ItSeemstoMe

SJ Mercury Breaches 'Do Not Call'

I have been very surprised by how effective the 'Do Not Call' law in California has been in deterring junk phone callers.  Those characters who call you at dinner time and ask you how you're doing as if they knew you.

There have been a few breaches--occasional market pollsters who are actually slimeball telemarketers and the Benevolent Police Associations that seem neither benevolent, nor like police officers.

But I was pretty surprised when some guy called me, identifying himself as "Andy."  That's a good name because I know a few Andies. It took about 10 seconds before I realized he was trying to sell me a new subscription to the San Jose Mercury News. When I politely declined, Andy got aggressive resulting in my advising him to go to the window, open it up and to plunge to his death, before I hung up the phone.

The sad part for me is that the mighty Mercury has sunk to this low level.  You probably already know that it's on the auction block and that its reduced journalistic force is likely to be further gutted by whoever takes it over. But to have to ignore the law to try to boost its sales is just a wart on the face of its integrity.

The Price of Low Price

Everybody likes to get a great price on goods and services. When we do, we occasional use the phrase, "it was a steal." And when the price is a steal, we should wonder a bit on the victim was. Over at Naked Conversations, I've been shooting darts at two companies known as low-price leaders--Wal-Mart and Dell.

I got a comment from Daneca Vail, telling me that people who do not like Wal-Mart "suck. Wal-Mart is the right place to go shopping when you do not have a lot of money." And she most certainly has a point.  Wal-Mart and Dell gained their positions by offering the right goods at the right price. But to accomplish that Dell is now accused of providing shoddy service in support of increasingly shoddy products.  Wal-Mart is accused of screwing their own employees and the communities where they have bullied their way in at the expense of local merchants and aesthetic charm.

I won't even go into the issue of the working conditions of people who make some of these products. I have no first-hand knowledge and I can only speculate as to what overseas manufacturing facilities look like.

Yet other companies seem to be able to make shoppers happy without squeezing profits from their own infrastructures and the costs of goods sold. Costco, has great prices and over 100,000 employees who have full health and labor benefits and you feel their job satisfaction when you shop the warehouses, and they continue to ignore Wall Street complaints that they are too generous to employees.  Honda, Toyota, GM (Saturn) and Ford (Taurus) make reliable products that are affordable if not downright inexpensive. Target has a shopper fan blog and an amazingly stable workforce for a retail chain.

My point is this: There is a point where low prices erode from values to cheap. And when we buy cheap, we are often paying for abuses in the supply chain, in quality control and in having courteous, qualified employees. In the short run, we get our "steals." In the long run, I hope it proves to be bad business for companies like Dell, Wal-Mart and a list that is all too lengthy.

Conversational Marketing

A few people have asked me about “Conversational Marketing,” a term I used in a previous blog and in fact first used nearly 10 years ago,
in an unsuccessful attempt to redirect PR clients away from the buzz, hype and smarminess that would shape and scar the Dot Com Era’s marketing thumbprint.

Conversational Marketing is nothing new. It’s basically the concept that people respond better to lowered voices spoken in credible tones than they do to the aggressive in-your-face marketing speak as is evidences in everything from TV ads to the pap-lingo of so many website. If common sense prevailed, marketers would understand that simply conversing with customers, prospects, partners, investors and employees is more effective. People listen better and longer when you just talk to them and listen back. All too often professional marketers lose their credibility by hyperbole, hubris and amplification. It seems to me self evident that just talking with people is more effective than shouting and repeating yourself as if your audience was comprised of deaf idiots.

The problem until recently has been that conversations didn’t scale. You could use conversational marketing on phones and in meetings, at executive conferences and arguably, in focus groups. But if you wanted to reach the masses, you had to use tactics allowed by the same broadcast model that has around in Gutenberg’s time and didn’t really start deteriorating until quite recently. Over time, the number of messages directed at each of us multiplied at a cancerous rate. There was a Cold War type escalation between message senders and their targets. The more marketing messages demanded us to pay attention, the less we listened. People developed immunities to marketing messages.

The came the groundbreaking impact of social media—blogging, wikis, social software, Internet-enhanced meetings and more-to-come promises have now created the tools and the opportunity for effective massive conversational marketing. This is important because the concept of a company speaking to many and in return hearing from many is already changing things. Marketing hyperbole is just starting to ebb as marketers learn what Dan Gillmor has been saying for a while—the audience collectively knows more than the speaker does. Entities wishing to sell can get honest comment on what will motivate people to buy. Treating customers and prospects as if they were both deaf and stupid may just start waning—or at least I hope it will.

Service Kudos to Comcast

For those of you who have followed my perilous experiences on customer service, I am shocked … SHOCKED to report that I just had a wonderful experience with Comcast. Regular readers may recall my ongoing, agonizing perilous journey through SBC’s Temple of Gloom that they claim is customer support. I switched at the time to Comcast, who went down late this morning, leaving me sweaty of palm with dread of talking to one party after another of increasing dim-witted support people.

Not so. I called information and got the right number on one try. SBC took four. I was given only four choices by their voice processor. I punched one key and someone who shared my native language picked up on two rings. He asked my phone number and Zip Code, punched a few keys, then told me there was repair work going on in my area. He estimated I would be up in two hours and it took only three.

I’m a happy customer. It seems to me that we have entered a period in all applications—enterprise, small business, government and home that support is the crucial differentiator as the technology matures and becomes commoditized. The companies that give superior support—wherever it is based are the ones that should prevail and probably will.

Thank you Comcast. Now, just cut your rates a bit.

Blogging & the Death of Sloganeering

I can still sing the jingles that accompanied the advertisements of my childhood. I must have been about six when these ditties made me crave AlkaSeltzer, Chesterfields and seeing the USA in my Chevrolet. Now, we condition ourselves to be immune from the noise of marketing: the intrusions of banners, billboards and things that flash in neon or rich text. We pay rental fees to Tivo so we can fast forward through the ads from sponsors who pay for our alleged broadcast entertainment. Those advertisers are smartening up that the efficacy is gone and the cost to place a spot is inane.

Advertising and marketing slogans have become ineffective, unwanted background blurs. Visual ads are aesthetic intrusions like graffiti on a beutiful statue. Still, companies spend billions to hook housewives into thinking they'll be more attractive with cleaner floors; kids think will be cooler with peers if they drink the right Cola; and dad's will enjoy erupting testosterone if their weed killer works fastest.

Marketing stuff just doesn’t work the way it used to. PR releases, crammed with hyperbolizing adjectives and false claims meet cynical editorial eyes before landing in wastebaskets. Politicians are further distanced from constituencies as they emote marketing speak that sounds unlike the people we know and trust. Marketers keep escalating: The less people buy the crap, the louder the marketers shout. Look at how online ads progressed. When we became immune to banners, pop ups were developed; when we turned a blind eye, sound was added.

Blogging’s fountainheads say marketing is about conversations. If it has proved nothing else so far, blogging shows that people respond better to lowered voices spoken in credible tones. Because conversations are effective, it seems to me the dynamic will spread to other marketing media. People listen better and longer when you just talk to them and listen back. Advertisers miss this point so far. They think “interactive” means click to buy. But over time, they will adapt, because conversations are more effective than advertising.

It seems to me one of blogging’s many greatest promises is in “conversational marketing,” and its use will make advertising and public relations more effective. More important it will make us all happier prospects and customers.

At least I hope so.

Blogger for Hire

I believe the Cluetrain Manifesto concept of marketing as a conversation is among the biggest and best ideas of current times. In an era when customer relationships are relegated to automated hosted software and customer support is shipped to remote locations where untrained personnel read to you from user manuals, the concept of ongoing and egalitarian dialog between companies and their networks is essential and the social media are a phenomenon that will, over time, transform and improve free enterprise.

I have tried four times in recent months to persuade companies to contract me as a consulting blog evangelist. A blogging tools company turned me down because they thought the task should be done by a staff member, so they relegated it to the CEO who posts about once monthly; a VC firm who wants to be known in the social media market considered having their own blog to complicated and time-consuming; a social media start-up decided they were more comfortable with the costs of having an intern be their blogging evangelist and most recently a Global 2000 corporation backed out after I explained they would be obliged to post even adverse customer comments if they were going to use comments.

I think my idea is good and I have confidence in my talents as both a writer and a veteran marketing consultant. If you have an interest or know someone who has an interest, I would jump at the chance to help a company to get closer and be better understood by its customers, prospects, partners and even employees.

Please email me to discuss.

Company Bloggers Wanted

This is my second lonely cry for help in the Blogosphere. I am looking for companies and case studies of companies who have used the social media to improve conversations with their customers and to start conversations with prospects. Two well-know examples are Microsoft Channel 9 , which is dramatically improving the company’s relationships with developers and Activewords , where CEO Buzz Bruggeman uses blogging and the Internet to acquire and retain customers at extremely little cost.

A partner and I are considering doing a book on how companies use social media to improve relationships through the social media. We are trying to compile case histories and companies to talk with. The more leads we have, the more compelling will be the case we build.

Please email me any leads you may have. It can be your own company, or just a company you’ve come across that interests you. It can be a global corporation or an individual in a home office.

Three Tips on Conference Presentations

As editor of Conferenza Premium Reports , I attend more technology executive conferences than most people would want or afford to, which makes me appreciate my press pass—most of the time. I’ve just completed covering both DEMOmobile and Dow Jones DataCenter Ventures , two very different conferences except they both spotlight promising early stage companies delivering new and occasionally exciting technologies to market. Often the technology may be promising, but the presentation sucks so badly that companies who sometimes have spent years to get to this critical moment do irreparable damage to the company’s future.

Why, I often wonder, are they so foolish to wing their presentations or relegate its scripting to some lower tier member of their company PR or marketing team. Why do CEO’s allow themselves to emote phrase and thoughts that they would never use in conversations with peers, prospects or employees? Why, after putting products through alpha and beta testing, through focus group scrutiny and all sorts of hoops, do they not think investing in the time to get the verbal portions of their presentation tight?

There is no second chance for a first impression and yet companies with perfectly good technology just blow it. At DemoMobile, company executives stood on the dais in front of more than 400 people including a global representation of press and bloggers, investors, companies looking for partners and they read from stilted scripts that failed to deliver suitable messages. I ask a couple of CEOs who stumbled about this and they said they just hadn’t had time.

That seems to me to be a bone-headed answer showing arrogance and a lack of understanding of the importance of the moment. Before stepping on stage executives, should:

1. Write the first draft of their own scripts. When marketing refines them, allow only words, thoughts or terminology you would use with a trusted colleague,
2. Never read a script. Let me put it another way never, NEVER read a script.
3. Be able to say in one sentence, using neither adjectives nor hyperbole just what your technology or company does that is unique, valuable and enduring.

If you cannot do this, if you do not have the time to prepare, my simple advice to you is to sit down and shut up until your ready to taking up the important time of other people.

Companies who Blog

I would like to write about companies who use blogging technology to get closer to their customers--actually engage them in conversations. I've written about Microsoft's Channel 9, who is a shining example, but I'd like to hear more examples about companies of all sizes in all sectors except companies inside the blogging tools baseball park. If you know of any good--or bad--examples in this area please email me and point me in the right direction. Thanks.

Thanks, LinkedIn--for my 248,800 Trusted Friends!

This is my second of a series of ongoing reports on my experiences with LinkedIn, the online social networking service that seems to be leading the pack, and seems to me still to be of highly dubious value, although I’m starting to hear from a few folk who are finding it valuable in specific applications.

I’ve been enrolled in the “free beta” service for 12 nights. I’ve received no squawking geese, nary a made a milking, but I did see a sparrow this morning in my backyard pear tree. Back on March 28, I invited 85 people to join me. They were selected because I already knew them and they were already listed on LinkedIn, so I was assured that my good name would not expose them to some of the potential troubles I see with this service. I sent several variations of an email inviting them to join. In each case, it said that I had my doubts about not only LinkedIn, but all existing offerings in this burgeoning, revenue-vacant category. I asked people to tell me what they could do or have done that they could not do just as efficiently and effectively by such old-fashioned channels as e-mail and phone calls.

To date, I have 71 links with people I already know. I’m two degrees away from 4000 of their collective friends; three degrees separated from 64,700 folk and four degree apart from 169,200 people. By some mathematics I do not understand, LinkedIn tells me that I have “Total users contactable through a TRUSTED REFERRAL NETWORK of 238,000 people.” In addition, I’m told I can reach 248,800 people. I assume these additional 10,800 people are not to be trusted—but at least they’re accessible.

First off, let me tell you I’ve been around a few city blocks, and the number of people I trust with my personal information is much, much fewer than that. I’ve always opted for quality over quantity when it comes to friends, and I’ve always trusted my friends to be cautious with how they use my name.

I was pleased that about 30 of these 71 people answered my email asking them what value they were finding at LinkedIn that they weren’t getting through other communications interaction, such as lunch. I really began this LinkedIn project thinking that I just didn’t get it as I was told so often prior to detonation of the Dot-Bomb Era. Then as now, I don’t get the revenue model. I don’t get the user’s value proposition, I don’t trust what’s going to happen when companies like LinkedIn get acquired, and the only asset they can sell is our personal data. Some 25 people responded that they were as clueless as I was, and had joined LinkedIn generally because they kept getting invited to do so like me, and they tend to like trying out new technology early along the curve.

The only introduction that’s been requested of me was a request for me to contact a Microsoft executive on my network to set up a meet with Bill Gates. Tonight, I found out, to the request was a prank started by one of my dearest trusted friends who knew I was writing this column and enjoys a good laugh at my expense from time to time.

Actually there are five others who wrote and gave a range of tepid to strong endorsement on how they’re using LinkedIn successfully, particularly an executive recruiter for one of the top blogging technology companies. I’ll report on what they have to say in a future blog, and I encourage anyone with any thoughts on social networking, particularly LinkedIn to contact me at [email protected].

This LinkedIn serial will continue. It ends best if I can discover a pony is somewhere in the network.