There’s no question that marketing is changing. Advertising is dying and getting reborn all over the place, and word-of-mouth is leveraged by technology tools. The problem is how, how much, how fast and how does it affect your business? It’s a new world, with a changed landscape.
For idea leadership in this realm, look to Seth Godin: his books and his blog. He’s redefining advertising as “shouting.” And he looks to a new kind of marketing built on being remarkable, in a very literal sense of the word: remarkable, as in something that people will talk about. And for practical how-to leadership, I recommend John Jantsch, Duct Tape Marketing founder, redefining marketing as getting people to know, like and trust you.
And for actually working rapidly changing marketing assumptions into your own business plan, frankly, it’s hard these days. It’s complicated because the landscape is built on sand mines; it crumbles fast.
I recommend you use a methodology somewhat akin to following the money for the financial portions of your plan. But for the marketing portions, you follow the attention. You could call that eyeballs (a popular web term), or mindshare, if you prefer.
Start with attention. Ask yourself what makes people aware of a need, a problem or a want that you solve. You could call that an itch, because need is misleading: People buy a lot of goods and services they don’t really need. So you want to understand what gives people the itch that leads to you when they scratch it. And then you understand how to scratch the itch: Where do they look for solutions? Is it habit, the shop next door? Do they look in some repository in their mind or memory, like some ad they’ve got stored in the back of their mind? Or do they open a web page and do a Google or some other search?
Imagine an advertising world where … spending on interactive, one-to-one advertising formats surpasses traditional, one-to-many advertising vehicles, and a significant share of ad space is sold through auctions and exchanges. Advertisers know who viewed and acted on an ad and pay based on real impact rather than estimated “impressions.” Consumers self-select which ads they watch and share preferred ads with peers. User-generated advertising is as prevalent (and appealing) as agency-created spots.
And Glass adds his own commentary, from his advertising professional’s point of view.
There is no question that the future of advertising will look radically different from its past. The push for control of attention, creativity, measurements and inventory will reshape the advertising value chain and shift the balance of power.
And what can you do about it? Follow the attention. Follow the eyeballs.
I’ve followed the Free controversy myself, and posted about it here on this blog, and here on the Huffington Post, when two of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin, squared off about it a few months ago. Gladwell essentially hated the idea, and Godin declared it here whether we like it or not.
If I had to choose one short description of the basic idea, it would be this paragraph from Anderson’s 2008 story in Wired:
Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multi-player online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.
King has a gift for summary. He says in his post:
Free has been used effectively as a business strategy and marketing tactic for pretty much as long as businesses have existed. Given how widespread and successful free is and has been, I don’t see how you challenge the concept.
The only place I see room for criticism is if you think Anderson is suggesting that free is a complete business model. Obviously, if free means no source of revenue then it is destined for failure. But I don’t think this is what Anderson is suggesting.
King goes on to point out several examples. He also points out that it could be tactic, strategy or something else. And it’s not that new an idea, either (Chris Anderson would agree with all three).
Are you looking at using a free offer as part of a business plan? You’ll have good company. I do hope, though, that you define for yourself the specific business objectives (traffic, visibility, whatever) and put in some metrics so you can measure results.
Eliminate Paper and Filing with Screen Shots “I’m finding I can eliminate a lot of paper and filing expenses–not to mention filing and recovery of documents–by taking quick screen shots of web orders and travel documents and such. I save them on my CPU unless they’re travel documents, in which case I save them as JPGs and put them onto my iPhone.”
Use the Amazon Cloud “We’re saving several thousand dollars a month now by having moved our servers from a server farm somewhere else to the Amazon cloud. We get much better up-time and response time, but for significantly less money. We’re also using the Amazon cloud for storing files and backup.”
Insist on Price Reviews from Existing Vendors “When the recession was at its worst we pushed our vendors that provided phones and the office internet bandwidth to redo their pricing. We found that vendors we’d been with a long time were giving new customers much better deals than existing customers, and we insisted on a review.”
Hold Meetings Online Instead of Traveling “We’re using the web conference for webinars and to host meetings, often one-on-one meetings, to reduce our travel costs. We’ve had success with both WebEx and GoToMeeting. We’re finding the simple meeting online as quick and easy, and a lot more effective, than getting on the plane.”
I’ve included these here because they were mine, which makes them automatically my favorites. But they aren’t the best of the bunch. The entire post is good reading.
If you’re intimidated by the thought of jumping into the online video pond, don’t be. It’s a piece of cake to do and YouTube simplifies the process for you.
With a simple camera like a Flip and a few minutes, you too can add good value and content to your website or blog.
I don’t know that anybody is arguing this point anymore, but I thought I would pass on this Mashable post from yesterday titled 5 Reasons Why Twitter’s Growth Cannot Be Stopped. This is pretty much a given in our constantly changing business environment. Not that every company must necessarily restructure its strategy to accommodate Twitter, but certainly, if you’re operating in the world of startups and small business, it’s foolish to ignore a trend this size.
1. Consistent Growth.
Post author Vadim Lavrusik uses the chart here to show how Twitter.com’s unique visitors have grown from about 2 million to about 20 million per month in this year alone. That’s astounding growth.
2. Big companies jumping on the bandwagon.
“54 percent of the companies have a Twitter presence and for the companies that use only one social media platform, 76 percent of them use Twitter as their preferred choice.”
3. Number One Most Social Brand
Social Radar ranked Twitter number one for June and July.
“Social Radar analyzes the Web to see what brands are mentioned most by unique sources. This includes blogs, other social networks, forums, etc. The analysis includes brands, not just social networks. Facebookis at number 4, with the iPhone and Googleat number 3 and 4, respectively.”
Darren Dahl brought back some bad memories with his A Small-Business Guide to Intellectual Property in The New York Times last week. Not that his story is off base, either: He seems to have things pretty much straight. Even so, he may be way too optimistic. Out here in the real world, from my experience at least, things are often worse.
For the first example, he tells how Daniel Lubetzky discovered that a competitor had done a knock-off package that looked like his company’s snack bar:
He kept hearing how one of his competitors had copied the packaging, look and feel of his bars.
Fortunately for Mr. Lubetzky, he had secured crucial components of intellectual property like trademarks, trade dress (the look and feel of a product) and web addresses after founding his company. Unlike a patent, which can cost up to $25,000 to secure, trademarks and web addresses can be obtained relatively cheaply and without the aid of a lawyer.
Several years ago my company had a bad experience with a competitor who brought out a new box that was so much like our market-leading box that our sales reps called complaining we’d brought out a new product without telling them. We had one of the best intellectual property lawyers I’ve ever heard of, and we had all the trademark protection he could think of, but it turned out that copying packaging is not illegal. You watch the key trademarks, make things look the same, and the consumer gets fooled.
You’re probably thinking we didn’t have the right lawyers, but if so, take a stroll down the retail shelves of any office superstore or a grocery store and count how many packages look like their competitors. The imitators copy market leaders.
I think the package knock-off strategy sucks. But it also works. People make money that way. And most of the time, it’s not illegal, and trademarks and copyright are easy to work around.
And then, second example, patents: The patent system is broken. Just read what Wikipedia says about patent trolls. Here’s what a patent troll does:
Purchases a patent, often from a bankrupt firm, and then sues another company by claiming that one of its products infringes on the purchased patent
Enforces patents against purported infringers without itself intending to manufacture the patented product or supply the patented service
Enforces patents but has no manufacturing or research base
Focuses its efforts solely on enforcing patent rights
Unless you’re running a business, you probably have no idea how widespread this is. My company is a small business, barely 40 employees, and we got caught in it. And I know a guy who had a family photo-sharing site, no employees, and he got caught by one. He had no revenue, but he still had to pay $1,000.
But to be fair to Darren Dahl, he doesn’t talk about patent trolls, but he does summarize very well the frustration of patents in general:
Actually, what a patent does is give you the right to prevent someone else from producing what your patent covers. “Having a strong I.P. position helps ensure that other people pay you for your innovation like they would a toll on a road,” Mr. Kocher said.
But even if you do have a patent, there’s no guarantee that someone won’t try to get around it. There’s also no guarantee that you will win if you fight that person. But if you have your I.P. ducks in a row and a commitment to do whatever you can to defend those rights, you do have a fighting chance–even in a fight against a much larger company.
I don’t want to be too negative, but sometimes it seems that the “fighting chance” he mentions is also too optimistic. The world of high technology is littered with the corpses of companies that eventually won their cases on appeal, but the company was lost in the meantime.
And I’m not saying that as an entrepreneur you should ignore patents, trademarks or copyright. No. You do what you can to protect yourself as best you can; but don’t think that it’s easy. And don’t think the system actually works.
Trends: solopreneurs, the new artisan economy, social media, a lot of one-on-one relationships, the long tail, splitting larger groups into smaller groups. More channels, each of them more focused.
With that in mind:
For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well.
Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word-of-mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network.
Examples include a food cart in San Francisco, a sushi restaurant in San Francisco, an antique store in Ohio, a bed and breakfast in North Carolina, etc. My favorite is from Becky McCray, a Twitter friend of mine. She runs a liquor store and cattle ranch in Oklahoma, and does a blog named Small Biz Survival:
In towns like hers, with only 5,000 people, small-business owners can feel isolated, she said. But on Twitter, she has learned business tax tips from an accountant, marketing tips from a consultant in Tennessee and startup tips from the founder of several tech companies.
What I particularly like about this idea are the focus and specificity. It’s target marketing executed well, using a good tool.
One word of caution: I don’t know the rest of these small businesses, but I follow Becky on Twitter and she’s there as a person, not a product, not a company. From what I see on Twitter, that’s an important factor. Relationships are between people, much more than between companies and people. Sure, there are exceptions, but that’s the rule.
This 18-minute TED talk offers a very intriguing broad view of the changing face of information, media and communication in general as new phenomena–cellphones, Facebook and Twitter–change the way information travels and multiplies.
If for any reason you don’t see this video here, you can click this link to jump to the source as it was posted on YouTube.
I enjoy the chart of the day; it’s almost always interesting and usually informative. I really like a good business chart as a way to see a lot of information quickly.
I just caught Ann Handley’s latest post on Marketing Profs Daily Fix, in which she gives us several good links and a short video interview on Twitter as “An Enormous Opportunity.” This is important.
Among other things, Stephen Berlin Johnson–who did last week’s Time Magazinecover story on Twitter, says:
“We’re getting to invent what this new platform can do.”
What’s happening with Twitter, including the easy-to-poke-fun-at aspect of Twitter as trivial boring updates–an idea we get when the late-night comics take it on–is that it’s caught on with the early adapters and opinion leaders, whom Seth Godin calls the sneezers, people who tend to be communicators.
Although it’s a lesser example, it does remind me of what I saw (and lived through) about 25 years ago with the personal computer revolution; and again, about 15 years ago, when the business world caught onto the web.
It’s not as big as either of those, because there’s no fundamental change in technology. But the phenomenon of bandwagon is there, and in that sense it’s similar.
Why do you care? It’s not that you have to be at the bleeding edge to be an entrepreneur; you don’t have to. But it helps.
And believe me, it’s not just what people had for breakfast: It’s what they’re reading, watching and thinking.
My suggestion, concretely, is that if you’re reading this blog and you aren’t already on Twitter, go to twitter.com and join. Follow me and everybody else on Anita Campbell’s The Ultimate Small Business Twitter List, and just see how the ideas flow.
I’ve been joining the #sbbuzz chat on Twitter lately, Tuesday evenings. I’m finding it a nice way to get in touch with a lot of people at once with an interest in technology in small business. I guess Twitter is controversial in some circles, but I like it and use it a lot.
For example, click here for the transcript of a recent chat on business planning and funding for new businesses.
And you can click here for instructions on how to participate in the sbbuzz Twitter chat on Tuesdays.
15th Anniversary Edition. Looking for a fast, easy way to create a business plan? This popular software solution offers 500+ sample plans, step-by-step guidance and more. Your words, your numbers. Let the software do the mechanics.
Marketing Plan Pro 11.0 powered by Duct Tape Marketing is simple, practical marketing plan software that makes it easy to plan and carry out the marketing activities you need to grow your business.
There’s no question that marketing is changing. Advertising is dying and getting reborn all over the place, and word-of-mouth is leveraged by technology tools. The problem is how, how much, how fast and how does it affect your business? It’s a new world, with a changed landscape.
