2 Facebook marketing tips for eCommerce

The latest on my other blog.

2 Facebook marketing tips for eCommerce beginners.

Coffee is for closers! Sales lessons for eCommerce

My latest post

http://forewardsapp.com/blog/ecommerce-marketing-strategy-alec-baldwin/

Supercharge your eCommerce with referrals

For those of you who are interested in this type of thing, I've just written a new whitepaper on referral marketing and how it can improve your e Commerce business over at my other site.

Check it out, and let me know what you think

Where does the time go?

I pretty much have no time to maintain this blog these days.

HOWEVER. There is a very good reason for that.

I invite you to check out my latest venture. We're changing the world of referral marketing and in the process hoping to help our eCommerce clients make their referral program,s effortless and effective...

www.forewardsapp.com

and if you did enjoy my amateur writing it's continuing on... for good or bad here:

www.forewardsapp.com/blog

To upgrade or not to upgrade... the question for RIM

Reading the avalanche of bad news coming out of Waterloo these past few weeks, there seems to be one small positive that most pundits agree on.  When RIM releases their new Blackberry 10 devices later this year, it will be a make or break moment for what was once Canada’s most valuable company.

I actually think there is a subtle nuance in that sentiment that some are overlooking.  RIM needs to actually get most if not all of their current 75 million users to actually upgrade to the new devices and platform as soon as possible.

That’s the precariously same situation that every technology company finds themselves in every few years.  In the case of Microsoft, usually every 3 years, Apple every year, and RIM will face later this year.  How can you ensure the smoothest and fastest possible upgrade cycle?

Existing customers on one hand love familiarity.  In my own day to day, I’ve been a loyal RIM user for many years, so the quirks that come with their devices are something that I’ve grown accustomed to.  You could almost say that are quirks that I’ve come to expect and as such have accepted as part of my daily routine.  On the other hand, those same quirks are what make me consider competing devices as a replacement.  In fact on some days those quirks even have me contemplating paying for my OWN better device, in lieu of my “free” company provided blackberry.

As with most technologies, I have no doubt that Blackberry 10 will be an improvement on their current operating system. 

So how can they get those better, faster RIM devices in the hands of their most loyal users as soon as possible?

As with many things in life I suspect the secret lies in going back to the basics.  For RIM that means focusing on the five Ps of marketing, and tuning them for their core audience.  The 75 million people globally who they’ve already captured as customers.  Products, Price, Placement, Promotion and Packaging that will appeal to all those people that at some point already bought into the RIM value proposition.

How easy that will be remains to be seen however, not to mention how soon they need to begin executing on this…

Corporate branding and what's wrong with Nickelback...

There was as a youth I dreamt of becoming a rock star.  In fact some of my friends from that period never gave up that dream.  I got a very exciting message earlier this week that one of those friends was nominated for a Juno this year for Metal album of the year. For any international readers out there the Juno’s are a Canadian version of the Grammies.

I sent over a message of congratulations mentioning that “it must be exciting to soon be sharing the stage with perennial Juno nominee – Nickelback”.

This seemingly innocuous comment got me thinking about NIckelback.  More specifically why many people find them so irritating AND how this might actually be a lesson for marketers.

Nickelback is Generic music, like much of pop music, but I suppose they take more abuse because they step outside the world of bubblegum pop into the world of rock or in some cases heavy metal.  Nickelback seems to step outside that pop world by having all their guitar effects pedals set to the “Power Rock” setting at full blast, all the time. 

On the surface it sounds great.  They have high production value and great hooks.  But therein lies the problem.  For music fans with more discerning taste they want to hear more.  Generic power rock doesn’t provoke deep thoughts, there isn’t really much substance.  The engineered sound of power rock also all sounds very bland.  There is a reason why every Nickelback song sounds like a song you’ve heard before.  It blends into the background and doesn’t make a statement about anything.  I think their latest single is actually about drinking beer as an example.

Corporate brands and corporate marketers might be well served to take a lesson from this.  We are facing a similar challenge - How to not be like Nickelback.

Consumers have more choice than ever before, so brands really need the old unique selling propositions.  More and more from a brand perspective people want to know what exactly you stand for.  What is the story your brand is trying to tell me?  And please, please, please say something meaningful… without your effects boxes set to “power rock”.  We’ve been there, done that, and it’s no longer good enough…

I love, therefore I buy...

I have a friend who happens to own and run the largest privately owned hardware store back where I’m from.  Granted it’s a family business that was started by his father.  But by most accounts he’s managed to not only maintain the business but grow it as well.  He’s done all this in the face of the Home Depot, Loews and a world of competition that his dad never had to deal with.

He also happens to be the first person in his family to ever graduate from university.  He’ll tell you that all the book smarts he picked up about business and management strategies combined with all the hard work put in by the family is the secret to the success.  No doubt those are huge factors, but I think there’s something else at play.

For some bizarre reason his favourite artist has always been Madonna.  Always has been always will be.   In our younger years, when out on the town.  When Madonna came over the sound system.  Watch out!  My buddy would spread his arms as though he had wings and would spin around like a helicopter on the dance floor.  If only more camera phones existed back then...

This gregariousness and larger than life personality carries over to all aspects of life.  He’s the guy that nobody has anything bad to say about.  In fact, he’s the face of the hardware store which markets itself as a place where the staff will remember you and where you’ll get a level of customer service that you simply can’t put a price on.

Contrast that with who he competes against, big boxes.  Faceless corporations, the type of businesses that Michael Moore makes documentaries about.

That disparity between the culture of small business and the culture of big business is something that as marketers I think we can all help to improve.

Social media and a renewed focus on the experience provided to customers across all channels at its core are humanizing the world of business.  Consumers don’t want to be looked at as sources of revenue on a pie chart.  Consumers want to be a part of a community, and they want to know the people behind the businesses and be a part of an active dialog on how to improve them.  This is grounded in not only psychology but biology.  We’re a tribal species, and I think that business is really on the cusp of an era of understanding this again.

That’s why as long as Madonna still sells albums; my friend will be ok…

Look what I've got up my sleeve...

I probably spent about 82% of my teenage years playing the guitar; most of that time was practice, some of it playing gigs, and some of it jamming with whoever I could find to jam with.  At one point I actually got pretty good at it.  But that didn’t happen until I learned an important lesson about what being a good guitar player actually meant.

Early on my dad taught me how to play some basic chords and scales, then I bought myself few song books and I was off to the races.  Once I had some finger strength I proceeded to spend about a year and a half learning how to play every song off of Metallica – Kill Em All, and Eruption by Eddie Van Halen.

At that point I was quite proud of myself, and I thought I was pretty good.  I could play accurately, and I could play really fast – really fast.  Then one day I was jamming with some folks in the area and an older guy who was a one of the best musicians I’ve ever played with told me something quite profound.  “All those things that you do, the pinch harmonics, the finger tapping, all the effects, forget about them, those are just tricks… focus on the notes you’re playing and how they feel”. 

He was right, I was hiding the music with all the tricks I learned early on, and since I was so skilled at scattering my music with those tricks they were both obscuring the notes, and they were holding me back from really becoming a good guitarist.  So from that point on I tried to focus on how the notes felt, instead of how many I could play at a time.

Today I see a similar thing happening with social media.  Everyone seems to be creating Twitter scavenger hunts, or a social media raffles that send users on some web based goose chases.  In today’s marketing’s quest to turn every campaign viral, and get the type of groundswell buzz that folks like JJ Abrams often get they are repeating the mistake that I made as a young guitarist.  They are letting all these tricks obscure the value of the social channel.

Social at its core allows customers an unprecedented level and speed of communication with vendors.  In short social media channels such as Twitter, allow you to have a direct conversation without the gatekeepers that usually exist in a customer/vendor relationship.  Plus in the case of Twitter, the message limitations actually force both parties to get to the point much faster. 

So for the time being, why don’t we all set aside the social media tricks for a minute (unless of course you actually ARE JJ Abrams) and focus on the conversation…

Can’t we just get along… sales and marketing alignment

"Teamwork is essential - it allows you to blame someone else." Author Unknown

I came across an interesting discussion on Linkedin, over the weekend about the difference between sales and marketing that got me thinking. Upon further research I discovered that a Google search for "sales and marketing alignment" yields over 2 MILLION hits!

I've always found it interesting that one of the accepted truths of business is conflict between the sales and marketing. Having spent time on both sides of that coin I've seen this conflict first hand, but I still don't quite understand it. Sales and marketing are the two organizations that bring products to market and drive revenue. Poor communication and a lack of coordination between the two could surely prove disastrous, but many companies accept this as the norm. Imagine if the engineering and product management organizations didn't see eye to eye. Surely that would drive innovation to a halt.

One of the biggest sources of frustration I find in any role is a lack of understanding of what value you bring and how it impacts others. Better understanding of roles and responsibilities can help both to motivate and resolve conflicts. In my world, sales and marketing both have the same goal – connecting with customers to increase company profits and revenue. What is implied is that both organizations are connecting with the world outside the company walls. The only difference I see between the two is the audience each is trying to reach.

In the marketing organization our goal is to sell to the entire world (or rather the specific market segment we are trying to capture, otherwise sales would have a right to be mad at us). The sales organization and individual sales people generally connect more directly to a particular account or set of accounts.  As such, sales tend to get much more granular in terms of customer conversation, whereas marketing stays more strategic. Marketing educates the world about the broader problems affecting a market to build a funnel of educated prospects. Salespeople connect the market problems directly to the individual pains of a customer to bring in revenue.

Ultimately both organizations should be telling the same story, only tuned to different audiences.

Hey marketing, why should I care?

My son recently entered a particularly interesting new phase of life. He has decided that the standard response to everything that I ask him to do will now be "Why?" Go to bed – Why? Eat your dinner – Why? Clean up your toys – Why? And so it goes.

I've heard some parents describe this as the "the most terrible phase of life". As a parent I might agree. But as a marketing person, my two year old has taught me a valuable lesson (whilst simultaneously causing my hair loss to accelerate).

One of the needs of all people is simply a better understanding of Why?

The world of technology marketing however hasn't always understood this. If you think about it you can probably think of endless streams of marketing messages that answer a different question – How? More gigabytes, more megahertz, more bandwidth, less bandwidth, less megahertz, less gigabytes, or maybe even a patented algorithm… all this serves to tell and audience is How something works. If the joys of parenthood have taught me anything it's that nobody cares (or at least little boys) about How something works until they first understand Why it's important.

A simple example. If I was someone who had never driven a car, I wouldn't care about horsepower, in fact I probably wouldn't even understand what it was, I'd gotten where I need to go by walking and it was fine. To join the ranks of car owners I would need to first be educated on Why getting places faster would give me more time in the day, or Why owning a car could give me the freedom to go anywhere on my own schedule. I would need to first understand Why a car could help me, before I cared about about How it worked, or How one car was better than another car.

You might think that this behavior is exclusive to technology folks. But I've seen enough panty liner advertisements focusing on how much blue liquid can be absorbed to know that this behavior has less to do with technologist and simply more to do with marketers.

Understanding Why can educate and even inspire. Simon Sinek's golden circle describes this in a much more profound manner than I ever could and I encourage you to check it out. Sadly answering Why instead of How is difficult to do, but I think taking a step back to think about it is worthwhile for all marketers. I think my son would agree….

PS. You need to go to bed on time and finish your dinner to grow up big and strong.

The first rule of design…there is no design

I was reading a story about how Apple's SVP of Design Jony Ive is rumored to be leaving. He's not a household name the way that Steve Jobs is, but many believe that he's been as critical to Apples success as anyone. He was the designer of the candy colored iMac computers that were the first big hit of the second iteration of Steve Jobs' Apple, and has had a hand in the design of their entire portfolio of products since then.

He has an elegant approach to design which he outlines in the documentary Objectified which profiles several prominent personalities in the world of industrial design.

The core of his approach in his own words is simplicity. Not simplicity for the sake of simplicity or to be a minimalist. He states that his main role as a designer is to get design out of the way. A good design isn't based on arbitrary shapes; good design should feel as though it hasn't been designed at all. It should feel natural and intuitive. An example of this in his work is Apple's exceptional discipline in not including unnecessary design elements in their products. Rarely does Apple add additional lights or buttons to their products unless they serve a clear functional purpose, and in some cases they even go so far as to remove buttons that are considered standard because ultimately they aren't necessary (the track pads on their Macbooks are an example of this).

I think there is a lesson to be learned as a product marketing person from this simplicity. Focus on the customer problem(s) you solve. Don't agonize over the hurdles that your engineers had to overcome to create a solution. Nobody really cares about that; they just want to know their problem can be solved, or in some cases they want to better understand the problem itself. Having potential customers read about patent pending technology, years of laborious development effort, and what every line of code does has little impact on how they use the product.

How the product helps them and the outcomes from using them is something that can universally resonate.

After all the first rule of design… there is no design.
 

What I learned from a homeless dude with a golden voice…

I'm certain that you've all seen or read, and heard about a man named Ted Williams who's blessed with a golden voice. He was once a radio announcer but had fallen on hard times until Doral Chenoweth III posted a video of him online showcasing both his voice and his story.

That little video went viral and now Ted has several job offers on the table, and even some offers from some to sponsor him a new home.

Definitely a great feel good story, and definitely a much happier story to start the year than the other big story in my news feeder at the moment which involves hundreds of thousands of animals dying and falling out of the sky… scary.

Anyway, back to the man with the golden voice. His story reinforces something that I believe in with when it comes to social media or web 2.0 or whatever other buzzword you want to attach to communication on the internet. These are technologies that can finally bring us together as a global village.

The portion of the video that to me was the most powerful was not simply the voice, but when he described how he used to have a career in radio, but then drugs and alcohol became a part of his life and things took a turn for the worse. With that, I was pulled in to the screen and Ted resonated as a real person. A real person, with a real story, who had experienced real tragedy, which all somehow made me care. What the internet provided was simply a platform for him to distribute his message to an audience wider than he could have ever imagined.

That's what a global village is all about. It's about going back to a time when we all knew each other's names, a time when I felt a personal connection to my neighbors. A time when people even had real relationships with vendors, only they were called local businesses back then. Joe the butcher, Doris the florist, Ken the guy who cuts my hair.

Some will tell you that things have evolved past those ideals. But this new communication platform now give us an opportunity to turn back the clock… at a global scale. The internet changes the definition of local. My neighbourhood is no longer measured in kilometers, but instead by the reach of my message.

So all you sales and marketing people out there. A request. Please stop inviting me to "like" stuff or asking me to follow you if all you're going to do is send me the same boring brochures and press releases. Tell me something about yourself. Tell me why you're a real person. Make me laugh. Tell me why you're a real person who I should trust, and heck maybe I'll even take a look at what you're selling along the way.

 

What is this guy talking about again?

Over the years I’ve developed a love/hate relationship with product demos.  In my various sales and marketing roles and even today I’ve had to deliver hundreds of product demos for audiences as small as one person or as large as a few hundred at an event.  Being a regular attendee of industry events, I’ve also had to sit through many, many, many product demos over the years as well.

The good and bad of product demos really crystallized in my head over the holidays.  

In an effort to better share photos with my in-laws, my wife set her father up with a Facebook account.  All he wanted to do was see pictures of his grandson…  My wife had all the best intentions but proceeded to put him through a painstakingly detailed product demo of Facebook.  This is how you post your status update, this is how you search for new friends, this is how you buy a new pig in Farmville, this is how I play Scrabble with my friend from high school I haven’t seen in ten years... on and on it went…  He was put through a gauntlet of about a dozen features and capabilities before he got to see even one photo.  The look on his face said it all… He had fallen asleep.

And that is what’s wrong with product demos.

I’d seen this demo before.  Only it had to do with virtualization, or business intelligence, or systems monitoring, or some other “B2B” related topic.  Very rarely did a product demo ever get to the point.  Or at least they rarely get to the point before I fall asleep.

All I want to do is see some photos!  Or perhaps all I care about is the one report I need!

Sadly technology driven people, and technology driven presenters are too focused on features.  Especially the new ones - those are the shiniest.  Users, customers, father in laws, they just want to get to the good part.  They want to read the last page of the book first.  Or perhaps a better analogy - they just want the headlines.  Takes less time, and gives more value.

So please, for all you product presenters out there.  Get to the point.  Show me what I care about, and save the features for inside your own boardrooms.

It’s all in the sauce man…

Over the holidays I had a few discussions with various people about the failed buyout of Groupon by Google. Everyone was completely flabbergasted by the valuation the company was given, rumoured to be close to SIX BILLION DOLLARS (said in my best Dr. Evil voice). Interestingly just this week Goldman Sachs invested in Facebook putting their valuation close to FIFTY BILLION DOLLARS (again, with the Dr. Evil voice).

This got me to thinking. Where is this value really coming from? An accountant I am not, however from what I can tell, neither of these companies, can justify this valuation off of revenue alone. So there must be something else, something about their potential.

So here's a story…

I have a friend back home who is wildly successful. The root success is pizza. He started a local pizzeria many years ago and has since expended to having multiple locations and even franchised out other locations as well. If you ask him, the secret is in his sauce, some of family recipe. Although I swear I see it simply come out of a can. Nevertheless, I believe that his secret lies somewhere else.

Whenever I walk in to his restaurant (he still enjoys manning the counter at the place where it all started) he greets me by name. Not only that. Everyone who walks through the door is greeted by name. Even more, he still remembers most people's orders by heart. No onions for this guy, extra sauce for her, that ladies kids like the crust well done…

For me the personal touch that he brings and real relationships he has developed with his customers over the years is what has made him a success. It's what makes his customers come back over and over, and it's what makes us all recommend his restaurant for best pizza in the city whenever asked.

What if there was some way he could expand that personal touch outside of his neighbourhood? What if there was some way that he could create a global community where everyone could get to know him, interact with him, suggest things, or maybe even post a coupon or two…

AH HAH!!! Could that be the secret? I think so. Never before has it been so easy for customers and vendors to start a direct dialog. Social media, web 2.0, team buying, blah blah, blah. To me the core value of all of this is the internet's ability to break down the communication walls between buyers and sellers. The online world gives us all an ability to take the loyalty of the local pizza store and spread it to a global fan base. How much is this worth? Well apparently the financiers of the world have already valued it at BILLIONS OF DOLLARS (again Dr. Evil)!

And you thought it was all in the sauce…..