THINKing

Twittering Journalists List Redux

Twittering JournalistsI’ve had several reports that people can’t see the Twittering Journalists wiki I set up. If you are having trouble, go to the bottom of the upgrade page. In small type it says “No, not now, take me to my wiki.” Click on this and it takes you to the list.

Or, I’ve copied the list into a Word document that you can download. Happy New Year.

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Customer Retention Strategies

After my prediction yesterday of increased attention on customer retention in 2009, I thought I’d provide some links to related articles on customer retention. Here you go:

Patience? No, Let’s Kill Something!

Cheaper To Keep

Customer Retention: Be A Relationship Leader

It’s The Relationship, Stupid

Surveys Help In Customer Retention

Dear Valued Customer

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2009 – Back To Basics

Prediction: In 2009, marketers will get back to basics and will suddenly fall in love with their current customers again.

I’ve been saying it for years, marketers want the thrill of new business and spend way more money on it than they do on retaining the business they have. But every time there is a hiccup in the economy, you customers start to be a marketers new BFF. It’s back to customer retention in the new year.

Any marketer worth his salt has never taken his eye off his good customers in the first place. Marketers who have ensured that their brands have maintained their relevance and who have not resorted to promotional activities that devalue the brand will weather the storm fine.

It’s not a soft economy that is affecting many brands, it is soft marketers.

Email, the best customer retention tool, will make a comeback in 2009. So, content marketers, brush off your content, retool it for email and serve it up. Restore those connections with current customers and they might just introduce their friends to you.

Read more 2009 marketing predictions at Junta42.

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All About Email

I’m a big believer in email for customer retention, so I’ve been reading a lot about it recently. Thought I’d share some links for you. If you are interested, My Creative Team produces a monthly enewsletter. Here’s our latest.

Your 2009 To-Do List

Start Planning For 2009 Now

Email Is The Most Popular Online Activity

Email Fundraising Success Story

How To Sync Email With Customer Lifecycles

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Branding Lessons From Santa

Every Christmas Eve, a burglar named Santa busts into homes around the world, but he has never been charged with B&E. He has one of the best, most positive brands around and it continues to inoculate him against any hint of impropriety, as it has for generations.

Why does Santa’s brand remain so strong? Because Santa is:

• Consistent

• Unique

• Customer-focused

• Viral

Let’s examine these to see what lessons we can learn.

First off, Santa has a positioning statement and has used it to stay true to his mission for decades.

It is this consistency that has helped him build a brand franchise that is the envy of other marketers. No matter what kind of communication vehicle he uses, the message is measured against the positioning statement.

Fed-Ex and UPS also deliver packages, but they don’t do it in the middle of the night in a sleigh drawn by eight tiny reindeer. Santa has cornered the market on uniqueness.

He has not strayed from the market he identified in his positioning statement. His target is not every carbon-based life form. He focuses on kids. End of story. Talk about customer intimacy. Santa has perfected data mining.

Who else knows if you:

• are sleeping or awake

• want a Barbie or a baseball bat

• have been naughty or nice

Santa invented viral marketing. As his customers get older and become parents, they market to the emerging group of customers for him. They know that if they deliver Santa’s message, they will benefit from their children’s good behavior.

And it’s not just the parents. Other marketers help him, too. Santa has never spent a dime on advertising. He has used good public relations tactics to develop, manage and maintain solid relationships with marketers who advertise for him. Consider the Coca-Cola ads featuring Mr. Claus. Think of all the newspaper inserts that carry his picture during the holidays. Then, there are all those helpers in department stores everywhere.

Because of his adherence to simple marketing tactics, everyone loves Santa. Not bad for an old burglar with a reindeer fetish.

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A My Creative Team Christmas Present

Here are some helpful links from My Creative Team. Merry Christmas.

Top 8 Links On The Business Value Of Twitter

20 Online Media Relations Links

Top 17 Media Relations Links

Personal Branding White Paper

Media Relations White Paper

One-A-Day Marketing Vitamins White Paper

Subscribe To The THINKing Blog

BONUS CHRISTMAS LINK

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Seven Things Most People Don’t Know About Me

Scott Hepburn tagged me to play along on this meme, so here goes. I’ve participated once before in eight things people don’t know about me, so I’m repeating that post. See the end of the post for those I tagged.

#1. I’m probably too old to blog.

Yep, this old guy (56) has always been an early adopter of technology, and it’s no different with social media. Good PR people should always figure out how to hold conversations with their constituencies. Analog or digital – it doesn’t matter how the dialogue happens.

#2. I got paid to talk.

I did a daily, one-hour current events talk show called Carolina Roundtable on WAYS, an AM radio station in Charlotte, NC. I also was the managing editor of the radio news team and a media critic for the newspaper.

#3. I got paid to watch basketball games.

I did radio color commentary for UNCC basketball games, and got paid for doing it. Now, if we could have been drinking beer at the same time, that would have been the ultimate job.

#4. I can tune up an airplane.

I was in the NC Air National Guard as an aircraft mechanic. I have worked on 28-cylinder reciprocating engines and on turboprops. Also, I can taxi one of the big fellows like a C-124 or C-130.

#5. I’m armed and dangerous.

I won a marksman ribbon in Air Force basic training, hitting 100 of 100 rounds in the kill zone with an M16. I also can fire a pistol accurately with either hand. I’m usually pretty mellow but I thought you ought to have fair warning.

#6. I was almost killed in a thunderstorm.

One hot summer night, while broadcasting a semi-pro football game from a stadium in Meridian, Mississippi, we moved the equipment out of the concrete block booth because it was so hot. The only place to move was atop the booth. A thunderstorm whipped up late in the fourth quarter and lightning crackled all around us. Luckily, the game was completed and we were able to pack up before the center of the storm arrived.

7. I’ve seen dead people.

On July 4, 1978 I was working as a reporter on the police beat. Our usual cops’ reporter had the day off. We got a call about a multiple homicide and I was the first reporter on the scene. I walked into the house, which was the home of a motorcycle gang, where several of them had been gunned down during the night. The bodies were still there. This case has never been solved – at least officially.

BONUS – #8. I’ve been threatened by a sheriff.

As a police reporter I discovered the Mecklenburg County Sheriff was involved in a lot of unsavory activities. I reported on these. One day prior to a County Commissioner’s meeting, the Sheriff and two of his deputies circled around me and began making threats. I had the presence of mind to turn on the tape recorder. I used this tape in radio news stories. I made it my mission to ensure that this Sheriff would serve only one term. Mission accomplished.

Tag: You’re It!

D.J. Francis, @marketerblog, is recovering from a stint in politics, which gave him a firsthand look at persuasive communcations at the street level.

Jay Ehret, @themarketingguy, says he is a small business marketing coach, consultant, speaker and blog author, and “Don’t Junk Me” gangsta.

Maddie Grant, @maddiegrant, is the diva of social media for the non-profit world.

Mark Harrison, @MarkMHarrison, is a longtime business colleague turned friend. You’ll find him at Opus Communications.

Jason Keath, @jakrose, is a social medialista, and founder of the Stratius Group

Robert French, @rdfrench, of Auburn University’s communications school and PROpenMic.org

Joe Pulizzi, @juntajoe, founder of Junta42, author, blogger, and content marketing evangelist.

The Rules

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged

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It’s Time For A Social Media Takeover

It’s time for a social media takeover. But who should launch this bloodless coup? Marketing and advertising have historically been more about one-way communication. That rules them out.

I say it is the PR professional that should lead the charge. We have always been – at least in theory – focused on dialogue.

Many people think that PR is solely about media relations. Not so. PR is the management and development of relationships with any group that can materially affect your organization.

But is PR equipped for this job? Sadly, most are not. Like journalists, PR people have sometimes been slow to embrace new methods and new technology. I’d like to call on my peers to change that. We have always been the communicators interested in dialogue. New technology gives us the chance to truly have one-to-one relationships with journalists, customers and our other publics. We need to own the conversation, but we can’t if we don’t understand the new enabling technologies.

Let’s get out there and raise conversation through social media to a new level. Who’s with me?

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A Question Of Trust

Forrester Research has a new study indicating consumers don’t trust corporate blogs. In fact, only 16 percent of respondents say they trust corporate blogs. According to a story in Online Media Daily,

That makes them the lowest-rated source of reliable information among 18 categories Forrester asked about including Web portals, print newspapers, radio and personal blogs. “Email from people that you know” rated highest in trustworthiness, at 77%. So should companies simply give up on blogging? No, says Forrester. The lack of credibility stems from corporate blogs’ focus on self-promotion, pushing products and services at the expense of two-way communication with customers.

Typical old school corporate behavior: broadcasting not engaging in dialogue. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think corporations can use their blogs to tell their stories. Got a critic blasting you? Then, the corporation can use the blog to tell its side of the story. Want to tout what your employees are doing outside of the work environment? Excellent use of a blog. Need to air some corporate news. That’s OK, too. How about developing an online community for customers? Even better. Just stay away from blatant product promotion.

Corporate blogger, how are you using your blog?

What are others saying about this topic?

How Trusted Is Your Corporate Blog?

Are They Worth Doing?

People Don’t Trust Corporate Blogs 

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The Elasticity Of Truth

Would you lie to get business?

In a new business pitch once, we told the prospect that we require any message we help deliver to be true. This seemed to pose a problem for some in the organization we were pitching, particularly among the Europeans.

The Europeans in the group seemed to have a more elastic definition of the truth than did the Americans.

To be anything but truthful hurts you in a number of ways:

- your message may attract the wrong prospects for you

- your message may attract the right prospects for the message and when they find out you are lying, you lose the customer and they tell others about your lie.

- lying is just wrong from a moral standpoint.

Thoughts? Anyone?

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