, but one thing is clear … I absolutely do not want to sell marketing services.

I finally reached the conclusion that selling marketing services for hire is a twisted soul-sucking racket filled with liars, and it has led me to ask this very important question of what I want to do with my life … and why I keep letting people suck me back into building their success while neglecting my own.

Knowing the answer to what you want to do with your life is vital to professional and personal growth, and it’s why my career is about to take a sharp turn, which I’ll announce one day soon.

The big life question I’ve addressed here was perhaps most famously asked in the 1984 music video “I Wanna Rock” by Twisted Sister. For your amusement, I’ll share that piece with you as you contemplate your answer.

I guess you could call it my mid-life crisis that brought me to this point. After all, I am about to turn 40 years old, my beard is going gray, my belly is getting bigger, and my job is sucking the life out of me. I’ve done most of the things I ever wanted to do. I’ve raced cars, authored books, been a CEO, earned squillions, retired, un-retired, and even created a family complete with three kids and a wife, but now I largely hate this job. As much as I love the work I do, dealing with a public who really want to believe that marketing is a commodity sucks a little more soul out of me every day.

I’m simply not willing to participate in the “marketing as a commodity” mentality, and I honestly hate to even watch it from a distance. I’ve got better things to do than demean myself by taking peanuts for my skills and dealing with clients who don’t have a clue how much I am worth to them if they get out of their own way. Nosiree, Bob, that’s not my bailiwick … not in the least!

I previously promised myself to quit the addiction of accepting marketing clients by mid-2011, but as the end of 2011 draws near, I plan to stick to my guns. I’m not going to play along with the absurdity of “commoditized marketing” any longer, but I’ll tell you some good reasons for my decision, and leave you with some keys to help make more people flock to you like a free bacon sandwich covered in sex appeal.

While I take this turn away from selling the services of marketing, I’ll give you some indications of where this mentality is taking companies.

“Flat Broke” is Popular in Business!

Average Marketing is Failure

Many companies are flat broke these days. Being broke is very a popular trend in business, but in most cases, they have a competitor that is raking in the profits. Decades ago, I made it a career objective to help people understand some of the reasons this is the case.

Helping companies to create success has always been very inspiring to me, but it also comes with a lot of challenges. Now, more than ever, I see a lot of companies making bad decisions about their marketing, and I see a lot of fear.

Why did it get this way? I have my ideas on the matter, and I’ll start with this: Marketers got lazy, and while they did, people’s confusion of marketing being a commodity was booming right along with the Internet. Fueled by that confusion, the barrier of entry to a marketing career was lowered to the level that any intern can pretend to be the equivalent to a Chief Marketing Officer or Marketing Director without being called out as an obvious fraud by the general public.

That’s for the fakes and liars, but as the frauds became more believable, the true marketing professionals with an ounce of integrity still faced the same old challenges.

The Challenges of Marketing Professionals

It has always been a challenge of marketing professionals to help people understand marketing concepts like customer modeling, targeting a market, and many other components to effective marketing.

Most people really don’t need or want to fully understand these things, and trying to explain it can often bore them to tears. So it is fitting that the client often just assumes these are things the marketer is using to confuse more money out of them.

A much tougher concept to explain is that marketing is not a cost, but rather an investment. This one stumps many good marketers, because companies either “get it” or they don’t. In my experience, most companies only understand their market very fractionally, and doing what it takes to achieve their potential scares them.

Other companies are complacent, and they are certainly beyond help. You can give some people case study after case study of successful marketing campaigns, and you can explain that it is the difference between growing a company or shrinking it, but if they refuse to help themselves, you cannot force it on them.

These things have never changed, but one thing that has become clearer is that marketing is increasingly viewed as a commodity.

I’ve provided marketing services to clients for a very long time. I’ve watched marketing change dramatically since my start in the 1980’s. I watched it change from small companies trying to chase unicorns with $1,000,000 catalog mailers and newspaper ads, to chasing unicorns with $300 ecommerce websites and marginal blogging efforts. More recently, I watched it change into the popular notion that hiring an intern to send tweets and update the company Facebook status is what marketing is all about.

It seems that an astonishing number of companies have been falsely convinced that social media marketing is just about socializing, and that search engine rankings are a function of technology. They’ve also been convinced that it is easy to be successful online and that if they keep doing what they’re doing, success will just magically come to them one lucky day.

Great Marketing Professionals Don’t Need to Lie!

I often find that marketers lean in one of two different directions: There are marketers who are great at selling marketing services but stink at actually performing them, and then there are marketers who are just great at performing marketing services, but stink at selling it. I am the latter of the two.

Something you should know is that good marketers don’t need to lie, and don’t like to sell.

An analogy I think is kind of funny is that I rank quite nicely if you search for “how to sell SEO” (search engine optimization), but I am absolutely terrible at selling SEO. In fact, if you google “SEO hell“, that’s where you’ll find me.

If They Can't Prove it, Move On!

From my experience, I’d suggest seeking the the ones with the highest prices and finding out why their rates are so high. That’s what I do when I’m looking for marketing help, because I understand that this is not a commodity … I accept it, and I embrace it.

I look for the ones who are doing it for the right reasons, and who made success for themselves and others. Then I make them prove it, and if they can, they’re in!

There are more than enough “Johnny Come Lately” marketers out there, so you have to be diligent. Watch this video to see my take on them, or read “Bashing SEO and Social Media Experts: Humor or Hazard?” to see real life examples of it. Without their proof, you’re just guessing, and good marketing is not about guesswork!

$300 Unicorn Ride to Planet Success

I can show you a metric squillion instances of people seeking unrealistic profit from minimal commitment. It has become so convincing that some people will try almost anything, as long as it’s cheap.

What went completely wrong for me is that I am one of those marketing marketers, and not one of the selling ones I mentioned. I’ve had sales reps to handle sales for me, but most of them have been just as confused and in the dark about the value of good marketing as the general public. Besides, you just can’t train somebody to overcome apathy … people either want more, or they don’t.

I am entirely unwilling to let people pay me to deliver them mediocre results. That is my curse, and my Achilles heel. I just cannot see letting people believe something is going to help them unless it is actually going to help them.

I’m not willing to start offering $300 unicorn rides to planet success, and as long as people see marketing as a commodity, somebody else always will. I thought about stooping to the cheap side of marketing, but my integrity always gets in the way.

I hope that you can believe my words more than ever by knowing that I’m out of the consulting business, and I’ll turn you down when you come waving a wad of money in my face. Well … I guess it depends on the wad, but it let’s just say that it would take a signed letter of commitment and a lot of money before we sit down for lunch to talk about changing my mind. Plus, I’d have to really like your brand.

Farewell to the Mediocrity of Commoditized Marketing

If you are one of my many readers who makes it to the very end of my articles, I hope you will at least give me a good send-off with a “hello” or something to let me know you’ve been reading. I hope you will know that I really feel the words I write, and that this is not an easy step. I also hope that you will look forward to hearing more from me, because I have many working drafts for articles to come.

To those knuckleheads who were just lurking around, waiting and thinking about contacting me to help them grow their business: You waited too long. I would have worked a lot harder and could have achieved a lot more for your business than you gave me credit. On a positive note, there’s probably a 15 year old kid in Pakistan who will do the same thing for fourteen bucks. Yeah, it’s probably the same.

I hope that my work (including my books) has, and will continue to help you move forward in your business and personal desires. I sincerely believe that my integrity is fully intact and I have never been misleading in this blog. I know there is a lot of benefit for those who continue to read my archives … and my tales of what’s to come.

Now I’d really appreciate hearing from you. Please take a moment to add your comments and help me create a discussion of what you’ve just read. It means a lot to me.

Photo Credit:
I’m A Human Being NOT A Commodity by Kenny Sun via Flickr

I'm Writing to You ... No Sharks, Please!

Every blogger and every user of any other social media platform has a goal. There is always something … an outcome that they hope for and work toward. Whether that outcome is making a friend, or making a sale, there is a goal.

Those goals are each different, and they are often not entirely clear to the individual, but one common thread is that we all want people to read what we have to say.

With any luck, they will subscribe, come back, read more, add their replies, and click “Like”, “Tweet”, and all those other buttons to share it with their friends.

Luck isn’t enough! They will need reasons, and everybody has their own … reasons. It is your task to find those reasons, and I have some ideas that I truly believe can help you.

Define Your Social Media Objectives

If you don’t know what you want, it will be pretty hard to achieve it, and even harder to match it with what others want. Why are you doing this? If you don’t know, how will anybody else know, and how will you measure it when it happens? I don’t think I have to remind you that it is not a perfect world, but let’s imagine for a moment.

In a perfect world, everybody will follow our website links to all the right things we really want them to read, and maybe even get to know us. Even if it doesn’t make us money, it makes us feel good to be useful, entertaining, or whatever kind of validation which makes up those goals I mentioned. Sometimes the most useful of all is that it lets us know if we’re on the right track … or not.

If it is a business endeavor, we generally hold hopes they will become a customer.

That’s a perfect world, but in the real world, it’s going to take more than just hope. It will often require some pretty extensive effort, and maybe even a little magic … such as building trust, fostering ongoing communication, and a good dose of creativity.

First of all, you must define your objectives if you ever hope to match them with their objectives. You know … them … those people whose objectives you hope to trigger.

Define Their Objectives … That’s What Really Matters

This could go into a huge topic of audience modeling, but that’s another article … and it’s in my archive with the rest of them. What I want to suggest here is that being likable, human, and considerate is like Shark Repellent.

One of the strongest most profound objectives most people have is to avoid people they don’t like or trust. Heck, I’ll avoid whole cities because there are people there I don’t like or trust. I’m certainly not going to read their marketing material or do business with them. I’d rather throw a hungry shark at them!

A flaw that I often see in business use of social media is the tone people use, and whether that tone is really just about them, or about the person reading. If you ever want to sell something … anything … the message should be about the ways it will benefit them … and not just you. Focusing on why you want them to buy something rather than why they want to buy it is not likable. It turns people off like a light switch. If you want their attention, you need to address their objectives.

The best way to solve your tone issues is often with proper intentions. That is usually something people either have, or they don’t … but it can be developed and improved.

The tone we set with our words can tell a lot about us, but those words are often based on our intentions. Your words can help somebody feel like they would enjoy having beers with you, or your words can make them want to throw a hungry shark at you. Your intent will nearly always show through with your words, and so it holds true that your intent is often what makes you either likable or shark bait.

Get on Their Beer Side

The best way I’ve found to be on the beer side of their decisions rather than the shark side is to keep my intentions in check. When I know that is in check, the next thing is be a real person, and write to people just as I would speak to them in person, or how I would write if I was sending them a letter.

You may be writing to a lot of people at once, but as they each read what you have to say, they identify with it individually. Yes, I’m writing to you. Will you write me back?

I’m not going to claim that I have this just perfect. If you’ve read my blog for any time at all, you may consider me just a bit “crusty”. I tell things how I see them, even when it is not comfortable to everybody. That’s because I’m not trying to reach “everybody”, but hopefully the ones I do reach will keep their sharks for somebody else.

If you are likable and you avoid the flying sharks, all of those hopes and goals are a lot easier. For example, I am not ashamed or afraid to tell people the outcome I hope for. Of course, there must be a good balance between being useful to others and sustaining usefulness to yourself. I try my best to strike that balance, and from my experience, that balance is a lot easier when we’re feeling like having beers together, and nobody is throwing sharks.

Be Genuinely Human … Always!

I’m not out to make everybody happy … plain and simple. I have claimed it many times that “I am not out to please everybody, and that pleases some people very much.” What I do have on my side, and something I think matters a lot is that I am here to talk to you, directly, and to tell you just the way I see it. Even if you don’t like it, you will at least know where I stand. Being a genuine human makes that more palatable.

Yes, I’m human. I have my good moods, and I have my bad moods. I have my good ideas, and I have some that are flawed. Well, not actually flawed, but I just threw that in because some people like it better when I seem more humble.

I am pretty sure that if you have a blog, use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or any other communications tool, you can probably relate to this in some way. You’ve seen the fake people. So, my thought today is to reflect on just how human you are, and how human those people reading what you say are, too.

Are you being conversational in the things you say? Are you writing for people, or are you writing at them? Are you inviting them for a beer, or are you making them want to whip out a shark and wing it at you?

I consider this often, and I hope you know that I am not just writing to write … I am writing to communicate. So, here it is … my letter to you. I didn’t write it in calligraphy and seal it in a sweet smelling envelope, but I did write it for you. Keep your sharks handy, if you must.

Dear Reader:

I appreciate your interest in improving your market share with better social media marketing. I hope you find my work useful.

I am pretty sure you didn’t wake up this morning jazzed to read about marketing, but I’ve got some reading material for you. I can’t make you read it, but I sincerely believe you will find real value in the information I am sharing with you.

One of the first things to note about social media is that much of what you will encounter sounds too good to be true. That’s because it is. The world has largely been enamored by the “new” trend of social media, and so there are a lot of people still in awe by the packaging, and still playing with the bubble wrap.

I think you will find that I tend to direct people back to some common sense and rationality. I believe in things which are objective and measurable, and I like to dispel the popular hyperbole. It is my job to make companies more visible and more profitable, not to waste clients’ money.

Social media is not new to me. I met my wife and mother of our three children by way of social media, a dozen years ago. We merged our respective companies and created one of the top wholesalers of Internet access and wholesale website hosting services in USA. Our growth was largely due to the same type of marketing services I provide for hire.

I would like to share some of the things I believe every company should know before jumping into social media marketing. The link I am about to share is to a series of articles that can provide a lot of understanding about what works and does not work, and how to make good decisions for your business (even if you don’t hire me to help you).

If you dare to accept some truthful and logical advice, based on extensive experience, please see this collection of social media marketing articles.

I hope that you will read it and put it to good use. If you don’t have the time right now, I hope that you will bookmark it and come back. If you subscribe for my updates, I’ll help to remind you.

There is also a link to my bio, on that page, as well as my blog archive with hundreds of articles dealing with online marketing, including a lot of useful information about search engine optimization. It will certainly not all interest you, but it can help you with good direction for your marketing.

If you will take the time to read some of this material, I am confident that it will benefit you. If you know somebody else who can benefit from it, please share it with them, and note that I pay quite generously for referrals.

Feel welcome to contact me any time. If you decide that you want to have a beer with me, let’s put that in our calendars!

Best Regards,

Mark Aaron Murnahan

P.S.

I just want to add one more thing. Thursday is Thanksgiving in USA. Since I am writing and publishing this in between Thanksgiving-related cooking tasks, I thought I’d share this with you. Yes, it is three pounds of bacon shaped like a turkey with a Thanksgiving wish from The Murnahan Family. Cheers!

Happy Thanksgiving from The Murnahans!

Photo Credit:
writing santa by timlewisnm via Flickr

Don't Be a Headless Chicken!

I think this should be obvious, but then, obvious is not so obvious, and common sense is not so common. That is the main emphasis of this article, so if you decide to stop here without further consideration, you’ve got the bulk of the benefit.

This is not just about content curation, or any one specific tactic that somebody told you may be a good practice for your marketing goals … this is about all of them. If there is something you are doing in your business pursuits, but you would never in a million years see the value in hiring somebody to do it for you, stop doing it, and get back to doing things that actually build your business.

I may sound like I just picked on “Content Curators”, meaning those people who expend their energy to bring you the latest and greatest news and information, but that is just an easy example to make this point. It is also a very common way to avoid the realities of business, and the limitations of time.

Who doesn’t love that person who generously takes time from their day to find interesting things to share with us? We all love that, and I, for one, am grateful for them. As a group, they have cumulatively helped to make my words, my industry knowledge, and my unique mind-spin very popular. I am sincerely very grateful and humbled by that. At the same time, I think it is important to note that many of those people who do it exceptionally well, and provide that extended filter of what is worthwhile, interesting, or useful, are generally doing it out of generosity. They are not getting paid for it. In most cases, not even a little bit. In fact, it can cost them (or you) a whole lot of time.

If you are curating content with the idea of it being a useful business tactic, I want to share reasons to reconsider your strategy about social media sharing and why you do it. Where it applies to your own marketing strategy, it is at least worth a momentary “think-over”.

I understand the thought that if you tweet, facebook, and share enough great ideas and information, it will make your name more prominent in people’s social media information backlog, but is it useful to you or not? Have you considered whether it may cause people to tune you out for the excessive noise it produces? Would you hire somebody else to do that for you, and would you consider it a valuable asset to your business? Would somebody ever, in a squillion years, pay you to receive the updates you curate? Unless you are a major news agency, the answer is “probably not” … and even if you are, the answer is “probably not”. How much would you be willing to pay to receive the content curation you provide?

Look, I really do have a good understanding of the mindset that if you share something, others will be more likely to share what you have to say. I wrote about it, and if you really want to curate something popular, have a look at what I said about “Social Media and The Absurdity of Implied Reciprocity“. To put it mildly, I’d suggest you don’t hang your hat on that strategy.

I also offer some really good insights about “Social Media Popularity Addiction and Why I Quit“. The truth is that although many people find it very alluring to share a whole bunch of industry information with the notion that if they are sharing enough outside information, it will be easier to sneak their call-to-action in there so they don’t feel too “self-promoting”. I get this. If all you are doing is promoting your own thoughts or ideas, people may see you as “The D Word“, but there is an even worse option … being a headless chicken without a strategy.

Another popular notion is that by sharing good information and ideas, it may help somebody else to view you as more informed or knowledgeable about a given topic. That’s fine, and it can be very useful to share ideas to express your approval (or disapproval) but what about content creation? Wouldn’t creating an idea provide an even better yardstick of what you know, or what you think?

What I want to caution here is the downside of performing tasks without using forethought and common sense. If you think it will be a huge business asset to keep doing things which you would never pay somebody else to do, take a deep breath, sit down, think clearly, and question whether you are really spending your time productively.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t share what others have to say. Not at all, and there are some great ideas out there which should be shared. I am just suggesting to think it over before you do, and consider how much time you expend with such things. I’m also not saying you shouldn’t be doing each and every thing you are doing in your marketing, public relations, or networking. I am mostly just suggesting that you rethink it to better define where your assets and liabilities each lie. You may be right, or you may be wrong, but in either case, you should be cognizant.

Here is are two acid tests to consider:

A.) Would you pay somebody else to do the things you are doing to promote your business?
B.) Would somebody else pay you to do the things you are doing to promote your business?

If you are unsure, or these questions hit a nerve, it is probably time to readjust things.

Photo Credit:
Chicken by Leif K-Brooks via Flickr

Stop Boring Your Audience

A thought came to mind today about the frequently very low attention span of Internet users. When they come to your website, you would probably like to fix that. I will share some thoughts and handy tips to help you do just that. First, let’s consider why it is this way, by looking at how we use the Internet, ourselves.

We often must scan through a lot of dis-interesting information in order to find what we seek, so we each do a lot of scanning when we use the Internet. Just considering all the advertisements we dodge on a daily basis, it is amazing that we ever find our way. Then, adding in the huge volume of obviously false, overtly misleading, and downright dishonest drivel, it really has our information filters working overtime.

It makes a lot of sense how we can become excessively dependent on a quick scan-and-click defense of our time. Let’s face it, most of what is on the Internet is worthless, offensive, or irrelevant to any given individual. The majority is just plain boring. Otherwise, we would want to read and fully absorb every link we can get our mouse on. Of course, this is all subject to the perspective of the reader. Even toupee maintenance and Acetaldehyde dehydrogenase will be interesting to somebody. Here comes my first tip: know who that interested “somebody” is. I’ll get back to that.

Once we find what we are looking for, we make a quick jab on the brakes and we slow down enough to try and learn something. What seems obvious, but is easy for many people to overlook, is that this scanning and filtering is not just something we do … our potential customers do it, too. That’s right, they are not so different in this respect, and it is entirely possible that you are not as immediately interesting to them as you could be.

Be More Interesting, to More People, More Often

This is a prominent goal of many marketing efforts, but being more interesting, to more people, more often is easier said than done. It comes with some challenges. If not, more people would drive down the street tossing hundred dollar bills out the window because their marketing made them so filthy stinking happy.

In the Internet marketing field, when somebody just pops in and takes off without reading, we call that scan-and-click ratio a “bounce rate“. I like to call it, a “Yawn Rate” … or the rate at which people encounter a big yawn and dismiss it as useless and boring. It usually happens within only a few seconds.

The “yawn rate” creates a great challenge for online content producers. Whether it is a product description for an ecommerce website, an “about us” page, or a blog article, it is a challenge that must be recognized in order to overcome it. I have some tips that may help, but there is still no perfect answer. If you intend to be astonishingly interesting every time, it will take practice … plus a good amount of magic.

Today, as I often do, I want to offer you some marketing ideas you can put to work immediately.

Sometimes It’s The Timing

Sometimes it is just the timing of your message that fails. Not that you created or released it at the wrong time, but that a reader has discovered it at the wrong time … for them. Maybe it just wasn’t what they needed right then, but maybe they will need it later. Be sure to make it easy and desirable for them to come back later.

Create Action to Avoid Yawns

If they don’t take action, at least you have tried to help them. It is pretty unlikely for them to go away horribly offended by your effort at continued communications. If so, their neurotic episodes probably extend to other areas of their life, too.

Sometimes It’s The Delivery

This is a tough matter for a lot of people. Most people are only a fraction as good at creating interesting or useful information as they think they are. Before you start feeling defensive about your website, consider asking for advice from others.

Have you ever watched a talent show like American Idol, X Factor, or So You Think You Can Dance? Much like the many humorous failed auditions that make these television shows so interesting, many people with a couple dozen visitors to their website think they have amazing marketing talent, and refuse to accept good advice.

Don’t take it personally if somebody offers you a suggestion. Ian Benardo thought he could sing and dance, so he refused to listen to criticism. Don’t be an Ian Benardo!

If you are willing to face the truth, ask somebody else for their unbiased opinion. Maybe you need to hire it out to a professional (usually the best option), or maybe you don’t. In either case, you should be willing to listen and accept good advice.

Fix Your Yawn Rate With Audio Feedback

This is a favorite, for me, and it is a staple of providing read-worthy information. Knowing the way somebody will read what you have to say can be invaluable. When people read your website, it is like a little voice in their head, silently speaking those words you produced. Shouldn’t you know how that quiet little voice sounds to them?

Reading comprehension is not the same for everybody. There is often a language barrier to overcome, even among readers of the same native language. Something I find helps me a lot is to hear my words in audio. If I don’t have my editor handy to read it aloud, I record it and listen to how it comes across. Many times, I find errors in the flow of material just by reading it aloud, but they come through even clearer when I record and then listen. Try reading your website aloud and pretend you are speaking to the person reading it. Does it sound awkward? Would you still express it the same way verbally, or would it be better to rephrase it?

I have found the value of using a conversational tone to be useful for decades, but it became even more obvious when I started providing all of my blog articles in both text and audio versions. If you try this tip and listen to your words, I think you will agree that it can be very beneficial. I believe it is much better to have somebody else read it to you, and I thank my lucky stars to have an awesome editor, but even if you are self-editing, it is worth the time to hear what you are saying before publishing it.

A Yawning Gator ... Now, That's Interesting!

Don’t Pre-Judge or Dismiss Visual Appeal

I am a word guy, so I sometimes resent the fact that a picture can say things I cannot say. Well, I guess I could say those things, but if a picture is worth a thousand words, as they say, my blogs would be even longer … and that may seem impossible, but it is true.

Visuals count, and as much as I stomp my feet and pout about it, they still have a strong value in making the information you share more interesting. I often consider this one of the hardest parts of producing website content. I guess that is because the words come a lot easier than hunting down a cool graphic to represent those words. It is worth it, and I think of it like setting the tone of that voice I explained. Be creative with this and see what happens. I think you may be surprised how much it can help grab and keep a reader’s attention.

Do You Feel More Interesting Yet?

Far beyond the suggestions I made here, it is critical to understand that everybody is not your best audience. In fact, I highly recommend reading the article titled “Everybody is Not Your Target Market!” to emphasize the point. They will not all love what you are promoting, and some people may even dislike it very much. That’s a good thing, because the ones who do like it will probably like it even more.

You will never get it perfect, and there is always room for improvement. It can take a lot of effort and adjustment to make it optimally effective, but isn’t it worth it? When you get it all just right, you will find that more people will read to the very end … and that’s when they take action on your words. Don’t we all want that?

What do you have to say about this? Do you have suggestions, or did you like my ideas? Please take a moment to express it.

Photo Credits:
Yawn. by Michael Lemmon via Flickr
A Big Yawn by Mark Robinson via Flickr
Yawn by Linda via Flickr

Stop Believing Marketing Hogwash

I must have heard nearly every conceivable absurd notion a person can come up with when it comes to marketing. There are a lot, and I have heard some really bad ideas about marketing practices. One silly thing I encounter a lot is when people say “It’s not about you.” A few people may really know what others mean when they say this, but I think the majority of people are just giving you hogwash.

It seems to me that this message has been mutated in so many ways that it has actually become a scare tactic against marketing, rather than good advice.

If you hear people say “It’s not about you”, you should never accept that as a reason to hide who you are, what you stand for, and what you are seeking, only to sneak it in once in a while. Tragically, I believe that is the way many people have taken this message, and it is often completely contrary to effective marketing.

Stop Letting Knuckleheads Control Your Marketing Assets

When you think of your social media marketing, and especially blogging, let’s consider some things. It is a whole lot easier to spread a message if it is useful and interesting to others, rather than just a sales pitch. That should be obvious. If you are just telling people how awesome you are without relating it to how it benefits them, your ship is sunk. Nobody wants to hear about that, and nobody wants to talk about that.

It is comparatively easy to spread a genuinely useful message far, and spread it wide. When it is done just right, it can get a lot of people talking about it, and you may even benefit from many other websites linking to it. This is also a primary factor to being listed better in search engines. It works in perfect synergy, and it grows like a downhill snowball. It all looks shiny and grand, right?

Here’s the kicker: When something is implicitly “not about you”, it comes with a big risk of people never knowing you, your brand message, or your call-to-action (what you want for them to do next). Until you show them who you are, and what your call to action includes, it is just guesswork for them, and missed opportunities for business.

If you think that being useful and interesting means you should carefully hide your call-to-action … the thing that actually provides benefit to your business … then why are you doing it at all? Who ever suggested that you should be playing Mother Teresa and Gandhi with your marketing assets? If somebody suggested that, perhaps you should give them a big hearty slap.

Finding Your Marketing Balance

There must be a good balance to your efforts, and in that balance is where much of your success is locked up like Fort Knox.

You can take the approach that those useful things you do on your blog or social networks will make up an overall better presence for your brand, and this is very true. It is a very important principle in online marketing. At the same time, you cannot expect people to go hunting through pages of information just to discover how to pay your company a profit. They won’t do it! No, they really won’t … and the numbers show the truth! This means you must create a good balance, and that balance should include letting them know what it is that keeps you in business so you will be there when they come back for more.

Sure, it is fine to give the whole world a nice pat on the bottom and a kiss on the brow, but if you are doing something valuable for others, you deserve the benefit of growing your business for it.

Where is The Voice of Your Brand?

When it comes to market research and learning who will give your brand a second glance, it is not about your company or yourself. It is about them … your market … the people who will become your loyal customers and brand advocates. With this information, it becomes about you and them, and where the two parties meet in the middle and do business.

Beyond the research, when it comes to building a brand, you would be foolish to invest in the marketing hogwash that “it’s not about you”. Yes, it is about you, but with some checks and balances. The balance comes somewhere between the value you provide, and the value you ask for, so you need to get that part right.

If the people you are reaching are the right audience, they want to hear from you, and they want to know what you’re all about … whether you represent a company or an individual. That sense of “You” is what they connect with, and what gives them the confidence in who they are considering doing business with.

I’ll explain this in real and vivid terms, and I stand behind this. First, I’ll give you a bit of background, and then I’ll explain the direct benefits to you. I hope you can apply this to your business.

I’ve been in marketing my entire adult life. I have provided marketing consulting and training to successful companies when I was as young as 15 years old. I was raised into it by some brilliant parents, and they taught me a lot. They mentored me.

I was actually raised for my job, much like the six year old girl playing piano in the video above was raised to be a concert pianist. I was fed all of the best books about marketing, success, and motivation. I was taken to conferences of all types and sizes. I was hidden behind phone lines and fax machines to work with clients who simply wouldn’t understand it if they knew their new marketing campaign was largely being constructed by a kid.

I was on a stage talking to people about marketing before I was old enough for a driver’s license. Back then, I could barely wait to be 40, so people could take me more seriously. Today, as I approach 40 a couple months away, I question whether that was my best goal. In any case, I suppose that turning 40 with 25 years of marketing experience and business ownership has its upsides.

I grew up a lot faster than I would ever wish for my children, but I had good mentoring for this career. My parent-mentors trained me to understand how to make something marketable, and how to see markets as systems. That means seeing more than just “the dots”, but rather being able to connect the dots between companies and their consumers. I don’t know why I was raised that way, but my parents had their reasons, and must have seen something in me.

Ten years after I left school at 15, I was able to retire early, as a 25 year old “know-it-all”. Some years later, I went back to work and merged two companies and grew them to the pinnacle of the wholesale Internet services industry. I have also created similar success for clients who had the fortitude and desire to grow their companies, and called me to build and manage their marketing strategies.

That’s a small portion of my career history. I am not ashamed to tell you, nor afraid that it offends you. That does not make me dis-interesting to the right people, and it does not make this all about me, either. If somebody is dis-interested in my career history and qualifications in marketing, they may be the type who will listen to the first slick-talker to tell them what they want to hear. I’m not that guy, and I have a robust brand message that confirms it. I am a guy who strongly understands that it takes willingness to make sacrifices in order to build a successful company … and my clients do, too.

Here’s How You Benefit Knowing This

I offer a lot of reliable information on this blog, the majority of which is based on things I have witnessed in my career. The benefit to you of knowing about my history, who I am, and what I’m about is that you may have more confidence in the things I write. If you have good reasons to trust my integrity, you can see that my efforts are intended to be helpful, and not based on hype.

You can learn a whole lot about my industry, and gain a lot of useful information on this blog … and I provide it for free! If you want the other 99.7 percent, and you want it implemented exceptionally well, I welcome you to contact me to see if we’re a good match. That’s what I’m paid for, and I’m not a bit apprehensive to ask for your business.

Are you ready? If so, click here!

Oh, but there is another point I want to make about one of those early lessons I learned in marketing … just to drive the point home.

The Lessons of Two Ears and One Mouth

Early in my marketing career, I received constant reminders of why I was born with two ears but only one mouth. That is a really tough lesson for most kids to master … and some never do. They explained that it was because I should be listening twice as much as I talk. Of course, a critical part of marketing is to listen to the customers. That’s how you come to understand them, and their desires. It is critical, and it is what market research is for.

I think this is the part where the notion that “it’s not about you” totally confounds a lot of people.

Another lesson I learned that was equally valuable is that when people are considering a purchase, they also appreciate a story of how well the product or service worked for others … or how it could work for them. In order for them to become a customer, they must envision having whatever it is you are offering for sale, and they must envision it with a favorable outcome.

This means, you must be more than just a listener. You also need to know how to tell a story. Sometimes it is a story of a customer, your product, your brand, or your experience, but that’s what people connect with and understand. If you have a story from your experience in business, tell it. Yes, it is about you, and that is a good thing! That is a whole lot better than letting people guess, and it is a lot more genuine than just telling somebody how great your product or service is. That piece of “you” is what becomes valuable … so in this sense, I’d say yes … it is about you!

A question that sticks with me is this: “Would you rather be an interested introvert or an interesting extrovert?” I think we all want to be a little of both, but if you put this in terms of a customer and a seller, I would have to say that I want them to be interested and I want to be interesting. That doesn’t mean turning off the listening, but it does mean you’ve got to do some talking.

People don’t want to hear your hyperbole, but they do want to hear what makes you who you are. If you hide that because somebody told you “it’s not about you”, then you are covering up your best asset. When it comes down to actually doing business, those things about you are what makes up a large portion of their decision.

Just as there are more followers than there are leaders, I believe there are a lot more introverts in the world than there are extroverts. This may be partially because in order to be an extrovert, you put yourself out there on a limb. You are taking a risk to be the one doing the talking. Don’t worry though, because even if you try really hard, you will never make everybody like you … and it is counterproductive to even try.

I say go for it … talk about yourself enough so we can know who you are and what you stand for. If you don’t, all that your would-be customers have to base their buying decisions on is facts and figures. Unless you are the best and the cheapest, all at once, somebody else can nearly always beat you out on at least one of those measures.

That’s my piece. It’s your turn, and it’s all about you, now. Go ahead and add your comments to tell me I’m wrong.

Photo Credit:
Pig by dullhunk via Flickr

Illicit Drugs Are Popular, But Still Illicit

I believe the popularity addiction that many people suffer from in social media is downright pathetic. I’m going to tell you, in plain business terms, why I quit putting that drug in my bloodstream and stopped caring about appearances of popularity, having a squillion followers, or stressing about having the highest Klout score. In short, it is because those things aren’t what pays the bills, and they can even be quite destructive pursuits.

If you will look at it rationally, for just a moment, I’ll show you why the fashionable illusion of popularity fails the test of real business value. If you are ready to breathe a sigh of relief, you may want to pay attention and join me on the road to recovery.

For the most part, you probably don’t follow people on Twitter or “Like” them on Facebook because you’re planning to do business with them. Sometimes, perhaps, but how often? Really, how often do you use that long list of people you are connected to as a reminder for your shopping list?

When you need to pick up something on your next shopping venture, you don’t go and see who you’re following to decide what to buy or who to buy from. No you don’t! OK, maybe you do … but if that’s the case, you are in a very small minority. If you buy from them, it is likely because they built a positive brand image, and became more memorable.

Then why is it that so many people out to sell something have it in their head that other people are using social media for formulating their shopping list? They aren’t thinking in rational human terms … that’s why! They are thinking in terms of appearances and what may make them look more important or popular, rather than building a sustainable brand recognition. I guess that must make sense to some people, but not the successful ones … not for the ones with two brain cells to rub together.

Let me explain it like this: If you saw only 426 people following Subway Restaurants on Twitter, it probably wouldn’t alter your thoughts about buying a Subway sandwich. You buy from them because they make an awesome sandwich, and you’ve heard of them because they built their brand based on those awesome sandwiches. That is also why they don’t have 426 Twitter followers … they have 184,847. They produced something people want, and they made it memorable.

Conversely, if you see that a small real estate firm has 184,847 Facebook fans, it doesn’t mean they’ve got a house you want … or that they will be any better at selling your house. In fact, it may mean they are playing the popularity game, and prioritizing poorly.

Upside Down Social Media Thinking

You can lie to me, but don’t lie to yourself. If you try lying to me, I’ll break out the real numbers. Try this on for size: Here is a recent snapshot of a random hundred people who followed me on Twitter, along with the results I put together from over 1,000 tweets of my previous ten blog articles. See “Twitter in Numbers: Marginal, Not Magical“. Click it and read up if you really want the truth.

Perhaps too many people latched onto the fallacy of “more is better”, or the crazy idea that social media marketing is just about the networking … but it’s not!

The Psychology of Social Media Popularity

Nobody is fully immune to the notion that a perception of popularity will somehow serve them. I’ve even heard it from people who have absolutely no business case to have a big audience. When I have asked people about it, they are often confused by why I think it is unimportant. A small number of them are honest enough to admit that they want the popularity because it makes them feel good … and it makes them feel more productive, or more important.

In itself, a Twitter follower or a Facebook fan or friend is a terribly weak way to measure your brand’s love, but I see it all the time. I have heard many instances of companies wanting to know how much it will cost to acquire “X” number of friends, fans, followers, and other useless measures. A much smaller number is asking how to breathe awesomeness into their brand and earn faithful brand advocates and customers.

Something those who participate in the popularity contest are reluctant to admit is that more social media connections alone does not actually equal true popularity, or value. What it can do, however, is make them feel like they are making progress, even when there is no true progress at all. It often just means those connections had the same psychological need for validation, and they are participating in the absurdity of implied reciprocity. These people are completely confusing cause and affect, and they are wasting precious resources, like time and money.

The hope is often to have hundreds of people tweeting and facebooking something about them. That is a different kind of popularity, and it means your message is spreading. I don’t begrudge anybody for that, and I won’t call them a fool. In fact, it is just great! That may actually have value, and it may land the right person to become a customer. It is a sign of doing something well. That kind of popularity is often due to legitimate reasons.

Look at how you use social media, and then consider why you think everybody else is so different. Unless you are doing something totally different, and awesome, it really seems arrogant to believe that they are paying more attention to you than you are them.

What's your social media addiction, and is it time for an intervention?

You may find a number of people or companies that you find interesting, but don’t tell me for a second that you found thousands of people you really intend to keep up with and give attention to what they have to say. It simply doesn’t work that way. Have you ever heard of Dunbar’s Number? It works both ways, and unless those people are really interested in you, it is worthless. For the truth, just picture yourself as one of those random names or faces you see as you look at who you are “following” or “liking”. Do you really pay attention to them? Do you really think they are paying attention to you?

The Little Company That Couldn’t

I want you to imagine the little company who couldn’t. They set out to find popularity, and they paid a “social media expert” to help them amass an audience, but they wanted it done quickly and at a low cost. The social media expert could be blamed (and should rightfully be hung by the short hairs) for delivering them a group of totally disinterested people to follow them on Twitter and “Like” their Facebook page. The thing is, it is exactly what the company asked for, and they refused to see it any other way. It was what they were sure would work, and it was all they were striving for. They dictated exactly what they wanted, and now they’ve got an untargeted audience.

Months later, they wonder why they are still not seeing a return on their social media investment. They have a huge audience, but those people just aren’t rushing the gates to buy their stuff. It is often because they were too concerned by the cost of time, money, and hard work that they never questioned the return. As the company resentfully struggles with “What in the heck is wrong with those people?!”, the competition is doing great.

The competition saw the value of a strategy, and they stopped trying to be like everybody else. The competition realized that having a disinterested group of people to follow them, “Like” them, and pad their egotistical desires for appearance without substance will not be worth a box of frog toenails if they are the wrong audience.

Here’s My Theory on The Value of Popularity

I guess should know a little about this … I have a metric squillion readers of my blog, and a reasonably sizable following across my social networks. I don’t need, nor want everybody to like me, love me, or follow me. I don’t concern myself with a bigger audience, because I would rather focus on the right people, and give them something they want … something useful. That’s why the audience is there in the first place!

Without a focus on people’s interests, and doing something worthwhile, it has very little business value. I guess you could say that I am reasonably popular, but I am still working on the awesome factor, every day. That matters a whole lot more to my business and personal pursuits than just looking popular.

Even with a great audience, it still requires a lot of effort. The most valuable audience is often the smallest target of all.

That’s my take on the subject. What do you have to say about it?

Photo Credits:
Heroin and Syringe by Michael Velardo via Flickr
“Red Face” sells? by Daniel Axelson via Flickr
Héroïne by Alexandre Duret-Lutz via Flickr

Everybody Needs Friends: Treat Them Right!

I am reminded of a story of two friends, John and Mike. I introduced them many years ago. John was the number one real estate agent in town, and Mike was seeking to sell his house, and buy another. One day, Mike called John and asked him to evaluate his house for market, and make suggestions for improvements to increase the sale price.

John was glad for the call, and he offered his professional time and efforts to help Mike. A few days passed, and John discovered that Mike had listed the home for sale … but chose a different listing agent. As the top agent in town during a good time in real estate, John certainly did not need the commission, but was disappointed because he had wanted to assist our friend Mike in the sale, and subsequent purchase. Plus, he had been somewhat crudely taken advantage of professionally, by his friend.

John was a bit confused as to why his friend chose a different agent. He feared he had somehow offended Mike with the suggested listing price. No, Mike took his advice on the price. Was it the suggested improvements, the commission, the way he combed his hair? No, no, and no … the agent Mike listed with was a young sexy lady. Mike hoped he may have a chance with her, so he took all of John’s suggestions and listed the house elsewhere.

Once the house was sold and Mike was ready to buy his next house, he still overlooked John. He went with a different agent, again.

I really don’t think John ever felt the same about Mike after that. Whether it is right or wrong, I can understand how John could feel insulted. After all, he would have done the sale transaction and the purchase transaction for his friend, without a commission at all. Ironically, Mike had done a similar thing to me, years earlier, and he was on his way to building a reputation for it.

I am certainly not a fan of implied reciprocity (as you can see if you read that link), but you can probably imagine (or remember) how it feels when a friend overlooks you and buys from your competitor, right? It actually kind of stinks, and it is easy to take it as an insult. It also feels even worse when the friend is hurt by a competitor, when you know you could have saved them the trouble. No, it does not feel satisfying … is stinks!

Have you ever witnessed a friend go somewhere else when they needed something? I have heard speculation about the mindset, but I refuse to understand it or adopt it for my own use. I know that some people think you shouldn’t do business with friends, but I think that is largely a horrible attitude.

I will always try my best to give my business to a friend or acquaintance above a stranger. They may really appreciate that you thought of them, and they may really appreciate the business.

Now I’ll tell you what got me to thinking about this.

What Reminded Me of This?

I recently had a friend ask me if I knew a good option for web hosting. Now, when I say “friend”, I don’t mean just a random acquaintance on Twitter. She has sat at my bar for drinks, she co-chaired a school fundraiser with me, and we have celebrated kids birthdays together. She has sat in my office, and she has even seen and touched the corporate YourNew.com, Inc. Race Team Corvettes. She has also been my friend on Facebook for years. So, I know she knows I do something “Internetty”, and she knows I do it very well. She knows I know a lot about this Internet, so she asked me about web hosting.

The sad thing is that she didn’t really know much about what I actually do, or just how much I am able to help her. It bothered me, but mostly because of how I could benefit her, rather than that her business would pay me a dollar or two per month. That’s why I decided that I am going to start letting more people know.

I know that a lot of people who know me don’t really know or understand my work. I do more than a couple things here on this Internet, but I don’t really promote them very much. It’s mostly kind of an “obvious secret”, in a way, because the majority of my work is operating as “the geek behind the geeks”. I generally don’t promote my services to a retail market, or to friends.

You see, aside from my work as a marketing guy, I founded a company sometime over a decade ago, as a merger of two other companies. That company sells Internet services to wholesale clients … who often sell those same services to resellers, who sell them to the public. We’ve been very successful at that market segment, and retail sales are a minimal part of what we do.

We sell web hosting to web hosting companies. You knew it had to come from somewhere, right? In fact, if you have used the Internet very long, there is a very high probability that you have used services I have created or brokered. The company is still my full-time employer after all these years, and I work there as the CEO.

So, why don’t I promote that to my blog readers? It is mostly because I have enough search engine traffic and recognition in that specific area of the industry that it is just a distraction to what I do here at aWebGuy.com. In any case, if you are in need of any of the many Internet-related services we provide, I’m always happy to help … I am just not out to push those on you. In fact, you may even see Google ads for my competitors right here on my blog. It’s ironic, right?

Let Me Show You Why I Have a Reputation

I want to show you why I have a good reputation in my industry. I’m going to start with this: If you have been a reader for a while, you probably have some sense of who I am. You may even know a good amount about my principles and my ethics. You can probably tell that this is not some big scam waiting to suck you in.

Today, I have decided to offer web hosting to my readers and friends at a rate of $10 per month, or $5 per month for ten or more websites. I was going to say free, but come on … having a guy to call who really knows his stuff has got to be worth something, right? I’m not just offering basic web hosting, either. I will include the same web hosting system that is used here at aWebGuy.com … which clearly exceeds an average demand when it comes to web hosting. I’ll even include all the bells and whistles like website builders, ecommerce tools, plenty of email, and support for about any technology you can dream up … just ask me.

Better yet, I will provide your web hosting technical support, myself. Sure, I will have my tech support folks waiting in the wings in case you encounter something really pressing and I am in the shower or otherwise cannot take your call … but I will be the live voice at the other end of the line if you need web hosting help. How many CEOs do you know who will do that? I’ll bet that “Daddy” guy won’t take your call on his way to pick the kids up at school.

In fact, to take me up on this offer, I want you to contact me directly, and I will personally help you to set up your account and walk you through the basics. Now that doesn’t sound like such a scary offer, does it?

The one caveat is that you subscribe to my blog and keep reading to learn more about how to use that web hosting to build your business. If you are a subscriber, just ring me up and introduce yourself. I’ll be delighted to help you.

If you need web hosting, or you need better web hosting, contact me. I’ve provided web hosting for over a decade, including many websites you know and trust. Maybe even your bank, your city, your hospital, or your university. It’s better to trust somebody you are familiar with than trusting a total stranger.

I also want to add that if you know somebody else in the industry … by all means, call them! I really do believe it is valuable to do business with people you know and trust. I think it is always important to know who your friends are, know what they do, and remember them when they can help.

Oh, and one more thing … this is just for new web hosting accounts. I can’t just give away the whole farm. If you are already paying me more, I’m confident there’s a good reason for it.

Success Has Its Pains

Some people say that you can learn a lot from successful people. I think it is largely true, too. It makes more sense to learn from somebody who has been successful than to learn from somebody who has not. At the same time, one thing that becomes very valuable is to learn from the mistakes they made, and use those things to avoid repeating their mistakes.

Some would say that I took a bit of an uncommon direction to learning about marketing. I dropped out of school about 25 years ago at age 15, regularly held 2-3 jobs as I built my first few companies, and nearly worked myself to death by the time I was 25. It sounds glamorous, doesn’t it?

My career path would certainly not be comfortable for most people, and I would never encourage it for my own children or anybody else I care about, but it worked for me. I learned my way through it the hard way. I read a lot of books, and I studied a lot of concepts from successful people. They were often people I knew first hand, and there were many instances when I should have listened more carefully. Since I was stubborn, I still had to learn some things the hard way, by making my own mistakes.

OK, I’ll admit, my path to learning was not totally awful, and there were a few benefits along the way. I earned more money by the end of those ten years between 15 and 25 than most people will in a whole lifetime. I retired for a few years, and it mostly seemed worth it. Yes, indeed … I had become one of those successful people like the ones I worked so hard to learn from.

Some of the greatest benefits I received were the marketing lessons I learned. Those tough lessons about marketing taught me how to bounce back from nearly any business calamity. That is because if you can market something, you can sell something, and if you can sell something you can earn profit, and let’s be honest … the majority of things that can go wrong in business can be improved with more money.

I want to share some of what I learned with you. I’ll offer a glimpse of my early years in business, and some valuable lessons it taught me about marketing. I hope it will save you some of the frustration of my mistakes. At the same time, it may scare you to imagine what it really takes to build success in a business. It is not for everybody … “average” is for everybody.

If The Doors Aren’t Swinging, The Cash Register is Silent

In my early days of business ownership, nearly 25 years ago, it was pretty easy to recognize that my business was much better when the doors were swinging open, or the telephone was ringing. Without enough customers, I wasn’t selling enough, and selling something was how my company generated revenue … money … profit. You know, the stuff that sets the difference between a hobby and a business.

I needed to attract customers, and I knew it would take some pretty clever marketing to keep my company moving forward. Without marketing, even the best companies fail. I had seen such failure in other companies, so I knew I needed to get that part right.

Of course, marketing comes in many forms, and it involves many aspects of a business. It includes product assessment, pricing, merchandising, public relations, and more. Focusing on just one area of marketing is short-sighted, and leads to a lot of waste. What I knew for sure was that if I didn’t do something and do it right, I would never grow the company into anything sustainable. First things first, I needed to generate some money to make the whole thing work.

Sales reps were not worth a garage sale necktie to me if I didn’t have the right product offering. So, I worked on our offerings to be sure they were better than the competition. The sales reps were also no good to me if I could not legitimately define why the offerings were the best option in the market for our given customers. That meant I needed some product research. That’s when I realized the product research and the customers had to match up just right. It would not matter how awesome the offering was, or how well we could merchandise it, if we did not understand who would benefit from it the most, and would have a greater propensity to respond to our efforts. That’s right … “everybody” is not a target market.

I researched like mad to put all the pieces together. I got the products just right, the pricing was attractive, and I ran great ads to get bodies through the door, but then I figured out that there were good customers, and then there were great customers. I needed to determine how to get the right customers through the door. When I learned how to do that, our profits grew like mad. With all that research to my advantage, advertising cost went down because it became more effective.

You see, it took a lot of little pieces to be put in their proper place in order to grow. It took a lot of very time-consuming and often high-investment efforts to create success.

Putting all those little pieces in the right order and in their rightful place is even more important now than ever, in the digital world. The competition is broader, the offerings are sharper, and getting people to a website is not at all the same as getting the right people to a website. Once you get them there, you will need very compelling reasons they will want to do business with you. My early experiences really helped me to understand this.

Here comes a lesson that came really hard for me, but it makes a huge impact once you get it right.

Who You Are is Not a Microcosm of Your Market!

You are not the same as your customers and potential customers. You may try to be like them, you may try to speak their language, and you may even be part of a very similar demographic, but the truth is that they are different. We each want to believe those warm and friendly lines like “people are not so different after all” … but they are!

It is very challenging to try and understand your perfect market segment, and how to reach them with the right message. It is a bit unnatural, because it requires thinking in a way that is not your usual way of thinking. They are the customer, and they will always have their own perspective, their own experiences, their own mindset … and you will have yours.

During my earliest days in business, I remember a constant nagging question of “Who are these people?” I’ve got to say that as much as I tried, I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I understood them in concept and in statistics, but I still could not relate to their ways of thinking. Fortunately, I didn’t need to nor want to become more like them. It is true but misunderstood that you do not have to “become your customer” to provide their best option … but you will need to know a lot about them. I was selling very expensive things to very egotistical people. I knew exactly why they would buy, and I knew that it was all about stroking their ego.

What I couldn’t grasp was why they were so willing to endure all of that opportunity cost just to splurge on luxury items. They were buying things that I felt I could never afford. The crazy part was that I would constantly find that my customers were actually earning only a fraction of what I was.

The big separation for me was that I was in a different stage of my life, and in a different mind capsule of my own. I believed in taking every dollar I earned to further build my businesses, and buying showy things just didn’t fit into my model (until much later).

There are many things which can separate us from the mindset of our customers, and it is usually not a simple task to figure it out. In my case, it became my most monumental career objective to understand the gaps between customer and seller perspectives … and to bridge those gaps.

One of the best and hardest lessons I learned was that it usually takes a fresh set of eyes looking from outside. That means outside of the buyer’s perspective, and outside of the seller’s perspective. Analysis from a complete outsider is one of the best ways to understand the gaps between sellers and customers. I am lucky I learned this early, and I will always value the outsider. This can be a friend, an associate, or a trade organization, but it is even better when it is their job to serve your company needs and expectations. You can be afraid of the truth, but it will not change the truth. The best outsider is often in the form of a trained and experienced marketing consultant.

The funny thing is this: I am a marketing consultant, and in fact, I am a very accomplished marketing consultant … but knowing what I know, I will never stop using them. Yes, it probably sounds totally nuts to you, but I rely on outsiders to provide the same services that others pay me to provide.

The reason I use outside marketing consultants is that for as much as I can do the research, bring you to discover me, know your hot buttons, and even address them fairly well, I will never completely understand you, or why you are not buying my services. If I tried to understand you all on my own, without influences from the outside, I would destroy many of my greatest opportunities. I would also likely go even crazier than I already am.

Delegating Saved Me More Than Once

I learned that one of the most profound commonalities of successful people is knowing when and how to delegate things outside of their expertise. They realize their limitations, and the value of concentrating their efforts on the things they are best suited for. They recognize what they don’t know, and they become good at finding the right people to handle those things.

I learned to delegate. It was terrifying to me, and I never got really comfortable with handing the controls over to somebody else. I hated that my accountants and attorneys often knew more about me than my own mother. I also hated the thought that my marketing consultants have often known enough about my businesses to try and mirror my company and become my competition.

I thank my lucky stars that I got over it and realized that I cannot be the very best at everything. I am absolutely terrible at accounting! All I want to know is that there is enough money in the accounts to carry out my purchases. I generally grasp the whole legal thing, but I hate writing my own contracts, and I understand why they say that “the lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a client.” A similar principle holds true in marketing. If you rely on your own brilliance, without outside influence, you will make mistakes … and often very costly mistakes.

If Building Success Was Easy, Wouldn’t Your Market Share Be Higher?

Building a successful business is not easy, and it requires a lot of uncomfortable decisions. If it was easy, it would be easy for your competition, too. A key factor lies in your will to achieve more.

There will always be people to dislike you for doing the things they are unwilling or unable to do. There will always be people to try and roadblock your success. You may often create your own biggest roadblocks based on other people’s frustrations. I know this, and I can almost bet that it is like fingernails on a chalkboard to many people when I say I’ve spent much of my adult life in the top fraction of a percent of money-earners in the USA and in the world. Yeah, that’s annoying to the people who have not joined me there, and have no hopes of achieving the same or similar results.

I really enjoyed and related to an article my friend John Falchetto recently wrote titled “5 reasons jerks are successful“. I hate to give away the ending, but the fact is that they are not jerks at all. They just work very hard and have very strong commitments. I encourage you to read it and also read the comments on the article. I had a lot to say about it.

I know that there is a huge deluge of information telling you that you can do it all yourself, and that you can reach a huge audience of all the right people with the perfect message about your company and make your product or service offering so popular the phones will ring all night and day.

If you really believed it was so simple, I think you must ask yourself “Why isn’t my market share higher?” or “why am I still reading this blog?” You want more business … that’s why.

Let this roll around in your head for a while: If you were given all the right resources to market your company, would it become as successful as you hoped it would be? Either way you answer, this should require you to consider what mistakes you are making and which required resources you are missing. It very likely has a whole lot to do with your marketing.

Photo Credit:
Separation Anxiety by j bizzie via Flickr

What Are Marketers Feeding You?

Isn’t it time to take inventory of what you’ve been accepting on faith, and start to question it? I think so, and I think it should apply to marketers and their clients alike. Of course, that will require a shift toward using due diligence and common sense. When you wonder if what you’ve been told is a lie, do you accept the responsibility to find the truth, or do you just give in and believe it because it is what you want to believe?

It is not my full-time job to be a whistle-blower about the abundance of bad marketing, but I’d say I definitely have a knack for it. I also have a sense of industry responsibility to balance out all the worthless junk and cons with some common sense and honesty … brutal honesty. Maybe I shouldn’t harp on it so much, but there are many instances when I see just how badly lies about online marketing can hurt a company. It is true that many marketing efforts can cause a net loss even greater than the upfront price paid.

I’ll wrap this up with a real life example of a company that was scammed for many thousands of dollars, but this is also about the course that brings them to accept their defeat rather than fight back. I’ll begin with some observations, and I’ll include some links throughout this article to extended resources on related topics. You may like to give attention to those.

Convincing Evidence of a Marketing Decline

I am fully convinced that the majority of things people are promoting to fix your online marketing is a string of lies. I see it all the time that somebody lied to somebody else, and now they are out to sell it to you. I suspect that many of the people lying don’t even know they are lying … they believe what they have been told so completely that they actually see it as the truth. There is a huge component of the blind leading the blind, and taking inspiration from even the slightest of success stories they read about on the next amateur marketing blog. I can prove the concept, too … just have a good hard look at this piece about the sad state of SEO and social media marketing experts.

Consider this: How many times have you heard how important it is to use Facebook? I like Facebook just fine, and it can be very useful for marketing, but how much of what you hear is hyperbole and lies? After all, how much do you actually expect to buy from that guy on Facebook trying so hard to sell you his stuff? Do you think the answer is completely different if you asked him the same question about you?

This is not about Facebook, and I actually know for a fact that Facebook can play an amazing role in a marketing strategy. Facebook has performed wonderfully for my wife’s cakes and confections company (of course, she is far sweeter than I am), and it has become invaluable to many of my clients. What I am very unsettled about is the utter loss of common sense I see surrounding “miracle cures” like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and the rest of the wagon full of assorted snake oils.

Sure, maybe snakes have great oil, but do you rub it on your feet, fry with it, put it in your bath, or what? There is no perfect single-source cure for your every marketing objective, and it takes much more than just showing up! It is important to note that “everybody” is not your target market, but that’s how I see a majority of marketers promoting marketing these days. If you are hoping to earn squillions of dollars, or even a few dollars, just by being on Facebook without a strategy, you will be disappointed. Let’s try to be more realistic … please!

For your enjoyment, I have included a video about lying.

It is easy to see how the industries related to marketing a business online became so hard to trust. After all, who doesn’t want a commission … a job … a paycheck? Many people will lie to get those things. You will find a massive abundance of them in marketing … especially online marketing. The end result is that it does not matter if the lies are due to ignorance or greed. Lies are lies, and there are no innocent lies, nor innocent victims, as long as the truth is available. There are just the willingly confused.

Great Marketing Professionals Are Not Just Mythical

I’ve got to say that there are some amazing marketing people out there. There are also many of them with a lot of integrity. I know they exist, because I’ve met many of them. I’ve also trained many of them. The trouble is that the field of marketing was flooded with newcomers like a tsunami. Now that it all looks so “easy” to reach a huge audience online, there is little wonder why everybody wants to be an expert. It is a mathematical truth that most of them are not, and will never be very good at marketing. Marketing takes training, it takes experience, and it takes aptitude, but since the majority of today’s online marketing newcomers have very little of these things, they lie … even to themselves. I suppose it must seem easier to lie than to go through the hard process of working and learning their way to the top. Only the few with high integrity and strong work ethic will survive in the long run, but there is a constant flow of new liars … so look out!

There is also a huge audience who are swallowing those lies like a free bacon sandwich and washing them down like sucking free grape soda through a garden hose. It is maddening that they are in even greater abundance than the lying newcomers shamelessly taking their money. They are getting more gun-shy with each leap of faith, so it makes me wonder what it will look like when the whole thing collapses like a house of cards, and there is nobody left to believe it when they actually do encounter the truth. Have you seen the housing market? Most people thought that would never collapse, but it did!

The Marketing Con Job I Promised

I told you I’d wrap this up with an example of a company that was scammed. In this case, it is a friend of my friend and colleague. It is driving him nuts to see his friends get ripped off, so he asked me to help.

The company is paying thousands of dollars per month for search engine optimization services. They have previously paid multiple SEO companies to optimize their law firm websites to reach their target market, but each time, the results were just as bad. They have largely lost faith that online marketing can help them at all, but at the same time, they are strangely afraid to stop sending the checks … just in case.

The latest rip-off has performed so horribly that more than five months into their $36,000 contract, they are receiving under 30 monthly website visits that are even from the same country as where they provide their legal services. The last report I saw showed just over 600 monthly website visits from Southeast Asia, while only 28 were from within the United States. When the law firm asked for a list of the work performed, the marketing company replied with what one could logically estimate at under an hour of work … total … after months of being paid thousands of dollars per month.

The law firm has said they want my help, but they are “waiting it out” to see if the crooked SEO provider will do right by them. It becomes really upsetting as I consider how frequently I hear stories just like this. They keep hoping the lies will somehow miraculously become the truth, even when they have been presented with concrete proof that the SEO company is actually hurting their efforts … quite likely well into the future.

What do you think? Why do people allow themselves to be ripped off? Should marketing companies be willing to lie, just because it is how others do it? Shouldn’t we all use more due diligence and common sense? Am I doing this all wrong by trying to be honest in a dishonest world?

Please answer me!

P.S.

If you question how it can possibly be the majority of marketing that is plagued with lies, be sure to notice that there is a lot more marketing that you never see than what you do see … but yet, somebody is paying for it.

Google's Panda: Watching from Above

Your search engine ranking efforts may be hurting your business a lot more than you think! Whether you are the person handling your search engine destiny, or you have hired a search engine optimizer to handle it, this is information you should know. I’ll start with some simple facts.

Google makes frequent changes to their algorithm (roughly 500 per year). Yes, algorithm … the mathematical methods used to determine which websites will rank higher or lower in searches. On occasion, the changes are quite significant, such as the “Panda” series of updates (most recently Panda 2.5). We should expect changes, and it is a very good thing.

Google has a lot at stake in continuing to deliver the most relevant results when we go searching. From a search user’s standpoint, it is excellent, because it helps us find what we are looking for, easier and faster than ever. From a business standpoint, it is a huge cause for concern to many people, and often rightfully so.

Should you worry about Google’s changes? Perhaps yes, and perhaps no. Let’s see if I can answer that question. I’ll address some changes in layman’s terms, including a blast from the past that seems to be making a resurgence, which is “Google Bowling”, and it is not to be overlooked. In fact, I’ll explain how the methods of link building which many SEO sell to their customers is the same tactic other companies use to negatively affect competing websites. Please don’t click away if some of this seems too basic, or too advanced. There is value here, and I’ll make it easy to understand.

I often challenge search engine optimization providers for their abuse of people’s fears by telling them SEO requires constant technology changes to keep up. What the abused SEO-buying public hesitates to understand is that SEO is not a function of technology. It is generally very untrue that search engine changes will adversely affect rankings based on technology issues. I have extensive proof of this in competitive markets where I have ranked websites at the top of searches, but made absolutely no changes. Some have not been touched in a decade, but still rank in the top one to three positions for competitive searches. Of course, that only happens if you are doing things above board, and not trying to cheat your way to the top … or paying somebody else to do it.

The problem that is hitting many websites hard with the new Google changes is that they have, either knowingly or unknowingly, used practices which Google has recently cracked down on harder than ever before.

What Google Changed in Panda Update … In Simple Terms

Some of the most recent Google algorithm changes are making a broad impact across the Internet. Big change always sends the cockroaches of the search engine optimization industry scurrying for a new patch of darkness. This time, the changes are in a series of updates called “Panda”, with the latest to date being called “Panda 2.5″. The focus of the updates is to wipe out some of the most prevalent and slimy tactics companies use to try and trick their way to top search engine rankings. I’ll share some reasons this could affect your online business future.

Panda Update is Good News ... Unless You're the Bamboo!

Unique Content Matters: Copycats Don’t Have Nine Lives!

One hard-hit area is companies taking content from other websites and re-purposing it on their own website. This can be as simple as a retailer re-using a manufacturer’s description, or a lazy content producer stealing somebody else’s work. An extremely hard hit area is auto-blogging, which automatically scrapes content from other websites to increase blog content. The more “innocent” instance uses automated means to replicate product descriptions from a manufacturer or supplier database. It happens a lot, and has been widely accepted for years, but many companies are finally seeing the downside. If you are unsure whether this is being done with your website, you may soon find out … the hard way.

What’s worse, is that a lot of people are paying search engine optimizers who use links from this kind of reduced-quality website to link to theirs. These dirty SEO tell the client that more links are a good thing, so they create thousands of them, but they don’t tell the client the rest of the story. It is extremely common, and very destructive, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

A huge number of websites are hit by Google’s more hard-line approach with Panda updates. It is often because somebody opted for the easy way, instead of the right way. This is the way of the dark side of the SEO industry, but somebody keeps feeding the SEO monster, and it’s not me.

I cannot call anybody a victim if this hits them in the wallet, because there are no victims. There are only “willingly confused“. Due diligence and common sense often go out the window when it comes to marketing, and especially as it applies to the Internet. People really want to believe that “easy success” actually exists.

Many people previously decided that the easy way is the better way, but its not true, and Google is proving it. It takes a lot of work to create truly excellent unique content that will perform well in searches. A lot of companies fell for the notion of trying to save money by using cheap SEO tactics and taking shortcuts, but Google is fighting back. Now people are finding out that the cost of shortcuts is a whole lot more than doing it right in the first place. If you who want to know “How much does SEO cost”, I suggest searching Google for it … but be sure to look for this article while you are there: “How Much Does SEO Cost?” is The Wrong Question. It won’t be hard to find … I wrote it.

Links Are Not Created Equal!

A tactic that Google is aggressively punishing is buying or trading links from other websites to make your website falsely appear more credible and “important”. This has always been a sore spot for Google, but more today than ever, as the Internet’s growth accelerates. Google wants to judge the Internet by what people like and find useful, and not things which have been falsely inflated by “content farms” and low-quality link gathering. It is why I have always spoken out against such tactics. An example is my article titled “Reciprocal Link Exchanges Don’t Work!“. I don’t think I can be a lot more clear than that.

Acquiring links is something that most search engine optimizers will tell you is very important. What too many of them don’t explain is that doing it the wrong way will, with near certainty, cause more harm than good. Link building strategies are not created equal, and a huge number of SEO are doing it totally wrong! It is another in a long list of lies SEO tell.

Google knows who links to your website, and who links to the websites that link to your website. There are no secrets here … if there is a link in a public place on the Internet, it is Google’s intent and responsibility to know about it. From all of those links, Google creates and evaluates the website’s overall link portfolio. It is a primary factor in determining what will be listed in search results, and where it will appear on the list. If the links in a website’s overall portfolio of links are not relevant, or are not what Google can logically (algorithmically) expect as a natural conclusion, the website will suffer.

Google Bowling and Bad SEO

I touched on some of the things Google does not like, but now, let’s imagine reverse engineering this. What if somebody else tried to make it look like you used these tactics? One way that seems possible is “Google Bowling”. That is the practice of buying or otherwise acquiring low-quality links to a competitor’s website in hopes of affecting a penalty against them from Google.

Wait! It seems crazy if there is actually a value in this kind of links that they could be used for harm, right? Well, there is not a value in them, and Google Bowling is a real thing … just google it. Directing a high volume of those low-quality links that so many SEO are selling is actually often used against competitors. It is an old trick, but it appears to be making a resurgence since Google’s Panda updates.

That is a dirty tactic, but does it work? Many indications show that it can and does work. Before you worry, here’s the good news: It will generally only have an affect against websites with a weak link profile. The bad news is that if you don’t have a mature and high-quality link profile, it may include you.

This came to mind recently, as I discovered nearly 300,000 new links pointing to my blog, here at “SEO and Social Media Marketing Blog”. They all sprung up in only a few days, which is a bad signal to Google of somebody buying links. Some people would surely say “Wow, that’s great! Hundreds of thousands of free links!” To say the least, I was not so delighted. Somebody is trying to Google Bowl my blog. I discovered it because of excessive Google Alerts, and also signals in my Google Webmaster Tools. See the example screenshot below.

Screenshot of My Google Webmaster Tools Links Report

The good news is that I already had a baseline of over 150,000 incoming links. Some are good, while some are not so good, but it is a good balance. It is a mature link profile with a significant volume of high-quality links in the mix. If not for that, I would be worried, and with good reason.

With a good existing link profile, the worst scenario would be to file a reconsideration request with Google and explain the issue. With a link profile built on weak tactics, the challenge to recover becomes much more tedious, and emphasizes the value of being proactive.

Summary of Google’s Panda Update

When you have thousands … millions … billions, and even squillions of companies competing for the same space, it is pretty easy to see how trickery and fraud could flourish. It is easy for Google (and other search engines) to see this, too. They have billions of dollars at stake, and some of the brightest minds working to thwart that kind of trickery and fraud.

It should be no surprise why, as high search engine rankings became more challenging, the masses have scurried to try and figure out social media. Social media is an important signal which Google uses to measure a website’s value. In actuality, Google is the biggest example of social media there is. The links to and from websites are the most profound social measurement across all social media. It reflects what the people like and do not like. When that is faked, Google has a lot of ways to measure it.

As long as you are not sending false signals by trying to cheat search engines, you have little to worry about when they make changes. The sad fact is that many people are sending false signals, and they don’t even know it. They relied on search engine optimizers who offered a good pitch and a low price. The outcome is often far more costly than doing it right in the first place. Doing it right does not cost money, it pays money. Doing it cheap and haphazard is where the big cost comes in.

P.S. If you are the thumb-sucker behind trying to Google Bowl my blog, know this: People are sick of your kind of useless tactics. They already wasted their money trying it your way, and they are pissed. That’s why I often write about your type of SEO, and warn people. I suspect you are pouting like a wet toddler who never got enough love, but you won’t bump me from your favorite spot. Count on it!

Photo Credits:
Panda by geopungo via Flickr
Panda Floss by istolethetv via Flickr

Why? Just Ask Google!

My optional title was “Why Do We Blog? (or Not): A Question Every Business Should Ask”. I just thought I’d share that upfront.

I believe my considerations about blogging can be applied to many industries, and I’ll even have a little humorous fun along the way. If your eyes are tired, just push the play button for the audio version.

As I recently took a seven day break from blogging, a question that has been rattling through my head is “Why do I blog?” The question is not on my mind because I don’t want to do it, although that happens, too. The question is more a matter of focus and purpose. If I know why I am doing it, the purpose is enhanced, and the message becomes clearer. Just like any other business effort, there should be a good reason for it. Periodically asking the question of why I blog keeps things making sense. Similarly, I think every business should ask this question of why they do, or do not blog.

I decided there would be no better place to put my thoughts about this in writing than right here … in a blog.

Why Would Anybody Do This?

I wouldn’t continue writing this blog if I didn’t have good reasons. I also would not recommend it to any person or company without a good strategic purpose for it. I can cite a lot of good reasons to blog, but wasting hundreds of hours and gallons of coffee are not among them.

It can be really punishing to write a blog. It takes a lot of time … many hours. In the audio version of this article, I share some of what I put into each article, but let’s just say that it requires a lot of effort.

Why Arizona: Population 116

Once any new blog article is sent out into the wild, the real punishment comes calling. It comes in the form of doubts. Even with a good track record, it is still easy to let the common doubts creep in. “Will they like it?” … “Will they comment about it, and let me know what they think?” … “Will they share it with others?” … “Did I just waste all that time?!”

To say the least, if you are not committed to the task of blogging, it is probably a bad idea. Taking up compulsive body piercing or volunteering as a crash test dummy may be a lot easier.

Here Are Some Answers to Why I Blog

As I have expressed, blogging is not simple. In the case of a business blog, if it is ever to become a success for the business, it will not be an easy task. If you don’t believe anything else I say, please trust me that producing a blog is a lot different than producing a successful blog. It takes a lot of creativity, and a lot of work. In nearly every instance, somebody will lose sleep over it!

So, here are some reasons I blog, and they are in no specific order. I hope you will be able to apply these to how and why you have a blog, or otherwise consider how and why you should.

Blogging Keeps Me Sharp

There is never an instance when I write a blog article that does not provide reminders of other articles I have written. When I am reminded of lessons I have learned and shared, the lessons become fresh again. I have found it very convenient to have hundreds of articles in my blog archive, and not just for others. It often becomes very useful reference material. Yes, it is true … we can actually even teach ourselves!

Blogging Improves My Industry

When I write something that becomes useful to others in my industry, it opens communications with my peers, and helps us each to learn. When we each perform better work, it adds just a little more credibility to the value of marketing. As it applies to search engine optimization and social media marketing, there is a lot of confusion. There is a tremendous value in collaboration and information sharing that should not be overlooked.

Giving a boost of thought to my fellow marketing professionals, whether creatively, technologically, mathematically, or otherwise, is good for them, and good for me.

This can be applied to many other industries, if you give it adequate effort.

Blogging Makes Search Rankings Nuclear!

Search engines do not list websites in search results just because they are pretty. It happens because the words on the website logically match what somebody is searching for. The ones at the top of a search result (just below the ads) are there because they are highly relevant to the search, and because there are a lot of links from other websites that vouch for their relevance. There is really no better way to achieve that mix of text content and links from other websites than a blog.

Blogging Shines a Light on Crooks

You may not have crooks in your industry, but I’ll bet there are still good reasons to help people understand what sets you apart from the rest.

Like any industry where there is a lot of confusion and a potential to earn “easy money”, the online marketing industry is filled with crooks. Attorneys and car salespeople should love the Internet marketing industry, because it takes the heat off them. These days, the cruel jokes about sleazy attorneys are about sleazy Internet marketers.

All attorneys are not evil. Every company needs an attorney at some point. There are also good car salesmen. Most people would not have a car to drive without one. The same holds true about marketing, but it can be challenging for industry outsiders to find which are good or evil. This is another reason I blog.

SEO Grenade Launcher Goes Viral

I will not save everybody, but I can help starve a few of the cockroaches, and that makes it a lot more comfortable for me to keep working hard.

Seizing opportunities to help others become more aware of industry issues, and doing so with integrity and usefulness can be an asset to nearly any industry, don’t you think?

Here are some examples of my efforts to help educate people. There are hundreds more like them in my archive, and I put my stamp of approval on every one of them.

• 7 SEO Lies: How to Know When the SEO is Lying
• Good SEO vs. Bad SEO: How to Tell the Difference
• Bashing SEO and Social Media Experts: Humor or Hazard?
• Social Media ROI, Marketing Cost, and the Willingly Confused
• “How Much Does SEO Cost?” is The Wrong Question

Blogging Boosts Credibility

Blogging is an excellent tool for establishing credibility in a given area of business. It shows where you stand on a topic, and it allows others the opportunity for due diligence. I have often expressed that if somebody wants to know if I am credible in my field, they should spend some time on my blog.

When I think of my blog for business development, I look at it a lot differently than some. It will vary in every industry, or at least it should. Because I seek a very unique client, the kind who will implement a marketing strategy (as opposed to just tactics), establishing industry credibility comes long before chasing a sale.

Having a lot of useful information on my blog is a good point of reference for that ideal client to determine whether I know my work. It is also where I establish two very important things. Those are ability and integrity, and I look at these as “I can do it”, and “I will do it”. They each scream credibility.

Whatever the case with your industry, I am confident that blogging can emphasize topical credibility. If not for you, for your competitors.

Blogging and Narcissism: We All Want to Be Awesome!

Blogging is fun. I love how it lets me express my personal brand. Some days it is with my tongue-in-cheek ornery tone, and other days I can be quite inspirational and thought provoking. It just wouldn’t feel the same without having some fun. If you don’t have a sense of humor, stop here! If you take it too seriously, you will probably hate me, and the last thing I need is another stalker.

I have heard people talk about social media being popular because it suits people’s egotistical needs, so I’ll play on that! I suppose it makes some sense, though. After all, who wouldn’t want to be popular, and how could it get any better than having your own blog? So, here is the secret answer about blogging that you really wanted to hear. It’s for the egotism!

Sure, I probably made it sound all great and useful to write a blog, but there is more to it. The real truth is that it provides a gushing river of self-worth. I always really wanted to be cool. Blogging makes me cool, because I get all those people to think about it, talk about it, tweet about it, facebook about it, and share it with their friends from around the world. In spite of all the hard work and torment it can involve, I can’t get enough of it. It’s like crack cocaine.

Maybe it sounds totally nuts, and maybe my mother didn’t hold me enough as a child, but I get a huge rush by being listed at the top of search engines for hundreds of thousands of searches. It’s not just for the money, either. Call me narcissistic if that makes you feel better, but I really love it that squillions of people per month are clicking on my literary works. That should be worth a free shot of tequila at any bar … anywhere!

There are a lot of services out there to tell me how awesome my blog is, and measure me up against others. Oh, I know you want a display, so here is a graph of my blog’s estimated worldwide traffic ranking compared to the top television station in my region. It is our local CBS affiliate, and I spank them like an ugly baby.

They have a whole staff of news, weather, and sports people blogging, and hundreds of thousands of television viewers. They even have a General Manager to tell people about his dog pooping (see image). No kidding! The thing is, they don’t have awesomeness … they don’t have my Murnahanism.

WIBW Channel 13 Jim Ogle's Facebook Dog Poop-Talk

Now isn’t that fun?! I’m thinking I should get some free shots out of that, for sure! Who cares whether it is accurate or useful? It strokes my ego, and that’s what I’m after!

Website Grader ripped me off when they graded me at 99. I’m sure there was a mistake! Twitter Grader scores me at 100 … yeah, One Hundred, but I think I can persuade them to create a “101″ score just for me!

Another service says I’ve got “Klout”. Check this out … they even call me a “Celebrity”! Sure, I downplay the importance of Klout, but deep down, I’m really shallow. I know I’m awesome, and I think you and all of your buddies should know it, too! So, I blog … a lot!

Yeah, that's right ... a CELEBRITY! Are you that cool?

Better than all that fluffy pseudo-awesomeness … I love to feel that rush of popularity when I see all the reader comments, and people sharing my work on a massive scale. It is proof that I exist!

I joke about it, but the real truth beyond the ornery joking is this: As long as I know my work helps others, I am happy to keep doing it. The fact that people keep sharing my work and help me feel a little pat on the back is great. The good fortune that the numbers add up and it produces a profit justifies the hard work. All of these things together hold a lot of meaning for me.

It means I’m doing it right!

Photo Credits:
Why, Arizona by Ken Lund via Flickr
Why? by Joseph Vasquez via Flickr
Hand grenade training by The U.S. Army via Flickr

Social Media Knows Hypocrisy

It may seem strange that so many companies need and want help to market themselves better online, but yet, turn to an offline connection to help them do it. A lot of companies who are in the market to hire a consultant for their online marketing are seeking a warm handshake, meetings in-person, and looks in the eye. They are understandably cautious about this sort of service. It makes sense, but yet it doesn’t.

The topic came up in a conversation with a friend earlier today. He is excited about partnering with a company that provides social media consulting services. He gave me the web address, and said he had spoken to them about how I am able to help them with their online presence. It sounds crazy, right? The social media consulting company needs social media help.

What shook me was that he said they have more business than they can presently handle, but their online presence is miserable. How miserable? They have sent under 100 tweets on Twitter, their latest video on YouTube had under 50 views and was uploaded over a year ago, and more than I can express, it was simply atrocious! Even the big rage online marketers have been touting lately … Klout (the online influence measurement company) did not have a profile for them.

Oh, but they’re selling like mad, so it really made me question the logic. How can somebody be successful at something without a demonstrated ability to do it? Even if they can do it, how can they be taken seriously if they don’t practice what they preach? This may sound just a bit jealous, but for many years, I thought I actually had to prove that I know my business. I have been wrong, and I see similar instances all the time. I think they must just smell really good, but I’ll explain that.

This is one side of the hypocrisy, but I’m not to the good part yet … the buyer’s hypocrisy.

Smelling is Not Due Diligence … Research Is!

I certainly recognize and respect the human aspects of doing business. It feels good to look somebody in the eye, and a lot of people believe they can tell a person’s integrity from their body language. Of course, it helps if you have training in the field of psychology, or spent some time as an F.B.I. agent. Let me tell you, though, there are plenty of people who will fake anything for money … I’ve met some of them.

I’d like to point out some things I’ve learned from over a decade and a half in a line of work where I have met less than one tenth of one percent of my customers in person. It really doesn’t hold the benefit to the client that most people imagine and hope for. It actually turns out that it is a whole lot more beneficial to the seller than the buyer.

Here’s where the buyer’s perception gets screwy. Think about this for a moment: Doesn’t this seem hypocritical to imagine a company that wants to sell more online, but cannot make their own fact-based judgments online? Companies often seek the faith of their customers online, but they, themselves, do not have the faith they ask from others. They have the tools at their disposal for making rational and logical decisions, but prefer to use a less effective and less objective tool set, in their meeting room. What’s worse, it often hurts the buyer, by opening them up to whatever brand of fairy dust is being pumped into the room.

Meeting in person will not tell you if somebody knows the Internet as accurately as their demonstrated abilities online will show. In fact, it will show a whole lot less than spending some time with our old friend Google. The only thing shaking hands and talking in a meeting room will reliably prove is whether they know more about the Internet than you do. It will not prove whether they know more than your competitor, and it will not prove whether they know how to produce an appropriately targeted audience, or even a fraction of what they say. Spending time researching them online is what proves those things.

Sitting across a table will not tell you if they are a crook. Ironically, you have to look online for that! The only thing it will really tell you beyond what you can learn online, over a telephone communication, or a Skype video conference is how they smell.

I’ll just tell you right now … I smell like cigarette smoke and coffee, but I can bend a crooked online marketer over my knee and whip them like the crybaby sissy bed-wetter they are.

Rational Thinking Eludes Confused People

It may just be a little too rational for companies to seek social media services where they can actually shop and compare, and can see who has demonstrated abilities or does not. Companies are made up of people, and people are not rational and logical about things they don’t fully understand, such as social media marketing, search engine optimization, and other areas of online marketing.

I’m too deep in the online side of this equation to be objective, but I categorize this as an absurdity. It seems as hypocritical as it gets for a company to ask customers for faith in something they fear too much to embrace. My best guess is that they are just waiting for a good smelling pitch man.

What do you think? Please share your comments on the topic.

Oh, but wait … here is some bonus material.

Where Can You Find Good Marketing People, and How Will You Know?

Just when I thought I was done writing about this topic, I realized that it leaves a question open about a better way to seek an online marketing professional. I do not have all the perfect answers, because that question has a lot of possible conclusions. I’ll give you a couple thoughts that may help you.

First and foremost, consider how you arrived here. If somebody sent you here, ask them what else they know. Sure, there may be a few dummies reading my blog, but I would suggest that many of them I have encountered are pretty bright, and have a strong interest in the areas of social media marketing and/or SEO. Look at the comments here on this article and check those people out. If they have been reading for a while, they probably have some pretty good ideas about marketing online.

Of course, if you arrived because I brought you here … call me … ask questions. I am for hire! Even if I cannot help you, I’ll try to suggest a good match and avoid a costly catastrophe. I am not a good fit for everybody, and I only take on one to three clients at any given time, but I sure know a lot of quality people in my line of work.

Your best fit will depend on your needs and expectations. If you want marketing excellence, it may require more digging, and the investment will be much higher.

If you are trying to keep within a small budget, or you have a tight time frame, be sure to understand how and why it will affect you return on investment. Discuss this with any potential marketing professional you are considering. Be sure they have an acceptable answer for you.

I must suggest, just as I have previously explained about search engine optimization, many of the best marketing people are not looking for you. It is also true, in my case, and I believe many other do not enjoy the sales process of their work as well as they enjoy the work they do. So, it may be best to not expect them to do a lot of schmoozing.

In any instance, the most important factors regarding their experience and knowledge will be found online. If they are good in their line of work, they will be very easy to discover with a search for their name on Google. Look at what they are doing online. Check them out. See what others are saying about them. Read their blog … a lot! It will give you a much clearer view of their ideas and their methods.

Finding the right fit will be worth your effort. Due diligence takes patience, but it will save you a lot of money and hassles! On the other hand, a horrible mistake I see companies endure is believing that because a friend, acquaintance, or somebody in their area knows just a little about Twitter or Facebook, they are safer with that, than to risk the effort and do a little research. Maybe they really are the right one, or maybe they are not. If the way they smell is used as a primary measurement, the company gets what they deserve. It is often how companies end up with fakes like these “marketing experts”.

OK, so I’m asking again … What do you think?

Photo Credit:
NO MORE PROTESTS by hobvias sudoneighm via Flickr

100 Twitter Profiles Examined

I don’t write a lot about Twitter these days. I did back in the golden days, but many Twitter users don’t readily recall “The Golden Days of Twitter”. Today, I want to offer up some recent observations about Twitter, along with some rather curious numbers.

If you are an old timer with Twitter, you will almost undoubtedly nod and agree with a lot of this. If you are new with Twitter, this should help you understand the service in ways you may have missed. If you are one of those incessant spammers of modern day Twitter, oh yes … then you must be new, or you would have received the memo to explain how the Twitter Follower Frenzy just makes you look bad.

I want to offer a short bit about Twitter following, but then show you more about where Twitter is going for those people who are unwilling to adapt to a better, and smarter purpose for their tweeterizing. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to tell you the right or wrong way to use your Twitter … I will just give you some facts and figures and let you see for yourself.

Holy Bird Poop! Look at These Twitter Followers!

Once in a while, but less frequently than before, I check to see who is following me on Twitter. There are always a few new faces to greet me, and I like to know who they are, the best I can.

I used to try and follow most people who followed me on Twitter, so they could feel free to reach out to me directly with a private direct message if they should choose. It has never been because I was concerned they would stop following me if I did not return the “favor”, as if it is some amazing favor to follow somebody. Maybe they think it’ll make them famous … or at least feel famous.

This is just a bit of opinion, but it seems to me that following somebody’s Twitter feed should be because you are interested in what they share, or because you are interested in establishing some sort of communication with them. Am I right, or did I miss something?

Let me show you what I found yesterday when I looked through the list of people who, in theory, wanted to know what I have to say on Twitter. This table includes numbers I gathered from the most recent 100 people who followed my Twitter feed. I chose to follow a few of them, but I want you to take a quick glance through the list. Below the list, I will share some averages, and logical assumptions that a reasonable person could make.

What Do These Twitter Follower Numbers Indicate?

What I hope you will notice is that the average of these 100 users is following 2.84 other users to every one who follows them. That came out to the average person following 396.98 more people than are following them. A common strategy Twitter has tried to address is that of following a lot of people in hopes they will return the follow. Twitter has set limits as an effort to avoid this, but it is still alive and going strong. What so many people don’t understand is how worthless it truly is in practice.

Now, we could assume the 284 percent (2.84:1 ratio) means people are just doing a lot of “listening” to others, but I found reasons to doubt that. I have tested simply re-following everybody who follows me on Twitter, and you probably guessed it … my follower count goes up like mad! When I stop re-following everybody, it levels off.

This whole topic is much like I wrote about two years ago in an article titled “Follow, Unfollow, Re-Follow … What?!” In that article, I even offered a logical alternative, but apparently that memo missed a few desks.

Perhaps an even more important read for people doing this would be a popular piece I wrote titled “Social Media and The Absurdity of Implied Reciprocity“. Yes, I said “absurdity”, and based on public reception of that article, I think I built a pretty darn good case against this tactic.

What is Twitter Really Getting You?

I’m going to show you some real numbers that reflect user attention and engagement. Of course, there is much more to Twitter than just sharing website links, but since it is a valuable part of Twitter for many people, I’ll use website traffic to make the point.

Let’s look at some sobering numbers based on over 1,000 tweets, and their affect on website visits. Below is a table showing the ten most recent articles published here on my blog, along with the number of times they were tweeted at the time I wrote this. The total of tweets is 1016. The average number of tweets is 101.6, with the lowest at 48 and the highest at 228. Those are sufficient numbers for the point I want to illustrate.

I measure everything. Measuring and analyzing data is an important part of my job. So I’ll tell you what I found from those 1016 tweets, and their multi-million user exposure. The readership totals reflected great signs that readers were paying attention. They spent an average time on page of more than five minutes. That includes the 10 second clicks, and it is good time on page. The average pages visited by readers referred through a link from Twitter was 1.8, so a decent number of them clicked around.

Here’s the punchline! Out of this sample of 1016 tweets by many different users, the highest number of website visits attributed to any individual tweet was 21. The average number of visits per tweet came to 2.74. Maybe that doesn’t seem very surprising, but let’s add some contrast. Two years ago, I witnessed no less than 500 visits from a single tweet within the first hour of tweeting a link to my blog. My guess is that the past level of engagement and traffic generation from Twitter had a big role in its eventual degradation. Times have changed, and much of that change can be attributed to the following frenzy I described.

I Still Like Twitter … But …

I like Twitter a lot, and I don’t intend to stop using it any day soon. Twitter presently accounts for approximately 10 percent of traffic to my blog. I’ll take that 10 percent, but one thing I’m certainly not going to do is worry about whether a squillion people follow me.

The way I see the math, even if each and every one of those 100 users I listed above were to read an article and then tweet the link to my blog, on a sunny day I could expect 374 website visits from that (their 100 visits, plus an average 2.74 visits per tweet times 100). Based on their usage model, I think that would be a pretty steep climb.

The overall average engagement of Twitter users is very low. There is a relatively minuscule few who truly make good use of the service, and those are the ones I enjoy my Twitter time with.

What do you observe about Twitter?

I hand-picked some articles I have written about Twitter. I hope you will enjoy these.

• How To Become Popular on Twitter Without Actually Being Useful (humor)
• Did Twitter Go Deaf With Broadcast Static? (I saw this a long time ago)
• Twitter is Useful but Blogging is Better (interesting statistics)
• Twitter: The Tweet About Retweet (the old days of Twitter)
• Follow, Unfollow, Re-Follow … What?! (sensible thoughts on follower numbers)
• Twitter Like The Twitterati … But Get Me a Bucket! (humorous yet tragic)
• Dear Tweeps: I love you so much … (humor)

If you still insist on more, I wrote a book about Twitter.