THINKing

How Touching

Test drive a car, put on some cologne, sample a grande mocha choka double soy half sugar non-fat latte. Seems like someone is always trying to place you in touch with their product. Did you ever wonder why?

Well, now we know. Science Daily reports that if you touch an item – even just for a few seconds – the likelihood of you buying it increases. According to the lead author of the study reported on in Science Daily,

“The amazing part of this study is that people can become almost immediately attached to something as insignificant as a mug,” said lead author of the study James Wolf, who started the work while he was a doctoral student at Ohio State. “By simply touching the mug and feeling it in their hands, many people begin to feel like the mug is, in fact, their mug.  Once they begin to feel it is theirs, they are willing to go to greater lengths to keep it.”

Looks like those car dealers have been way ahead of us. A little test drive and that car starts to feel like your own. Have you thought about ways to get your product or service into the hands of prospects? Tell us about it.

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Quick Hits

A couple of quick PR-related items in which you may be interested:

MediaKitty is an online source for connecting with travel journalists. Sign up and follow them on Twitter.

Bill Stoller, who writes the Publicity Insider Newsletter, is on Twitter as well. Follow Bill onTwitter and sign up for his newsletter.

Finally, here’s the PR Channel Dashboard, an online PR resource for articles, white papers, templates and tools.

NOTE: I’m speaking at the NC Main Street Conference 1/29/2009 on media relations. So, I’m dropping a few other links below for the benefit of my audience.

- Pitchengine

- Press Release Grader

- Instant Press Release

- PRWeb

- PRNewswire

- 20 Online Media Relations Links

- Top 17 Media Relations Links

- Twittering Journalist Wiki

- Six Tips For Perfect Email Pitches

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Listening: Marketing’s Secret Weapon

Customers know you and your business better than you think, and often better than you. In the many strategic planning projects I’ve done over nearly 30 years in the business, the customer always gives me the nugget that frames a client’s positioning.

Customers will tell you when you are doing something right or something wrong. All you have to do is listen to them. This rarely happens in businesses of any size. And guess what? Chief marketing officers at 500 major corporations know this. A study by the CMO Council suggests,

…marketers don’t know how to use customer input to improve operations, products and processes. The council, whose study, “Giving Customer Voice More Volume,” surveyed around 500 senior marketers at major corporations, found that only 33% of survey respondents said their companies claim to be good at handling customer complaints. Of the executives who responded to the survey, only 23% said their companies track or measure customer emails, and only 17% use that feedback to identify potential customer advocates.

The customer “custodian” function is one of the most critical in marketing, says Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council. Neale-May adds that the CMO must, 

“own every facet of listening, learning, interacting, engaging, and optimizing the relationship with the customer, and understanding where the attrition, pain and aggravation is, and doing this in real time. It is mind-boggling to me that the level of attention to this is not what it should be, and fragmented in terms of who owns it.”

If you really want to listen to your customers, you need to track and propagate positive word of mouth, as well as gather insight from all customer engagement and integrate that insight into the marketing process. So, are you listening to your customer? Tell us about it.

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2009: The Year Of Direct Marketing?

There has been a lot of talk about the death of direct marketing. I don’t buy it. Here’s why: Every time the economy softens, marketers are pressured by higher ups to utilize tactics that can be quantified. Direct marketing is on the list in all tough years. Is it on your list this year?

Now, response rates for direct mail and for email marketing have fallen in recent times. But that is not because direct marketing has outlived its usefulness. It’s because of lazy marketers; marketers who won’t develop a plan but instead just bombard consumers with ill conceived and misdirected messages. Let’s review how to improve your direct marketing efforts.

First, you need to develop a plan. It does not have to be as long as War And Peace, but it must include a few key elements so that you can develop a focused, targeted, measurable program that gets results. For our purposes, I’m going to focus on the use of email, but the elements are similar for direct mail:

* Objectives

* Audience Definition

* Key Messages

* Format

* Tactics

* Timeline

* Budget

* Measurement

Determine what is it that you want the email program to achieve from marketing and communications perspectives. Is this a newsletter designed for relationship management purposes, or is it a sales-oriented vehicle? Are you trying to build awareness, generate leads, increase web traffic, encourage loyalty, or close sales?

Next, you need to define audiences. Who are you trying to reach? What do you know about them from demographic and psychographic perspectives? Are you addressing multiple audiences? If so, do you need to segment your audiences and develop emails with different messages? How will each audience profit from our communications.

Now, what is it you want to say to each audience? What’s the nature of the content? Will this include just editorial information or will it also contain some sales-oriented material?

Closely tied to messages is your format. Are you producing a newsletter with a lot of editorial material, or does it contain just brief snippets of information? Is it an announcement list, a discussion list, or just commercial messages? Think about your audiences as you develop the most appropriate format.

Your tactics section lays out tasks and who is responsible for them. What technology do you need? Do you have in-house email capabilities or should you use an application such as Publicaster? How will you build and manage your list? How will you acquire new subscribers? Who will create content, design and distribute the email?

After you answer those questions, it’s time to turn to your timeline. Develop a schedule for having your technology in place, building your list, creating content, designing and distributing the email. Determine if this will be a one-time mailing, or if it will recur on a weekly or monthly basis.

Your budget may help you answer many of the questions above. Small budgets may mean you complete a lot of the work in-house.

Finally, it’s time to establish criteria for measuring the program. An awareness program may call for some baseline research so you’ll know how you are doing. A relationship management program may measure customer retention. Increased click-through from your email to your website is also a measurable element. Sales-oriented programs might measure total sales from email, or incremental sales increases with individual customers.

Are you planning your direct marketing efforts? Wade into the conversation.

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Media Update

Although I believe the main stream media are dying, there still are opportunities to receive media coverage that can benefit you and your organization. After all, the media is not dead quite yet. And you need to take advantage of these opportunities if your organization is cutting back its marketing budget because of a challenging economy.

Bill Stoller of Publicity Insider reminds us this month of some of those opportunities:

The Wall Street Journal Online’s “Journal Women” is a new section devoted to women in business. The section covers work, family and the intersection of the two. The new section also features: “The Juggle”, which is a blog on the tradeoffs of juggling work and family, as well as “Front Lines”, a daily news brief about women making headlines and other woman-related issues in the news of the day. “Journal Women” also offers community discussion boards, Q & As, videos and polls. Carol Hymowitz covers leadership issues and pens the daily column “Above The Glass”. Sue Shellenberger covers family issues. Almar Latour is the managing editor. The Wall Street Journal Online is at 200 Liberty Street, 12 floor, New York, NY 10281, (212) 416-4750. Their E-mail formula: firstname.lastname@wsj.com

Here is a rundown of Associated Press (AP) business reporters and their beats: Joyce Rosenberg is the financial markets editor, reached at (212) 621-1688; Skip Wollenberg is the business assistant editor, (212) 621-1682; Patrick Rizzo is the economy editor, (212) 621-1976; Amy Finkelstein is the retailing editor, (212) 621-7002; David Brinkerhoff is the manufacturing editor, (212) 621-1587. Other editors are: Charles Sheehan, covering energy; Brian Bergstein covers technology; Trevor Delaney is the personal finance editor; Noelle Knox covers the real estate beat and Michael Lee is the editor of the healthcare business industry. The Associated Press provides news, photos, graphics, audio and video for 1,700 U.S. newspapers and 6,000 broadcast outlets around the world. It is headquartered at 450 West 33 St., 14 floor, New York, NY 10001, (212) 621-1680 is the phone for the business department of AP. The email formula is: firstinitialfirstnamelastname@ap.org

So, get out there and start pitching.

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Why Steve Jobs’ Health Is A Public Concern

Apple’s Steve Jobs and his PR firm are bucking the notion that the health of the ill CEO is of public concern. Ragan.com reports,

Problem is Jobs, and his PR machine, think his health should be kept private. To meet this goal, they have been—to put it kindly—less than straight-forward. For example, back in June, Apple’s PR pros blamed their boss’s notable weight loss on a “common bug.”

They are wrong to withhold this information.  Jobs, to most, is Apple. He is the brand, unlike Bill Gates at Microsoft. Gates did an excellent job of making Microsoft’s brand about the company and not reliant on him. When a person becomes the brand of a company, most of the things that can happen to the brand are bad.  Now, that is not to say that if Gates were ill, it wouldn’t be news. It’s just that there is no real Gates’ premium built into the stock price of Microsoft, as there is with Jobs and Apple.

When you are publicly traded, you must be open and as transparent as legally possible. Apple needs to start practicing transparency right now. Next, they need to show how Jobs’ creativity has been institutionalized. This helps separate Jobs from the brand and makes future executive health concerns less problematic.

I hope Jobs gets well and back to work soon.  Maybe while he is off-duty, he can think about how to change the Apple culture to one of  openness. What do you think?

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Out Of Work? Don’t Be That Guy

Now, this is not aimed at you, regular reader of THINKing. You are a smart, capable person who understands how the world works, and who understands digital personal branding. This is aimed at the hapless person who just happens to stumble by and who needs schooling on this particular topic. Regular reader, go do something else while I give “that guy” a piece of my mind.

You know who you are. You are the person who finds himself out of work.

You have not kept up with your contacts but now you need a job. I know what you will do next. You will begin calling and emailing everyone you have ever known to see if they can help you. You’ll scour Facebook to find every person you have ever met in your life. Maybe they can help? You’ll begin following thousands of people on Twitter, then tweet your fingers off to let everyone know that the remarkable you is available for work.

You should have been doing this, but you didn’t. Now, you need to read this.

To you, it’s all about volume, or mass marketing. You’ll resort to what I call To Whom It May Concern Marketing as you try to find a job, any job. Today, whether you are selling yourself with a cover letter and resume or selling a product, it is a one-to-one world.

You won’t take the time to try to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your work life and then identify the companies where you might be able to do it. Whether you sell products to customers, yourself to a hiring manager, or story ideas to journalists, you need to target people who have an interest and provide them information about how they’ll benefit.

You aren’t going to change, and in this environment, you aren’t going to find a job because you are that guy. I don’t feel sorry for you because you brought it on yourself.

End of sermon. I feel much better now.

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Content Marketing Again

We talked recently about placing your content marketing on steroids. We need to finish the story. There are still other ways to move your content, as Jay Ehret and Rodger Johnson reminded me.

Jay says to prepare a video of the content and post it online. Rodger is turning a lot of his content into podcasts for use on his website. And, of course, you can register your podcasts at the Apple itunes store, where people can find you.

Let’s not forget writing articles from your content and posting them at EzineArticles. Additionally, you should offer your content as guest blog posts.

We already talked about developing seminars from your content, but you also could cut it up into more bite-sized pieces to take on the road as a speech to civic and professional groups. Have we forgotten anything else? Let me know.

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Content Marketing On Steroids

Content marketers often equate public relations techniques purely with media relations. They think distributing news releases is only to promote a product, make an executive announcement or discuss company financial matters. They forget that they can use PR to get their information about their content out to the most important audiences: the media and their own customers. Let’s review.

Content is a treasure chest for marketers. So, let’s share it everywhere and in every way possible. But do it from the inside out. In other words, tell those audiences closest to you first, and then go wider from there.

First, write an educational or informational white paper on your area of expertise.

Use your customer and prospect email list to tell key constituents about the white paper’s availability.

Issue a brief news release about the availability on your website of the white paper. Send the release to your targeted media list using Pitchengine, which also gets your release picked up by Google News.

Consider spending a little extra to broaden your reach by distributing your release on PRNewswire or PRWeb.

Use the content in your blog.

Develop a seminar from the white paper.

Use email to offer this seminar to your key constituents.

Issue a brief release about the availability of the seminar, and repeat the above sequence.

Hammer this one content message in all communication channels and reap the rewards. How are you marketing your content?

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Links – 1/12/2009

Here are a few things THINKing is reading today:

Our friends at The Thinking Inbox are offering 52 email tips for 52 weeks.

Blogging is one of the most effective ways to brand your business, says our colleague Rodger Johnson over at Your PR Guy.

I’ve always been a big proponent of having a media room as part of your website. So, too, is Newt Barrett, who writes this week about the 5 essential reasons to add a media room.

Jason Falls has a very good case study at Social Media Explorer about Humana, the healthcare giant.

We all struggle with content ideas for our blogs. Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has some thoughts on how to keep your content fresh.

What are you reading?

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