Category Archives: marketing

FIR B2B podcast #101: Machine learning comes to marketing

Posted on by
Reply

This week we talk about new ways that machine learning and artificial intelligence can benefit marketing organizations. While these three news items are all different aspects of this technology, they show collectively how these new technologies are changing the way marketing is done.

First up is a new smartphone app called Truthify that does advertising context analysis (as shown at right). The app interprets the user’s facial expressions to deliver what it thinks the user’s emotional state is, including fear, anger, or happiness, among other traits. The app comes with a web dashboard so you can analyze your campaigns and the resulting demographics. The app is now available for iOS users and soon for Android.

Second is a new influencer platform called AdHive. It is a combination of influencer marketing and AI-powered campaign management. You can sign up for the tool and influencers are paid to participate, while advertisers can choose the right kinds of people to exploit, er, we mean make use of, their tool.

Finally, Google last week announced four new products using machine learning that are aimed at helping marketers create more effective ads. These include responsive search ads, tools to optimize YouTube traction and local campaign management and smarter shopping. Google claims that advertisers who have tested these services have seen clicks increase by 15 percent.

Marketers who have been loathe to adopt new technologies do so at their own peril. These tools are good examples of what the future portends.

You can listen to our 18 min. podcast with my partner Paul Gillin here.

How to market your book in the social media age

Posted on by
Reply

(This article originally appeared in the newsletter of the St. Louis Publishers Assn. It is part of a speech that I gave in July 2018 about marketing books by self-publishers.)

The most important phase of writing your book has nothing to do with the actual act of writing. It is in finding the right people who will promote the book to the world and turn potential readers into your buyers.

Back in the old days, before the Internet became popular, book authors hired publicists to promote authors, get them booked on talk shows and for book tours. They still exist, but there are other paths towards promotions. And what is good is that you can largely do much of this work on your own, if you have some self-promotional skills. The biggest part of that is in understanding how social media influencers work. (Here is a link to start your research.)

These influencers are the people that have the right kinds of followers in their networks. And they can become very powerful allies in your book marketing plan, and the cost to use them is pretty much just your time, and tenacity.

So how do you find these folks? The first thing is looking at your own social media networks, and making a list of the people that would be relevant to the topic of your book. What, you don’t have many friends on your networks? Now is the time to get busy friending people, and seeking out folks that could become pathways to promotion. You don’t need thousands of names, but you do need to approach this task on a regular basis, and friend new people every day. For those of us who are introverts, this can be painful, and can run counter to our instincts to hide behind our computer screens. Try to fight this, and reach out to people across your neighbors, your work colleagues, your church or other social organizations, and so forth.

One thing you don’t want to do is to buy lists of names. While this is certainly possible, you don’t know the quality of the names you are getting, and chances are many of these names aren’t going to be helpful to your book promotion anyway. Save your money.

Next, figure out the keywords that describe your audience, topic, focus, and what they are interested in and why they would buy your book. This means using these keywords to do many Google searches. Many means hundreds. Sometimes, you want to combine two or three keywords to be more effective.

Next, pick your social media network where your audience will hang out. If your book has a visual component, then stick with Pinterest or Instagram. If you have news-related content, Twitter. If it is general interest fiction, Facebook. Business-related topics, LinkedIn. These aren’t hard and fast choices, and feel free to experiment with more than one social network if you have the time. This doesn’t mean you need to craft a separate collection of Tweets, Pinterest Pins, etc. In fact, you can share announcements across multiple social networks. A good tool to do this is Hootsuite (shown here).

While you are doing all of this, you should settle on your book title and domain name for your book’s website. Yes, you need a website. Part of that website should be an email newsletter, where you tell your potential readers what is going on with your book, so they can get involved in its writing and production. You should commit to writing one post every week in the months leading up to your book launch on your website. After all, you are a writer!

Next, start collecting email addresses from your social media connections and use them to populate an email list. There are plenty of low-cost web hosting providers out there, and plenty of choices with email server companies such as MailChimp, ConstantContact, SendGrid, and others. Many of these services have free plans if your list is small, so take advantage of them. You can send out a new email with a copy of each blog post to save time if you wish.

Finally, start thinking about collecting reviewers. There is an entire universe of Amazon influencers, but I won’t get into that here.Look at NetGalley, especially if you want to join the IBPA. This is a website that is used to promote new books to a list of active readers and reviewers. Good luck with your marketing!

FIR B2B Podcast #99: Why Was Intel’s CEO Really Fired?

Posted on by
Reply

The firing of Intel CEO Brian Krzanich last week over a single sexual harassment claim shocked some people because the scope of the crime seemed out of proportion to the punishment. This articleby Agility PR makes the case that one harassment claim can do more damage to your brand than a charge of financial fraud. The Register suggests that the reason for Krzanich’s dismissal goes deeper, and if that’s true, it wouldn’t reflect well on Intel. Companies need to navigate these waters with care, making sure they are prepared for a harassment charge, rather than hoping for the best.

What you ask Google influences the results you get. That’s probably not news, but it has interesting implications when you consider the trust people put in search engines to deliver the truth. Francesca Tripodi surveyed two Republican groups in Virginia — a women’s group and a college group — during their 2017 gubernatorial election. Just by varying one word in the search box, such as using  “NFL ratings up” vs. “NFL ratings down,” proved to deliver two very different result sets. We discuss what marketers can learn from the exercise and how to craft better keyword collections and hashtags for your future campaigns.

You can listen to our podcast here.

FIR B2B podcast #98: WHY DOESN’T MARKETING ATTRACT MORE RECENT GRADS?

Posted on by
Reply

Why isn’t marketing attracting more college grads? That’s the topic Paul Gillin and I explore this week, starting with the results of a study commissioned by Marketing Week earlier this year which  found that just 3% of undergraduates think marketing offers them the best career opportunities.

The publication held a seminar to try to explore ways to better engage Gen Z, and we have several thoughts on the matter too. Colleges need to have more focused marketing programs, and businesses need to show that a wide range of skills and talents can be put to best use with marketing programs. Certainly there are obstacles, such as CEOs who think they are good marketers when they aren’t, or conflicts between sales and marketing staffs. But with big data becoming an essential part of the marketing discipline, there’s more opportunity for marketing to impact a company’s future than we’ve seen since the dawn on TV advertising.

Listen to our 14 min. podcast here:

FIR B2B PODCAST #97: NOTABLE HITS AND MISSES IN GDPR PITCHES

Posted on by
Reply

In my role as a journalist, I’ve been deluged with hundreds of pitches for GDPR-related stories, which went into effect last week. It didn’t help matters that on the first day the UK commissioner’s website was down for a couple of hours, an Austrian privacy advocate hit Facebook and Google with billions of euros in lawsuits and the privacy browser plug in Ghostery sent out emails about its change in policy, but inadvertently cc’d 500 user names in each batch of email.

In this episode of FIR B2B podcast (19 min.), I discuss the impact of GDPR with my partner Paul Gillin, who has seen his fair share of pitches as well. We discuss some of the best and worst PR pitches we received in the months running up to the launch of the General Data Privacy Regulation, and why a handful stood out.

FIR B2B Podcast #96: Lessons from the demise of Klout

Posted on by
Reply

Klout is dead. The news wasn’t a surprise, and the announcement from its current owners at Lithium didn’t leave anyone tearing up. The idea of boiling influence down to a single number always struck us as overly simplistic. And the tools to measure influence are so much more sophisticated now than in Klout’s heyday.

But we should pause and understand why Klout fell into disuse and what marketers can learn about measuring the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. It’s also a good time to look at what other tools are available that are useful, such as LinkedIn Social Selling Index, (shown here) which gives your account various scores and then breaks them down into four components that have a little more meaning. You can see how you rank within your industry and within your LinkedIn network. There’s also Twitter Analytics, which tracks changes in your Twitter engagement through five different elements: tweets, tweet impressions, profile visits, mentions, and followers. Again, one number doesn’t really describe the range of influence that a social network provides, and you might want to focus on one or two elements as you measure your own reach.

I reviewed social media marketing tools many years ago and certainly that universe has seen some evolution, but SproutSocial, SimplyMeasured, Looker and Adobe’s Marketing Cloud are all still available and very reasonable measurement tools as you construct your campaigns. And as general purpose business intelligence tools such as Microsoft’s PowerBI and Domo become easier to use, they can be used for this purpose.

We also touch upon another looming deadline this week, with the GDPR regulations coming into full force. My podcasting partner Paul Gillin has written a piece about executives are turning more positive on its potential and also using the compliance deadline to effect some positive changes in their organizations’ privacy and data protection policies.

You can listen to our latest podcast (15 min.)here.

Corporate blogging rules of the road (and bonus podcast)

Posted on by
Reply

Let’s talk about what makes for a successful corporate blog and how you can assemble one of your own. Blogs are an essential element of any corporate marketing strategy, and should be the linchpin of creating an integrated digital marketing campaign that includes email newsletters, social media posts, and other kinds of content. But if you don’t have a strong blog, you will have a difficult time executing any solid marketing campaign.

I have written about corporate blogging for more than 13 years, including this story that ran in Computerworld, and contributed to dozens of different corporate blogs (in addition to running some websites that could be considered blogs if they were created in the modern era). Jeremiah Owyang once said that you shouldn’t accept blogging advice from people that are not bloggers. Given that he has blogged for as long (if not longer) than I have, he is worth paying attention to. I am writing about this again thanks to being inspired by a recent article about Autodesk and its 200-some corporate blogs.

Autodesk is the company behind AutoCAD and some 170 other products that are based on that industry segment. When you first see how many blogs they have, you think: that can’t possibly be the right strategy for them. But the more you look into what they are doing, the more you understand that this is actually brilliant. These different blogs (some of which you can see in the screen capture here) show something more than just quantity. For example, each Autodesk product and blog has its own dedicated marketing team, so it’s up to each to decide how to structure its operation and tell it’s own story. So as you are examining what Autodesk is doing, here are a few pointers.

First is understanding the key elements in assembling your team that will staff and run a blog. It is more akin to running a publication (something that I have done numerous times over my career in both print and online), but you may not have editorial and production people in-house. That is why it could make sense to outsource part of these back or front office functions of the blog to operations such as Skyword or Contently. While you pay a premium for these services, they can deliver benefits if you don’t have the time, skills or staff to handle these functions. Another part of successful blogging is creating an editorial calendar and planning what you will cover in the next quarter (or longer if you can), posting regularly and selecting the right topics. This makes it easier to assign posts and organize your campaigns.

Next, you need to understand your audience focus and define what the overall purpose of the blog or blogs will be, as well as adjusting to the appropriate level of knowledge for a particular readership. This is something that you want to do up front, before you start creating any posts.

It is also important to take the long view about your blog or blogs; on the Internet, content is eternal and many corporate marketers often make the mistake of having a blog stand up for just a particular campaign. I often get inquiries from something that I posted ten years ago. Many of the blogs and pubs that I have written for have taken down their content. Newsflash: storage and domain services are cheap these days.

Part of any successful blog is also figuring out what your metrics for success are, and that should involve more than just counting simple page views. While we all watch that particular statistic, it doesn’t tell the entire story, such as how engaged our readers are and how many of them convert to trial product versions or refer others who become customers. Figure out how you can track these things effectively.

Finally, make sure you pay your external writers quickly and without a lot of paperwork, otherwise they will migrate elsewhere. (That is where the outsourced back office providers can help.) I know this sounds somewhat self-serving, but I have seen many fine pubs lose talented writers who get frustrated when payments stretch out for months.

If you haven’t had enough suggestions, or if you want to send these suggestions to someone who is a more auditory learner, you can listen to a 20 minute podcast that Paul Gillin and I put together for our FIR B2B episode this week here.

FIR B2B #94 podcast: Panera Dread

Posted on by
Reply

Panera Bread’s reaction to a breach of its customer records is a classic example of what not to do on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to start. Officials lied to reporters about the nature and extent of the breach, treated the security experts that knew what actually happened with disdain, took months to recognize the existence of the breach only after others revealed it to the public, told people that the leak was fixed when it wasn’t and glossed over the real issue: a major IT flaw in its application program interface specs that caused the breach to begin with (as well as another this week at P.F. Chang’s). It didn’t help matters that the chief information security officer at Panera came there from a similar job at Equifax in 2013.

The reaction from Ragan is a good summary of what happened and how the situation was mis-handled, and if you want more specifics from the security researcher that first found out about the flaw last August, can read this post on Medium. That latter link reproduces the email messages that showed how the company ignored the researcher’s notification. Firms need to hold themselves to better accountability, have breach plans in place, and make it easier for security researchers to submit vulnerability disclosures in a non-threatening and simple way.

My 14 min. podcast with Paul Gillin can be played here.

FIR B2B podcast #93: Is privacy finally a thing for B2B marketers?

Posted on by
1
With the #DeleteFacebook meme taking hold, this could be a turning point for privacy, or certainly is a major moment of reflection about what the role of marketing is in this debate. Marketers have certainly been dazzled by the potential of big data for targeting and personalization. Maybe they need to exercise more caution in the future, or at least respect the need for better privacy controls.

With my partner Paul Gillin, I discuss a few thoughts about the changing nature of privacy and what the revelations of the past week mean for marketers.

Reactions to the Facebook disclosures have been negative. The Internet Society has posted an op/ed saying that “Mark Zuckerberg’s apology is a first step, but it’s not enough.” Certainly, many people and businesses (SpaceX and Tesla are two corporate examples) are deleting their Facebook pages, but do they really understand that this data persists for quite some time? The EFF has this handy guide for individual privacy, and Wired has posted a more comprehensive series of suggestions here. We suspect that some corporate users will also get smarter about how their data is consumed by social platforms of the future.  Hopefully, some solid regulation will come of this movement, and a better appreciation of our customers’ privacy too.

On a related note, in perhaps the worst timed news yet, Slack has changed their privacy policy. Now business owners can download entire workspaces, where these conversations are recorded for posterity. We knew that our expectations around workplace privacy were low, but our IM chats too?

There’s also a new academic study on web tracking tools that shows that the threat of misbehaving third-party applications trampling on private data is huge. Thousands of these tracking tools are used by online advertisers, and many are good at evading ad blockers.

The notion of privacy by design has been around for more than a decade; perhaps marketers should take a moment to review some of its precepts.

Listen to our 12 minute podcast here.

GregoryFCA blog: Stop sucking your thumb and start getting your people in the media 

Posted on by
Reply

Ever wonder why some cyber security firms are constantly in the news? Do they offer a better solution? Know more than their competition? Do the heavy-lifting research that differentiates and substantiates their spokespeople in the minds of the media? Could be.

Or it could be that your spokespeople simply aren’t savvy enough to win media interest. In cyber security, expertise means a lot. But so does the ability to deliver powerful and memorable sound bites on breaking or trending news while empathizing with the interviewer to give the media what it wants (without a sales pitch!).

The process begins with carefully selecting your spokesperson and then educating and grooming them to deliver a message that simultaneously entices coverage while still reflecting favorably on the reputation and expertise of your company.

Start with the audience. Are you shooting for general business media or the technical, vertical media? If you’re looking for coverage in the New York Times or on CNN, then you want a spokesperson who can speak at a 30,000-foot level about how an attack or topic impacts a business, family, or person.

The trades? Well, they want someone who can get into the weeds and explain the precise technical shortcomings or trap doors that a hacker or fraudster is exploiting.

Who in your organization could speak to one or both sides of the coin? Make the call and then train them to understand: 

1. Media coverage is not about sales or lead gen. Rather, it’s about leveraging third-party credibility to establish thought leadership. Great spokespeople know how to quickly size up the direction of an interview and give the reporter new insights or understandings, information they can’t get elsewhere to propel their stories forward and get them filed and into print.

2. Reporters and producers want interviewees who understand the media rules of engagement. A great interview is a bit like jujitsu. A reporter comes at you from a position or angle. You need to be ready to take the barrage or use the momentum to deflect and disarm. It’s a learned skill, and one that will never be mastered without preparation and training.

3. Media interviews don’t waste time, they leverage it. Thought leaders lead by sharing and engaging with a community. There’s no more powerful way to share and engage than in leveraging the reach and credibility of the media. Building a media presence doesn’t take away from a thought leader’s job. Rather it advances it, along with the goals and objectives of their employer.

4. Charisma counts and it can be learned. Not by our spokespeople, you say? They are too nerdy, too techie. Ironically, there’s nothing wrong with getting your tech on if you’re speaking to the right audience and understand some of the rules of engagement espoused here. A 23-year old nerdy ex-hacker often conveys more authenticity than some slick, paid corporate spokesperson. The key is to harness that nerd-dom and put it work educating and engaging with the media in a real and compelling manner.

5. Sound bites matter. It’s not spin. It’s not hyperbole. The media love short, pitchy sound bites that they can use to convey meaning in a few words instead of paragraphs. “It’s ridiculous that 140 million Americans had their data stolen because a single person failed to install a patch.” You get the point. Develop those sound bites for your spokespeople before each interview and you will dramatically increase the impact of your media coverage.

Some people are naturals at speaking to the media. Most aren’t. But it is a skill your spokespeople can learn and practice before they ever talk to a reporter. The PRCoach website has a bunch of clips illustrating common interview mistakes, and has other helpful resources too. And this document lists the mistakes spokespersons make with consumer media, such as not staying on topic or losing control over the interview, or taking too long to make your point and not speaking in sound bites.

Use these five points as the backbone of their training as you shape them into go-to media sources. And maybe you can develop your own version of such security rockstars as Troy Hunt, Tavis Ormandy (who is from Google), Cris Neckar of Divergent Security and Chris Vickery that are often breaking news and being quoted by the security trade press.