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Social Media Marketing Lessons from a Broken Pilot G2 Pen

February 6, 2012 By 4 Comments
Broken Pilot G-2 .5 mm penWhat a $2 pen taught me about the power of strangers.

My pen died last week.

Normally, this is not big news. In fact, this may be the lamest thing I’ve ever written about, and that includes my “this is my first post” post on Blogger back in 2003.

Broken Pilot G2 .5 mm pen

It gave its life in service of my words.

But it’s a notable event, because I want to brag about my pen, and also talk about the power of strangers in the world of social media marketing.

Social media has turned the marketing world on its ear, because it has disrupted marketing altogether. It used to be that we needed professional marketers to tell us what was cool/great/awesome about a particular product. If the paid professionals told us, then it must be true. Or at least, if it wasn’t true, their shouting generally drowned out the one or two detractors who hated the product. In fact, if there was something we didn’t like about a particular product, we got our talking points from a competitors’ commercial, much like talking points in a political ad.

But several years ago, when we started using early social media, like AOL, and creating websites with comments, we started relying on each other to tell us what was cool/great/awesome about a particular product.

That’s how I became such a fan of my Pilot G2 pen. In 2004, I had just entered the world of Moleskine notebooks, way before they became douche-y, and realized I couldn’t use just any old pen in the same notebooks used by Hemingway, Picasso, and Bruce Chatwin. So I went to the Moleskinerie website, an online community for and by Moleskine fanatics, and looked for any recommendations for a good pen. As it turns out, a few months earlier, someone had posed that very question, and the fans weighed in. In fact, it was one of the most commented-on posts they had.

The commenters far and away raved about the Pilot G2 pen, the 0.5 mm size, so I bought one and immediately loved it. I loved it so much, I have used nothing but Pilot G2 0.5 mm pens for the last 7 years, even carrying the same exact pen for over four years (I cannibalized the cartridges from a box of G2s to replace the empty one, rather than just replacing the entire pen). That pen finally broke last summer, so I had to pull out a second one, which broke last week and leaked all over the place.

The cool thing about this is, for as often as I use this pen, to have only one break or go bad in nearly eight years, I’m very pleased. (I’m especially pleased I found it before it leaked into my shirt pocket.) That’s a pretty good testament to quality — to have one cartridge go bad in 8 years of using them? I’ve never even had a car that long without developing problems.

But the coolest thing? I bought this pen based on the advice of a bunch of people I had never met. I didn’t need the Levenger people telling me what was cool about the $237 Pelikan, or Faber-Castell’s four-color booklet on the long history of the Faber-Castell name. All it took was several random comments from a bunch of strangers who were passionate about a notebook and were choosy about their pens.

Traditional Marketers May Be Out of Work Soon

Marketers who haven’t yet embraced social media need to take note: you’re basically out of a job. Consumers are no longer being persuaded by your beautiful graphics and well-designed websites and brochures. We’re being informed by them, but we’re not being persuaded. Instead, we’re persuading each other.

Italian artist Luc on 24 hours of Le Mans - he sketched and wrote about the highlights of the auto race in his Moleskine notebook

We’re getting advice from each other on where to eat, what to watch, which computers to get for our kids, what cameras to buy, what cars to drive, and yes, even what pens to write with.

Marketers who want to take advantage of this should provide places for your customers to talk to each other. You should get your products and/or services into the hands of influencers. Moleskine went so far as to buy Moleskinerie.com and leave it in place, so Moleskine users could share what they were doing with their notebooks, like Italian artist Luc, who uploaded several photos of his sketches and notes about the 24 Hours of Le Mans auto race.

The smart marketers aren’t telling us what’s cool/great/awesome about their products. They’re providing places for the rest of us to tell each other. They’re sponsoring special niche networks on Ning and other platforms for their target audience. They’re getting their products into the hands of influencers. Or in the case of Fiskars and their Fiskateers (which we discuss in No Bullshit Social Media), they’re turning it into a niche community and a research and development channel. They’re basically letting us do all the work for them, and are getting out of the way.

Social media marketing is disrupting the way traditional marketing is done, and giving us all of the power. Now if I can just get someone to send me another pen, I’ll be happy.

Photo credit: Broken pen –
Moleskine Notebook – Luc on Not Not Tana

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    Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : Social Media Marketing Lessons from a Broken Pilot G-2 Pen  •  Keywords : social media marketing, traditional marketing, Moleskine, Pilot G-2 pen  • 
    Filed Under: Disruption, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Writing Tagged With: , , ,

    Measuring Social Media vs. Traditional Media

    November 9, 2010 By 1 Comment

    The one advantage social media marketing has over traditional marketing is accurate measurement.

    With tools like Google Analytics, Google Webmasters, SEOMoz, and even bit.ly, you can see how well your corporate social media campaigns are working. (Doug Karr has a great post, Your Analytics is Missing the Mark, on the different social media tools you can use.) I can use these tools to measure my social media performance, down to the visitor, the second, and the penny. Photo of an old tape measure

    But you can’t do that with traditional marketing.

    Why Can’t You Predict the ROI of Social Media?

    Last week, I talked about why it’s important that — at least in early discussions — you ignore the question of “what’s the ROI of social media?”. That’s because, as Scott Stratten said, you can substitute words like “Twitter” with “talking.” Then you’re asking questions like “what’s the ROI of ‘talking?’” “why should we be ‘talking’ with our customers?”

    Part of the reason is that social media is so new, it’s difficult to say what your ROI is going to be. For example, we have one client that has $20 million in sales each year, and we helped him grow his sales by 6% through social media. We have another client whose business is big enough to employ four people, and she tripled her sales — that’s 300% growth — through social media.

    So, our range of success is 6% to 300%. That’s a pretty big range. We could split the two and say “on average, you can expect 153% growth,” but that wouldn’t be accurate or honest. And we could say “you can expect anywhere from 6% – 300% growth,” but that would also be misleading.

    However, what we can tell you is that we can accurately measure every step of your social media efforts, from the number of people who visit your blog, how they got there, which stories they read, how long they read it, whether they read another story, and did they follow your sales funnel?

    But you can’t do that with traditional marketing.

    Traditional marketing can’t do that

    The reason the ROI question for social media is rather silly is because traditional marketing can’t measure those same numbers with the same amount of accuracy. To be fair, traditional marketing has a long history of measurement, and they can give you basic numbers, like “the industry ROI on direct mail is 2%,” or “100,000 people usually watch this station locally on Sunday nights.” But they’re still missing a big piece of the pie.

    • Cable TV stations like to tell you how many homes get their channel, not how many people watch it. The Golf Channel boasts their channel is received by 110 million homes, but they don’t tell people that their daily viewership averages around 77,000.
    • Magazines and newspapers will tout their readership, but they can’t tell you how many people read a particular story on a particular day, or how many people saw your ad.
    • Billboard companies can give you an approximation of how many people drive by, but they can’t tell you whether they actually looked at the billboard, or how many times people have seen it.

    And bottom line, none of these marketing channels can tell you which of your ads compelled people to buy, or which one contributed to increased sales.

    The closest you can come to measuring these channels is by putting channel-specific phone numbers and websites on the ads. If someone calls that number or visits that website, you can assume they responded to your ad. But you still don’t know how many people saw it or how many times they saw it, and you can’t monitor overall traffic.

    Profit is the most important measurement

    Of course, the only thing that really ultimately matters is your profit. It’s not just increased sales (although that’s important), it’s also reduced costs in customer service, travel, and even printing. If social media can help you answer customer questions while reducing phone hours, improve networking to help grow relationships without traveling, and disseminate marketing information without printing out brochures.

    The analytics tools that exist can show you all of these things. And by tying those figures in with your customer service, sales, and marketing departments, you can easily figure out how social media is making or saving you money.

    But you can’t do that with traditional marketing.

    Photo credit: Wikimedia

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      Filed Under: Lead Generation, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, Traditional Media Tagged With: , , , ,

      Don’t Measure Web 2.0 with Old School Expectations

      February 15, 2010 By 1 Comment

      This post was originally published on April 11, 2009, at my DeckersMarketing.com blog, now defunct.

      My friend and fellow social media guy Kyle Lacy asked a question on Smaller Indiana about whether we should measure Web 2.0 with Web 1.0 tools.

      Tape measure

      You can't measure social media marketing the same way you measure traditional marketing.

      The problem, Kyle says, is that Marketing 1.0 folks are expecting old school results with 2.0 tools. They still expect to measure thousands and thousands of views, like they used to see with TV and radio commercials, billboards, and newspaper ads.

      Even as recently as five years ago here in Central Indiana, TV and billboards reached hundreds of thousands, radio and newspapers reached tens of thousands. Across the country, Web 2.0 is only reaching hundreds and thousands – tens of thousands if you’re lucky, hundreds of thousands if you’re Amazon, Microsoft, or Apple.

      These “low numbers” are having a chilling effect on some marketers, especially the Marketing 1.0 folks, because they’re used to seeing the BI-I-I-I-G numbers. They have these too-high expectations because they have been lied to by traditional advertising and PR.

      The Golf Channel’s Inflated Numbers

      On the Golf Channel’s website, they tell us “the Golf Channel has a global reach of almost 110 million homes.”

      Ooh, squeals the marketer in capitalistic delight, if I advertise on the Golf Channel, my ad will be beamed into 110 million homes.

      Not so. Who typically watches the Golf Channel? Golfers. And how many of them are there? According to the National Golf Foundation, in 2008, that number was 29.5 million Americans. That’s not even 10% of the entire country.

      In other words, the Golf Channel wants us to think they’re reaching 110 million homes. That may be, but that’s not how many people might watch it — 29.5 million. And of those, how many are actually watching it? It sure ain’t 29.5 million.

      The Golf Channel won’t even say. But Sports Business Daily did. They said — probably to the chagrin of The Golf Channel — the average daily viewership is 77,000, while their primetime viewership runs around 131,000.

      Let’s see, 77,000 viewers divided by 110 million homes is. . . .07%. Not even one-tenth of one percent the Golf Channel likes to brag about. But you can bet every Golf Channel ad salesperson is telling their customers, “We have a reach of 110 million homes.”

      But the Golf Channel isn’t alone in these misleading figures. Newspapers and magazines like to boast about print runs, but don’t mention actual readership (often less than half). Radio’s Arbitron ratings and TV’s Nielsen ratings are based on surveys and estimates, not actual numbers of viewers. (And don’t get me started on cable companies that lump in dozens of stations no one watches and then count them to pad their advertising rate cards. Like I really want 12 different home shopping channels or an HD version of the International Military History Channel.)

      Therein lies the problem. There isn’t a completely accurate way to measure the number of viewers on a TV channel, but marketers have been conditioned to think they’re reaching 110 million.

      The same is true for PR. Let’s say a newspaper has a print run of 500,000 copies but a real readership of 300,000. The PR person will say, “we reached as many as 500,000 readers,” but they can’t tell how many people read an article, clipped it out, sent it to others, or stuck it at the bottom of the bird cage.

      Why We Can’t Measure Traditional Media

      PR, traditional marketing, and media people like to say they can measure their efforts by measuring sales, web views, numbers called, etc. They run a few commercials, or get some airtime and column inches, and look for a spike in sales.

      “Look, sales went up right after we ran our commercial,” they say. “We made it all better.”

      But that’s not completely accurate. They can’t prove the cause-and-effect of their efforts. Was it their latest ads? Or the previous set of ads? An unknown newspaper article? Coupons? A full moon?

      I agree, the PR/ advertising most likely led to the increased sales. But which commercials at what time? Which story on what TV news program? And how many of those particular commercials led to a particular percentage of sales?

      There is no piece of software on earth that will tell me that 10% of Friday’s sales increase happened because of Thursday’s 6:00 TV news segment, and not the article in the newspaper. And I’ve got nothing but surveys and estimates to tell me that I need to focus more attention on the NBC news, not ABC.

      We Can Measure Social Media Though

      Now that we’ve got some great tools to measure social media, people aren’t seeing numbers of millions or even hundreds of thousands, they’re seeing thousands, and sometimes even hundreds. (And sadly, these are the numbers they were probably getting all along.)

      And marketing people, used to that 110 million figure, are writing off Web 2.0, because it doesn’t have the same numbers as big media. Of course, they write it off, not knowing important figures like commercial viewership, or how many people are fast-forwarding through their commercials on the DVR.

      Sports marketer Pat Coyle often writes about the problems he’s facing with marketers who are very interested in in-stadium sponsorships and reaching 60,000 people per week for 8 – 10 home games, but balk at sponsoring a social network with 20,000 raving fans because they don’t have “high click-rates.”

      What these marketers are missing is the passion of the raving fan that social media harnesses. A raving fan who finds the latest song, article, or video online will tell their friends about it through Twitter, post it on their blog, or even post it on a discussion forum. Their friends pick it up, and forward it on through the same channels. This ultimately drives traffic to the website, thanks to the exponential growth of they tell two friends, and they tell two friends. This leads to increased sales or viewership, which leads to more raving fans, which leads to increased sales, and so on, and so on.

      The benefit of social media is that we can measure the passion of Web 2.0 users, and how much they love the company or brand. We can use services like Radian6 to measure the real reach of our marketing and PR 2.0 efforts.

      Programs like Radian6 tell us who the raving fans of our brands are. One raving fan is worth more to a company than 200 people who glanced at the TV ad or raced past a billboard at 70 miles per hour. The raving fan tells their friends, who in turn become fans and tell their friends. The cool thing is, social media measuring tools can follow that train. It shows where the raving fans are talking, and how often they’re doing it. It will show us who that first raving fan was, and how much of the actual number of sales they created.

      Social media is still new enough that there isn’t a standard method of measurement, but that’s because there are too many methods. We’re spoiled for choices, and because this is such a new way of doing things, the people who find out the best way and can standardize it will own social media measurement.

      Meanwhile, marketers need to learn that if they want to learn how to measure the effectiveness of their online campaign, they need to begin understanding the emotion and passion of many of their customers. If you can harness that, then you’ll finally begin creating the traffic –– and sales –– you’ve been looking for.

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        Filed Under: Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, Traditional Media Tagged With: , , ,