Monthly Archives: July 2013

July 18, 2013 · 8:15 am

Meet HAL, Our CMO

Anyone remember HAL? Or more specifically, the HAL 9000, one of the great screen villains of all time? Sure you do – it’s the computer in 2001. Throughout the course of the film the computer runs almost everything, including the humans. When the humans rebel, it murders them (trust me, that’s not a spoiler and you MUST see the film if you haven’t).

Hal 9000 D - Chrome

(Photo credit: K!T)

HAL is on my mind this morning because of something I read in Media Post:

Adobe Systems released an updated version of its social media platform Thursday allowing marketers to predict the effectiveness of posts before they are published.  Using predictive analytics, the feature in Adobe Social learns as it goes, refining recommendations and increasing intelligence with each action. The platform pulls in historic data from similar posts and integrates it with image data on Flickr, check-ins on Foursquare and videos from Instagram, to determine the outcome for sharing, comments, and likes.

I’m well aware that many companies use testing to plan advertising.  Focus groups are a tried and true method and I’ve used them myself.  Copy testing is part of that.  What I find creepy, however, is when this moves over to social media and it points out a flaw in many companies’ thinking.  Part of using social is being real.  It’s why I have an issue with any sort of programmatic content in general.  There needs to be a human on the other end, and not just a human running an algorithm.

Another problem is in the last sentence, above.  Programming to generate likes and sharing is specious reasoning.  That’s the sort of goal that someone looking to impress a boss who has no understanding of social media would have.  After all – things can go “viral” and generate a ton of comments when they’re used as the butt of a joke or as something negative.  Nice metrics, horrible outcome.

I don’t know about you but I can feel when it’s a computer on the other end.  It’s the digital equivalent of those nested phone menus where you type or say a response to a series of questions.  Those infuriate me .  Maybe they do you as well.  As marketers we need to have the courage to be human in social media.  Auto responders aren’t as good as human responders (properly trained, of course).  Letting a computer dictate what does or doesn’t get posted over the nuanced judgement of humans is not going to be as effective in the long run.

What do you think?

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July 17, 2013 · 8:48 am

One Man’s Relevant Is Another’s Spam

There is a factoid coming out of some research that will be our topic today.  I find it of interest because it’s a dilemma that I share to a certain extent with the folks surveyed.  While the topic of the survey was the use of email, one of the key findings resonated with me:

The greatest percentage of marketers still felt challenged to create relevant and compelling content that will really draw in recipients. This ranked as the No. 1 challenge among B2B and B2C respondents to achieving their marketing objectives, but it was also considered the most effective tactic, cited by 71% of B2B marketers and 65% of B2C marketers. If marketers can create strong content, they believe it really does work at converting consumers.

This survey was conducted by the folks at Ascend2 and Research Underwriters.  I can attest to the challenges of creating compelling content – you see the result of that struggle each day here on the screed.  However, I wonder about the definition of relevant.  After all, you don’t have to go further than your own daily conglomeration of inbound emails to recognize that what’s compelling to those sending the stuff isn’t always at the top of your interest list.

Let’s take it out of the realm of commercial email for a second.  You probably get a few emails each day from friends or coworkers that are totally useless.  By that I mean you can ignore them and be no worse off – no less informed or enlightened.  They’re the “thanks” emails when you say you’ll follow up.  They’re the mails sent to 25 people on a team about a meeting involving 5 of them.  I’m all for communication but that gets to the “compelling and relevant” issue found in the survey.

Take that notion to mail you’d send on behalf of a commercial enterprise.  If you’re and airline and you’re sending me information about special fares that don’t apply to the city in which I live, you fail.  If you’re a vet sending me a special offer for the dog that died last year, you fail.  You see, what I’ve found is that compelling and relevant also means reader-focused, segmented, and based on whatever user data I have such as best read posts, etc.  It’s not  just some formula that satisfies MY agenda.

Marketing is hard and getting harder.  So’s blogging!  Neither one succeeds without a laser-like focus on the user.  Right?

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July 16, 2013 · 10:13 am

Staying Together

It’s Tunesday! Today is a special one for me since it’s the 35th anniversary of the day the Mrs. and I got married. Because of that, I wanted a song from roughly the time when we got married that’s also a love song. What popped into my head this morning is “Let’s Stay Together“, a hit for both Al Green and Tina Turner.   The two hits actually happened on either side of our wedding date and I’m very aware that a lot of folks use this as a wedding song (we didn’t – Embraceable You, as I recall…).  I’ve always thought that Al Green’s version was way too low-key for the passion of the song and the video below is a live Tina Turner version which captures the song’s essence:

So what’s this got to do with business?  Actually, quite a bit.  You see, trying to stay together is what all of us do as businesses – with our customers, our team, and our vendors:

Let’s, let’s stay together
Lovin’ you whether, whether
Times are good or bad, happy or sad

The one thing that makes a relationship last is the trust that you’re standing on certain ground.  As the lyric says, you may go through bad times as well as good but never wondering about the underlying connection is crucial.  A customer with issues may not be happy but they’ll stay a customer if they trust you’re working to resolve their problem.  They want to hear “let me be the one you come running to”, not “I’m unable to help you.”

At its core, a relationship of any sort involves an investment of some sort.  While there is a lot of sanity in not throwing good money (literally and figuratively) after bad, it’s generally easier to keep a customer than to find new ones.  A commitment to trying to stay together makes that happen.  That’s how you celebrate 35 years as partners!

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