Know your RSS from your elbow

I’ve been re-reading David Ogilvy’s “Confessions of an Advertising Man”. This passage stood out for me:

Competition for the consumer’s attention is becoming more ferocious every year. She is being bombarded by a billion dollars’ worth of advertising every month. Thirty thousand brand names are competing for a place in her memory. If you want your voice to be heard above this ear-splitting barrage, your voice must be unique. It is our business to make our clients’ voices heard above the crowd.

Guess when that was written. It’s an accurate description, after all, of the current problems of interruption marketing. When Ogilvy wrote that, however, there were few alternatives available. Interruption was really all there was. Ogilvy wrote that in 1963.

Of course, things have become worse for advertisers, not only because of an increase in the number of competing brands visible through advertising, but also because advertisers are competing against the inherent scepticism and associated ad-blindness of its target audience. People do all they can now to avoid watching, reading, or hearing advertising. For many, it’s got to the point that an advertisement is a sign of a product’s failure. It’s certainly a sign of the product’s manufacturer failure to engage with its core market.

If the product is seriously worthy of spending millions to promote through a methodology that everyone by now surely knows is generating diminishing returns - to say the least - surely it’s worthy of spending a fraction of that amount engaging directly with the very consumers you hope will buy.

Don’t ask your agency to show you their ideas for your next TV campaign. Ask it how it intends to find the consumers that matter and discuss with them how to make your product better, get those consumers to tell other consumers, and how it intends to measure the success of the campaign.

Here’s the choice. Do you want your ad agency winning creative awards for stylish ads where nobody remembers what was being sold or do you want a campaign that delivers measurable results and is spread by consumer recommendation and conversation?

Doritos is obviously a company that has accepted that interruption marketing has no more legs. Well, on Earth, at least. I just received this press release:

Today Doritos makes history, taking the UK’s first step in communicating with aliens as they broadcast the first ever advert directed towards potential extra terrestrial life.

And how are the aliens being interrupted?

The message is being pulsed out over a six-hour period from high-powered radars at the EISCAT European space station in the Arctic Circle.

Can they pick this ad up on the Space Station, I wonder? And what is the call to action for beings seeing the ad out beyond Sirius?

If there remains any doubt as to whether Doritos are taking this seriously or not, the final paragraph of the press release should set minds at rest:

The broadcast received praise from Nick Pope, former Head of the MoD’s UFO project. Nick, a leading authority on UFO sightings and alien abductions commented: “I support this bold new venture in space communication. As humanity reaches out to the stars, this broadcast could lead to us finding the real ET. This is a historic day in our continuing search for alien life.”

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.

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.

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.

Interruptive marketing is on its last legs. People generally don’t want to be interrupted. In the days when traditional advertising ruled the roost - the period Seth Godin defines as ‘During Advertising’ - interruptions were tolerated because it was perceived to be a price worth paying for receiving entertainment (i.e. TV shows) and learning about things to spend money on. Now, though, people face a huge information overload - much of which they choose themselves - and feel able to make their own choices about how to spend their money. That means that they often don’t notice your interruption in the first place. Most of us now record some of our favourite programmes or watch them on catch-up channels. This lets us skip the advertisements. Younger audiences are watching less TV and spending time with YouTube and MySpace instead. Printed advertising in the traditional press is probably in even worse shape: how can advertising thrive in a market that is continually shrinking?

Even companies with the budget for large advertising campaigns are finding it costs more and more to lift sales. This is because they’re still trying to interrupt. They’re like the guy at the cocktail party who wants to talk about himself and wanders round the room butting into conversations. He hasn’t listened to what’s being said in the conversation and he doesn’t care whether they want to hear what he has to say. He just reckons if he tells his story loudly enough and often enough someone will pay his some attention. He usually ends the evening alone by the bar, swaying slightly and feeling sorry for himself. Everyone else appears to be having fun.

But telling a story is good. That makes for interesting conversation. But it’s only a conversation when you tell a story that’s relevant to the listener. Broadcast stories don’t work as a marketing tool. What works is your story being picked up and told by others, one to one. When it becomes many to one and many to many, you know your story has hit gold. The problem for companies wanting their stories to spread is how to tell it without sounding like they’re selling. One way is through listening. How can listening lead to better stories? Simple: by listening to what your prospective market is talking about, you learn what’s important to them, what they want from products and services, and how they want to be approached.

Next problem: how to listen? I’ll cover that in a later post.