This is the core driving value of 24PageBooks: Our time is too valuable to waste with filler.

BTW, if you’re not familiar with HARO, check it out. He is reinventing the PR business. And watch for an upcoming 24 book called Fire Your PR Agency: Required Reading For PR Professionals.

I’ve been working on a 24PageBook called Learn To Market, Fast. It’s my distillation of what I’ve learned about marketing in the past three years or so. My grandiose vision is that you throw out everything you think you know about marketing and focus on two things: your reputation and reaching out to people who are publicly seeking a solution for a problem that you can fix. Your reputation gets you in the door and your response to their problem gets you the business. Simplistic? Yes, when compared to the arcane brand strategy mumbo-jumbo marketing and ad agencies are pitching. They offer secret sauce in a world where nothing is secret.

The best thing about this 24PageBooks project is the discovery that subjects like this, which have had millions of words written about them over the years, can be distilled down to a brief format without really losing much, if anything. My approach is to show a business owner exactly how to do marketing in a socially connected world, regardless of the size or kind of business they have. And I’ve discovered a measurement for the success of that marketing, a very concise measurement based on some serious research by a guy named Frederick Reichheld. More about that shortly. The book should be out in a few weeks if I can pull my business partner Mike out of the sea of work he is swimming in.

Money quote:

“I’m going to quote a competitor to Mediapost, Advertising Age, but its packaged-goods reporter, Jack Neff, said it best: “BlogHer helps solve the mystery of how marketers will manage to spend money on social media despite showing relatively little interest in ads on Facebook or MySpace and the numerous free opportunities available everywhere.”

Neff than goes on to quote Jill Beraud, the Global Chief Marketing Officer of PepsiCo, who explains that wooing the mommy bloggers is a long-term ROI effort. As for the entire roster of advertisers at BlogHer, it reads like a who’s-who of the blue chip: Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, General Motors, Gymboree, Unilever, Kodak.”

Craiglist, local marketing and how it changes the landlord business

Both activities involved thinking locally rather than globally. Apartment hunting takes place entirely on Craigslist these days and this is a very good thing. Landlords don’t pay for listings in our area (they do in major markets, in part to stop scammers) and the listings can contain long descriptions and multiple photos. The old classified print ad model was based on paying per word so an apartment hunter was very limited in what you’d know before calling. Now it’s easy to screen out the dumps and get a feel for places before you contact the owners.

The net result of this local search mechanism is that landlords will be forced to clean up their places, upgrade and take better photos, a net win for the consumer and the community. After I found my new place, I mentioned it on Facebook and that I’d seen several nice units in the same building. Two friends contacted me for contact info so they could look. It turns out that the management company pays referral fees of $200- I did not know that when I posted. So with a few emails I may stand to make several hundred dollars and have some friends as neighbors. All via social media.

Skip the long strategic discussions, this is local and social

The other project is a large wiki site for a local business association- hundreds of pages covering Rochester’s downtown entertainment district with photos, video, mapping etc. (Yes, we do have a thriving downtown entertainment district with dozens of restaurants, clubs, theaters, galleries, museums, etc.) I was late to the game with the RFP process but got the project because of my social media experience. Two ad agencies were finalists prior to me but both lost when they came in with proposals that included a lot of strategic brainstorming mumbo-jumbo. The group of club and business owners were bewildered by this stuff.

My approach was to take available web 2.0 tools (Wetpaint, Flickr, YouTube and Google Maps) and show them quickly how we could organize a lot of information in a relatively short period of time at a reasonable cost. No complex strategy- my strategy statement was simple:

“The purpose of this site is to put Rochester’s East End on the map as a major entertainment destination in Upstate NY”

No brainstorming required.

Local is pragmatic and all marketing is local

The point in both of these examples is that social media must be approached with a great deal of pragmatism, particularly with projects that have a local component- and I’d argue that all marketing must have a local component. Whether I’m looking for a place to live or a place to dine, I’m not concerned about strategy and branding. I want information and input from peers.

Forget everything you know about marketing

As a marketer this means that everything you know from the past is bullshit. Advertising, publicity, brand promotion, logos, graphic design, copywriting, hype, market research (the directed kind), everything. There are no logos in social media. No one really cares what a blog looks like as long as the info is interesting. Those people who fill their Twitter page backgrounds with pitches and links don’t get followed by me. Facebook is entirely about conversation, even photos and games are designed to encourage comment streams.

Marketing was a guessing game

Am I being glib with the ‘bullshit’ distinction? No, because its true- we never really knew ahead of time what marketing strategies and tactics would actually work. This was always the not very well-hidden ’secret’ of marketing: Marketers, in spite of all their creativity, focus groups, panels and strategic brand management, never actually know why some things work and others don’t. Until now.

The market tells us what to make and how to improve it, so listen up. Go beta.

To be a conversational marketer you have to be a part of the conversation, a participant. That means you start on the sidelines and listen to learn what others want, need, wish for and dislike. Then you go back to our company or client and you tell them so they can make those products. In the meantime you identify influencers and you share beta prototypes with them, emphasizing that these are beta because they still require the market to test them, to kick the tires, break the interface, find the bugs and suggest changes. Google, for example, excels at the beta release model, in fact they don’t take most products out of beta- they continuously improve based on input and how customers use the products.

Transparency is your only choice

During this stage you enter the conversation, making it totally clear that you are on the product team, and you convey the input back to your design team and your customer experience team. You also set them up to start listening and conversing. That’s the entire conversational marketing model.
No ads. No logo or branding. A simple name that’s memorable. No radio, TV, outdoor or banners. No girls in bikinis handing out freebies to drunken idiots.

Are we really abandoning creative? No, we’re substituting discipline.

Can you do videos and white papers? You can do anything you want as long as it adds to the conversation in a positive manner. If an ad gets you talking about the product with others then it may be valuable. However, that ad must have been conceived within the context of an existing conversation. Here’s an example:
Apple is running an iPhone ad on the back cover of New Yorker. It targets small business users and consists of an interface shot with application icons. There are call-outs to each icon that feature a quick description of the app and its small business value. I read the entire ad because I’ve been having an ongoing conversation with friends about using an iPhone to run my business from any location. Apple knows that conversation is going on and they made that ad specifically for me (and the thousands of mes out there participating in that conversation). It is a highly targeted, value-adding ad that supports the conversation.

I’d suggest that anyone in the marketing business think this through. It is not a change you have any control over. You can’t slow it down or influence it. You can learn from it and enhance it.
Join the conversation.

Build a dedicated social media team and business group

First, look outside of your existing team. It is very difficult to take the creative and media buying mindset of the agency culture and fit it into social media. You cannot ‘buy’ social media nor do you need ‘creative’ to get a message across. I recommend starting a new business with new employees to build a social media practice, a business that your agency refers clients to. There are many good reasons to take this approach:

• You avoid the problem of familiarity- your people are going to focus on what they are comfortable with and social interaction with customers is seldom their forte
• You need new people that are communicators because they are going to be facilitating a new form of customer service
• You do not need designers, copywriters, creative directors or media buyers. Nor do you need any silly agency titles like ‘brand ambassadors’.
• You can still use your agency infrastructure for billing, etc.
• Your social practice needs its own dedicated account management people. I know from experience that this is critical because they are selling an entirely different service and existing account people will have a hard time making the jump.
• Most important: You are a consulting practice. You’re going to get the clients’ social media campaign up and running, train the internal client staff and sell the senior management. You are not going to do it for them. This is a recipe for disaster that is probably the single most common mistake agencies make in social media.

The A side and B side of social media marketing

There are two sides of any social media marketing plan that your new business will be offering. The A side is the development of social media platforms that customers can interact with- company-owned social networks, blogs, micro-blogs (Twitter is a micro-blog), wikis, etc. These need to be set up, filled with relevant content and managed, ultimately by the client.

The B side is the engagement strategy. Engagement involves the monitoring of social media for keyword mentions related to the client brand and a modulated response to those conversations. It also involves regularly participating in targeted conversations on blogs and social networks associated with your clients’ market(s). This is done via commenting, responding to Tweets, adding value to social networks, etc.

The ultimate goals of these activities include:

• Reputation Management. Ensuring that client brands are viewed positively.
• Risk Management. Directly dealing with problems as soon as they emerge.
• Lead Generation. Always have an offer when you are engaging. It might be a white paper, a webinar, a free version, etc. You’re going to have a dedicated landing page with a shortened URL that you can use when commenting, tweeting, etc. If you don’t know what this means you better call me ASAP!

Lead Generation is the ultimate goal and it is measurable

A note about Lead Generation: Social media is the single best lead generation source we’ve ever seen. The ability to generate highly motivated and qualified leads is unique to social media and it is your selling proposition. This is the prime reason you need a separate unit to handle social media. Social media, as a marketing tool, is going to rapidly eclipse all of the activities your agency has been using in the past. This represents a threat to your existing employees and they will often respond by denying its effectiveness and getting defensive. This is because, in social media, everyone is held to measurable standards, based on results, for their work.

Unlike advertising, social media is highly measurable for ROI

There is the old saw about knowing that half of advertising works but not knowing which half. In social media we know what works. Everything is measurable to a great degree and you can build an ROI model. This is because social media is a vast, searchable, public database of information about your clients’ brands, reputations, products and services, a database uninfluenced by design. You cannot create it, manage it, mold it or eliminate it. You can take advantage of it in many ways. This is the basis of your social media practice.

Coming Soon: Part 2, the team structure.

Are you building a social media practice in your agency? We should talk. Contact me at martinedic.com