Shape of Things

You’re the expert.

You’re the one who knows how to position the product.

You know how to tell the story.

You know the buttons to push: benefits, benefits, benefits.

But what’s that language you’re speaking? Is it marketese? Is it generalism? Is it how you would explain it to your family and friends? Is that a Facebook hook or an Anandtech hook?

If you are talking to people like yourself, you’re likely speaking a foreign language to the engineers, developers or R&D people with whom you want to engage.

To communicate in the same language as those you want to reach, you need to reach out yourself. Interview people from the target audience. Immerse yourself in their culture. Find out their pain points and what they consider their victories. Put yourself in their position and feel what they feel.

Most of all, get technical. If you don’t understand the concept or terminology, get someone to explain it to you. Be the person who makes the technical understandable, without patronizing anyone.

It’s hard work, but it has immense value. We need people who can bridge marketing, engineering and upper management. You can be one of those rare people.

There are two types of companies: those who care about the quality of their content and those who simply follow a PR or communications template.

The former develop content based on the need of their customers for information that will help them do their jobs better. The latter do it because they feel obligated to check off a box in their marketing/PR to-do list.

First option or distant runner-up?

It’s difficult to directly prove the benefits of great content. But it’s like great design: you know it when you see it. Or more importantly, your customers know it. And it will be reflected in the incoming traffic to your website and your website’s stickiness — how long your target audience lingers on your site.

A well-researched, well-written and cogently stated case study, technical article or white paper might not directly translate to sales leads, but it builds trust, confidence and a sense of identity. It can be the difference between positioning your company as the first option when a potential customer is making a buying decision or being considered a distant runner-up.

A matter of choice

Who do you get to generate compelling content? Again this separates the committed from the window dressers. Almost always the best choice is to have content generated by an internal engineer or developer — a peer of your target audience — and then have a skilled editor mold it into shape.

Another choice is to hire an outside consultant with proven writing skills and deep knowledge of your industry. That person will cost you a lot more than a generic writer who might only dabble in your particular field.

When hiring a writer, think of hidden costs. The writer who has both skills and industry knowledge will likely get it mostly right in the first draft, and completely right by the second draft, sparing review and rewriting time from your highly paid technical and marketing people. Although more expensive initially, that person will save a lot of money in the long run and give you something likely to resonate with your target audience.

What’s your company?

How you communicate says a lot about your company and its culture. Are you a leader or follower? Are you a partner or exploiter? Are you distinctive or generic? Are your customers worth the extra effort and expense or not? Do you want a relationship with your target audience or a one-night stand?

What you say and how you say it means more than you might realize.

A recent article in the New York Times documented attempts at Yoplait to imbue its yogurt with authenticity to ward off competitors such as Chobani and Fage. After experimentation, focus groups and name changes, corporate researchers uncovered a story about Yoplait making yogurt in small batches, just like French farmers did for centuries. Voila, instant authenticity!

“Instead of culturing the ingredients in large batches and then filling individual cups,” the company’s news release reads, “Oui by Yoplait is made by pouring ingredients into each individual pot, and allowing each glass pot to culture for eight hours, resulting in a uniquely thick, delicious yogurt.”

So, you can reverse-engineer authenticity. Brands for years have traded on nostalgia and history to become hip even when they never were in their heyday (PBR, anyone?). But do people really believe the stories?

Authentic doesn’t necessarily cleave to history, of course. Something new can be authentic. That’s what I think about American Giant, a company that makes honest, high-quality t-shirts, sweats, jackets and hoodies. They don’t exaggerate who they are. They stand for good things: quality, durability, fit. Their story is well-told and free of hyperbole. It feels genuine.

My life was marked by skepticism at an early age. Perhaps that’s why I gravitated toward journalism as my first career choice. It’s a trade where you need to be suspicious; lies are everywhere and your mission is to uncover truth. I don’t think I’m alone in bringing a similar attitude to my life as a consumer. There’s a lot of fake stuff out there and we’ve learned not to be taken as suckers (at least not repeatedly).

I think we all have finely tuned shit detectors. Fabricated stories — like lip-syncing, synthesized horns or butter substitutes — might pass muster for some, but for the rest of us they will always make the needle jump into the red.

Try all you want, but you cannot manufacture authentic. You can build it into your company’s culture, but you can’t retroactively bend a suspect culture to resemble authentic. It’s either there or it’s not. And we know the difference.

I was talking with a friend this morning who is selling his company on the idea of internal branding. It seems everybody in this fast-growing company has a different story on who the company is and what it does.

On the surface, this doesn’t seem like a bad thing. After all, if it’s internal, who cares? Let everyone make up their own stories about their employer.

Only problem is that there’s no such thing as internal when it comes to communications, especially now when everyone has personal broadcasting channels and the enterprise might be spread throughout the world. So, as controlling as it might sound, spreading the brand identity internally is just as important — perhaps even more so — than what a company says externally.

Given this environment, companies have to ask themselves: Do our major shareholders, our employees, really know our story, and are they invested enough in it to spread the word?

We see them and marginalize them: Those street vendors offering phone cards, knock-offs and overtly fake fashion accessories.  But, as Robert Neuwirth points out in an interview in this month’s issue of Wired magazine, these unregulated economies have a collective GDP of $10 trillion a year.

It got me to thinking about how most high-tech companies do marketing and PR: It’s almost always about people coming to them, not the other way around.  And, it often involves the grand gesture.  The big advertising and PR campaign. 

What if, like street vendors, we went to the places people hang out.  No, not the big trade shows, but to home-town markets around the globe, inviting people to see our wares and spend some time with us.

OK, I know what you’re thinking: big bucks.  But it doesn’t have to be.  It can be one man or woman and a laptop (or whatever other equipment your technology requires) on a tour of underserved, but significant markets.

This isn’t about the New Yorks, San Franciscos, LAs, Londons, Parises, Hong Kongs and Berlins of the world — those cities are already served by major conferences and waves of sales troops.  It’s about having feet on the street in cities that don’t get a lot of high-tech suitors.

In the U.S., that could include places like Boise, Idaho; Wichita, Kansas; Durham, North Carolina; Houston, Texas; Salt Lake City, Utah; and others a bit off the usual high-tech conference circuit.

Recruit locals from your customer base, find out the cool places where customers and potential customers hang out, book the hottest local band or DJ and have a workshop followed by a party.  Give out swag. Buy beer. Make friends. Be personable.  Generate fun. Tweet and facebook about it.

People will love the fact that you came to them and delivered an experience that reflects their needs and culture.  And, it sets up a foundation for that most important business-builder: a relationship.

While not everyone appreciates a Gucci knock-off, most people will approve of a company that brings a good product and a good time to their fair city.

You might have thought that the pressure to say the right thing, wear the right thing, do the right thing, left you in high school, but you’re likely wrong.

Studies cited in yesterday’s New York Times magazine (“Nudge the Vote” by Sasha Issenberg) show that peer pressure is the biggest single generator of higher voter turnout.  The article also punctures the myths of celebrity endorsements, four-color glossy mailings and robo calls (or almost any call for that matter).

Leave fingerprints behind

The findings are interesting for all marketers.  How can we use subtle (or maybe not so subtle) peer pressure to help sell products? Beauty and exercise products have used this forever, of course, but couldn’t it be applied to technology or informational products?

A finding that I found aligns closely with the sensibilities of engineers and other buyers of technology is that voters don’t want marketing dazzle, according to political consultant Hal Malchow.  His primary findings:

• E-mail and text messages from unexciting senders (such as “Election Center”) often do better than those with livelier “from” lines.
• Voters pay less attention to glossy four-color brochures than they do to spare envelopes containing simple letters like ones received from government officials.

“People want information, they don’t want advertising,” Malchow says. “When they see our fingerprints on this stuff, they believe it less.”

Voters are a lot like your audience

Other interesting snippets from the article:

• People are more likely to perform an action if they have already visualized doing it.
• In-person canvassing outperformed all other voter promotions by a wide margin.
• The most effective way to find what works is testing different messages with small samples and then sending the most influential ones to a much larger target audience.

If you think of the audience for your products — especially if you are in high-technology — chances are they are a close fit with voters: skeptical, disillusioned with marketing, and not convinced by displays of force or flash.

Conformity is a bit like heroin: comforting, but extremely addictive.

If your company or clients value conformity over creative, it’s your role to try to break the chain of addiction.  Then again, maybe you are the pusher.

About a decade ago, an innovative 3D graphics company I was working with was sold to a major computer company.  I was entrusted with preparing a brochure and poster that conveyed the excitement of a new product. It shouldn’t have been hard: the images generated by this computer were stunning, and its capabilities singular.

The challenge was overcoming the rigid standards of the parent company: Use one of two typeface choices and one of a few design templates. Exact color and positioning for the logo. Reference the company name in the exact same way all the time.

The pieces ended up looking and sounding fine, but they took three times as long to produce and involved four times as many people as they should have. And, they could have been much better. I vowed never to do a project for a company like that again; I’m glad to say I’ve stuck to that vow.

About five years later, what a relief it was to see Google snub conformity. Silly company name. Logo that it changed daily and had fun with — in fact, playing with the company logo became part of Google’s corporate identity and a subject of discussion.

Think about things you do to conform to some rules that were written years ago and might not be relevant, or are actually dragging down your corporate image. Like that boring standard paragraph at the end of your press releases.  Or the corporate-speak that saturates your marketing materials. Or those quotes from the CEO that sound like they came from an automaton. Or using trademarks when they aren’t needed. Or the staid design of your web site.

Conformity sends a message: “We’re like all the rest and we don’t care if you think so.”  Is that the corporate message you want? If so, fine.  If not, time to get the conformity monkey off your back.

Is social media the new web 2.0, a term that’s absolutely meaningless?

In practice, social media is often a new form of interruptive marketing. The vast majority of companies are tweeting, linking in and facebooking just to broadcast messages, without regard to discussion or conversation. Most corporate messages in social media are the equivalent of truncated press releases.

Indulge in social media if you want, but if you really want to deliver value, establish a community for customers, partners and potential customers. Provide an outlet for technical information, peer-to-peer interaction, customer stories, surveys, Q&As, interviews, blogs from your product developers, commentary and other content people in your industry can’t get anywhere else.

You have a choice: Add to the cacophony or establish a welcomed outlet for constructive conversation.

Sometimes the hardest thing is just getting started.  Objections are easy to come by, and big change seems insurmountable.

Maybe like the multiphobic Bob Wiley (Bill Murray) in the movie “What About Bob,” you should consider taking baby steps.  Here are five you can take to get involved with social media and lay the groundwork for establishing a community around your products and services.

1. Establish or participate in LinkedIn groups that share information about your industry. Initiate intelligent discussions and add constructive commentary on others’ discussion topics to solidify your credentials and expertise.  Provide special free offers that are valuable to group participants and provide an ancillary benefit of promoting your product or service. But, whatever you do, don’t pander.

2. Participate in forums.  Provide information and initiate discussion on topics related to your company’s products or services.

3. Get on twitter to monitor discussion about your company and the industry it serves, and to develop followers to whom you can provide information and perspectives.

4. Start a blog on your web site and contribute to it regularly — at least twice a month, but preferably once a week. If you don’t know how to do it, bring in a journalist to help you. Topics: technical information on your products or services, profiles of customers, industry perspectives or opinions, surveys, open-ended inquiries of readers, guest blogs by partners, video tutorials, research results — there are tons of resources within your company waiting to be harvested.

5. Take the information that you regularly use for press releases, case studies, white papers, and support documents and consolidate it into a permission-based e-newsletter.  Add surveys or forums to encourage interaction with readers. Six times a year is a good frequency. This will set up a direct link to your customers for sharing information and collecting feedback. Remember that the information has to be valuable to and welcomed by recipients.

These five steps will begin establishing a conversation with customers and potential customers, creating a sharing relationship rather than a vendor dictatorship. The ultimate goal is to begin establishing a community around your products and services — more on that soon.

I’m in ample, though fairly silent, company when I say that my greatest regrets have come from fear and complacency — the dual killers of ambition.

Afraid of appearing foolish, being ridiculed, called stupid or naive.  Then justifying my inaction and certifying it with complacency.

For everyone who feels this way about new forms of marketing, PR and communications, it’s not too late to catch up according to Seth Godin. My nomination for the best place to start is by reading Inbound Marketing, the new book by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. 

I’ve heard Dharmesh speak twice at the Business of Software conferences, and he walks the walk. I knew this book would be practical and well-written, but didn’t anticipate how inspiring it would be (although I’m not giving up my newspapers as the authors suggest).

I’ll spare you a full review, as I wouldn’t have much to add to the excellent one by Neil Davidson on the Business of Software blog.

If you are bound by fear or complacency regarding new forms of marketing, PR and communications, this is where you shrug off those shackles.