Participate in your marketing

One of the things I quickly realized when I wrote my last post is that it is much more difficult to participate in a marketing or public relations campaign than one would imagine. So, I wanted to expand a bit more on the Participate element of CRAP.

Most large companies simply aren’t agile enough to actively be involved and followup on a campaign. And a lot of smaller companies simply don’t have the time to be actively participating in conversations.

Participating in a marketing campaign is about connecting with the audience. Let them into your world. Show them how things work and show them why your product is the best.

One of the best examples of participation is Wine Library TV. The point of WLTV is not to get video views or Twitter comments, it is to sell wine. The videos that are produced, the events Gary speaks at and the messages he sends on Twitter are a means to an end.

But other examples exist as well. Every party thrown is an act of participation. When Scott Beale at Laughing Squid has a drink up, the goal is to meet new people, interact with his audience and hopefully score some new business.

More traditional methods exist as well. Take the Webinar as an example. A project manager or product architect giving a personal, non-marketing tour of a product or technology goes a lot further with an engaged audience than a banner ad on Digg.

So, participate with your audience. It’s not about being seen, it’s about seeing and connecting with the audience.

Marketing is a bunch of CRAP

Yeah, I said it. Marketing is a bunch of CRAP! But not the kind of crap you may be thinking I mean. I am talking about C.R.A.P.: Communicate, relate, anticipate and participate.

These are the foundations of an effective marketing campaign and will help any brand, any PR pro or any marketer work better with their clients and potential customers. So, spread the CRAP and let me know what you think.

Communicate

Photo from Flickr user kool_skatkat under Creative Commons.

This is a pretty obvious practice and should be standard operating procedure. Communicating means not just broadcasting, but responding and conversing with your audience as well. Most organizations fall short in a couple of key areas.

Openness is essential. The Beta’s delayed? Say so. There’s a bug? Fix it, apologize and move on to new features. There is a limit to how open you want to be, but I feel that in order for a company to succeed, it needs to be as open as responsibly possible.

Brevity is a key. I have invented a word: conciseification (ironic, no?), which means “take what you said in 500 words and say it in 200. Take your four sentences and make them two. By tightening your message, it becomes more memorable. The recipient can take the message away much easier.

Listening makes you a good spouse. By actively listening and conversing with your audience, they feel respected, empowered and happy. A happy audience is one of the most effective marketing tools possible.

Relate

Relating to your potential market is absolutely essential. Don’t just go to the trade show, take it over. Be a presence anywhere your potential customer base is at. This does not need to be huge parties, expensive sponsorships or even in-depth webinars.

A simple hello or a simple appearance at a meetup is enough. People will remember the brand or the business that goes the extra step to go to a Barcamp or to go to a PHP Meetup. Your competition isn’t doing it, so you should be.

Anticipate

This is probably the hardest premise to follow. In the tech business, people the customers generally get what they want. How can you as a marketer anticipate what the customer wants? Easy: Follow the other three elements of this post.

By communicating, relating and participating, you become an expert. You can identify trends and you can jump ahead of the mob to deliver the solution it is running toward.

Participate

I thought about just retyping the word “participate.” But I realized there’s a lot more to participation than being present. You’re participating because you have a goal: to succeed. But if you are genuinely passionate about the product or brand you are representing, then it will show.

Photo from Flickr user matiasjajaja under Creative Commons.

These concepts make for an effective cornerstone for a product launch, a new campaign or simply reconnecting with your audience. Step in this CRAP and the only thing you’ll smell is success. What do you think?

Conquering fear

Technology is a wonderful tool for tackling fears. You can register for any anonymous email address you want and post anything you want, anywhere you want it.

But what does it take to really tackle a fear or move past an initial hesitation? In our highly-social, highly connected world, it’s difficult to imagine that we have real emotions that cause us to pause, and have to stare something in the face.

But in reality, a lot of our daily decisions are, at a minimim, affected by fear. The fear of failure, the fear of not being acceped. Even the fear of success.So, let’s look at fear from a sociological perspective and determine how to fix fear.

According to a paper in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, fear can be divided into two primary types: fear as an emotion and fear as a consequence of or motivation for social relations.

Fear as an emotion is often times based upon learned or natural behaviors that external forces have no bearing on. But what about the fear we can control? The social and business interactions.

Social fear

In my opinion, situational and social fear is normal. Being hesitant to enter a situation, sign a term sheet or hit submit means that your brain is firing as it should. But the challenge is what methods can you use to conquer the fear?

Information is power

I’ve found that being knowledgeable helps to alleviate any fear or intimidation I may have been feeling. Make sure you are factually accurate and can defend your points and perspective. Then you have nothing to worry about.

Trust your gut

Making any decision is difficult. If you’re educated on the circumstances, then trust your instincts. Usually the first reaction is proper and won’t lead you too far astray.

Talk about it

Find somebody you trust. Having one person that can serve as a confident but is honest enough to provide a reality check is an essential business tool.

These are just three tips that I use and help me make decisions and proceed in the face of fear.

So, what do you do to confront fear? Let me know.

The absurdity of an “Enterprise Twitter”

Micro-sharing within a large enterprise. The concept mystifies me. If I were in charge of running a large corporation, or even a division within one, I would be so adamantly against the use of company funds, time and resources to develop something like was talked about recently on ReadWriteWeb.

The author (Laura Fitton, who is AWESOME), has an interview with the two guys that developed a service for Best Buy called Mix. Mix is an initiative to get Best Buy’s employees micro-sharing and micro-blogging. This is absurd.

We’re all a bunch of geeks. Those of us on Twitter have adopted this way of communicating as a means to fool ourselves into thinking we’re interacting with people. For “micro-sharing” to be thrust onto an army of retail workers seems like an inherently bad idea. Now, I’ll be even more self conscious when I check out, wondering what they’re going to post about the 6’8″ guy that just bought a Wii.

But I’ll Twitter that, so you’ll find out I guess.

The other issue I have with this is the productivity suck these services are. Think about this. I work in a small office. But in a given day, I will email, call, Skype, IM and maybe have a Twitter conversation with people in my company. Now, compound this by expecting me to participate in a micro-sharing thing makes me wonder when any actual “work” will get done.

Am I completely wrong?

Say what?

I spent last week at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. I heard a lot of words. Like, a lot of words. But not many people really said anything.

Now, I know this isn’t a unique post and I know my ideas are shared by many, but I felt like this would be a good introductory topic to this place and The Geek Giant.

Let’s look at this Press Release from Bungee Labs:

Bungee Labs ™ today announced federated hosting to expand adoption of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) among enterprises and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers. Organizations developing highly interactive applications on the Bungee Connect ™ PaaS can now elect to host those applications on self-managed infrastructure running the new Bungee Application Server ™, or on the multi-tenant Bungee Grid ™ at datacenters in the United States, Europe, and on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Umm, huh? Let’s try a simple exercise in MarCom translation:

Bungee Labs announced that you can host your apps on their servers.

Seems simple enough. For naïve businesses and developers, this is great. Simply code your app in whatever language Bungee supports and they’ll host it for you.

Moving beyond words

One of my issues with public relations, marketing, social marketing, social media or whatever the buzz word du jour is, is that it’s so much more effective to just convey your message with plain and simple words.

Try this exercise the next time you’re thinking about drafting a press release or blog post: Take what you’ve written and re-write it using half the words. It sounds difficult, but it’s not, I promise.