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March 30, 2008
Define or Differentiate? A Marketer's Dilemma
Fellow PRSA Counselors Academy member Eric Morgenstern of Morningstar Communications wrote an interesting article for Counsel -- the organication's monograph -- on the possibility that marketers are spending a little too much time on differentiation and not enough time on meeting -- or exceeding -- customer requirments. There's an excerpt below and you can purchase the full version for a nominal fee on the Counselors Academy Web site.
He makes some good points. Too many companies ask the question "how can we be different" when they should be asking "what does the customer want and how can we deliver better than the other guys?" When we're leading our Communicating for Action planning sessions, we make absolutely sure that, along side any differentiating messages, there are also clear "definers" that help a target audience understand the company.
Awareness first -- differentiation second. Or, as one of our clients said recently: "You've gotta be IN the game before you can separate yourself from the other players."
Think Excellence, Not Difference
Positioning Strategies for Success
ERIC M. MORGENSTERN, APR, FELLOW PRSA, PRESIDENT AND CEO
MORNINGSTAR COMMUNICATIONS
Executive Overview
In recent years, marketing professionals have focused their strategies around
market differentiation.
However, in many industries, companies are finding it increasingly difficult to
differentiate themselves from their competitors. What's more, the chief concern of
customers -- whether they be consumers shopping in a retail store or businesses relying
on the advice of a consulting firm -- is not differentiation at all. Instead, it is "Who can
most effectively fulfill my specific needs while meeting my standards?" or "Who is my
best choice?"
For many customers, different isn't necessarily better -- it's just different.
The only solid strategy for meeting these ever-increasing customer expectations is one
focused on excellence. This means if you manage a company's marketing or public relations
programs, you want your company's customers to perceive it as excellent, instead of
simply different from the rest of the pack. Similarly, if you work for a public relations or
marketing agency, you want your clients to be perceived as excellent -- rather than
different -- by their customers.
This proposed approach -- Think Excellence, Not Difference -- is not another
marketing theory that has little connection to the real business world. It is, simply, a smart
marketing method communicators can use to position forward-thinking companies as
market leaders.
Leading companies can no longer prosper by continually positioning themselves
against their competitors. Instead, their continued success depends upon convincing
customers that they are a reliable resource for excellence.
There are four steps to the Think Excellence, Not Difference method. They are:
• Determining the end customer's definition of excellence
• Evaluating how well your client, or company, is currently meeting
those expectations
• Designing a measurable program that will meet or exceed the expectations of
your customers, and
• Leveraging your excellence to attract other, similar customers or clients.
An organization can measure its immediate success with this method by how well it is
retaining its customers, its rate of revenue increases, routine client satisfaction studies and
its profitability. However, the sustainability of an excellence mind-set will ultimately
Think Excellence, Not Difference depend on how a customer describes the organization to others in the marketplace. What an organization's customers say about the organization to others represents the true
embodiment of that organization's brand.
Posted by Matt Kucharski at 11:23 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 28, 2008
Newbie guide and analyst relations on Twitter
Twitter looks like it was designed way last century, but can be a useful tool and is gaining ground as a way to connect with analysts, a workgroup or a cluster of blusterers (also called twit knits) (OK I made that up). The idea is you can have a group of followers who want to know what you're doing or thinking at any given moment; kind of like blogging from your mobile phone. (I use it to let my college kids know we're headed to a volleyball game or eating seafood without them.) You can use it to follow an industry pundit or let your team know when you're headed into a meeting. While it may be a great way to connect with your friends, it's not that friendly so here's a useful guide. It's about a year old.
Also, here's an analyst blogging about using Twitter for analyst relations and connecting employees. Like blogging began, there's a lot of drivel out there, but try it out and look for the serious possibilities.
Posted by Bob Brin at 6:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 27, 2008
I Was Too Early! YouTube Adds Insight to Measuring Success
While we're on the subject of viral videos, which I just blogged about this morning, I thought I'd post a link to the latest from YouTube/Google. They're working on launching an analytics-type platform for YouTube videos, called YouTube Insight. It will allow anyone with a YouTube account to access statistics surrounding the videos they upload. Pretty cool. The back-end system looks very similar to Google Analytics and will offer stats like how often videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a certain time period.
I posed the question this morning as to how to best track and measure viral videos - making the claim that marketers are still trying to figure it out. It looks like Google is already doing that for us.
Posted by Jason Swartz at 3:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Viral Marketing: Pass it Along, or Pass it By?
We had a great discussion yesterday afternoon during a meeting with our internal SMERF group (no, not those blue characters who live inside mushrooms and sing songs all day.) Padilla's SMERF team represents our Social Media Elite Response Force - a group of younger 'Padillians' who meet monthly to discuss the latest trends in social media and often times bring in guests to gain outside perspectives. Yesterday, we did just that by inviting in a local video producer to share some examples of viral videos they've created and to gain his take on the whole viral video landscape. I think we were all in agreement on a couple of things:
1.) There are common driving forces behind successful viral videos.
2.) Even with all the proper driving forces, the success or viral nature of a video remains unpredictable.
We often see companies spend gobs of money on the production of what is essentially a television commercial, with the expectation of it repurposing it on YouTube and making it "go viral." There lies the first issue; TV ads aren't Web videos. Some can be, but if you look at the majority of successful videos on the Web, many of them have not, or could not be aired on TV. Our visitor said that Web videos are either highly entertaining or highly informative, and are almost always fairly short. Now consider that a lot of TV commercials are funny or informative and very short, yet you probably wouldn't pass many of them along. I believe that's because Web videos are usually edgier than what you'd find on TV - or they have a cheesy, home-grown feel and can be completely random. In addition, when videos live on the Web, entertainment usually comes first. In the ad world, brands can't afford to spend millions of dollars to entertain. They want to measure, dissect and ultimately sell products. Here lies another question; do millions of views on YouTube equate to an increase in sales? Maybe, maybe not. Overall, I see viral videos as more of a branding effort, geared for the "long tail" than an instant sales generator.
On the flip side, even if your video is entertaining or informative, and even short in length, people still may not share it among peers. Why? I think a lot of marketers are still trying to figure that out. In the meantime, if you have a video that you want passed along, look into some of these driving forces and manage your own expectations about its outcome. Then ask yourself if it truly has viral potential, or if you have a TV commercial that you just really want people to watch.
Posted by Jason Swartz at 7:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 25, 2008
Lazy like a Firefox
We're increasingly coming across Web developers who don't even bother to test their work for Internet Explorer. Just in the last couple weeks, we've run into a CMS tool (with this one, it's more like Ground Hog Day the movie), a national consumer brand's site and several sites running Flash videos that only work properly in Firefox.
Now, I like the alternative browser and I'm all for revolution, but with Firefox owning 16% market share to IE's 67%, according to one report, the mice aren't going to take over the laboratory (much less the world) any time soon. Testing our work on the market is not only lazy; it's crazy. Didn't we learn anything from Pinky and the Brain?
Posted by Bob Brin at 6:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 24, 2008
BASF launches B2B blog for turf pros
BASF recently launched its TurfTalk blog (with some help from us). It's a good example of how a B2B blog can help open a dialog with a niche market, in this case, the pros who manage grounds for golf courses and the like. Various experts from the company will chime in, along with occasional industry pundits.
Related, we built the site using Wordpress, and our developers are finding it most friendly. Can I say that on a Movable Type-powered blog? We used lots of available plugins for things like the poll, the graphic icons tied to each category and the little pop-ups with each author's name. We also added Google Analytics to track traffic, FeedBurner and Share This. Share This is a great way to include all the social media sharing features (from e-mail to Facebook to de.licio.us) with one icon instead of the dozen or so icons you'd need to add to each entry. Could even spruce up this blog a bit!
Posted by Bob Brin at 6:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 23, 2008
The Difference Between a Financial Planner and a Day Trader
I'm proud to be a public relations practitioner, but I do have to admit to occasionally wishing for a secret identity when I see some people passing themselves off as members of my chosen field. The ones who make me reach for the fake nose and dark glasses treat journalists like telemarketing targets during the 6 p.m. dinner hour and think nothing of representing clients starved for attention but with no regard for building long-term positive reputations and brands. Our own industry is at fault -- with vaunted publications like PRWeek and PRSA's Tactics magazines actually giving these half-wits credence.
If your client hasn't done anything to warrant receiving positive attention -- either through the media or otherwise - maybe it's your job to advise them on what they should be DOING -- not what they should be saying.
Let me make it clear -- a publicist is to a public relations professional what a day trader is to a financial planner. They scarcely belong in the same field.
An article from our Lumin Collaborative partner Steve Cody of Peppercom in a January issue of Bulldog Reporter did a nice job of laying it all out there. In this "dis-intermediated" media environment -- where a great deal of the information generated by companies appears online without vetting by real journalists -- we as public relations professionals need to have even more discriminating news judgment than ever before -- and have the guts to tell our clients the same.
Posted by Matt Kucharski at 12:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
CSI Season II
My good friend Leo Bottary had been writing a blog on client service while serving as a VP at Hill and Knowlton. I'd wondered what happened after he left H&K. He's now back at it again, and for anyone involved in agency management, his musings on topics relating to agency/client relations and other related subjects are worth a look-see. Welcome, back, Leo!
Posted by Matt Kucharski at 12:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 20, 2008
Yahoo! Looking to Become Queen Bee of News Aggregation
Feel the need for yet another Web site where you can find and share news stories? I thought so. Regardless, Yahoo! is providing just that, with their newly launched "Buzz" platform, still in beta. Like Digg and other news aggregators, Buzz aims to feature the most popular stories right now, determined by the number of votes, searches, emails and other factors the story generates. Users can "Buzz Up" a story if they find it worthy, as well as post it to other social media sites and share it with their friends. Buzz also provides Yahoo!'s top search queries, updated hourly, which is always interesting to see. I'm assuming they've kept the 'adult filter' switch turned on, so the top search queries probably aren't an exact reflection of what people are typing into their search bars, but it should give you a good idea.
So, if you happen to Stumbleupon a Delicious story, Web site, photo or blog that you really Digg, share it with others and help create more Buzz -- Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Posted by Jason Swartz at 11:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 10, 2008
Search Within
A strange new feature here from Google...It's their "search within a site" function that allows you to search for info within a Web site, without having to visit that site. For example, a search on "Microsoft" will yield a link to the company's homepage at the top of the results as you'd expect. But now, you have the option to do an additional search, within the Microsoft site, all from the comfort of the results page. How this differs from a search function within a company's own Web site is still a bit confusing, but I can see this becoming a more standard method of search in the near future. Google states in their blog that this new feature will occur "when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site."
Posted by Jason Swartz at 3:28 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
