Know your RSS from your elbow

We’ve been quiet here for too long. I could make a list of excuses but that’s exactly what they’d be; excuses. The simple truth is that we’ve not been holding up our end of the bargain. We’ve not been talking. It’s time, therefore, to interrupt our interruption. And that reminds me of this video I saw posted first by Chris Brogan. It’s easy to nod in amused superiority but it’s equally easy to fail to see how regularly we can fall into the same patterns of behaviour.

Over the last week I’ve been immersing myself in Twitter. It can become addictive but for all the right reasons: there is a lot of valuable information and insight to be had. One of the guys I follow - Igor Poltavskiy (known to his Twitter friends as Scabr) - just tweeted a link to this BBC article from Bill Thompson, which makes some great points about Twitter. At the same time, Bill shares my own disappointment about missing SXSW - next year, definitely! - but points out how following the tweets on Twitter were a fairly good second best.

Last year I waited for people to blog about SXSW: this year I was following them ‘in action’.

Dell continues to invest in it’s direct2dell blogging group, with an announcement that it has launched ‘In the Clouds‘, a blog that discusses the future of cloud computing.

Perhaps the biggest insight into how dell have adopted blogging comes from within the announcement (titled: more conversations…):

“From the beginning, the purpose of Direct2Dell has been to educate and to support our customers on a wide variety of topics that they care about. This blog has grown since those early days. And that growth has encouraged more Dell folks to want to have conversations with our customers.”

Dell’s strategy is also now including other web 2.0 channels - youtube, flickr and twitter to extend their conversation, and reach their customers in new ways.

So it was written 5 years ago, which is the equivalent to about 57.3 human years on the Internet, but Robert Scoble was clearly on to something when he wrote the corporate blog manifesto. Read it, print it out, pin it above your computer and trust in its wisdom.

It’s what we (passionately) believe should be at the heart of your blogging and marketing strategy. Read it here.

Chris Brogan (see blogroll) has sparked a good debate about categories of conversation with his latest post. More than anything, this is a great example of how asking the right question can lead to an outpouring of useful thinking. Chris seeded the debate by having a go at putting types of conversation into categories and then asking “Am I missing anything?”

How can anyone with an opinion fail to rise to that?

There are many companies out there who seem scared to ask open questions like that. Or like, “What don’t you like about our latest product?” Sure, they may conduct some surveys and bury the answers. I believe that the company who does it openly and who then responds and takes criticism both as valid and as input to the next iteration of their product line, will leave the businesses lurking in the shadows in permanent darkness.

Today’s FT carries a short piece on some research recently carried out by Cranfield School of Management on behalf of Pipex Business. The upshot of the report is that many SMEs are struggling to see the real benefit of internet use.

Here is the most telling sentence:

The report concludes that the popularity of online communication in society has created more competitive markets and more picky customers.

Imagine that. Basically, what that sentence says is that customers are finding ways to get better information before making choices. And businesses are suffering because of it. The report’s co-author - Andrew Burke - draws a dispiriting conclusion: he thinks that widespread uptake of internet use means that SMEs struggle to gain competitive advantage with it.

Now, pardon me, but that really is a case of looking at things the wrong way round. Or, as we say in online marketing circles, RSS about T/T.

The majority of the 422 businesses that took part in the survey need to stop and think about their customers. It’s apparent that the company’s use of the internet is currently passive. There is no sense that they feel they should be trying to drive a conversation. If their customers are looking for information, what are they doing to provide it? If they want to seek competitive advantage, they should be looking to what they offer, not what the technology is doing.

If all businesses are doing the same thing, to stand out you must do one of two things: be remarkable in your sector or change sector. How do you become remarkable? Start off by changing what you do that everyone else does. Get rid of your dull corporate web site and replace it with a blog, for instance. Create a forum for all your customers to post up complaints about your service. Stop issuing press releases to media outlets that never use them and write pieces that will interest your customers instead.

Above all, change.

This is the final post in my short series on listening. In the previous two (here and here) I looked at why listening was so important for companies attempting to find new ways of connecting with their customers. This post is a practical look at some of the ways to make listening a conscious action.

Al Alvarez is a wonderful writer. He writes criticism, essays, non-fiction studies of subjects as diverse as poker, mountaineering, divorce, and working on oil rigs. He’s also a poet and a novelist and has written a superb autobiography called “Where Did It All Go Right?”. In a recent series of lectures - now published in book form as “The Writer’s Voice” - he introduces his subject like this:

“…in order to write well you must first learn how to listen. And that, in turn, is something writers have in common with their readers. Reading well means opening your ears to the presence behind the words and knowing which notes are true and which are false.”

There are two key points here. Firstly, that writers and readers share a common trait; and secondly, the ability to detect what’s authentic. But let’s leave the world of literature and apply these insights to social marketing. Traditional marketing ‘listened’ through surveys and opinion polls, market research and measuring media coverage. All, quite obviously, driven from ‘above’ and producing results that could easily be interpreted in whatever way best suited the marketers. There was no way to gauge what was authentic, in other words. Worse, the only voices heard were those both willing to be interrupted and to respond. Over time, this method almost guarantees that the marketers and the market are heading on separate paths.

Finding the conversation
To start listening, you need to find the conversation. You want to know what people are saying about your products and your company. Given the size of the internet and the vast numbers of people using it, this might seem an impossible task. Luckily, however, there are tools that make the task slightly less Herculean. Here are three simple methods of determining where you are being discussed:

• Google alerts - anyone can set up an alert on Google and, whenever your search term (eg. “purple king-sized super widget”) is found by Google, you’ll receive an email pointing to the link.
• del.icio.us - this takes a bit more work but if anyone has created a shared bookmark and tagged it with your company name or your product name, it will be here. You can widen your search to take in competitors and similar products, of course. The aim is to discover some of the authoratitive voices on the internet that may be discussing you.
• technorati - at the time of writing this post technorati claims to be “Currently tracking 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.” One of its most useful features is that it clearly shows you how long ago a blog pot was written, so you can get a sense of when activity peaked on a certain conversation.

Passive listening (or tracking the conversation)
Once you’ve found the opinion makers and thought leaders or the forums where your type of products are discussed, it’s time to put in place a method for tracking the conversation.

The best way to keep track of blog conversations is via RSS. Adam put up a post here recently explaining what RSS is and what it does. Keeping track of your feeds is easy with a feed reader. I use Google’s reader but if you prefer an off-line version, give FeedDemon a try.

When conversations take place on forums, it can mean that you need to visit the forum regularly to keep up with the discussion. This is not necessarily a bad thing as it reinforces the listening habit. Remember why you’re doing this? It’s easy to lurk on a forum and just listen. Sometimes, forums have functionality to allow you to receive an email when a particular discussion is updated. Check the FAQ of any forum you join or visit to find out some of the ins and outs.

Active listening (or joining the conversation)
Lurking and eavesdropping are all very well for a while. But it can become a bit frustrating hearing only one side of the conversation. Now it’s time to let your voice be heard. If you’ve been paying attention in the forums and to the blog posts you’ve been reading, you should have a feel for the tone, topics, and limits for each conversation. Now’s the time to let them know you’re there.

One of the quickest wins comes from simply leaving a comment on a blog. If there’s a post that directly relates to you, your company, or one of its products, state your view. Let them know who you are and why you can talk with authority. If a post refers to a case of poor customer service, for instance, tell them you’ll look into it. Do that and report back your findings and you’ll find that immediately some of the bad press is diminished.

The next step is to start your own blog. Use it to ask questions and drive traffic to it by leaving comments on other blogs and forums. Make it a blog that matters to the audience you have been listening to.

Listening as call to action
As you establish your credibility, honesty, and authenticity through your blog and your willingness to listen, you’ll find that you can begin to shape the conversation. This is not about advertising: it’s about sharing news and information with an audience that is interested. They are reading your blog: you are not interrupting. Where before, this audience wanted to talk about your products and company but were limited to rumours and opinion, now they have a real-life horse’s mouth to get the facts from. You’ll stilled be called up on mistakes and bad judgement but the long-term ill effects will be minimal and be heavily outweighed by the positive effects.

Get listening today.

Things are bad in the world of marketing. In marketing departments and for marketing directors in particular, it’s hard to see how things could get much worse. Deloitte have released a report - Marketing in 3D - which, to put it bluntly, states that marketing is a dying profession. Nothing makes this clearer than the fact that a marketing director spends, on average, only 22 months in the job before being asked to move on to “better things”.

Anyone involved with new media or with companies who have already embraced the idea of the conversation will find this unsurprising. I was shocked, however, to find an article in this month’s Director magazine from the IOD that seemed to deduce all the wrong messages from Deloitte’s report.

Jane Simms is a former editor of “Marketing Business” and believes, with the understandable conviction of someone who has spent a career promoting marketing, that “Marketing should play a crucial role in identifying and satisfying customer demand.” Mmm. She does have a few harsh words to say about marketers whose sole interest is the size of their budgets but she refuses to face reality. It’s no longer about changing a few characteristics of marketing: the game has changed completely. New rules, new stadium. Even the ball has changed shape.

The sad truth for the ‘marketers drive the market’ brigade is that consumers are more sophisticated, have a wider range of communication tools at their disposal, and have grown mightily tired of being interrupted. If there is a role for marketing now, it is surely one that begins with the consumer rather than the company. A savvy marketer is one who relays the mood of the market and tries to effect change in his or her company rather than in the consumer. Customers know what they want, what works for them, and what is simply marketing hype and nonsense. It’s time to accept that it’s the consumer who does the marketing. The smart company listens.

There’s a case to be made that, if you can’t get your company’s internal communications right, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to engage with your customers in any authentic, believable, or genuine manner. I chose these three adjectives deliberately. Not that I have a habit of using random words but these three in particular lie at the heart of a December press release for a new report that focuses on what a number of CEOs at high profile organisations consider essential for building trust in their workforce.

All well and good, of course, but what struck me was that the ambitions aired and the desired outcomes of the interviewed CEOs seemed stuck on the workforce. It was as if they couldn’t make the obvious leap from realising that what worked for their workforce would work for their customers. Here’s a typical remark from one of the CEOs: “I think employees are smart enough to understand that things aren’t always going great.” Replace ‘employees’ with ‘customers’ and is the sentence - and sentiment - any less valid. Of course not.

The message from the press release and the report in question is that CEOs are keen to appear more human - but only to their employees. Customers will still be fed the ‘positive message’ and the ‘spin’.

December also saw, coincidentally enough, Todd Defren posting his ‘Open Letter to CEO Bloggers’ on the PR Squared blog. It’s an excellent piece on the necessity of listening as a precusor to joining the conversation. CEOs, like everyone else, can get excited by the possibilities of blogging and the opportunities it can bring personally and for your company. Of course, CEOs can be larger than life and accustomed to being noticed. They might expect their blog to be noticed and praised, simply because of who they are. It’s a hard lesson to learn: the web teaches humility. Before you start saying things, try and discover what your audience are interested in hearing.

So, whether a CEO is communicating internally or on the web through a blog or any other social media, being human, admitting mistakes, showing a little humility and, more than anything, being honest, will reap rewards that bluster and spin can never hope to match.

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In the first part of this series of posts I tried to show - from 30,000 feet - why interruption is no longer a valid form of marketing for most companies. I ended by suggesting that before joining an on-line conversation, it was important to listen. I also promised to tell you how but that’s for the next part. For now, here’s a story about ‘why’.

The unwanted restaurant
John is the landlord of a busy pub. It heaves with customers at lunchtimes and evenings. The bar gets crowded and he’s had to add tables outside for warm days and even set up a covered area out back to convert into a beer garden. One thing John has never done is sell food beyond the usual nuts, crisps, and that staple of high pub cuisine - the bags of pork scratchings. He’s lost count of the times he’s been asked if there is a bar menu. Takings over the last few years have been good and John had the cash flow to covert a large room upstairs into a rather fancy restaurant - even if he did say so himself. He brought in a chef, who designed a tasty menu, using high-class produce. The dishes weren’t cheap but, then again, it was high quality food.

In the weeks leading up to the launch of the restaurant, John posted notices around the wall of the bar and left leaflets on the table. As soon as the menus were printed, he left copies in the bar, too. For opening night, John offered a free bottle of wine with every two main courses bought. Standard stuff.

Opening night came. John hoped - and, to be honest, expected - for a hectic night. In the end, the restaurant was never more than half full. The bar downstairs was as busy as ever. Perhaps it would take a bit longer, he thought, to develop the same buzz. He knew that the quality of food was good enough to generate some positive word of mouth.

Over the next few weeks, bookings for the restaurant continued to fall rather than rise. By the end of the second month, only a booking for a wedding party that had lost their original venue to flooding allowed John to pay the restaurant staff.

From behind the bar, John could see drinkers on any given night pick up the menus and look at the leaflets, talk with their companions and….. stay where they were. Occasionally, he’d even asked a punter whether they were going to eat. The replies tended to be uninformative and non-committal.

Poor market research
Of course, what happened was that John took a perceived market for pub food and remade it in his own image. He wanted fancy food and a fancy restaurant. His customers wanted pub food in a pub they obviously enjoyed. They certainly didn’t want to leave the atmosphere of the pub they had come to and go upstairs to a restaurant atmosphere. If they wanted a fancy restaurant, they could take their pick of a large number in the area.

John could have saved himself a lot of expense and worry - and embarrassment - by listening. His clientele were asking for food and were talking to each other about food. Each table in John’s bar was a forum where he could have gathered first-hand knowledge of the sort of food and restaurant that was wanted. Luckily, John saw the light and did just that.

Pub grub
Now the upstairs is as busy as the rest of the pub. The fancy decor is gone along with the fancy food and fancy prices. When people ask for food, the bar menu is exactly what they’re looking for. They even have to grab their own cutlery from a tray at the end of the bar. People love it.

A lot of small companies do a John, if you’ll pardon the expression. They hear a message from their customers or prospects and force it into something it’s not. Something that fits what they want or plan to do. They they’re surprised by failure. Unlike in a pub, of course, it’s hard to wander round and ask all your customers what they really want. There are no groups sitting around tables in front of your company HQ.

However, the internet lets you visit all those tables or forums - a bit like speed dating. (I’m using my imagination here: my one experience of ‘speed’ dating came when I was in my late teens and was set up to go on a blind date. I turned up, she turned away. The gap between expectation and reality was just too great for her. She wanted fancy food and got pub grub, perhaps. Anyway, end of date.) The trick is to find the forums and listen in and then join in.

This is obviously not a task for your busy CEO. So, who listens? And how? Next time.