Category Archives: Consulting

September 5, 2014 · 8:50 am

Scallion Pesto

Foodie Friday brings one of summer’s great dishes: pesto.

English: this is a picture of self made pesto ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When you hear the word you think of a mixture of basil, pine nuts, cheese, and olive oil, and there is no better time of the year than late summer for basil. Of course, what I’ve just described is the traditional pesto alla Genovese, named after Genoa where it originated. The word itself comes from the local dialect’s word for “pound” which is what one must have done to make the sauce before the advent of blenders and food processors.

The term refers to a method, not an ingredient.  The French adopted it, called it pistou, and omitted the nuts since there aren’t a lot of pine trees around.  Cheese is optional as well.  Yet most people think of pesto in just one, very traditional way.  I had my mind semi-blown the other day when I made a batch of scallion pesto.  No basil, just a bunch of scallions thrown in the food processor with the other traditional ingredients.  While I was expecting a sharp hit of flavor, this was a mild, wonderful sauce I smeared on chicken and baked.  Since good scallions are available year round and basil can be expensive outside of summer, it’s a great alternative. Which is, of course, our business point today.

We make too many assumptions and don’t focus on alternatives.  When you shift pesto’s paradigm from specific sauce to method it opens up a world of possibilities.  Different greens, different oils, maybe different cheese.  We tend to get too focused on a specific recipe or outcome and forget that we have options that may produce better results, even if they are unfamiliar.

As business people we need to entertain every ingredient and see what happens.  Not being afraid to fail is a key to success.  I thought scallion pesto was a really weird and potentially bad idea.  It’s now going to be a staple.  What kind of pesto will you make?

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September 2, 2014 · 11:36 am

Mistakes You’re Making With Content

Now that the summer is over (I’ll wait while you boo), many marketing teams are getting back to work.

Collection of Marteting books

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One area that is on many of their minds is content marketing.  I’m a fan when it’s done right and unfortunately it’s increasingly rare that brands are going down that path in a way I admire.  Let me explain.

As the folks as the Content Marketing Institute say:

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

Putting aside how and why there is already an “institute” for something so relatively new, I like that definition because it emphasizes what’s missing in much of what’s being produced – value.  As an aside, the fact that it only implies a customer-centric view is a shortcoming but I guess that if you’re focusing on “valuable” you must focus on the recipient’s view and not your own.

That’s the first mistake many companies make.   This isn’t advertising, folks.  Yes, potential customers are after information but they are trying to make intelligent, informed decisions.  Done properly, good content marketing fills that needs and helps them to do so.  Done badly, it’s another ad they toss and ignore.

We all know people on social media who overshare.  I don’t mean that in the Too Much Information sense (no, I don’t care what you had for breakfast) but in the 100 posts a day sense.  They share or retweet damn near everything that crosses into their stream.  Bad content marketers make the same mistake.  Sure, you’re just trying to be helpful but you need to strike a balance between helpful and annoying.  When you have something useful to say, by all means say it.  When you’re just publishing to make noise, think again.

Finally, one tenet of creating any kind of content is to write what you know.  Companies who make cars shouldn’t be giving out recipes unless they’re hiring noted chefs to write them and publishing them is a way that makes sense:  here is how to use your new Model X for tailgating and here is some great recipes to help you to do so.  You can’t be all things to all people.  Be a resource in your areas of expertise and avoid all the others.  Your audience will thank you.

Oh – one last thing.  Do NOT hide an ad as a piece of research or a white paper.  I’ve written about that elsewhere so I won’t belabor the point.  Be transparent.  Be real.  Add value.  Don’t be sneaky.  Your thoughts?

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August 26, 2014 · 11:37 am

The Only Two Numbers That Matter

Everyone in business has heard talk about “big data.” It Takes 2!There is no question that we know more about our customers, their buying patterns, their media usage – heck, just about anything – than ever before. It’s easy to get trapped into micromanaging all that data which will overwhelm even the best systems and the smartest analysts.  So today I’m going to try to get you to follow some great advice from Thoreau:

I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.

He wasn’t exactly talking about big data, but he might have been.  In my mind there are really only two numbers that matter.  While I’m going to speak of them in web terms the reality is that they apply to every business as I will explain.  They are:

That’s it.  Multiply those two and you get a measure of success.  The first is how many opportunities you have to create a successful interaction; the second is the rate at which you do so.  That successful interaction can be a newsletter sign up, a sale, a social share of some content – you will need to define it.  Taking the number of times that successful thing happens and dividing it into the number of people who potentially might have done it (your traffic) gives you a conversion rate.  Simple!

You would be surprised how many of the analytics accounts I’ve looked at over the years haven’t set up goals, and without goals there are no conversions.  It’s not just web-based businesses that can do this.  Retail can count foot traffic and numbers of sales, for example.  Numbers of customer service calls with a successful (in the customer’s eyes) resolution.  Once you’re focused on measuring traffic and conversions, you can place everything else you do in marketing in those contexts.  More traffic without conversions is useless.  More conversions from the same traffic is fantastic.

Big data is great and I use it all the time.  As with all things, however, start with the simple, which often gets overlooked – the necessary and the real, as Thoreau says.  You agree?

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