Category Archives: Rants

Every so often I have to blow off steam. These are the results

Feed Up with Feedback Requests

Sorry Google. I realize this is my last chance to tell you about my experience. But you see, you’re in a long line of companies that are also desperate for the juicy details of my various consumer escapades. Best Western, Ford, Kia, Home Depot, Apple, Samsung – my in box is completely clogged with pleas for the “dets” of my transactional interactions with them. I’ve never been more popular – or frustrated.

I appreciate the idea of customer follow up. I really do. But as company after company jumps on the customer feedback bandwagon, poor ordinary mortals like myself don’t have a hope in hell of keeping up. It could be a full time job just filling out surveys and rating every aspect of my life on a scale that runs from “abysmal” to “awesome” The irony is, these customer feedback requests are actually having the opposite effect. Even if my interactions with the brand are satisfactory, the incessant nagging to find out if I “like them, I really like them” are beginning to piss me off. In the quest to quantify brand affinity, these companies are actually eroding it. Ooops! Talk about unintended consequences.

So, if we accept the fact that knowing what our customers think about us is a good thing, and we also accept the fact that our customers have better things to do with their lives than fill out post-purchase surveys, we have to find a more elegant way to get the job done.

First of all, customer feedback should be part of a full customer relationship continuum. It should be just one customer touch point, not the customer touch point. You have to earn the credibility that gives you the right to ask for my feedback. Too many companies don’t worry about gauging satisfaction “in the moment.” If you don’t care enough to ask if I’m happy when I’m right in front of you, why should I believe that you’ll pay any attention to my survey. But too many companies jam this request for feedback on their customers without doing the spadework required to build a relationship first.

Worse, because compensation is increasingly being tied to feedback results, you get the “please say you’ll love me” pleading on the sales floor. See if this sounds familiar: “You’ll be receiving a survey from head office asking me how I’ve done. I don’t get a bonus unless you give me top marks in each category. So if there’s anything I can do better, please tell me now.” There are so many things that are just plain wrong with this that I don’t know where to start. It’s smarmy and disingenuous. It also puts the customer in a very awkward position. When it’s happened to me, I just murmur something like, “No, you’ve been great,” and run with all speed to the nearest exit.

The next thing we have to realize is that not all purchases are created equal. Remember the Risk/Reward matrix I talked about in last week’s column about how our brains process pricing information? While this applies to our motivational balance going into a purchase, it also provides some clues to the emotion landscape that exists post-purchase. If the purchase was in the low risk/low reward quadrant, like the home improvement supplies I picked up at Home Depot this weekend, it’s a task that has been crossed off my to-do list. It’s done. It’s over. The last thing I want to do is prolong that task by filling out a survey about said task. But, if it’s something that falls into the high risk/high reward quadrant, such as a major vacation, then I am probably more apt to invest some time to give you some feedback. The Rule of Thumb is: the higher the degree of risk or reward, the more likely I am to fill out a survey.

The final thing to remember about customer surveys is that you’re capturing extremes. The people who fill out surveys are usually the ones that either hate you or love you. So you get a very skewed perspective on how you’re doing. What you’re missing is the vast middle of your market that may not be sufficiently motivated to toss you either a brick or a bouquet.

I’m all for getting to know your customers better. But it has to be part of a total approach. It begins with simple things, like actually listening to them when you’re engaging with them.

The Messy Part of Marketing

messymarketingMarketing is hard. It’s hard because marketing reflects real life. And real life is hard. But here’s the thing – it’s just going to get harder. It’s messy and squishy and filled with nasty little organic things like emotions and human beings.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been filing things away as possible topics for this column. For instance, I’ve got a pretty big file of contradicting research on what works in B2B marketing. Videos work. They don’t work. Referrals are the bomb. No, it’s content. Okay, maybe it’s both. Hmmm..pretty sure it’s not Facebook though.

The integration of marketing technology was another promising avenue. Companies are struggling with data. They’re drowning in data. They have no idea what to do with all the data that’s pouring in from smart watches and smart phones and smart bracelets and smart bangles and smart suppositories and – okay, maybe not suppositories, but that’s just because no one thought of it till I just mentioned it.

Then there’s the new Google tool that predicts the path to purchase. That sounds pretty cool. Marketers love things that predict things. That would make life easier. But life isn’t easy. So marketing isn’t easy. Marketing is all about trying to decipher the mangled mess of living just long enough to shoehorn in a message that maybe, just maybe that will catch the right person at the right time. And that mangled mess is just getting messier.

Personally, the thing that attracted me to marketing was its messiness. I love organic, gritty problems with no clear-cut solutions. Scientists call these ill-defined problems. And that’s why marketing is hard. It’s an ill-defined problem. It defies programmatic solutions. You can’t write an algorithm that will spit out perfect marketing. You can attack little slivers of marketing that lend themselves to clearer solutions, which is why you have the current explosion of ad-tech tools. But the challenge is trying to bring all these solutions together into some type of cohesive package that actually helps you relate to a living, breathing human.

One of the things that has always amazed me is how blissfully ignorant most marketers are about concepts that I think should be fundamental to understanding customer behaviors: things like bounded rationality, cognitive biases, decision theory and sense-making. Mention any of these things in a conference room full of marketers and watch eyes glaze over as fingers nervously thumb through the conference program, looking for any session that has “Top Ten” or “Surefire” in it’s title.

Take Information Foraging Theory, for instance. Anytime I speak about a topic that touches on how humans find information (which is almost always), I ask my audience of marketers if they’ve ever heard of I.F.T. Generally, not one hand goes up. Sometimes I think Jakob Nielsen and I are the only two people in the world that recognize I.F.T. for what it is: “the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993.” (Jakob’s words). If you take the time to understand this one concept I promise it will fundamentally and forever change how you look at web design, search marketing, creative and ad placement. Web marketers should be building a shrine to Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card. Their names should be on the tips of every marketer’s tongue. But I venture to guess that most of you reading this column never heard of them until today.

None of these fundamental concepts about human behavior are easy to grasp. Like all great ideas, they are simple to state but difficult to understand. They cover a lot of territory – much of it ill defined. I’ve spent most of my professional life trying to spread awareness of things like Information Foraging Theory. Can I always predict human behavior? Not by a long shot. But I hope that by taking the time to learn more about the classic theories of how we humans tick, I have also learned a little more about marketing. It’s not easy. It’s not perfect. It’s a lot like being human. But I’ve always believed that to be an effective marketer, you first need to understand humans.

Are We Guilty of “Numbed” Marketing?

BombsightA few years ago, I was moderating a panel on mobile advertising. The room was full of marketers. After much discussion about targeting and the ability to track consumers both geographically and behaviorally, one audience member lamented, “Why don’t the carriers just share the subscriber information? They know who they are. They know addresses, family status, credit history, demographics – they have all that information. Then we could really pinpoint our market.”

I had to jump in. I asked this room full of marketers to indicate who would like to have access to that information by raising their hand. The entire room answered in the affirmative. Then I added a twist…

“Okay. Everyone in this room has a mobile phone. Who, as subscribers, would want your carrier sharing that information with anyone who wanted to target you? Keep your hands up.”

Hands wavered. You could almost hear the switch clicking in their brains. Every hand slowly went down.

That story came to mind last week when I read the following passage in a book by Arthur J. Dyck called “Rethinking Rights and Responsibilities: The Moral Bonds of Community,”

“In his study, (Robert Jay) Lifton takes note of a phenomenon he calls “numbed warfare,” a mode of combat in which participants have psychological contacts only with their military cohorts and their own equipment…. Lifton describes research that found a striking correlation between altitude and potential for guilt:

‘B-52 pilots and crews bombing at high altitudes saw nothing of their victims and spoke exclusively of professional skill and performance…’

Lifton calls these B-52 pilots “numbed warriors.” What have been numbed are their empathic emotions: ‘lacking emotional relations with his victims, the numbed warrior receives from them very little of the kind of feedback that could permit at least one layer of his mind to perceive them as human.’”

That may seem like a horrific parallel to draw with marketing, but the similarities are striking. One of the ways warriors have always desensitized themselves is by thinking of the enemy in non-human terms, either as a faceless, monolithic group, or by assigning a dehumanizing (and usually derogatory) label to them. We marketers have been doing this for years. What is more dehumanizing than taking a thinking, feeling person and calling them a “consumer?” Someone once described consumers as “mindless wallets eating shit and crapping cash.”

Warriors have to clearly delineate the concepts of “us” and “them” in order to do what they have to do. But as my room full of marketers realized, when it comes to marketing – “them” is “us.” In a recent PEW study, 80% of social network users were worried that their data would be accessed by advertisers. That means 4 out of 5 people don’t trust you, Ms. or Mr. Marker. They’d rather you didn’t know who they were. If you knocked on their door, they wouldn’t answer. Maybe it’s because you keep calling them a consumer or a target market. I’m also betting that if you were asked that question, you’d answer the same way. Because even though you’re a marketer, you don’t trust other marketers.

In a recent interview, I was asked what one piece of advice I would pass on to other marketers. I said, “Be an empathic marketer.” Or, in plainer terms, don’t numb yourself to your market. I’m not alone in saying we can be better. Fellow Spinner Cory Treffileti talked about the importance of emotion in ad messages. And Katie Meier recently asked the question, “What if data wasn’t about numbers, but instead we made it about the people the numbers represent?”

Technology has put us at a crossroads. We could use it to further distance and dehumanize our market, turning real people into digital data points. We could become “high-altitude” marketers, never coming face to face with the humans we’re trying to connect with.

Or, we could use it to create, as my friend Scott Brinker likes to say, “markets of one.” But before we do that, we have to make them want to listen to us. They have to answer their door if we knock. And that will take some work. We have to start treating them the way we want to be treated, when we’re not wearing our “marketing” hats.

The Trouble with Trying to Stand on The Shoulders of Giants

Standing-on-GiantsIt has long been thought that academia provided a refuge from the sordid world of business. But when a Nobel prize-winning academic says that if he had to do it all over again, he wouldn’t publish, you know something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Laureate Peter Higgs (of Higgs-Boson fame) told the Guardian:

“Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough.”

The whole point of publishing is to share knowledge. But academic publishers don’t seem to have received that memo. For the past two decades, publishers like Reed Elsevier, John Wiley and Springer, who got in on a good gig early, have propped up ridiculous profit margins by slowly squeezing non-profit publishers out of the picture. In the process, they’ve turned academic publishing into a hamster wheel that stresses quantity over quality. Most academic research is rushed out to a limited audience that has been designated as the ones who “count” and the rest of us have to pony up ridiculous sums to access an article that lies on the far side of a barricaded pay wall. Academic publishing is one of the few bastions that has managed to resist the digital tide of declining transaction costs.

I love academic research. I am a big believer in scientific inquiry. I am an avid reader of blogs like Science Daily and Big Think. But 9 times out of 10 (or 99 times out of a hundred), when you actually read an academic paper (if you can get your hands on one), it’s hopelessly mired in academic jargon and the actual findings fall disappointingly short of remarkable. What should be a reflection of the best of who we are has turned into a sordid little business run by shortsighted people who are only in it for a quick buck. If one of the pre-eminent physicists of our generation would rather become a used car salesman or worse yet, a marketer, than follow his passion, we know something is seriously wrong.

Google tried to remain true to the spirit of academic publishing when they introduced Google Scholar. I use Scholar a lot, and have found it very useful for accessing landmark papers from a few decades back that have managed to seep into the public domain. But if you use it to try to access more recent papers, you typically run headlong into one of the afore-mentioned pay walls. I tried to see how academics feel about Google Scholar and was amazed to find this quote from the McKinney Engineering Library blog at the University of Texas:

“Google Scholar has an ambiguous status in the library and research world. Obviously, it is powered by the Google, which is kind of a dirty word in academic research. Also, the fact that it is free throws further suspicion on its quality, particularly when libraries pay lots of money for database access.”

WTF? Forget for a moment that Google is referred to as “the Google” – which I hope is a joke aimed at fellow Texan George W. Bush. Since when should knowledge be judged by the size of its price tag? Stewart Brand identified the disconnect 30 years ago when he said,

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

The rest of the world seems to have moved in the right direction. What the hell is the problem with academia?

If you’re not mad about this, you should be. The vast majority of academic research is funded directly by your tax dollars. Academic publishers don’t pay anyone for content. They have done nothing but agree to publish, which, in today’s world, costs virtually nothing. But somehow they still feel entitled to charge $50 to access an electronic version of an article. Reasonable profits are the right of an honest businessperson, but academic publishing doesn’t even come close to passing the “smell-test.”

One of the big Academic publishers, MacMillan, is at least considering loosening the drawstrings a touch. They’re lowering the drawbridge of their pay wall just a smidge by offering the ability to read and annotate articles on line. But academic publishing still has a long way to go before it approaches the accessibility that marks almost every other form of publishing in the digital world. So far for most researchers, the draw of being published in a prestigious journal has outweighed the idealism of openly publishing their work for all to see on a digital platform.

I suspect this is an area just waiting for disruption. I hope that the academics that are creating the content agree. It seems that academic publishing has been hiding in a previously overlooked nook that has escaped the relentless liberation of information driven by technology. But if MacMillan is feeling threatened enough to lower their defenses, however slightly, I suspect that the tide is beginning to turn. I, for one, thinks that day can’t come soon enough.

The Sorry State of Online Publishing

ss-publishingDynamic tension can be a good thing. There are plenty of examples of when this is so. Online publishing isn’t one of them. The plunging transaction costs of publishing and the increasingly desperate attempts to shore up some sort of sustainable revenue model is creating a tug-of-war that’s threatening to tear apart the one person that this whole sorry mess is revolving around – the reader. Somebody better get their act together soon, because I’m one reader that’s getting sick of it.

Trying to read an article on most online is like trying to tiptoe through a cognitive minefield. The publishers have squeezed every possible advertising opportunity onto the page and in doing so, has sacrificed credibility, cohesiveness and clarity. The job of publishing is communication, but these publishers seem to think its actually sacrificing communication for revenue. Methinks if you have to attack your own business model to make a profit, you should be taking a long hard look at said model.

Either Fish or Cut Click Bait

The problem has grown so pervasive that academia is even piling on. In the past few months, a number of studies have looked at the dismal state of online publishing.

clickbaitIn the quest for page views, publishers have mastered the trick of pushing our subconscious BSO (Bright Shiny Object) buttons with clickbait. Clickbait is essentially brain porn – headlines, often misleading – that you can’t resist clicking on. The theory is more page views – more advertising opportunities. The problem is that clickbait essential derails the mind from its predetermined focus. And worse, clickbait often distracts the brain with a misleading headline the subsequent article fails to deliver on. As Jon Stewart recently told New York Magazine, “It’s like carnival barkers, and they all sit out there and go, “Come on in here and see a three-legged man!” So you walk in and it’s a guy with a crutch.”

A recent study from The Journal of Experimental Psychology showed that misleading headlines and something called “false balance” – where publishers give equal airtime to sources with very different levels of credibility – can negatively impact the reader’s ability to remember the story, create a cohesive understanding of the story and cognitively process the information. In other words, the publisher’s desperate desire to grab eyeballs gets in the way of their ability to communicate effectively.

Buzzfeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith has publicly gone on the record about why he doesn’t use click-bait headlines: “Here is a trade secret I’d decided a few years ago we’d be better off not revealing — clickbait stopped working around 2009.” He references Facebook engineer Khalid El-Arini in the post, saying “readers don’t want to be tricked by headlines; instead, they want to be informed by them.”

Now You Read Me, Now You Don’t

If you ever wanted to test your resolve, try getting to the end of an online article. What content there is is shoehorned into a format littered with ads and clickbait of every description. Many publishers even try to squeeze revenue from the content itself by using Text Enhance, an ad serving platform that hyperlinks keywords in the copy and shows ads if your cursor strays anywhere near these links. Users like me often use their cursor both as a place marker and a quick way to vet sources of embedded links. Text Enhance makes reading in this way an incredibly frustrating experience as it continually pops up poorly targeted ads while you try to tiptoe through the advertising landmines to piece together what the writer was originally trying to say. It turns reading content into a virtual game of “Whac-a-Mole.”

Of course, this is assuming you’ve made it past the page take-over and auto-play video ads that litter the “mind-field” between you and the content you want to access on a site like Forbes or The Atlantic. These interruptions in our intent create a negative mental framework that is compounded by having to weave through increasingly garish ad formats in order to piece together the content we’re trying to access.

A new study from Microsoft and Northwestern University shows that aggressive and annoying advertising may prop up short-term revenues, but at a long-term price that publishers should be thinking twice about paying, ““The practice of running annoying ads can cost more money than it earns, as people are more likely to abandon sites on which they are present. In addition, in the presence of annoying ads, people were less accurate in remembering what they had read. None of these effects on users is desirable from the publisher’s perspective.”

Again, we have this recurring theme about revenue getting in the way of user experience. This is a conflict from which there can be no long-term benefit. When you frustrate users, you slowly kill your revenue source. You engage in a vicious cycle from which there is no escape.

I understand that online publishers are desperate. I get that. They should be. I suspect the ad-supported business platform they’re trying to prop up is hopelessly damaged. Another will emerge to take its place. But the more they frustrate us, the faster that will happen.

 

 

A Prospect Ignored isn’t Really a Prospect

asleep at work / schoolI’ve ranted about this before and – oh yes – I shall rant again!

But first – the back-story.

I needed some work done at a property I own. I found three contractors online and reached out to each of them to get a quote.

Cue crickets.

No response. Nothing! So a few days later I politely followed up with each to prod the process along. Again, nothing. Finally, after 4 weeks of repeated e-nagging, one finally coughed up a quote. Most of the details were wrong, but at least someone at the other end was responding with minimal signs of consciousness.

Fast-forward 2 months. The work is still not done. At this point, I’m still trying to convey the specifics of the job and to get an estimated timeline. If I had an option, I’d take it. But the sad fact is, as spotty as the communication is with my contractor of choice, it’s still better than his competitors. One never did respond, even after a number of emails and voicemails. One finally sent a quote, but it was obvious he didn’t want the work. Fair enough. If the laws of supply and demand are imbalanced this much in their favor, who am I to fight it?

But here’s the thing. Market balances can change on a dime. Someday I’ll be in the driver’s seat and they’ll be scrambling to line up work to stay in business. And when they reach out to their contact list, a lot of those contacts will respond with an incredulous WTF. If you didn’t want my business when I needed you, why would you think I would give you it when you need me? A prospect spurned has a long memory for the specifics of said spurning. So, Mr. (or Ms.) Contractor, you can go take a flying leap.

If you’re going to use online channels to build your business, don’t treat it like a tap you can turn on and off at your discretion. Your online prospects have to be nurtured. If you can’t take any new business on, that’s fine. But at least have enough respect for them to send a polite response explaining the reason you can’t do the work. As long as we prospects are treated with respect, you’d be amazed at how reasonable we can be. Perhaps we can schedule the job for when you do have time. At the very least, we won’t walk away from the interaction with a bitter taste that will linger for years to come.

In 2005, Benchmark Portal did a study to compare response rates for email requests. The results were discouraging. Over 50% of SMB’s never responded at all. Only a small fraction actually managed to respond within 24 hours of the request.

I would encourage you to do a little surreptitious checking on your own response rates. Prospects contacting you need your help, and none of us like to hear our pleas for help go unanswered. 24 hours may seem like a reasonable time frame to you, but if you’re on the other end, it’s more than enough time to see your enthusiasm cool dramatically. Make it someone’s job to field online requests and set a 4-hour response time limit. I’m not talking about an auto-generated generic email here. I’m talking about a personalized response that makes it clear that someone has taken the time to read your request and is working on it. Also give a clear indication of how long it will take to follow up with the required information.

Why are these initial responses so critical? It’s not just to keep your field of potential prospects green and growing. It’s also because we prospects are using something called “signaling” to judge future interactions with a business. When we reach out to a new business we find online, we have no idea what it will be like to be their customer. We don’t have access to that information. So, we use things we do know as a proxy for that information. These things provide “signals” to help us fill in the blanks in our available information. An example would be hiring new employees. We don’t know how the person we’re interviewing will perform as an employee, so we look for certain things in a resume or an interview to act as signals that would indicate that the candidate will perform well on the job if hired.

If I’m a prospect looking for a business – especially one providing a service that will require an extended relationship between the business and myself – I need signals to show me how reliable the business will be if I chose them. Will they get the work done in a timely manner? Will the quality of the work be acceptable? Will they be responsive and accommodating to my requirements? If problems arise, will they be willing to work through those problems? Those are all questions I don’t have the answer to. All I have are indications based on my current interactions with the business. And if those interactions have required my constant nagging and clarification to avoid incorrect responses, guess what my level of confidence might be with said business?

Rethinking the Channelization of Advertising

Anybody who has been a regular reader of my column knows I very seldom write a column exclusively about search, even though it runs every Thursday under the masthead of “Search Insider.” I’ve been fortunate in that Ken Fadner and the editorial staff of Mediapost has never restricted my choice of subject matter. But the eclecticism of my column isn’t simply because I’m attention deficit. It’s because the subject that interests me most is the intersection between human behavior and technology. Although that often involves search, it also includes mobile, social, email and a number of other channels. I simply couldn’t write about what interests me if I was restricted to a single channel.

So why is Mediapost divided into the subject areas it is? Why, when you go to navigate the site, do you choose from email marketing, search marketing, mobile marketing, real time marketing, video marketing or social media marketing? Mediapost is structured this way because it’s a reflection of the industry it serves. Online marketing is divvied up in exactly the same way. We are an industry of channels.

the_rhine_color_coverThe problem here is one of perspective – the industry perspective vs. the customer perspective. Let me use another example to make my point. One of the best things about cruising the Rhine is that there is a stunning medieval castle or fortress around every bend. From Rüdesheim to Koblenz (the Middle Rhine) there are over 40 of these fortifications sprinkled along 40 miles of the river. As picturesque as they are, they were not put there to enhance the views for generations of sightseers yet to come. They were put there because the river was one of the major thoroughfares of Europe and anyone who owned land along the river had the opportunity to make some money. They exacted tolls from travellers to guarantee safe passage.

While this build up along the Rhine probably made sense for the German land barons, it did nothing to make life easier for the poor souls who had to get up the Rhine to reach their eventual destination. Unfortunately, they had few alternatives. They were stuck with paying the tolls.

The advertising business is divided up into channels for exactly the same reason the Rhine has a castle every mile. Channels are there to show ownership of property. Advertising is a way to generate revenue from that ownership. It is a toll that customers have to pay. Mediapost is divided up the way it is because its readers are the modern day equivalent of medieval land barons and that’s they way they think. If it were published in 1224 its sections may have been labeled Pfalzgrafenstein, Sterrenberg and Reichenstein (3 of the Rhine castles).

But if you’re like me, you’re not as interested in the castles as in the journey itself. And, in this way, I think we have built our industry in exactly the wrong way. We should all be more interested in the journey than in ownership of individual destinations along that journey. If you asked a traveller from Rüdesheim to Koblenz in 1205 which they would prefer; paying 40 separate tolls or paying one guide to safely escort them to the destination, I’m pretty sure they would chose the later. That is what our industry should aspire to.

The reason our industry is channel obsessive is because we had no option previously. In a pre-digital world, all we could do is own or control a channel. But technology is rapidly allowing us an option. Today, it is possible for us to map a customer’s journey and act as a guide along the way. All that is required is a change of perspective.

I believe it’s time to consider it.

#Meaningless #Crap

First published April 10, 2014 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

hashtagEverybody should have a voice – I get that. Thank goodness that the web and social media have democratized publication. Because of that, the power to say what’s on our mind is just a click away. From this power, great things have and will continue to come – the overthrow of tyrants, the quest for truth, freedom from oppression. I’m pretty sure those are all good things. Important things.

But I’m also pretty sure the signal to noise ratio in social media content is infinitesimal – verging on undetectable. For every post that moves humanity incrementally forward, there are thousands that drive us over the brink into mind numbing mediocrity.

For example, Justin Bieber has 51 million followers, and has tweeted 26,508 times. That, in case you’re wondering, has produced 1.35 trillion “Bieberisms,” or 193 little Bieber-tweets for every man, woman and child on planet Earth. Here’s one of his finest: “Put your heart into everything you do”. Perhaps the Biebs would be better served by using his head a little bit too. But no matter, he tweets on, sharing his special brand of wisdom. No wonder over 70% of all tweets never get read.

And, for God’s sake – stop hashtagging everything! First of all, it only belongs on Twitter and Instagram. It’s not a universal punctuation mark. And it doesn’t belong in front of every word of your post! If you’re writing about something that falls under a topic category that people actually care about – then by all means slip a hashtag in there. For example:

“Witnessing special forces retaking capital building in Kiev – #ukrainecrisis”

Or:

“Just discovered key gene in early detection of Alzheimer’s – #alzheimerresearch”

See how it works? You’re adding key content to a topic that people care about and may actually be searching for on Twitter. This is how not to use hashtags:

“Off to a funeral #selfie #zebra #sunglasses #bling #hairdown #polo #countrygirl #aero #dodge #ram #cute”

All I can say is #shoot #me.

The other problem is that with this diarrheic explosion of content flooding online, it becomes impossible to sift through all of it to find things that are truly important. Generally, most content filters use one of two criteria – recency or popularity. Recency is fine if you’re looking for breaking news. It’s a clearly understood parameter. Popularity, however, has some issues. The theory here is that the wisdom of crowds can be relied on to push the best content to the top. But that’s not really how the wisdom of crowds works. Just because something is popular doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. And it certainly doesn’t mean it’s important. All too often, it just means that it panders to the lowest common denominator. Do we really want that to be our filtering criteria? Should Kanye West and Keeping Up with the Kardashians mark our cultural high water mark?

One last rant. “Epic” is not the right adjective to apply to concert tickets, Saturday nights at the club, bowls of chili or, when incorrectly combined with the verb “fail”, your company’s Christmas party. According to this post,

“the word epic should only be used to describe two or three things, ever. In fact, here’s a comprehensive list of all things epic: 1. Oceans 2. Lengthy Narratives 3. The Cosmos.”

That’s it.

Feel free to retweet if you wish. Or not. No one will read it anyway.

Now, That’s a Job Description I Could Get Behind!

First published February 20, 2014 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I couldn’t help but notice that last week’s column, where I railed against the marketer’s obsession with tricks, loopholes and pat sound bites got a fair number of retweets. The irony? At least a third of those retweets twisted my whole point – that six seconds (or any arbitrary length of message) isn’t the secret to getting a prospect engaged. The secret is giving them something they want to engage with.

tweet ss

As anyone who has been unfortunate to spend some time with me when I’m in particularly cynical mood about marketing can attest to, I go a little nuts with this “Top Ten Tricks” or “The Secret to…” mentality that seems pervasive in marketing. I’m pretty sure that anyone who retweeted last week’s column with a preface like “Does your advertising engage your consumer in 6 seconds or less? If not, you’re likely losing customers” didn’t bother to actually read past the first paragraph. Maybe not even the first line.

And that’s the whole problem. How can we expect marketers to build empathy, usefulness and relevance into their strategy when many of them have the attention span of a small gnat? As my friend Scott Brinker likes to say when it comes to marketer’s misbehaving, “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

Marketing – good marketing – is not easy but it’s also not a black box. It’s not about secrets or tricks or one-off tactics. It’s about really understanding your customers at an incredibly deep level and then working your ass off to create a meaningful engagement with them. Trying to reduce marketing to anything less than that is like trying to breeze your way through 50 years of marriage by following the Top 3 Tricks to get lucky this Friday night.

Again, this is about meaningful engagements. And when I say meaningful, it’s the customer that gets to decide what’s meaningful. That’s what’s potentially so exciting about breakthroughs like the Oreo Super Bowl campaign. It’s the opportunity to learn what’s meaningful to prospects and then to shift and tailor our responses in real time. Until now, marketing has been “Plan, Push and Pray.” We plan our attack, we push out our message and we pray it finds it’s target and that they respond by buying stuff. If they don’t buy stuff, something went wrong, probably in the planning stage. But that is an awfully long feedback loop.

You’ll notice something about this approach to marketing. The only role for the prospect is as a consumer. If they don’t buy, they don’t participate.  This comes as a direct result of the current job description of a marketer: Someone who gets someone else to buy stuff. But what if we rethink that description? Technology that enables real time feedback is allowing us to create an entirely new relationship with customers. What would happen if we redefined marketing along these lines: To understand the customer’s reality, focusing on those areas where we can solve their problems and improve that reality?

And as much as that sounds like a pat sound bite, if you really dig into it, it’s far from a quick fix. This is a way to make a radically different organization. And it moves marketing into a fundamentally different role. Previously, marketing got its marching orders from the CEO and CFO. Essentially, they were responsible for moving the top line ever northward. It was an internally generated mandate – to increase sales.

But what if we rethink this? What if the entire organization’s role is to constantly adapt to a dynamic environment, looking for advantageous opportunities to improve that environment? And, in this redefined vision, what if marketing’s role was to become the sense-making interface of the company? What if it was the CMO’s job was to consistently monitor the environment, create hypotheses about how to best create adaptive opportunities and then test those hypotheses in a scientific manner?

In this redefinition of the job, Big Data and Real Time Marketing take on significantly new qualities, first as a rich vein of timely information about the marketplace and secondly as a never ending series of instant field experiments to provide empirical backing to strategy.

Now, marketing’s job isn’t to sell stuff, it’s to make sense of the market and, in doing so, help define the overall strategic direction of the company. There are no short cuts, no top ten tricks, but isn’t that one hell of a job description?

Never Underestimate the Human Ability to Ignore Data

First published January 30, 2014 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

ignore_factsIt’s one thing to have data. It’s another to pay attention to it.

We marketers are stumbling over ourselves to move to data-driven marketing. No one would say that’s a bad thing. But here’s the catch in that. Data driven marketing is all well and good when it’s a small stakes game – optimizing spend, targeting, conversion rates, etc. If we gain a point or two on the topside, so much the better. And if we screw up and lose a point or two – well – mistakes happen and as long as we fix it quickly, no permanent harm done.

But what if the data is telling us something we don’t want to know? I mean – something we really don’t want to know. For instance, our brand messaging is complete BS in the eyes of our target market, or they feel our products suck, or our primary revenue source appears to be drying up or our entire strategic direction looks to be heading over a cliff? What then?

This reminds me of a certain CMO of my acquaintance who was a “Numbers Guy.” In actual fact, he was a numbers guy only if the numbers said what he wanted them to say. If not, then he’d ask for a different set of numbers that confirmed his view of the world. This data hypocrisy generated a tremendous amount of bogus activity in his team, as they ran around grabbing numbers out of the air and massaging them to keep their boss happy. I call this quantifiable bullshit.

I think this is why data tends to be used to optimize tactics, but why it’s much more difficult to use data to inform strategy. The stakes are much higher and even if the data is providing clear predictive signals, it may be predicting a future we’d rather not accept. Then we fall back on our default human defense: ignore, ignore, ignore.

Let me give you an example. Any human who functions even slightly above the level of brain dead has to accept the data that says our climate is changing. The signals couldn’t be clearer. And if we choose to pay attention to the data, the future looks pretty damn scary. Best-case scenario – we’re probably screwing up the planet for our children and grand children. Worst-case scenario – we’re definitely screwing up the planet and it will happen in our lifetime. And we’re not talking about an increased risk of sunburn. We’re talking about the potential end of our species. So what do we do? We ignore it. Even when flooding, drought and ice storms without historic precedent are happening in our back yards. Even when Atlanta is paralyzed by a freak winter storm. Nothing about what is happening is good news, and it’s going to get worse. So, damn the data, let’s just look the other way.

In a recent poll by the Wall Street Journal, out of a list of 15 things that Americans believed should be top priorities for President Obama and Congress, climate change came out dead last – behind pension reform, Iran’s nuclear program and immigration legislation. Yet, if we look at the data that the UN and the World Economic Forum collects, quantifying the biggest threats to our existence, climate change is consistently near the top, both in terms of likelihood and impact. But, it’s really hard to do something about it. It’s a story we don’t want to hear, so we just ignore the data, like the afore-said CMO.

As we get access to more and more data, it will be harder and harder to remain uninformed, but I suspect it will have little impact on our ability to be ignorant. If we don’t know something, we don’t know it. But if we can know something, and we choose not to, that’s a completely different matter. That’s embracing ignorance. And that’s dangerous. In fact, it could be deadly.