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Four Ways a Corporate Blog Can Help Your Company Increase Profits

April 14, 2011 By

A corporate blog is more than just a company diary where someone from marketing talks about the latest trade show. A corporate blog is a support tool that can lighten the load of several different departments within your company. Here are four ways a corporate blog can help your company.

1. Reduce Marketing Costs and Improve Reach

In the past, Marketing put a lot of time and money into developing, creating, and printing new sales literature and brochures. But once the specs changed on a particular product you got a new area code (it happened to my company in 2002), or you made an egregious error (guilty), the remaining 8,500 copies of the brochures were rendered obsolete, or you had to hand correct every single one of them with a black marker.

A blog can replace a lot of sales brochures and literature, introducing customers to the new product, letting them read the new specs, and finding out the latest features and prices. A blog will also let you show new photos and video demonstrations, tell people about the upcoming trade show or the show you just finished, or even post a video of the CEO talk about the product and what it means for the industry.

By turning to electronic publishing, you can reduce printing costs, reduce costs per lead, and ultimately, costs per sales.

2. Serve as a Newsroom

The PR department spends a lot of time chasing down the industry media or traditional media, trying to get them to talk about your latest product or service. The problem is, the media isn’t always willing to listen, or they can only publish on their own schedule, not yours. But by posting news articles to your website, you become the news source, not the traditional or industry media.

A blog will let you disseminate the latest news to your customers, helping your most loyal customers not only read what you’re up to, they can share it with their readers, which promotes your news as well. The media can use your blog as an information-gathering source as well. This lets them see what you’re doing, rather than waiting for a press release. They can find your press releases, product photos, and HD video clips, and get everything they need with ease. They can also get further information and details without calling your PR person while she’s on vacation and unavailable.

3. Sell to New Customers

Corporate blogging can greatly benefit the sales department, because salespeople can talk about the benefits of the new product, use blog posts to answer frequently asked sales questions, and preemptively overcome any objections potential customers may have.

While this won’t answer every question and objection for every customer, you’ll find that it cuts down on the time per sale. When I started selling on the Internet in the late-90s, I found I had cut my time per sales call down from 40 minutes to 10 minutes just because of the information I was putting on my website.

Again, this is where video demonstrations can be invaluable to potential customers. This also helps improve search engine rankings, so your site is more easily found during web searches, which means more customers could find you, which in turn means means more sales.

4. Provide 24/7 Customer Service

If you have a product or service that has frequent questions, don’t just rely on an FAQ section. Turn your blog into a knowledge center, and ask your customer service reps to write posts that answer those frequent questions. Make them as easy to find as possible (proper keyword tagging, links from the FAQ page, or even listing them in your “popular posts.”

Ask other customers to leave comments on individual posts about different fixes and solutions they’ve found as well. Incorporate their answers into the official blog posts to continue the discussion, and to make your customers feel like they’re contributing.

Finally, customers can search your website and find in-depth answers to questions they have. This saves phone calls about basic constantly-asked questions, which means you can help reduce customer service costs.

Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Corporate Blogging Tagged With: , , , ,

New Twitter Tool, Twylah, Promises Huge Things for Social Media

February 4, 2011 By
Twylah screenshot for Erik Deckers

Last Friday I tweeted: “I’m easily impressed. I’m not easily flabbergasted. @kabaim just flabbergasted me. Follow him and ask how he did it.”

Screen shot 2011 02 03 at 11.39.48 PM 300x192 New Twitter Tool, Twylah, Promises Huge Things for Social Media

Screenshot of my Twylah page. Click to see a bigger version.

@kabaim is Eric Kim, founder and CEO of Twylah, the new Twitter tool that Eric says is going to change the way we use Twitter. Twylah (@Twylah)does all these amazing things. So many of them, in fact, that I’ve probably forgotten a few them here.

Imagine going to a website that’s laid out like a magazine theme for a blog. On that page are your tweets, categorized by the topics you tweet about most. There, a visitor can see those categories, and read more tweets within each of them. The layout page will pull out any photos you’ve included with your tweets, and then organize the rest in reverse chronological order.

This does a number of things for you, for the reader, even for search engine optimization.

    • It lets visitors experience your tweets visually, rather than seeing an entire timeline. Don’t like one particular category, like your 90 minute ongoing discussion with your project team about where to have lunch? Replace it with one you prefer. Want to highlight a Twitter topic from two months ago? Drop a less interesting one and replace it with the old topic.

Twylah screenshot of BrandingYourself 300x203 New Twitter Tool, Twylah, Promises Huge Things for Social Media

  • It can pull in tweets from weeks, or even months ago. This gives life to your tweets, beyond the typical 1-hour life expectancy that our tweets usually have.
  • Each Twylah page is a real web page. The links on them are shortened using bit.ly, which means they’re not only trackable, but they even count as backlinks to your real site. This will be a big help for anyone who needs an SEO boost.
  • You can direct people to your Twylah page instead of your Twitter profile page, giving people an expanded view of your bio. Now people can see if you’re a real person, and if you talk about what you claim to talk about.
  • People can even follow you directly from Twylah, rather than jumping back to your Twitter page to follow you.

 

These are all pretty cool features, and based on my scribbled notes, there’s a lot of amazing stuff that Twylah is going to do.

But, there are three things that social media marketers and practitioners need to take note of, because these things are going to be H-U-G-Efor social media professionals. Of course, these will not be included in the initial rollout of Twylah, but Eric expects them to be available around 6 weeks later. (I hope I didn’t just jinx that.)

Twylah Screenshot 2 300x202 New Twitter Tool, Twylah, Promises Huge Things for Social Media

Further down my Twylah page.

  • Users will be able to subscribe to a person’s categories of tweets. For example, if you’re following Douglas Karr, but only want to read his tweets about the Marketing Technology Blog radio show, you can subscribe to that category. Here’s the even cooler part: Those tweets will be emailed to you as a newsletter. Subscribe to several people and their categories for a bigger newsletter, and read their interesting tweets at your leisure.
  • Twylah will have an analytics package. Not only can you see how many times your stuff was retweeted, or how often you tweeted about certain topics/categories, but you can see how many people engaged with your tweets — retweeting, clicking links, etc. For example, if you tweet about the Android phone, you can also see the engagement with those tweets has gone up. If you also tweet about the latest Twitter meme, you may see that your engagement went down for that topic. Translation: You can adjust the topics, and even time, of your tweets accordingly, based on the engagement of your tweets by your followers.
  • Twylah’s analytics will also tell you what you need to tweet about and when, to help your engagement improve. Twylah will actually help you figure out when most of your network is actually using Twitter, and what sort of tweets interest them the most. What’s cool: This is especially useful for people who are very particular about following people with certain backgrounds, such as book marketers trying to build a following of independent bookstores.
  • Twylah will eventually aggregate the total engagement of different topics. Imagine being able to know which of Twitter’s trending topics are actually engaging the readers. Maybe the new iPhone 5 is one of the trending topics in July, and 20% of the people are engaging with those tweets. As an iPhone marketer, you would then know that you need to tweet more about the iPhone with links to important information, like nearest retail location.

A lot of these way cool Twylah features are still in the Alpha stage, while Eric and his wife, Kelly, are working feverishly to roll the beta out in the middle of February. If you want to be a part of the beta, go to Twylah.com and register. Also, ask Eric for a personal demonstration of Twylah.

You’ll be flabbergasted. I know I was.

Filed Under: Marketing, Research Desk, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, Twitter Tagged With: , , , , ,

Search Engine Optimization is NOT Gaming the System

February 2, 2011 By

I’ve heard the question so many times, I want to shout at something: “Isn’t SEO just gaming the system?”

Andrew Hanelly wrote a great post for SocialMediaExplorer.com about why search engine optimization would be important even if the search engines stopped running.2175221420 2cf3f4bcc9 Search Engine Optimization is NOT Gaming the System

And he makes a solid argument for why we should practice SEO techniques, even if we’re not actually trying to win search.

But I want to respond to the people who think SEO is somehow distasteful, or even cheating. Those critics and nay-sayers who think SEO is “just gaming the system.”

No, it’s not. It’s participating in the system that’s already in place.

First of all, this is the system. You go to a search engine, you search for something like “Italian wedding soup recipes” or “how to repair a bicycle tire.” The search engine tries to deliver what you want, because it knows what it should deliver. It looks for certain clues, like the title of a website — “1,001 Italian Wedding Soup Recipes” — or keywords in the body copy, and gives you the results that it thinks will most effectively meet your requirements. That’s the system. If you want to succeed in the system, you have to do the things that tell the search engines you can provide exactly what the users are looking for.

Second, the search engines can tell if a site isn’t very useful. It gets rid of sites that are pretty much useless. So even if someone wanted to game the system, if they’re not providing useful or valuable content, the site will soon be dropped when no one visits it, so the system weeds out anyone who isn’t giving users the things they’re looking for.

Third, using black hat SEO tricks is gaming the system. It’s cheating, because it uses tricks that have been banned by the search engines. Using tiny text or invisible text to cram keywords onto a single page is cheating. Building link farms with thousands of links on a single page is cheating. People who do that are immediately banished from the index, and will never show up on the search engine results. So the system eliminates cheaters and Internet ne’er-do-wells.

Search engine optimization is just the way Internet marketing is done. It’s no more gaming the system than buying a targeted direct mail list, or translating a website into Spanish to reach Hispanic customers. There’s nothing wrong with it, and people are going to continue to use it, because it works.

Even the people who think “gaming the system” is somehow wrong use their own life optimization techniques without batting an eye.

Would you turn in a half-finished crappy resume, because writing a good resume is “gaming the system?” Would you submit an RFP that didn’t meet all the requirements, because turning in what you’re asked for is “gaming the system?” Is practicing for a sales presentation gaming the system?

Of course not. So why is search engine optimization — a common business practice — somehow gaming the system, when that’s the only system that’s available?

Until you find a viable alternative, this is the only system we’ve got.

Photo credit: VizzzualDotCom (Flickr)

Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Tools Tagged With: , , , , ,

Random Thoughts on Writing a Book

January 14, 2011 By

I’ve finished my second book, Branding Yourself, with my good friend, Kyle Lacy, and am working on a third book on networking with Jeremy Dearringer, CEO of Slingshot SEO, an SEO company here in Indianapolis. I also have a couple other writing projects in the works, although those are still under wraps. I hope to have some news about those by Springtime.

But I’ve learned a few things about becoming a book author, things that I thought were easy, and things that I learned are hard.

  • Writing a book isn’t really that hard, if you write on a regular basis. I used to think the advice “write every day” was stupid. “Who has time for that?” I thought. “I have work to do.” Turns out the work I was doing was writing anyway, and when I decided to write intentionally — to focus on new aspects of writing and become better at them — my writing improved.
  • Have a good editor. I learned a long time ago that while I’m a stickler about grammar and punctuation, I make a crapload of mistakes. Even though I catch them on second and third edits, I still usually find one or two that has to be fixed. Pearson just sent Kyle and me the “gathers” of the book. Individual chapters that we need to read over and mark any errors before the second printing. Believe it or not, with two writers and four editors, I found a couple errors. (What’s worse, they were mine!)
  • The hard part isn’t writing the book, it’s marketing it. In order to support the book, and sell copies, I’m starting to travel more to promote it during talks. Next week, I’ll be in Northern Indiana one night and Lexington, Kentucky the next day. I’m trying to do some paid speaking gigs, but am thinking about adopting Scott Stratten’s idea when he was promoting UnMarketing Random Thoughts on Writing a Book (affiliate link). Scott made an offer to any group: buy 100 of my books, and I’ll travel out to you. I’m thinking about doing that for anyone who buys 50 of my books, as long as you’re within driving distance. But compare that to writing. I could write at home, spend three hours, and knock out about 6,000 words, or almost an entire chapter. It’ll take me that long to drive to most of my speaking gigs.
  • Know your subject matter. Writing teachers love to say “write what you know” (which presents a problem for science fiction or fantasy writers). But this makes life so much easier when you’re writing a book. I remember struggling with a couple of chapters on Twitter Marketing for Dummies because I didn’t use some of the tools we were writing about. I had to spend a lot of time using them before I could write about them, which threw a huge monkey wrench into my writing schedule.
  • Have a writing schedule, and stick with it. John Grisham’s writing schedule, when he first started out, was to write from 7 am to 8 am, before he opened his law office. Christopher Moore’s schedule involves a lot of screwing around all day before he settles down after lunch and writes for 4 or 5 hours. Mine is to write at night, after the kids are in bed, and go for about 4 hours. Ignore the people who tell you to wake up early because mornings are more productive, or the people who tell you to stay up late because no one is awake then. Do what’s best for your body and your schedule. If you’re a night owl, stay up late. If you’re an early bird, get up and get that worm. But create a schedule and stick to it.
  • Shut off distractions. I love my Twitter network, and love chatting. But they are also the biggest interruption of my day, because they’re always more interesting than whatever I’m doing (even as I’ve written this post, I’ve sent 4 tweets). So when I’m writing, and have the willpower to do so, I shut off TweetDeck, close my Gmail, turn off the notifiers, and get to work. I can save myself 30 minutes of writing when I do that. My wife once asked me why I didn’t do that more, and I told her to “rephrase your question in the form of a tweet.”

Writing styles and processes are different for everyone. What are yours? Do you do anything special to get your writing done, to be more efficient and effective, or even to avoid distractions? Leave a comment and let me know.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself Random Thoughts on Writing a Book (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Filed Under: Marketing, Speaking, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

I’ll Read Your Ad for $250. My New Pay-For-View Pricing

December 30, 2010 By

Kim Kardashian annoyed more than a few Twitter users when it was leaked that Kardashian commands $10,000 to send a promotional tweet out to her then-2.7 million followers (now 5+ million).

(Kardashian denies that she receives that much money. Rather, she says she just tweets about products she likes.)

While I don’t follow her, I’m sure that her 5 million followers (minus the ones who aren’t spam bots and people who abandoned Twitter after a month) are looking forward to reading something interesting and not very vapid or shallow. (Yeah, good luck with that.)

How disappointing is it for her fans to learn that their favorite non-celebrity celebrity is only telling you she likes her shoes because someone forked over 10 grand to say so? While marketers think a so-called celebrity’s time and endorsement are valuable, they are also showing they think my time or interest isn’t.

So I have a new offer to marketers who want me to read celebrity endorsements and social media marketing messages: I will read anyone’s tweet, watch their commercial, or read their marketing copy for a fee.

That’s right. You can pay me to absolutely look at, read, watch, and consider your product. Think of it as a personal endorsement. After all, my time is valuable. Time I could spend working or being with my family is instead interrupted by you and your spokespeople trying to get me to buy something. And I do my best to ignore it, hide from it, or block it completely. So you come up with something new and creative, which means I have to do something new and creative to avoid it.

So how about you pay me instead? If you pay me, I will read whatever you put in front of me (except for that damn Kay Jewelers ad where the brain-addled woman is afraid of a thunderstorm). Rather than spending $10K on someone who is famous without actually doing anything useful, spend the money on me, and I will read or watch to your heart’s content.

According to my new Pay-For-View pricing schedule, I will:

  • Read any celebrity advertising tweet for $75. Any non-celebrity advertising tweet is only $25. (Hey, if you’re forking out $10,000 because someone is famous, chances are I find them annoying. So the extra $50 is for the wear and tear on my soul.)
  • Visit any company website for $150, and spend 10 minutes on the site, plus additional charges for any of the following:
  • Watch any video less than 5 minutes in length for $200. For videos longer than 5 minutes, it’s an additional $75 per minute.
  • Read any marketing copy, up to 750 words in length, for $150. Since I can read 750 words faster than you can say it in a video, I’ll cut you guys a break on the cost.
  • Also, any marketing surveys, registration forms, or instances where I have to give you my personal information is $100 plus a $25 per minute processing charge (minimum 5 minutes). I had originally considered charging a flat fee per information field (i.e. mailing address, phone number, etc.), but the rate sheet ended up being three pages long and still required a lengthy explanation.

Now, these prices are actually fairly reasonable, and I feel completely justified in charging them. After all, my time and consideration are valuable. I have a job, a family, and disposable income. I’m not easily swayed by celebrity endorsements, and will go out of my way to avoid most commercials and marketing messages. In short, you’re spending all that money to get celebrities to reach me, and I’m going to support you (and them) by spending my money. The least you can do is support me for spending my time thinking about you.

Kim Kardashian may be on to something, and I have to give her credit for helping me stumble upon the idea. As a thank you, I will read her next three promotional tweets for free.

No guarantees I’m buying anything though.

Filed Under: Lead Generation, Marketing, Public Relations, Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Indianapolis Motor Speedway President & CEO Jeff Belskus Turning to Video Blogging

September 23, 2010 By
Screenshot of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Blog

As an Indianapolis 500 blogger, I occasionally get news from the folks at Indy Car and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (although they’re part of the same family, Indy Car is the governing body of the sport of Indy Car racing, and the IMS is the track the Indianapolis 500 is held on).

Anyway, I got something yesterday that caught my professional eye: the IMS President & CEO Jeff Belskus is going to start video blogging as a way to reach Indy 500 fans.Indianapolis Motor Speedway Blog Indianapolis Motor Speedway President & CEO Jeff Belskus Turning to Video Blogging

This is a rather bold step for the venerable institution, which will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Indianapolis 500 in 2011. I mean, it wasn’t until 2009 that they invited bloggers to the media center (giving some of us the recognition and confirmation that what we do is still journalism, even if it’s niche journalism or citizen journalism).

Fans are asked to post any questions, comments, or ideas for Belskus (along with their name and hometown) at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway blog.

While Belskus probably won’t do the customized Old Spice Guy YouTube videos, which included a pretty damn awesome marriage proposal — although if he did, I would become a lifelong fan of Jeff Belskus — I can see him doing shout outs to fans who took the time to ask a question. This kind of personalization can only further cement the relationship between fan and sport. Imagine how much more you would love your favorite team if they gave you special recognition, even once, during a game, match, or race.

Imagine hearing on a TV broadcast, “The Indianapolis Colts would like to personally thank Casey Mullins for the great comments and tweets during the game against the Giants last week. We appreciate your support.” How would you feel, especially if your name was Casey Mullins, if your favorite or even semi-favorite team did that for you? Wouldn’t you want to support the team even more?

Whether that’s the intention of Belskus and the IMS, that could be the side benefit: increased fan loyalty, increased participation in this growing communication channel, all for the price of taking 30 – 60 minutes to shoot 10 – 20 one-off videos with a Flip cam (or knowing the IMS and their technology, a kick-ass digital video camera that any self-respecting video production company would give their right arm to have).

So I’ll be interested to see what the IMS comes up with over the next few months with this experiment. I hope they can give it them time and energy a project like this deserves. The investment is minimal, since they already have the staff and expertise to do it, and the ROI should be huge.

Filed Under: Blogging, Communication, Marketing, Tools, Video Tagged With: , , , ,

3 Reasons and 6 Steps To Keep Your Microsites

September 1, 2010 By

Sean X Cummings, the director of marketing for Ask.com, made a rather bold, but completely wrong*, argument in his recent post “3 Reasons To Ditch Your Microsites.”17135231 30c542a363 3 Reasons and 6 Steps To Keep Your Microsites Cummings said that companies should ditch their microsites because they are “advanced brochureware” and a sure sign that a marketing agency “does not get it.”

(*It’s entirely possible Sean and I are using the same word for two very different things. I’ve been calling one-page sites on unique URLs “microsites.” The following is based on my usage of this term.)

Actually, microsites serve a very important purpose to web marketers. Here are the three reasons you need to keep them:

1) Microsites boost search engine optimization.
2) Microsites improve your SEO.
3) Microsites make your SEO better than your competitor’s.

Microsites are not for marketing, not for branding, not to participating in the conversation. Once you build them, you don’t do a single thing with them.

The proper way to use a microsite

Let’s say you own a carpet cleaning service in Kalamazoo, Michigan. You also serve other areas, like Grand Rapids, Holland, and Battle Creek. You’ve already checked, and CarpetCleaning.com is already taken, but you own Cleanest-Michigan-Carpets.com (mostly because you listened to your brother-in-law, and he’s an idiot).

But you also know that:

  • Yellow Pages usage is going down, while search engine usage is going up.
  • Rather than pull out the phone book, people would rather Google something.
  • Local search engine optimization wins local search (and carpet cleaning is definitely a local business).
  • Search engines love keywords in a domain name.

Here’s how to use microsites properly:

1) Buy domains for KalamazooCarpetCleaning.com, GrandRapidsCarpetCleaning.com, etc. This tells the search engines that your sites are about carpet cleaning in Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, Holland, and Battle Creek, and nothing else. Those are also your keywords for each site, and you will use those 3 – 4 words, in order, without exception (i.e. not “Carpet cleaning in Kalamazoo”).

2) Optimize the bejeezus out of each microsite.

  • Put the keywords at the start of the page title: e.g. “Holland Carpet Cleaning for Residential and Commercial Jobs” and “Kalamazoo Carpet Cleaning by John Smith.”
  • Put the keywords in the first 4 words of the body copy. This may be awkward, but it needs to be done.
  • Have no more than 2% keyword density (2 keywords or phrases per 100 words). SEO experts are still debating this, but 2% is a safe number.
  • Include photos of you cleaning carpets, and use the keywords in the alt tags. “This is John, working hard for a Battle Creek carpet cleaning customer.”
  • Use only the keywords in hyperlinks that lead back to your main site. “Find more information about Grand Rapids Carpet Cleaning on our website.” Don’t use any other words in those links. Put 2 -3 links back to your site.

3) Install a WordPress.org site on each page. Not because you need WordPress’ amazing functionality, but because it’s free, and let’s you create one front page. You can add more if you want, but you need at least one page. (You could expand each site later by writing blog posts about your keywords — see #2 — but that’s pretty involved. Save this as a last resort for when your idiot brother-in-law opens his own carpet cleaning business.)

4) Make it look pretty. A man is sitting in his living room wearing nothing but his underwear and a hat. A friend stops by to visit, and asks about the man’s outfit. “I’m in my underwear, because no one ever comes to visit me,” says the man. “Then why are you wearing the hat?” asks the friend. “Oh, because someone might come,” says the man. Put a hat on the site — download a free template — because someone might visit it.

5) Write strong, persuasive copy: If people come to visit, you need to give them a reason to click through to your main website. Don’t put up crappy copy just to game the search engines. Create well-written copy that explains what you do, how well you do it, and includes a call to action. Make significant changes to the text for all four sites, so they’re not identical or even nearly identical.

6) All links must point back to your main site: They should not point to any other site anywhere on the Internet. Ever. With one exception. Create links to the other sites under a small section that says “we also offer carpet cleaning services in other Michigan cities.” Then use the exact keywords and link to each of the other sites. These backlinks between the microsites and to your main site will boost your search engine ranking.

Here’s what will happen (more or less): The search engine spiders will visit each site and say “Hmm, this site appears to be about Kalamazoo Carpet Cleaning. Let’s make sure.” It will do a quick check, and confirm — based on your domain name, title tag, first 4 words, keyword density, and alt tags — that, “by God, this IS a site about Kalamazoo Carpet Cleaning! And it has everything we like, so it must be important. Let’s see where these links go.”

The spiders will follow the links back to your main site (hence, the name “backlinks”), and conclude, “if those really well-done sites point back to this site, and this site does carpet cleaning in all these cities, then this carpet cleaning site must be really important!”

Then, when people do a quick search for carpet cleaning in one of those cities, your main site will come up first.

That is how you properly use a microsite. No brochureware, no moving the brand, none of that marketing crap, just pure SEO goodness with trackable, measurable results. If your marketing agency ever suggests it for anything other than SEO, tell them Sean X Cummings would like a word with them.

Photo credit: Auntie P (Flickr)

Filed Under: Blog ROI, Blogging, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Tools Tagged With: , , , , ,

Don’t Trust Your Staff to Write Your Corporate Blog? Guess Whose Fault That Is.

August 2, 2010 By

Do you trust your staff to blog?

67989987 c6a7349194 Don’t Trust Your Staff to Write Your Corporate Blog? Guess Whose Fault That Is.

No? Then that’s your fault.

You hired incompetent staff. You hired people you can’t trust to properly deliver your company message. You hired people you don’t believe will represent you correctly to the outside world. That sounds like you made some bad decisions.

Do you trust your employees to answer your phones, or do you answer all the calls yourself? Do you trust your salespeople to speak to customers without you, or go on all the sales calls with them?

Of course you trust them. You have people you trust to count and spend your money. You have people you trust to write sales brochures and organize trade shows. You have people you trust to produce your product, put it in a box, and stick it on a truck. You have people you trust to speak to customers when they call in with complaints. And you even have employees you trust enough to let have access to email.

Yet you don’t have people you can trust to write 350 words three times a week on a platform where errors are easily fixed? That means you hired the wrong people for the job, and that’s nobody’s fault but yours.

Think of it this way:

  • Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh trusted his employees.
  • Hsieh trusted them to tweet and blog.
  • They tweeted and blogged the bejeezus out of that company, in addition to providing some awesome customer service.
  • Hsieh sold Zappos for $928 million.

Now do you want to trust your employees?

Photo credit: James @ NZ (Flickr)

Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

Your CEO Should NOT Know Social Media

May 4, 2010 By

My friend Nancy Myrland has posed an interesting question on her blog, Should a CEO Be Fluent in Social Media.

No.

Nancy’s post (which was based on a Mashable article by the same headline) makes a good point that a CEO should get social media.

After all, says Nancy, the CEO is the face of his or her company. They should be able to use the tools that allow them to have relationships with the customers.j0411742 Your CEO Should NOT Know Social Media

Still no.

Okay, “no, unless.”

Unless it’s a small company, where the CEO is doing a lot of the day-to-day work, they should. Basically, if you’re a CEO, and you still have to set up your own booth at a trade show, then you need to be able to use social media to converse with your customers.

You also need to know how to run payroll, fulfill shipping orders, edit your website, balance your books, and use the photocopier. (Handling the social media is the least of your worries.)

But if your company is large enough that you barely know the names of the people who work two levels below you, then no, you shouldn’t. You have people for that. As a CEO, you’re barely fluent in how to make the products or services you sell.

Manufacturing CEOs don’t know how to build their products, their floor managers do. Automotive CEOs don’t know how to design cars, their engineers do. Entertainment CEOs don’t know how to mix albums or edit movies, their producers and editors do.

(I doubt that any of them can work their phone system or make photocopies without yelling “Jaaaaa-nettttt!! Can you fix this stupid thing?! Damn technology, whatever happened to the good old days?”)

Frankly, I don’t want these people using social media. They have work to do. They should be running the company, not worrying over every detail in accounting, HR, and marketing. And social media.

More importantly, I have seen what happens when someone who barely understands how his or her administrative assistant sends an email decides they’re going to get involved in some of the deep-level marketing decisions. (It’s just not pretty.) When it comes to social media, it takes a lot of coaching just to get them to understand the technology. Understanding why they should do it is even harder.

But most importantly, CEOs are busy. Their time is worth hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars per hour. They make more money scratching their nose than I make in an entire day. I don’t think they should be actually operating the company Twitter account, writing a 500 word blog post about their latest product, or making status updates on Facebook (“I’m on a motherf—ing boat, y’all. No srsly, I’m taking the Bored of Directors (haha!) out on a deep-sea fishing trip. C-ya L8er, loosers!”).*

If they want to do their own Twitter account, or have time to blog while they’re traveling to and from exotic locales on the company jet (a la Sir Richard Branson), let them. But they’re the exception, not the rule.

However, you small business CEOs, this doesn’t let you off the hook. You absolutely need to know how to do this. You’re already the marketing, bookkeeping, and HR department. And as much as you think it’s going to add to your workload, this is a great way to grow your company, hire employees to take care of the marketing, bookkeeping, and human resources.

And then you can take your board of directors out on a deep-sea fishing boat. Just make sure you bring most of them back.

(*Yes, I know I spelled “losers” wrong. I did that for hyperbole and comedic effect.)

Photo credit: Stalin (Picasa)

Filed Under: Marketing, Social Media, Social Networks Tagged With: , , ,

Why Lawyers Shouldn’t Do Crisis Communications

January 20, 2010 By

It irritates me to no end when the lawyers and MBAs feel the need to get involved in PR and marketing decisions. You can tell when they’ve had their fingers on a press release or written statement, because they come up with such gems as “We feel terrible for our customer. We are grateful that the customer is now recovering.”

This little beauty came from the owner of a KFC in Canada, after 15-year-old Kendell Lakin — heretofore referred to as “The Customer” — burned herself on a serving of hot poutine, after suffering an epileptic seizure and falling into the dish.

(Poutine is a dish of French fries covered with gravy. Not to be confused with “putain,” which is the French equivalent of the F-word. I’m sure French-Canadians have great poutine-putain jokes.)

The new social media society is all about people and relationships. We don’t refer to 15-year-old girls who burn their faces as “The Customer.” They have names, personalities, and pissed-off fathers. Calling them “The Customer” will piss them off more.

If you want to avoid looking like cold-hearted corporate monsters, stop depersonalizing people and reducing them to a genderless wallet.

(Note: I completely understand the need for attorneys. They keep us communicators out of trouble when we’re about to do or say something stupid. But while they do important work, they shouldn’t be in charge of the actual wordsmithing.)

chichis Why Lawyers Shouldnt Do Crisis CommunicationsCrisis communication folks need to seize the messaging away from the Legal Department. CEOs need to remember that hiding behind the stacks of legal books will only anger the public, not placate them. The madder they get, the deeper they’ll cut.

People who remember Chi-Chi’s restaurants will also remember what happened to it. After 4 people died and 650 people fell ill from a hepatitis A outbreak in Pennsylvania, the corporate staff avoided all contact with the news media.

In an article on Levick Strategic Communication’s website, they pointed out where Chi-Chi’s made a huge mistake that ultimately led to their bankruptcy and closure.

Right from the start, Chi-Chi’s made a critical communications mistake common among big corporations facing product liability lawsuits. In an effort to minimize risk, Chi-Chi’s top executives avoided direct contact with the news media. All communications with reporters came through antiseptic one-page statements that had a crisp “just-the-facts, ma’am” feel.

When Chi-Chi’s Chief Operating Officer Bill Zavertnik did finally arrive in Monaca more than two weeks after the outbreak was confirmed last November 3, he read a brief statement to reporters, took no questions, and then returned to corporate headquarters.

From that point forward, communications from Chi-Chi’s and its parent company, Prandium, in Irvine, Calif., came chiefly in the form of news releases and prepared statements written in language designed almost solely to avoid exacerbating the class-action lawsuits against the restaurant chain.

To make a long story short, people got madder and madder, and the class-action lawsuits are what killed the restaurant.

In other words, avoid saying stupid things like “We feel terrible for our customer. We are grateful that the customer is now recovering.”

You’re not going to avoid making people mad. But giving your apologies in some sanitized, half-hearted written statement that sound like they were hatched by some corporate lawyer will only make things worse.

In a lot of instances of corporate crisis communication, you’re going to need the lawyers to keep you out of trouble. But keep the pen out of their hands. They can edit, but they shouldn’t be creating. They need to leave it to the pros.

Filed Under: Communication, crisis communication, Public Health, Social Media Tagged With: , ,
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