Aaahh, personas. Those imaginary people that all planners invent to help inspire our marketing.
At their best, personas are like our childhood imaginary friends – so real that we can almost hear their voices in our heads. At their worst, they’re cardboard-cutouts, boring “average” people designed to appease everybody and please nobody, with 2.1 kids and a dog, who haven’t existed outside of a Norman Rockwell painting in half a decade.
Companies spend big bucks to bring traffic to their websites and digital campaigns. But what are they doing when they get there?
A poorly thought-out website, ill-advised choices about ads or features, or lack of consideration to user experience can lose your visitors before they even get through the door.
Every day, I’m involved in this kind of thinking in my professional capacity. But sometimes it’s helpful to take a step back and think about these things not as a marketer, but as a user. Nothing crystallizes that more for me than when I am helping my non-tech-savvy mother learn how to do something or other online. And it led to my thinking about some of the worst decisions that digital marketers can make, which are sure to lose them some customers.
Here are 5 of my pet peeves, in no particular order:
I’ve nearly always had a very tough time explaining my job to anyone outside the world of advertising.
When I first started out in account services, it was difficult enough to explain my job. “Account (coordinator/manager/supervisor/director), what does that mean?” I’d get asked by everyone from my mother to my friends in more tangible fields like medicine or law. Some folks would confuse the role with that of an account manager in a sales organization; others would assume that every advertising job was in the creative department. Over the years, I tested out various answers to this question, the most expedient of which might have been “I’m a juggler in a 3-ring circus”. But, as a great scene in this week’s episode of Mad Men shows us, the job of account man (or woman) has been around for decades and has been misunderstood for just about the same length of time:
Pete Campbell: “So, I manage those accounts.”
Émile Calvet: “I don’t understand. What do you do every day?”
Pete Campbell: “Well, what do you do? You’re a scholar and an intellectual, right? Actually, from what I hear, you’re a bit of a trailblazer. [ . . . ] I bet the world would be better off if they knew about the work you were doing.
Emile: You are very kind.
Pete: That, Émile, is what I do every day.
– Mad Men, Season 5
Strategic planning has always been a core component of my job, but it’s only in the past few years that the word “strategist” has appeared on my business cards. And here, it seems, I’ve finally found a title that’s even tougher to explain than account services.
You've probably heard everyone from bloggers to writers to watchdog groups decrying the fact that, when it comes to Facebook, Google or Twitter, you're not the customer, you're the product.
It's true, after all. These companies make their money by selling advertising space and by collecting and selling your personal data. The more data they collect from you, the more money they make. Everything from your Google search history to your favourite books and movies listed on your Facebook profile is gold to companies who have figured out how to turn this into a profitable revenue model.
People have been decrying this for years. When Mark Zuckerberg declared – almost two years ago – that the age of privacy is dead, he was skewered by the media almost as badly as his movie version was in The Social Network. After all, nobody likes to feel like the product. It's demoralizing, right?
Maybe. But maybe not. There have got to be some benefits to being the product. So for my 2012 New Year's Resolution, I've decided to make peace with the whole concept. After all, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Therefore, here are my top 5 (ever so slightly tongue-in-cheek) reasons why Being The Product isn't so bad, and is actually kind of cool:
Continue reading “How I learned to stop worrying and love Being The Product”
By its very nature, estimation is a game of unknowns. When we make projections for budgets, revenue or returns, we base them on a series of wobbly assumptions. Each assumption in itself might be somewhat reasonable, but the more of them we put together, the shakier the foundation is on which we build our estimate… and the more likely the estimate is to collapse in a heap.
The fact that we base so much of our decision-making on these estimates ought to be worrisome, when we consider how they’re actually built in the first place.
How much money should you be allocating to each channel in your marketing mix?
One simple answer is that you should calculate the ROI of each channel and then shift your budget from the less profitable channels into the more profitable ones. But, even leaving aside various challenges with measuring ROI across a multitude of digital and offline channels, this approach is problematic even assuming you could get accurate numbers. It fails to take all sorts of factors into account, such as the value of emerging channels versus established ones, the difference between awareness marketing and lead generation, and the impact of one channel on another to create a sum greater than its parts.
But the opposite approach — not measuring at all, but simply planning budgets by instinct or by what “feels” right, is even worse. If you have no idea how your various tactics are performing, then you’re flying blind. And as demonstrating ROI becomes increasingly important for marketers, there’s no way that such a laissez-faire way of planning is going to work for very long.
It occurs to me that we need a different approach — one that takes a holistic view of multiple channels and tactics, and drives towards a common goal, but which allows for different performance objectives for each tactic.
Such an approach exists. Our friends in the financial planning industry have been using it for years. They call it portfolio planning.
Hockey season is back. And you know what that means, right? Yep, time for more what-hockey-can-teach-us-about-marketing posts. (Come on, you know you love them.)
This week, the social webs are abuzz with the series of videos being released by new NHL disciplinarian Brendan Shanahan, explaining each disciplinary decision being made. The videos, released after each controversial call, suspension or – conversely – decision not to suspend a player – explain, in a matter-of-fact tone, the reasons behind the decision.
Hockey bloggers and journalists are agog over these videos. Here’s why marketers should be paying close attention:
Continue reading “The Shanahan videos: Lessons from the NHL on social media crisis management”
The year was 1497. An Italian explorer, Giovanni Caboto, better known John Cabot, set off from Bristol, England in a ship called the Matthew, with a charter from King Henry VII giving him and his sons authority to “sail to all parts, countries and seas of the East, the West and of the North, under our banner and ensign. And to set up our banner on any new-found-land“.
As I prepare to embark on a new adventure in my own life, it therefore seems particularly fitting that I have prefaced it with a visit to beautiful Newfoundland. Standing at Cape Bonavista – widely believed to be the site of Cabot’s original landfall more than 500 years ago, I was able to look out at the vastness of the Atlantic and wonder how Cabot and his men must have felt when they embarked on their voyage. Were they enticed by the prospect of riches, fame and fortune? Were they fearful of the unknown? A little of both?
(Photo: Cape Bonavista, Newfoundland. Photo credit: Sari Stein.)
Sometimes in life, you have to take a chance. You have to leave the comfort and security of the known, and embark on a voyage to undiscovered lands.
After four and a half years working with the incredible and talented team at Twist Image, I’ve made the decision to move onto the next challenge.
It’s bittersweet, of course. But, onwards and forwards. The new lands are waiting to be discovered, and my ship is rigged and ready to set sail.
This isn’t goodbye. This is the start of something that I believe will be awesome. Watch this space.
Can anger, criticism and negative feedback generate more creative and better ideas than encouragement and positive feedback?
That's the hypothesis explored in a provocatively-titled article in Wired Magazine by Jonah Lehrer entitled The Creativity of Anger.
Why does anger have this effect on the imagination? I think the answer is still unclear – we’re only beginning to understand how moods influence cognition. But my own sense is that anger is deeply stimulating and energizing. It’s a burst of adrenaline that allows us to dig a little deeper, to get beyond the usual superficial free-associations. In contrast, when our mood is neutral or content, there is no incentive to embrace unfamiliar possibilities, to engage in mental risks or brash new concepts. (Why rock the boat?) The absence of criticism has kept us in the same place. And this is why anger makes it easier to think different.
The article has been making the rounds on social channels and stirring up debate all day. Some people are lauding it as a breath of fresh air, while others are aghast at the attack on the sacred cow of brainstorming in a positive, non-judgmental feedback loop.
Personally, I think this sort of thinking leads us down a dangerous and destructive path. Here's why:
The list of job descriptions today that didn’t exist back when you were in school keeps getting longer. The job of Social Media Community Manager is one of them. Companies started up Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, YouTube channels, blogs and web forums because they were cheap and easy… only it turned out that it wasn’t so cheap or easy to manage and maintain them after all. Social media, when done right, is time-consuming. Chances are, the marketing manager or web guy already has a full plate of responsibilities, so the question arose: who’s going to be in charge of this?
Enter the Community Manager. Often, it’s someone with extra time to monitor and manage social channels. Increasingly, companies are realising that the low-paid intern is not the best person for this critical job, and are hiring professionals or self-styled experts. Some community managers are in-house full-time employees; others are freelancers who are hired on contract. The job of the Community Manager is to “engage” in social media spaces. Roughly, this translates into posting content to feeds, monitoring, replying and responding to things posted by the community members or the public at large, and keeping tabs on stats and metrics. Sometimes, though not always, community management includes customer service. Often, there’s an element of risk management or crisis management to the role, too.
If you find yourself – by design or by accident – in the Community Manager role, here are a few tips to help you make a success of it:
