Marketing Tactics « Word of Mouth Marketing | Social Media, Search, Blog, and Viral Marketing

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Word of Mouth From the Inside Out

Navel Marketing helps create organizations worth talking about and then arm customers to spread the word. On the surface, this may seem like a simple enough task, but too many companies today focus the majority of their efforts on how to get the word out with little thought as to why someone would care. Whether you choose to use more traditional tactics, such as advertising, or new methods, such as social media, your target market needs to know why you matter before they invest any time or emotion in your brand.

Marketing today is about meaning. Customers buy products but evangelists buy causes. You have to mean something in the marketplace before someone will take notice of your communications and, most importantly, tell others about them. Navel Marketing helps you develop the inner tools that create meaning for your customer, such as a cause, a unique and compelling position, a culture that reflects your cause, a simple repeatable message, a viral customer experience, and more. We then implement word-of-mouth marketing tools to help arm your customers spread the word.

November 15, 2010 at 3:09 pm bcritchfield Leave a comment

If Social Media Were a Planet…

Many people refer to their geeky friends who spend all of their time in social media land as “living on their own planet.” Well, apparently now there is a map of that planet.

A recent Mashable story showcased how the social media landscape has changed in a short 3 years. Back in 2007, web comic XKCD published the original “Map of Online Communities”. If you visit the Mashable article, you can see the original compared to the latest rendition. Notice how the relative size of communities and online tools have changed between 2007 and the one created for 2010 by marketing firm, Flowtown, below. Twitter didn’t really exist back then, MySpace ruled the world of social communities, and “Farmville” would likely get you some strange looks.

Though many social media “experts” would have you believe that social media marketing means getting thousands of followers on Twitter or friends on Facebook, the landscape is always changing. I have often said that the tools will come and go, but the principles of marketing in a connected world will not. You still have to create something worth talking about, no matter the community in which your customers choose to talk about you.

October 14, 2010 at 4:23 pm bcritchfield 1 comment

Word of Mouth Marketing – Dilbert Style

A recent Dilbert cartoon nailed most companies’ approach to word of mouth marketing:

After you have yourself a quick chuckle, you’ll realize how much truth there is in this simple comic strip. How many companies today have heard of word of mouth marketing as a tactic and decide they need to add it to their “marketing mix”? I know have had too many companies approach me asking if I can do some of that “word of mouth stuff” for them. The problem is that marketing doesn’t happen in campaigns.

Let me share a secret I shared with the attendees at a recent workshop I conducted. The secret to word of mouth marketing is this:

Create an organization worth talking about
Engage with your customers
Arm them to spread the word for you

Notice step 1 is to have something worth talking about. How many companies do you know who miss that first, critical step?

How do you become a company worth talking about, you ask? Check out the “innie” model for a few ideas.

Any examples of companies you have seen who seem to epitomize the comic strip above?

October 4, 2010 at 4:15 pm bcritchfield Leave a comment

LinkedIn is the Business Lunch, Facebook is the Cocktail Party

One of the most often asked questions I receive is “when do I use LinkedIn and when do I use Facebook?” People, especially business professionals, are looking to take advantage of popular social networks as a way to build their personal networks, add to their “Rolodex”, and build professional relationships that can help them further businesses and careers. So when it comes time to select somewhere to spend your time, the natural question is, “where do I focus?” (Twitter is also effective, but we’ll leave that one aside for now)

The short answer is – both. It seems like a lazy answer, but let me explain why. When you want to build a true relationship with someone in the analog world (not online), how do you typically go about it? You will most likely set up some sort of formal meeting, such as a business lunch. Once you get through the formalities and a couple of business lunches, you begin to build your relationship on more of a personal basis. It is at that point you feel more comfortable talking about family, hobbies, likes and dislikes, etc. This is typically something you would do at a cocktail party or after hours event, such as grabbing an adult beverage together.

If you want to build lasting relationships with high value contacts, start with LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the online equivalent of the business lunch – quick, professional, exchange of business cards, a few probing questions, etc. Once you have built your relationship at the professional level, try broaching the personal realm using Facebook. Facebook is the cocktail party. This is an area where you can ask, “how are the kids doing?”, “how was the fishing trip?”, and “how is the new house coming?”.

Online relationships often mimic what we do offline. Take advantage of all the opportunities you have to connect with people. However, just because you are “connected” doesn’t mean you are friends. As the old saying goes, people do business with friends. We have unprecedented access to each other. Use that access to build friendships, both online and off.

September 16, 2010 at 1:48 pm bcritchfield Leave a comment

Strategy First, Then Tactics

(The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of the upcoming book Marketing From the Navel: How to Become a Company Worth Talking About and Arm Customers to Spread the Word)

I have a favorite saying by the famed war strategist, Sun Tzu, that says, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” In the marketplace today, there is a lot of noise. Anyone who learns how to use Facebook is all of the sudden a social media “expert” and the bookstore shelves are littered with publications giving their take on what this new reality means from a marketing perspective. Most of this literature tries to tell you what is going on in the market but few give you the tools to do something about it.

If you were looking for a Twitter or Facebook “tips and tricks” book, then you have come to the wrong place. There are plenty of excellent publications available that will help you hone your skills in one particular technology or another. There are some publications that will give you a task list (i.e. “write a blog”, then post it on Facebook, then Tweet about it). Others will give you a list of rules for online etiquette.

Stephen Covey talks quite a bit about “paradigms” in his writings, such as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. A paradigm is a mental map, or the way in which we see the world. He uses the analogy of an iceberg to illustrate that the tip of the iceberg is our behaviors or our attitudes. If we want to make small changes in life, we work on the tip of the iceberg. However, if we want to make large, quantum changes, we work on the mass of the iceberg beneath the water, which is our character. It is as Blaine Lee states in his book, The Power Principle, “The principles you live by create the world you live in; if you change the principles you live by, you will change your world.”

I believe organizations work the same way. For so many years, we have operated under a certain paradigm. The industry as a whole has been making small changes by simply changing their tactics or their attitude about the consumer revolution. We have merely added social media or viral marketing as arrows in our quiver. I want to do more than change your list of tactics, I want to change your paradigm. I want to change the way you think about marketing.

Secondly, you most likely hear a lot of “noise” in the marketplace about new marketing tactics and how the old ways are dead. The Internet bubble of the late 1990s taught us many lessons about hype versus substance. The biggest lesson of all was that core business principles don’t change, but remain constant. For example, you still need a business plan that will generate revenue at some point (being bought out for millions of dollars because you have a lot of users doesn’t count). Also, cash is still king, and the faster you burn through your venture capital money, the faster you will make it to the unemployment line. This is the reason Amazon.com is still growing, yet Pets.com is a mere sock puppet memory. The Internet bubble taught us that though the delivery mechanisms may change, the core principles stay the same.

While there is significant hype about new forms of marketing, whether it be new media, word-of-mouth, or simply new places to plaster ads (i.e. cell phones, urinals, bases in baseball stadiums), there is a risk in all the hype. People are again forgetting the basic principles of marketing that still apply and are more important than ever. Like core principles in the universe (i.e. do unto others as you would have them do unto you), there are core principles in marketing that never change – despite the tactics. Many of the technology tools available today, such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn didn’t even exist 5 years ago. The tools may change, but if you understand the principles you can be successful no matter what the hot new technology is.

In the following pages, you will hear familiar terms, such as “positioning”, “customer segmentation”, and “customer experience”. Do not be alarmed! These are simply some of the core principles of marketing that, when applied correctly in the new paradigm, are just as powerful and more relevant than ever.

In this book, I introduce two separate models. The first model will help you develop a company worth talking about. This is the strategy component. Before you do anything online or off, you have to create something worthy of our attention, worthy of our passion, and worthy enough to pass along. Otherwise, you will merely create the “noise before defeat.” The second model takes the buzz-worthy organization you have now created, and shows you how to deputize your own customers to take your message out and spread the word. This is the tactical component that will help you achieve a quick “route to victory.”

There were many who were too comfy in the existing power structure and existing paradigm. Marketers controlled the message, the medium, and the content. Today, they are no longer in the conversation, and that elicits great fear in executive corridors and ad agency war rooms. However, those that embrace and implement the following models and principles will find that it is an amazing time in our profession. Never before have we been able to engage with each consumer on a one-to-one basis. Never before have we had the key influencers in our target market gathered together in a central location. Never before has a message been able to spread so quickly.

All you need are the tools… the tools of the revolution.

November 9, 2009 at 2:55 pm bcritchfield 3 comments

How to Arm Customers to Spread the Word

Up to this point, I have emphasized the Navel Model for creating a company worth talking about. It is critical that you do this piece first. As the great military strategist, Sun Tzu, once said, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Most literature in the marketing realm is about tactics. In social media, people go right to Twitter and Facebook. In advertising they go right to the 30 second spot or the full page print ad. However, in order to have successful tactics, the strategic pieces need to be in place first.

Once you have created an organization worth talking about, the next step is to arm your customers to spread the word. It doesn’t matter what the medium is, the process remains the same. The six steps below work especially well in social media, but also work in public relations, advertising, direct marketing, or any other medium. The six steps below are also not linear but are circular because they are not always done in order. By implementing the steps below, you can better find your target influencers, arm them with tools to spread the word, and amplify their efforts.

Publish – There is an argument in the social media space about whether content is king or conversation is king. The reality is that both are important for successful word-of-mouth. Content without conversation is advertising – it’s one way. Conversation with content is chatter. It is social media strictly for the social benefit. The first step is to publish great content. With all of the tools available today, there are many mediums you can use – it simply depends on your audience. If they have time to read and revisit often, then right a blog. If they are more inclined to download content and listen at a later date, then a podcast may be the best option. If they learn visually and your content is meant to be demonstrated, then produce a video series, or vidcast. For tools, check out WordPress, Libsyn, and YouTube. If you want to know what to write your content about, always think “educate and advocate.” Provide educational insights, how to’s, or insider information. When advocating, look to the cause you created in your Navel Model.
Syndicate – Now that you have produced great content, step 2 is to find all the places you can share that content. Obviously, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or other online communities are a natural fit, however, also consider how you can share this content in your advertising, PR, and direct marketing efforts. Link to it within your social communities. Use snippets in advertising. Use it to pitch editors to cover important topics about your company or industry.
Integrate – The amazing thing about where technology has come from in the recent past is that today, everything talks to each other. That means you can spend less time and get better results from your efforts. By integrating your blog utility with your social communities, every time a new post is created on the blog, it can automatically be posted to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. Every time you Tweet it can update your status in Facebook, both your personal profile and your business pages. The key with integration is to amplify your efforts.
Converse – Referring back to the argument under “Publish”, once you have great content, the next step is to talk about it. Talk about your content. Talk about others’ content. Talk about a recent lesson you learned in your business. The key is to talk. Dare to be human; to be more than just a brand. The more personal you can be, the more others will grow in affinity for your brand and share it with others.
Help - This is the concept upon which social media was built – people helping people. The Golden Rule is as applicable in social media as anywhere else. The more that you help others, the more benefit you receive in return. This is where you solidify your customer evangelists. It can be something as simple as re-Tweeting their Tweets or something more complex, like writing a blog post about them. You can answer questions on LinkedIn (and syndicate by linking to your content) or you can comment on another person’s blog. These are all forms of help.
Monitor – Lastly, one of the most powerful aspects of social media is that it is infinitely searchable. I can monitor conversations going on almost anywhere in the social web and (politely) engage in the conversation. I can measure how much chatter there is online about a particular brand. I can even automate monitoring so that I am instantly notified when a conversation is taking place. The ability to monitor online conversations is one of the most important aspects of the social web and the reason it is one of the fastest growing marketing mediums today.

With the six steps above, you create great content, share it in as many places as you can, make your technologies talk to each other, engage with others, be helpful, and monitor conversations in order to start the cycle all over again. If you have done your previous work, such as creating a position, cause, culture, and message, you’ll know what to share and converse about. While you may go through the Navel Model only once in a while, the above steps will be a daily to do list.

With the six steps above, you can adequately arm your customers to quickly spread your message for you. Which do you do already and which could you improve upon?

September 24, 2009 at 7:19 pm bcritchfield 3 comments

What They Don’t Teach You In School… About Marketing

Over the last couple of weeks, I have lectured in 3 different college marketing classes (I have 2 more scheduled) and judged a high school marketing competition. Based on these encounters with mushy young minds, I was able to make a few general observations about the status of our educational system as it relates to marketing. Some of the observations were good, and some not so good. However, I walked away with a general frustration at a lack of the solid marketing principles upon which brands are built today in our educational system.

Don’t get me wrong, while there are some great teachers out there who pour their heart and soul into helping students learn and apply the right knowledge, I think some are a little farther removed from the real world of marketing. In fact, I think it is changing so quickly, it may have passed them by entirely.

Based on my experiences over the last few weeks, here are a few key principles that I don’t feel like teachers spend enough time on in school:

Positioning - It seems common sense that a class on marketing would start with “what makes you different than everyone else?” I believe that teachers spend WAY too much time on the 4 P’s (Product, Price, Place, Promotion). While these are the basic building blocks of marketing, you first have to understand where to build. I believe that any beginning class on marketing should be 80/20: 80% positioning and 20% 4 P’s. Most of the high school marketers built their plans around the 4 P’s but with no thought to differentiation. In my opinion (or IMO for you short hand freaks), positioning is the blood that runs through the veins of marketing. Thank you to the Godfathers of positioning, Al Ries and Jack Trout, for blessing us with this morsel of wisdom almost 40 years ago.
Focused Segmentation - Again, this is another component that receives cursory attention in school, but is critical to the success of any marketing effort. The more focused your target market, the easier your job becomes as a marketer. Start with demographics, narrow your focus with psychographics, then pinpoint with buying emotions. As the ole’ cliche goes in marketing, “the more you narrow your focus, the more you broaden your appeal.” In my view, marketing is a very simple concept. Identify what truly makes you unique (positioning), find out who cares about it (segmentation), and figure out how they get their information. That leads me to the next point.
Marketing is About Conversations - This was one of my greatest frustrations, with both high school and college students. Whenever they developed their marketing mix, they went right to TV, Radio, Billboard, Print, oh.. and some Internet stuff. Why? Because that is the way their parents and their parents’ parents did it. This is where the previous 2 pieces come into play. If you do any sort of of research, people are skipping TV commercials or watching it online, buying satellite radio or iPods so they don’t have to listen to radio commercials, and getting their news and information online rather than from the printed newspaper or magazine. Not that these can’t still be effective, but stop and think about where the target gets its information from first. Second, think about how you can talk WITH them, not AT them. The reason social media has exploded is because consumers want transparency, not carefully crafted marketing spin.
The Cause - This is a theme I talk quite a bit about in my interactions with clients as well as students. In order for any brand to become outrageously successful, it has to create customer evangelists. However, most marketing efforts are focused on “speeds and feeds”, if you will. Customers buy products, and will buy your competitors’ products whenever they are cheaper or more convenient, but evangelists buy causes, or buy into causes. Evangelists have to be passionate about something in order to be evangelists. Who get’s passionate about a “good quality product” or “good customer service”? What is the higher, holier calling to what you do? What is the altruistic meaning behind why you are in business? And don’t start into your “mission statement” because that ain’t it either. What is the real reason people buy your product? That is your cause.
Social Media - To the credit of the college professors, this is the topic they wanted me to come and talk to their classes about. However, most of them were clueless about how to integrate it into marketing efforts. They knew it was a powerful medium, they just didn’t know how to use it. I remember giving seminars 5 years ago about what a blog or a podcast was and now people come to me hungry for information on how to use social media tools. It is a nice change, but those who educate our nation’s youth need to be up to speed on what social media means to 21st century brands. They need to integrate case studies into their classes and, most importantly, need to be users of social media themselves. (As a side note, I was shocked with how few students knew about Twitter, but were avid Facebook users)
The Simple, Repeatable Message - Unfortunately, most would insert the word “tagline” here but a simple, repeatable message is not a tagline. It is a one line answer to the question, “what is it that you do?”. Too much of marketing today is what Bill Bernbach called “irrelevant brilliance”. It is all about snarky quips and provacative phrases. They miss the simple answer to “why should I buy from you?” Creatives often step over (or on) the simple, repeatable message in favor of some mythical creature called “the big idea”. Don’t get me wrong, your marketing efforts should be wrapped around a consistent, compelling theme but you don’t need to create complex out of simple.

These are just a few of the things that I wish they taught more of, or better, in school. It would sure make what our youth are paying for their educations worth the price.

As a side note, I somewhat broke the rules in the high school marketing competition, but I did it consistently. I took the time with each team to enlighten them as to the principles above. Hopefully they walked away from our interaction with a little more clarity as to what marketing is all about. I thought that was much more important than how many points they received.

What about you? What nugget of marketing wisdom have you learned that you wish they taught you in school?

March 31, 2009 at 3:18 pm bcritchfield 6 comments

Marketing From The Navel

I often get asked about our strange name. Many times I even get blank stares when I explain the term “navel-gazing”. However, I chose the name of my company and my book very carefully, and it wasn’t just because I wanted to make people giggle (OK, it was partly that).

For those who know me, they know I have worked with dozens of companies all over the world. Through my experiences, I have seen both amazing successes and giant failures (and been involved in both). Throughout these experiences, I identified a pattern. For a while, I couldn’t put it into words. I tried “Honest Marketing” or “Transparent Marketing”, but none of those really fit.

I finally realized that each of the companies who were successful marketed from the inside out, where the ones who failed miserably were the ones who marketed from the outside in. In other words, the companies who succeeded developed their internal tools, processes, and culture and used marketing tactics to simply communicate what they had already become. THe companies that failed wanted their communications to reflect an image of what they wish they were or what the customer wanted them to be – they wanted to put lipstick on the pig.

There are many who come to Navel Marketing for our social media marketing services. Without fail, however, they have missed many of the steps it takes to create a company worth talking about. So we start at the beginning. We start by creating a cause, identifying what truly makes them unique, and creating a culture that reflects their vision (for a complete list of steps to create a “buzz-worthy” company, see the Navel Model). Once these steps are completed, the tactics are the easy part.

I have seen a lot written lately about what constitutes a true “social media marketer”. I even wrote about this fact a month or so ago myself. Many base it on their knowledge of the tools or their proprensity to approach marketing as a conversation. However, it is my belief that they are all still lacking core component – what are you going to converse about? What about you is worth talking about?

Whether you use social media, advertising, public relations, direct response, or any other form of marketing, it all starts with strategy. It all starts with creating a company worth talking about. Once you’ve done that, the rest falls into place.

January 31, 2009 at 3:20 pm bcritchfield Leave a comment

The Myth of the Social Media Marketer

I have mentioned this in presentations and on Twitter, but I felt it needed a blog post as well. I have been involved in social media for about the last 5 years. I have seen it grow from its infancy to a powerful communications and engagement medium. I have seen companies come and go and I have seen mega-brands created almost overnight. In my 16 years as a marketer, this is, by far, the most exciting and compelling trend to happen in marketing.

However, social media has spawned a not so pleasant side effect: so-called “social media marketers”. What I am referring to are the hordes of techies who figure out how to blog, podcast, or use social networks to build a certain following and then start billing themselves out as “experts”. How many “internet marketing experts” or “social media experts” have you seen boasting about their capabilities in their Twitter profiles or on their blogs? In a very short period of time (5 years) an entire service industry has been spawned by former engineers, unemployed college students, ex-sales people, high-school drop-outs, and housewives who are now marketing “experts”. Yeah, doesn’t make sense to me either.

One so-called expert posted a press release about how so incredibly awesome he was at social media. He has been getting coverage all over the social media networks, except it is as “The Biggest Douche in Social Media.”

If you remember nothing else from this post, remember this one key fact: there is a difference between users of social media and social media marketers. To give you an example, I know how to use Photoshop. Been using it for about 10 years to do little tasks here and there. I even delve into bigger projects occasionally and took a class on it at a local training facility. However, just because I know how to use Photoshop or Illustrator or Quark doesn’t make me a graphic designer. A designer has training and experience in colors, shapes, and the emotions of good design. The software he uses are just the tools.

The same holds true of marketers. Social media can be extremely powerful, but the rules of marketing still hold true. While social media may be replacing advertising as the communication vehicle, you still need to position, differentiate, and build an integrated communication plan. I have found that those who most ridicule the educated and experienced marketers as being “out of touch” with how marketing works today are those without an education and without experience. True, there are many marketers who are not keeping up with the changing nature of communications, by my prediction is that those who succeed long term in social media will be the classic marketers who learn how to adapt to the new realities of how consumers like to be communicated to. The Internet bubble burst because the realities of business had not, in fact, changed, only the delivery vehicle had. The same holds true for social media; the core principles of marketing have not changed, only the engagement vehicle has.

Are there social media marketers? Of course there are, and many of them are extremely effective. However, don’t believe every “expert” who tells you they can get you to the Top of Twitter or can build you a giant following on Facebook and have that equate to increased sales. The principles haven’t changed, only the tools have.

December 8, 2008 at 1:19 pm bcritchfield 13 comments

The Missing Ingredient: Automation

For about the last 5 years, I have been involved in the word of mouth marketing and social media space. I have seen new technologies grow overnight and become relevant components of the online marketing mix. Names like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn were mostly non-existent 5 years ago. Using the term “blog” in every day conversation would elicit strange looks. The landscape has completely changed in that short amount of time.

Previous to my consultant days, I marketed and sold enterprise software. I have sold everything from enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) programs to accounting and retail systems. These software systems were all about automation. You automate the menial tasks and the critical path processes as much as possible.

As social media shifts from techies to early adopters and the early majority, people begin to ask, “where is the business value?” Honestly, that has been the argument for the last 5 years. Now that it has finally taken hold, people are beginning to see how social media can build relationships and grow businesses.

That being said, there are a lot of people who have the same problem with social media that they do with CRM systems, you actually have to go there and open them up and check them/input information. It takes time and effort to do the little things.

I have seen a new trend in social media where the combination of the automation principles from enterprise software with the ambient awareness of social media are creating integration, making social media simpler and more pervasive.

I first heard the term “ambient awareness” in a New York Times article discussing the rise of Facebook and Twitter. The concept of ambient awareness is the ability to passively monitor what is going on in all your networks until something sparks your interest and you comment on it. Facebook took off once it added the News Feed. Twitter grew solely based on ambient awareness. The beauty of ambient awareness is that through RSS, you can integrate your networks in order to consolidate your monitoring. Twitter can even act as a consolidation tool.

Let me give you a few examples:

I can connect my Twitter account to Facebook so that Twitter updates Facebook’s status field. Everytime I update my status in Facebook, it shows up on the News feed of my entire network. You can also comment on someone’s status in Facebook. Therefore, I have held conversations on both Twitter and Facebook from a single Tweet. That’s automation and integration.

Also, you can connect RSS feeds into Twitter. This means you can have a new blog post, a social tag, or any other form of social media post automatically to Twitter. I have found Twitter to be a very effective tool for blog promotion. Everytime I post a new blog post, I see a spike in traffic from Twitter. It is also great for furthering a cause using social tagging.

However, I have found a tool now that will allow me to use e-mail (which has a much higer adoption rate than any of these other tools) as an ambient awareness vehicle. I have mentioned InfusionSoft in previous posts, but I wanted to talk about why I became a Certified Marketing Automation Coach for InfusionSoft.

I am a technology junkie and I have been looking for technology that could help me deliver what I preached. I stumbled across InfusionSoft (actually they found me) and was impressed with its automation capabilities. Combined with social media, I had finally found a combination that could drive sales and give me the ability to track almost every aspect of my customer interaction. Best of all, it was automated and didn’t require people to have to go in and input all the information.

I can produce some great content (white paper, blog post, eBook) and create a web form from InfusionSoft that will allow someone to enter their information in order to download it. That information is automatically entered into my system and a follow-up sequence set in motion to keep my subscriber posted on what I am doing. Each month, I aggregate all of my social media content into an eNewsletter and push it out to subscribers with links to the social web. Now I can use the great content I produce with social media to build relationships and move people down the sales pipeline.

Whatever the tools, integration and automation are where social media is headed. Even Google’s OpenSocial initiative is all about integration. With the number of social media sites and tools out there, you have to be able to integrate in order to lower the switching costs and maintain your sanity.

How are you using technology to integrate and automate?

October 21, 2008 at 1:55 pm bcritchfield 9 comments

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