Totally Incorrect » Marketing

Mass Innovation Night – #MIN7

David — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:19:55 +0000

Amazing, tonight was MIN7 – the seventh in the series of Mass Innovation Nights. The concept seems to get better all the time, with some great companies being introduced and a new idea for the format as well.

For the first time, it was possible for innovators to meet one on one with legal experts, finance experts and banks to help get their businesses off to a good start.

As always at Mass Innovation Nights, there was a company that really caught my eye. This time it was mybrainshark.com – wacky name, but a great way to host presentation on-line. This is something I’ll be checking out for sure.

Check here for details on all the companies at MIN7.

As usual, I had the trusty iPhone with me – here are some of my favorite images from the evening:

Social Media in Manufacturing

David — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 13:40:47 +0000

How can social media be integrated into a marketing plan for a manufacturing company that sells to other manufacturing companies? This post has been on my to-do list for a long time. When you bear in mind that I’m a social media enthusiast and a marketing manager for a manufacturing company, you’d think it would be easy. I should be the perfect person to use social media to market to my clients, most of whom are manufacturers themselves. Just write about what I do during the day and the post should be finished right?

Needless to say, it isn’t that simple so consequently this post has lived in draft form for way too long, waiting inspiration.

Wow, this morning that inspiration might just have arrived. It was delivered to my Google Reader by that Guru of Corporate blogging, Mack Collier. Strangely, the story isn’t even new, it has been there for the best part of a month. It is called Your Boss Doesn’t Care About “The Conversation” and you can read it at Mack’s site here.

The story is about how a well intentioned, social media aware marketing dude is trying to get the boss to agree to get into social media and blogging in particular. To quote Mack, when the naive pimply faced marketing kid is asked what is in it for the company to start a blog, he replies “Blogging is a conversation, and right now we aren’t a part of it. We need to start a blog so we can join the conversation.”

Needless to say, the boss of Mr. Pimple Face isn’t too impressed with this reasoning. Her mission is to grow the business, get more qualified leads, build market share, awareness and all the other things a marketing group is supposed to do. Having a “conversation” usually isn’t included in the business plan.

Mack goes on to point out, that if Marketing Guy has any chance of selling his social media ideas to his boss, he needs to clearly show how the business will benefit. How building a blog, Facebook page, Twitter presence etc., will result in more leads, more sales, happier clients.

Right, so back to my post and my problem. How can social media become part of the marketing plan when there really isn’t much in the way of conversation in the first place? Is it a lost cause?

First of all, why no conversation? There are obviously various reasons for this. I wrote about one of the big ones in my post Social Media and the IT Guy A lot of businesses control where the employees can go on-line and social media sites are often blocked.

In addition, most of the people who represent my potential customer base are pretty busy and are not hanging around on Twitter or Facebook at work. Those that did have time for this sort of thing have probably been downsized already.

So that was our dilemma when we decided we wanted to add an inbound component to our largely outbound marketing program. We did all the traditional things; mailings, telemarketing, tradeshows, a quarterly newsletter etc. We also had a decent website and played around with Adwords a bit to drive traffic there.

Looking around and talking to people in the business, it seemed that our competitors and other people in our business were in much the same situation. Sure a few companies had blogs and some even had people using Twitter (most of the Twitter users were just Tweeting company stuff so not very interesting). The only exception I found was Carl Brown from SimplyRFID. Carl is active & entertaining on Twitter and has an interesting company blog focusing on his RFID business.

So when we wanted to balance our marketing to bring more inbound ideas, there was not an existing model we could use to get started.

One thing I had learned from my photography business was that Google likes blogs. For UniqueDay Events, our blog outperforms our static website every month in terms of Google search results.

So a blog seemed to be a good idea and I happened to have one kicking around. RFIDNews.net was an old project of mine that wasn’t even on-line any longer. No problem, I registered the domain LabelingNews.com, invested in a new template from great WordPress guy Brian Gardner and the Winco ID quarterly newsletter was now on-line.

We thought we had some pretty good stories to tell on Labeling News, but of course good content does nothing of no-one reads it. We therefore focused on getting our stories to rank well with Google, indeed the posts on the site are often written with Google in mind.

Why is this important? Well for us, we know that we are not going to be driving people to Labeling News via Twitter or Facebook (we do have a presence on these as well as other social media networks, but as already mentioned our customers are generally not active there) so we needed something else.

The something else was that we know our clients have problems and they have questions. When I come across a problem, my first reaction is to type the question into Google and look for possible solutions. I don’t look at the sponsored ads (on all my personal PCs I use Adblock so never see any Google ads anyway), just the organic ones. My strategy depends on me not being the only person who works this way.

So my tactic here is to try and write stories that address specific problems our clients might have. I also try to get inside their heads as to how they would search for information. By keeping an eye on Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools I can see how this is working. On the whole I’m reasonably pleased, I’d rate the results about B- (Not bad but room for improvement).

The other key metric is how often we get a direct contact from Labeling News or how often the phone rings. We make a point of asking new contacts how they found us and Labeling News is high on the list.

One thing I would like to see is more interaction in the post comments. I’m not sure this will happen though – as I mentioned already, our potential clients are not usually that engaged with social media. Instead they find us if they have a problem, get the answer (which often involves making a purchase from us) and move on.

So our Labeling News site is the centerpiece of our social media marketing. We support this with our presence in Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, send monthly targeted outbound emails (with links to specific landing pages), hold regular technology seminars, attend tradeshows. We have not allowed the economic situation to slow down our programs – indeed we see doing a better marketing job as being the solution to getting through the tough times and being in good shape as things recover.

It is still early days for social media in our industry, but I believe it’s important to start building a presence now.

If you are involved in a manufacturing company, does social media play a part in your job? Where do you turn to find reliable solutions to problems?

Preserved Machinery Photo by John Spooner http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnspooner/ / CC BY 2.0

Springer Mountain Mobile Marketing

David — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 18:32:21 +0000

Last night Em and I were home alone and we decided to cook one of our favorite pasta dishes. You can find the recipe here.

As it happens, I forgot the chicken (yes I know the recipe uses shrimp, but we like chicken instead) and had to go back to the store to get it.

Now, you might know that three of my interests are marketing, labeling & barcoding and mobile technology – the things I do for a living. You will imagine I was very pleased to see all three things being used on one of the chicken products – the one from Springer Mountain Farms. Needless to say, this is the one I bought.

The packages of chicken breast have a big datamatrix barcode printed on them, with an invitation to scan to get a discount or a free ringtone – there seemed to be several different versions. The only problem was that I had to charge my iPhone (if you’re an iPhone owner you’ll know this happens rather often) so I couldn’t scan any codes in the store – no problem, I hurried home with my new purchase.

So I grabbed the phone (which hadn’t charged because I’d forgotten to plug the USB cable into the PC) and tried to read my barcode. Try as I might, with two different barcode apps, I couldn’t get the barcode to decode. Very disappointing .

By this time one of Em’s friends had arrived and they were getting hungry – my experiments had to stop because we needed to cook the chicken.

Anyway, this morning it was off to the Springer Mountain website where I was able to scan one of the Datamatrix codes on the screen and be taken to their mobile site.

I must say that even though I wasn’t able to read the barcode on the actual package (and to be fair the iPhone is a terrible barcode scanner so that might be the problem) I love this marketing concept. It has been around in markets where mobile technology is more advanced, such as Europe and Asia for a while, so it is great to see it being used here.

All I need to do now is get back to the store with my iPhone and see if I can read any of the barcodes. Failing that, I’ll try with a proper scanner from the office.

Gotta love the SmartCar too!

What do you think? Do you have any experience of using mobile devices in consumer marketing?

The direct mail campaign

David — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:38:31 +0000

So today we have been planning a direct mail campaign and I am really excited about it. I think this level of excitment was a bit of a surprise to some observers, but there is a very good reason for it.

First, it is important to remember that good marketing needs to be balanced. You can’t spend your time doing nothing but trendy social media, anymore than you’d attend trade shows every week – you need to use a combination of tools to get the job done.

Having said that, the campaign probably wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without a nice dose of MDF (market development funds) from one of the manufacturers who’s products we resell. The companies that sell through the IT channel seem to be rather conservative when it comes to marketing and love their partners to spend their money on this kind of thing. Add to the mix that another partner is giving us great deal on printing and mailing and we have a low cost operation going on.

As if our partner’s are not helpful already, they have also provided some great mailing lists, all existing clients right within our area – you can start to see why I like all this, hey?

Of course, sending out some waves of great mailing pieces (great because our super creative team will be doing the design) is just the start. Because we have our own resource for outbound calling, we can do a good follow up program. We have also (of course!) put together a great landing page, with a call to action and several ways to get in touch. The sales team will be ready to follow up on leads to get the deals closed.

So I’m excited. Not so much because we are going to mail a bunch of postcards. I’m excited because we are working with our business partners, being creative, using a number of key tools and getting the sales people involved in a nice balanced campaign that is going to give good results.

Balanced marketing? That is exciting.

Are you involved in marketing? How do you balance the use of traditional and new marketing ideas?

5 Stupid Arguments

David — Sat, 30 May 2009 11:38:49 +0000

One of the newer additions to my Google Reader list is the excellent Legends of Aerocles blog by David Tetcher.

A recent story that caught my eye was not by David, but was written by a guest, Amanda Fontaine.

The title of the post is 5 Stupid Arguments Against Starting a Social Media Program which, to be fair, is rather hard to miss.

In here post, Amanda lists her 5 top excuses along with a rebuttal for each of them. All good points and a nice read. There are some more good points in the comments as well.

As usual with good posts, this got me thinking – always a good thing. I’d say that resistance to implementing social media into an organization is no different to the resistance to change that comes every time there is a new innovation. You are always going to get the “early adopters” who embrace change and want to throw away everything that came before. Then the more mainstream people who are going wait for this crazy new idea to prove itself, but will happily jump on-board when they can see it works. There will also be the group that hates change and always wants to stay firmly in their comfort zone.

I believe the key to getting your company on-board with the whole “social media as a marketing tool” is to introduce in small non-threatening steps. Show how the new marketing techniques will not disrupt what you are already doing – on the contrary they can enhance your existing marketing and make it more effective. Maybe start with blogging – pretty easy to understand and can be easily integrated with your PR, emails etc.

Rember, social media on its own isn’t going to achieved anything. The secret of success is a balanced marketing program using the best tools for your particualr needs.

Good post Amanda!

Have you had resistance to introducing social media into your organization? How did you get over it?

Another good reason to use Firefox

David — Wed, 27 May 2009 00:18:22 +0000

Today I had a nasty shock. I was at my office and had occasion to check out Chris Brogan’s blog in Google Reader.

You probably think this isn’t a big deal and indeed, I do this everyday from my home office. So anyway not being aware of my predicament, I happily navigated to Mr. Brogan’s feed to be confronted by ………………. Google ads in the RSS feed AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

This happened early this morning and I’m still annoyed. I’ve always looked at RSS as being a safe haven from the nasty world of advertising and my illusion was shattered.

Of course, the reason I was confronted by this horror was that at the office I’m stuck with using Internet Explorer whereas at home I use Firefox with Adblock plus.

Being a nice guy, I’d hate others to be confronted by this kind of thing. So please, ditch IE and make sure you are using Firefox and Adblock plus – the best way to deal with those pesky ads.

By the way I didn’t mean to single out Chris Brogan, who’s blog I read and enjoy everyday. His is the only example I saw before fleeing back to my cocooned ad free zone.

What about you? Are you bothered by ads or are you OK with it? Do you have any personal ad avoidance strategy?

Milltronics – a Sincere Company

David — Sat, 23 May 2009 20:03:12 +0000

You might just have read my recent story complaining about how fed up I am with companies pretending that they appreciate the people that work for them – then promptly outsourcing everything and laying them off. It often seems to me that when a business makes a big deal in their marketing about how great the people are, or how well they take care of their customers, it’s often just BS.

When I drove into the Eastec show last week and saw that the event was sponsored by a company called Milltronics making the claim that “Our people make the difference”, I was ready to be annoyed.

Milltronics is a manufacturer of CNC machine tools, an industry that is dominated by big companies from Asia. I was fully expecting the “Our people make the difference” to be just the usual marketing BS.

As it happens, I was in for a pleasant surprise. When I visited the Milltronics booth, I made the great discovery that they actually manufacture their products here in the US. Better yet, this is one company that does seem to appreciate that business is about people. On all of the Milltronics machines at the show was a label with a list of the companies employees – the people responsible for designing, building and supporting the machine.

Impressive, a company that gets it!

Personally, I am not someone that purchases machine tools, so there is very little chance I would ever do business with them (unless they buy some Winco labels of course!) but if I were the owner of a machine shop or manufacturing company, I would be wanting to purchase from an American company that supports its American employees rather than any of the big Asian companies.

Nice one Milltronics!

Milltronics gets a mention in my Eastec video too.

Do you know any organizations that are sincere about supporting their employees and US Industry? Let me know and I’ll be happy to feature them.

Here’s one already – Brogan posted about Maker’s Mark today; another good example.

Mass Innovation Nights – #MIN2

David — Sun, 17 May 2009 21:06:21 +0000

Checking in for #MIN2

As I mentioned in my little video podcast, this week was the second of the Mass Innovation Night events.

I had missed the first, so I was really pleased to have the chance to attend the second one.

Mass Innovation Nights is run by Bobbie Carlton of Carlton PR & Marketing along with Dan Englander of High Rock Media. The idea is create a friendly informal setting where inventors and entrepreneurs can network with interested people such as those in the media, bloggers and Social Media types. Bobbie is clearly a marketing person who understands Social Media and she engages the Social Media communities in helping her get the word out.

Bobbie, the boss of MIN

This is clearly working as about 300 people attended the event, held at the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation in Waltham, MA. The museum itself is a great location and well worth a visit. Check out the site here.

I’ve not spent much time in downtown Waltham and I was pleasantly surprised by how nice the area is. As you would expect, the mill building is right on the river and all around are great views and busy resturants – very nice.

Anyway, after fighting my way through the Rt. 128 evening traffic I arrived at the event just as things were getting going. There was already a pretty good crowd there and plenty more still arriving.

One of the first things I saw was that the Twitter time line for the #MIN tag was being projected onto the wall – right in the middle was one of my Tweets – cool!

The event was in a good size room, with the dozen or so exhibiting companies (I think they are called Presenters in MIN speak, but look just like exhibitors to me) scattered around the outside. There was plenty of room to move around, chat with the exhibitors as well as the other visitors. From the buzz of conversation in the room, there were a lot of people making connections.

Nice to see IBM supporting

So what kinds of ideas were being presented? I was actually a bit disappointed to see that none of the organizations was involved in manufacturing. Everything was a service of some kind, many with a social media twist. With social media being so trendy right now, I can certainly understand this. The organizations ranged from IBM (yes really – some of the local IBM people seem to understand the value of networking – in the social not computer sense!- and it was great they had a presence) to tiny startups.

Here are some of the people I spoke with and my thoughts on their “product.”

Nexiwave. This is a kind of conference calling service. Think WebEx on steroids, with a big dose of social media for good measure. I was impressed with the features, including voice to text transcription and archiving of calls. Also has some clever bookmarking features to help keep track of things.

Nexiwave

I don’t have a need for this personally (Whistletree.com takes care of my limited teleconferencing needs), I can see that companies needed high quality on-line collaboration would find this an attractive alternative to WebEx, Go to meeting and the other players.

Pixily was interesting because it is a new solution to an old problem. Even in our digital world, there are still huge amounts of paper documents to be managed and that is where Pixily comes in. These guys will handle converting your documents to digital formats and give you a web interface to be able to manage them.Send them the originals and they’ll do the rest.

Of course, if you are a big company, you probably have resources for this kind of thing, so I get the impression Pixily is aimed at smaller businesses with a problem to solve but not wanting to invest in their own infrastructure.

Again, I have no need for this kind of service, but I thought the concept was very well thought out.

Hubunity is very interesting because it is a tool for setting up and running social networks for organizations such as schools, non-profits or businesses – almost like having your own personal Facebook.

Really clever idea and I can already think of loads of ways I could use something like this. I would love my daughter’s school to have one of these networks – it would be the perfect way to keep everyone involved with what is going on. Hmmm – I just might have to suggest it

Click Health gets my vote

My favorite idea at the event was Click Health. These guys are looking to use new technology to bring healthcare to developing nations. The idea is simple – use the mobile phone network to link people in need to healthcare professionals to diagnose problems and provide support.

Check out the videos on their video page to get a feel for how this system can work. Really impressive and an idea well worth supporting. It is great to see technology being used a way that can help a great number of people. I wish Click Health every success!!

Great location

I wish Mass Innovation Nights success as well. This is a fantastic idea and I’m really pleased that Bobbie and Dan put this concept together. I plan to attend as many events as I can this year (hopefully get to the after-party next time) and I really hope you will as well. It would be great to see a NH Innovation Nights too.

Were you at MIN2? If you were what are your thoughts? If you live in a different area, do you have something similar?

Sick of insincere businesses?

David — Fri, 15 May 2009 21:48:59 +0000

I don’t always agree with Chris Brogan (no problem with that and I do read his blog everyday), but his recent post “Shut-the-hell-up-you-self-promoting-turd” caught my eye and not just for the attention grabbing headline.

Chris was complaining about the way a lot of companies insist of forcing old style marketing messages at us constantly, even when we all know they don’t work – rather like he does with his Thesis themes ads, actually.

So, anyroad up, the post got me thinking and my mind drifted towards things companies say and how this compares to what they do. Hmm, what do I mean?

First, I’m thinking of the businesses that go on and on on the “about us” part of their website about how the people are the most important thing about their organization. These are the businesses that promptly outsource manufacturing to China and make sad users have to try and deal with non-English speaking tech support in India. As soon as there is a dip in the economy these “really important and the real strength of the business” people are suddenly out on the street. They were just so important eh?

And then there are the companies who put a dumb “we take care for our customers” tagline on their logo. The kind of businesses that refuse to help clients when something is clearly covered by a warranty. Want to get a good reputation for fantastic customer service? Why not try actually doing it, rather than making it just marketing BS?

So here’s the deal – these days it is so easy for your clients and potential clients to find out just how an organization operates. You are not going to fool anyone with BS anymore. Your employees and customers deserve better.

To quote Mr Brogan: “Shut up! Just stop it.”

Danny Brown Interview

David — Fri, 15 May 2009 02:18:29 +0000

This evening I had the chance to chat with Danny Brown – the 12for12k guy.

Danny is kind enough to discuss his thoughts on Social Media marketing and how it fits in with a marketing plan. We also chat about the 12for12k charity and the exciting plans that are being put in place for the rest of the year.

Thanks to Danny for taking part – I hope you find his insights to be interesting.

Click on play on the little media player below: