Theresa Q's Viewspage on Marketkeeping

Finding an audience that cares #li

Building a great list of people who await your messages is very challenging, but in the end, it's the only way to have a marketing system that's sustainable. 

Blog: Trap of Social Media Noise, 2011-Dec, by Seth Godin

The game theory pushes us into one of two directions: either be better at pump and dump than anyone else, get your numbers into the millions, outmass those that choose to use mass and always dance at the edge of spam (in which the number of those you offend or turn off forever keep increasing), or

Relentlessly focus. Prune your message and your list and build a reputation that's worth owning and an audience that cares.

Here's an idea: don't exploit your customers. #li

If business is war, the usual victim is the customer. Don't just plan to take their time and money. Think about what you can give them. 

MENGonline.com: The big idea won't fix your marketing, 2011-Dec-9, by Joe Pulizzi

If you have a customer communication challenge, is one big idea going to fix that? Not in the least. It won’t be fixed by a glam-packed 30 second spot, print campaign, or even the integrated strategy itself. Even a decade ago, we drew on research at Penton Media (a large B2B media company) that indicated it took at least seven messages from a company for a buyer to get to the decision stage.  I’m sure you could easily double that number today.

Here’s the solution for 99% of the businesses out there: It’s not one big idea but a series of small, ongoing conversations with your customers, distributed through the media your customers use. This requires intimate knowledge of your customer and a determination to leave your customer, on each occasion, in better shape than you originally found them.

Please do your sharing on purpose. #li

While it's hard to find time to share things in a meaningful way, it's meaningless to do it otherwise. 

O'Reilly Radar: The End of Social, 2011-Dec-5, by Mike Loukides

Automated sharing is giving Facebook a treasure-trove of data, regardless of whether anyone cares. And Facebook will certainly find ways to monetize that data. But the bigger question is whether, by making sharing the default, we are looking at the end of social networks altogether. If a song is shared on Facebook and nobody listens to it, does it make a sound?

Way to start Thanksgiving: my boss told me she's glad I'm working with her. #li

Yesterday before I left the office, my boss called to tell my that she's grateful that I'm working at MosquitoZone.com. What a great way to start the holidays! I'm grateful to be there. 

As Daniel Kahneman suggests, today I'll focus being happy and remembering it happily, too. #li

Thanks to Maria Popova for directing me to Daniel Kahneman's inspiring TED presentation about the difference between being happy and thinking of yourself as happy. 

Brain Pickings: Thinking, Fast and Slow: A New Way to Think About Thinking, 2011-Oct-26, by Maria Popova

Among the book’s most fascinating facets are the notions of the experiencing self and the remembering self, underpinning the fundamental duality of the human condition — one voiceless and immersed in the moment, the other occupied with keeping score and learning from experience. Kahneman spoke of these two selves and the cognitive traps around them in his fantastic 2010 TED talk

Loyalty is as loyalty does. (Commenting on Kathy Sierra's post.)

The amazing customer experience expert Kathy Sierra surfaced last week at Hugh MacLeod's blog in order to share a rant about the loyalty marketing movement. Although I totally agree with what she says, I think, as a member of the "Support Local Grow Together" movement, I can be really unselfish when I buy something. Supporting members of my community makes me more willing to spend a little more and give someone and chance. And it makes me three times as angry if they take advantage of me. 

Gapingvoid: Your customer won't take a bullet for you, 2011-Aug-14, by Kathy Sierra

The key to understanding (and ultimately benefitting from) true “customer loyalty” is to recognize and respect that customers–as people– are deeply loyal to themselves and those they love, but not to products and brands. They are loyal to their own values and the (relatively few) people and causes they truly believe in. What looks and feels like loyalty to a product, brand, company, etc. is driven by what that product, service, brand says about who we are and what we value.

That doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from customer loyalty. The moment we stop trying to manipulate, coerce, incentivize, gamify customers into being loyal to us is the moment we free ourselves to consider how to help them where their true loyalty lies. And it starts with the deep recognition that:

If I buy from you it’s not because I like you but because I like myself.

As I said in my previous post, the key is to help users become better at something they care about. My what-looks-like-rabid-loyalty to Apple, Adobe, Gaiman, and Astund is because they have all contributed to Me Kicking Ass in a measurable, meaningful, sustainable, powerful way.

 

Why we read between the lines and how to leverage that in copywriting

Direct mail copywriting has always made me uncomfortable because it's so pushy. But every piece of writing has an intent, and people read it with that intent in mind. Does your writing quickly and authentically convey its intent? You stand to lose much more by obscuring it. If you read the entire article excerpted below (which I recommend), you'll find that visual reminders of a strong brand are much more effective in driving unconscious confidence than are words. Let your words show your intent and let the images build the reader's confidence.

Language Log: Not so gullible after all, 2011-Aug-3, by Julie Sedivy

But more generally, the study highlights the possibility that we're creatures for whom it's very important to quickly identify communicative intent, that we try to do so on the basis of whatever rough-and-ready cues there might be on hand, and that we automatically and unconsciously adjust the ways in which we process and respond to information depending on what we perceive that intent to be.

The study brings to mind arguments made recently by Gergely Csibra, Gyorgy Gergely and Jozsef Topal to the effect that even very young infants can pick up on certain cues from adults about instructional intent, and that they adopt a particular cognitive stance when it seems to be present. In the pragmatics literature, we're used to talking about inferring communicative intent—but perhaps inference is not always necessary in order to identify intent.