Innovation or comfort zone?

Humans are largely creatures of habit. We like the familiar. So when companies launch new and exciting products and services they can fall victim to their own innovation.

I was reading an article last week about a Microsoft vendor’s win over Google in a bid for the email hosting contract for the state of California. California could have been a big win for Google – which has been pushing its cloud-based offering as an alternative to more traditional systems, such as those offered by Microsoft – but it was pretty clear about what the state wanted in an e-mail system, and it sounded a lot like what Microsoft was offering. It had simply put together a list of requirements based on what it had had in the past, what users were familiar with.

As Google is learning fast, you can’t always give people what you think they want or need. Sometimes you have to give them what they’re asking for.

But I’m not discouraging selling innovative solutions, far from it; it’s how progress is made. Many users would like the confidence to adopt new ways of working, but are just more comfortable with what they know. So as marketers it’s our job to help your customers and prospects make this move with you.

It means changing mindsets and making the unfamiliar seem more familiar. As rather intelligent and social creatures, people like to chat with one another. The desire to communicate is part of their nature. As Marketers we can use this fondness for habit to our advantage. Get people talking about your new solution; get it out there – physically or virtually. Events, webinars, customer portals, and blogs and tweets will all encourage customers to explore your offering.

Google may have had more success if it had been more attentive to California’s current state of mind.

Size matters

I had an interesting meeting with a new client today. We often try and convince clients to try different approaches to engage their prospects and customers more. This client beat me to it. From the off they said that they wanted to tell a story to enthral the reader.

There was a time when whitepapers were long, technical pieces, often with a large element of blue-sky thinking; and case studies were quite in-depth reviews of a project. Driven by the perception of a time-poor audience, bombarded by thousands of marketing messages, we’ve seen pieces get shorter and shorter. But there are dangers in making everything shorter. Not only is there the risk of ‘dumbing down’ the message, but it can also take the human interest out of the story. Edited down to a curt list of bullet points, the customer and their story become implausible and impossible to emphasise with. Simplified to appeal to a broader audience, the whitepaper can become nothing more than a glorified brochure—that’s fine, but not when you are trying to demonstrate competence and thought-leadership to technical decision makers.

At HN we aren’t bound by industry-standard terms. We look at each project and agree with the client what length, tone and level of technical detail is most appropriate to the audience and therefore be best at achieving their objectives. Why not have a look at our article The resurgence of storytelling, or give us a call and put us to the test.

Have we forgotten the sizzle?

Are you familiar with the phrase sell the sizzle not the sausage? I sometimes think that in the rush to ‘sell’, the sizzle gets overlooked. From my personal experience I remember when my desk, sited on the floor above the office cafeteria, caused me to pile on pounds in just a few weeks after they began cooking up bacon rolls at 10am. The smell sold that bacon roll to me far better than any two-for-one pricing offer or even a picture. It helped me imagine the experience of holding and tasting that bacon role. Mmmm. I got the habit under control eventually but took a lot of willpower!

The better known anecdote is that of the Mercedes car sales person who outsold his colleagues month after month yet only used up a fraction of his allotted test-drive time. How? By showing them the logo on the key fob and talking to them about craftsmanship, prestige and how it felt to be the owner of a Merc…the sizzle not the sausage.

The way you talk about your products and services is all part of the sizzle. This is the power of content. Once you remember that your customer wants to buy into the feeling and the story not just the commercials of your proposition — the ethos and pathos, not just the logos — you can truly create content that sells. Hard facts and financial offers can pique interest, but it is these softer qualities that persuade, that help your prospective customers imagine what it would be like to be the owner of one of your solutions. How important is it, therefore, that all your content, in print, online and for face-to-face communication is written in a way that helps people engage with you, almost taste your brand and fire their imagination? Of course that’s what we do so our answer’s obvious.

Personalisation: does it still work?

How many of you still receive emails with your first name in the subject line? Does it make you feel like a valued customer? Or is it just an old trick that’s passed its best?

Personally, if I don’t recognise the sender, I automatically flag these emails as spam. And to be honest, even when I do, the fact that they have my name on file just doesn’t make a difference to me.

In fairness, this used to work. Maybe only a few years ago the use of personalisation in the subject line still increased open rates. But the wow-factor has definitely subsided. These days anyone using a mail merge function can send an email with my name on it. It’s just too easy.

If you really want to build a relationship and engage with your audience, tuning your content for the recipient will see a far greater return on your investment.

I’m not suggesting that you need to stop using your customers’ names altogether. I still really enjoy those emails saying “Happy Birthday, Caroline!”; or the postcard of a beach, with my name written in the sand, to remind me about the holiday insurance I bought this time last year. But the message is still tailored to me – making it personal.

We’’e always encouraging our clients to be sensitive to their recipient’s interests – and that applies to any form of communication. What will they want to hear about? Whether you’re updating them on their account with you, letting them know about an event local to them, or tailoring your content based on the interests they’ve exhibited in previous interactions, make it relevant. Genuinely put yourself in your recipients’ shoes. If you can’t think of at least one very good
scenario in which this content is the answer to a customer’s prayer, don’t send it.

At the end of the day, the best personalisation is relevancy; without it you’re really just a polite spammer.

3 in 1: social networking

The emergence of the personal brand | Is corporate social networking the equivalent of embarrassing dad dancing?| What’s the future of online privacy?

After a long period of social networking news being dominated by stellar valuations of Facebook, recent days have seen many reports about a flood of funding going to their competitors. So what’s turned the tide? Bebo is shutting down and Twitter’s 3000%+ growth has slowed to double digits. The answer is not external, it’s Facebook’s own hubris and failure to appreciate their members’ privacy concerns.

No doubt Facebook’s management are very well aware of the cautionary tale presented by MySpace. It was the dominant force in social networking and their position seemed unassailable too. Back in 2005 they were bought by Rupert Murdoch for $327m. Last summer it was forced to lay off a third of its staff after failing to meet the audience figures in an advertising deal with Google.

Privacy issues aren’t new to Facebook, they’ve had several past indiscretions. Over the years, Facebook has opened up access to more and more of its users’ information (see this fascinating infographic). The problem is that social networking isn’t just about your friends anymore. We’ve all seen the stories of people being caught out when they’ve claimed to be ill, or saying something derogatory about their company. And who would want their gran to see those photos from that big night out?

Social networking has created the personal brand. A great example of the dangers is the parliamentary candidate the Labour party ditched during the election due to some crude tweets sent as a student. I’m glad it didn’t exist when I was a student! But there are good examples too. Columnists such as David Mitchell (@RealDMitchell) and Victoria Coren (@VictoriaCoren) have become publicists, promoting their own work and by extension the publications in which they appear – the Guardian and Observer newspapers in this case. And it’s not just those in the media, tweeters and bloggers like Allen Kelly (@AllenKelly) of VeriSign mixes news on the security products offered by the company that he works for and personal opinions and updates.

And that’s good! Too many companies have felt obliged to have a social networking presence, but instead of learning the new media just mechanically churn out dull updates linking to their staid press releases. If you want to make a success of social networking, you have to have a genuine commitment to engaging with your audience. This has to have executive support as social networking needs to be timely, it can’t be subject to a laborious approval process. You can just tweet/facebook links to your website, but that’s no more than an RSS feed. Give your presence a personality, have an opinion, and you’ll see much better results.

We get mail

The other day an email landed in one of our inboxes and we passed it around in wonder; we couldn’t believe how long-winded and awkward it was. Here’s the opening:

In the midst of this dynamic, hyper-competitive global economy, understanding and addressing the ever-evolving needs and requirements of every customer is increasingly more complex yet essential. In response, a complete shift is happening in the way marketers are pursuing buyers and consumers, as well as addressing the needs of the sales channels. These realities provide immense challenges and opportunities for marketers.

Did you make it all the way to the end? If you were the recipient, would you continue reading?

To be fair, it wasn’t long ago that the trend was predominantly for a style of copy only slightly toned down from this example. We weren’t allowed to address ‘the business audience’ as if they were normal people who might appreciate plain speaking. There was a whole other language to use, ‘business language’; and it was unengaging, passive and wordy. Why say ‘in’ when you can say ‘in the midst of’? Why be satisfied with addressing customer needs if you can address both their needs and their requirements? Oh wait, not just address, but understand also. And we’re still in the first sentence!

The tendency to produce over-complex and verbose copy came, we think, from the belief that wordiness conveys seriousness and authority; and that adding adjectives makes copy more powerful. Neither of these beliefs has ever been true.

But things have changed. While each brand is doing it slightly differently, our clients are asking us for a much more relaxed style. They want copy that talks directly to their audience without fuss or embellishment. Have we writers finally managed to convince everyone that its possible to be both authoritative and concise? And that all those adjectives dilute the message?

Possibly; but I think the change really stems from accepting that people don’t expect, or want, to be addressed in a radically different way when they walk into work. It may never be appropriate to address the CIO or IT manager of a target company as if they’re your mate; but (in the UK and US at least) it’s become acceptable to address them as real human beings. That’s a trend we can only encourage.

Finding the ideal match

Finding the right agency is a lot like online dating. First off, expressing who you are and what you are looking for in a couple of hundred words isn’t easy. 5’8” and slightly chubby is simple enough, but are you adventurous? I’m more adventurous than Auntie Margaret, but not nearly as daring as Wild Sarah, so what do I put? Likewise, do you want an agency that pushes your creative or technological boundaries? And just like dating you might have to make compromises; the agency that produces the best visuals might not be very good at the logistics – of course two agencies are more likely to agree to a three-way relationship. But no matter how good a relationship looks on paper, how many boxes a potential partner ticks, there’s always that elusive “chemistry”. You can work at building rapport, but it will never be as good as those rare occasions when you meet somebody who is on the same wavelength.

So how do you wade through all the profiles out there and find the right agency for you? It’s fairly traditional to get a handful of agencies to pitch for a specific project. But is that really the best way? That approach is akin to speed dating, gambling everything on just a few minutes. And preparing for a pitch is a challenging and expensive process – for both the client and the suitors. Which is why I was interested to read about how Santander is approaching finding a new agency:

http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/news/1008409/Santander-overhaul-UK-brand-positioning/

What do you think of this approach? Do you have any advice or horror stories about finding an agency that you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you.

Or if you’d simply like to find out more about us, check out our profile.

Interesting musings on the English language

We are quite a geeky bunch at HN, or should that be nerdy. Working with this team of insatiably curious people is one of the reasons I love my job; we find all sorts of facts interesting and enjoy sharing a new discovery. I must say that most threads pertain to language or technology of one form or another, which is helpful when you spend your days writing about IT. And of course, Google is our friend helping to not just quench a thirst for knowledge by providing answers, but creating a new line of enquiry as you stumble across something interesting while searching for something completely different.

So, in the interests of welcoming our new blog readers to the HN geek community here’s a few esoteric musings from this morning’s raid on the web.

Did you know that there are more words in the English language than any other (probably)? AskOxford explains the challenge of actually counting the number of words because it is hard to define what constitutes a word…is ‘dog’ one word or two, for example, since it can be a noun or a verb. AskOxford suggest that there are at least 250,000 distinct English words. Other web sources claim 500,000-750,000 but this might include technical words and inflections. You may also be curious to know that the average mature English speaker can call on about 50,000 words.

Our language is so rich because although it is of Dutch/German origin, it was heavily influenced by Norman French after 1066 and by Latin, as the language of the church and scholars. We greedily added all this new vocabulary as it came along. And we continue to do so at quite a pace: English is widely used internationally and this encourages new words and derivatives to move into everyday use. Some estimates talk about 20,000 neologisms every year; OED production is around 2,500. At this rate the a Blade Runner like vernacular may be closer than we think.

A new game

A friend was recounting tales from a recent team-building course—you know the kind of thing where there’s construction of some mode of transport, usually to cross water, and biscuits available with every round of coffee. One of the early exercises was to pass a ball around the team such that every hand touched it. That was the only rule. The team, as you might too, arranged themselves in a circle and around the ball went. I forget the time, but let’s say it took a minute to do a loop. “Do it faster and faster,” encouraged the facilitator. And so they did, and with practice achieved a much shorter time. At some point they were at the limit—and they knew it. This is when the facilitator told them to cut at least another 5 seconds. “Not possible,” they all said. “It is,” he said.

So used were they by now to their circle that it took a long time for them to accept that this configuration wasn’t a rule. By breaking the circle, forming a column of hands and literally dropping the ball through all the hands, the best result was achieved. But these fantastic results needed a new perspective before they could be envisaged.

Apart from giving you the ‘hack’ for your next team-building event, the purpose of sharing this thought for the day was to reinforce the sentiments of Seth Godin’s blog A car is not merely a faster horse; that the new tools available to us as marketers are not just digital versions of the old. EDM is not DM; a webinar is not a seminar. The new media opens up new opportunities for how we communicate and build relationships with our audience. We all need to recognise that the old rules don’t have to apply and, to get great results we need to get with the new game plan.

Trust me, I’m a marketer

It’s possibly a case of ‘new car’ syndrome, you know, when you are thinking of buying a new car of a certain make, model (or colour) and all of a sudden you see that type of car everywhere. But I think not. I think there really is hyperbole at work when it comes to social media at the moment. Go on, shoot me down.

Some of our clients are running ‘thought leadership’ campaigns about it; Gartner is claiming it will be the main means of business communications for 20% of us by 2014—and that’s just four years away. Everyone sees the potential, many are searching for the ‘killer app’ that will revitalise their marketing. But this is about more than taking a ‘do you want a tweet with that’ approach to marketing comms.

To illustrate, I liked Julian Tanner’s article for Fresh Business Thinking last month and the anecdote about an athlete needing to listen to his expert coach rather than the crowd. How many people have changed their minds about a purchase or a restaurant booking based on a posted review? Quite a few of us, apparently, and yet very few of us knew the reviewer or the reviewer’s credentials/motivation in making the review that we took on trust.

The power of social media is in its ability to build communities of trust. That takes more than blogging, or tweeting or Facebook—although they may all feature. They are simply the mechanisms that carry the message to your audience. We associate the term ‘Spam’ with email, but it’s just as relevant with social media. How many companies have promised you useful information and instead bombarded you with completely irrelevant sales messages? How many companies have talked about wanting to build a relationship with you but never asked what you want or given up after a few months (no doubt because it couldn’t be shown to produce enough leads)?

Social networking has opened up lots of exciting new technologies. But I bet somebody said the same when they first thought of using email for marketing purposes. Some rules don’t change much. It’s still vital to get the message right in the first place, create content that will appeal to our intended communities and stick to our promises.

What do you think? I’m keen to hear your thoughts so please feel free to add your comments below.