The Absence of Fear is not Courage. The Absence of Fear is Mental Illness.

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Istock_000002165252xsmall I am awfully pleased for my friend Naomi, who made the front page of Digg yesterday with this post: What to do when you’re scared sh*tless. (Sphinn censored the name by dropping the last word, respectful asterisk and all. How sad is that? It’s also a study in what differentiates a great headline from a mediocre one.)

For those who will read anything that tells you how to get on the front page of Digg, she walks you through that too. She left out several instructions, however. Be smart, funny, relevant and fearless weren’t part of it. Add that stuff and you should have no trouble reproducing her results. Also, put a naughty word in the title. No one can resist that.

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably scared shitless about something. You’re starting a new business. You’re starting a big project. You’re juggling a day job and a new business and a big project or two, plus a two-year-old. (Oh, wait, that would be me.) You need to make more connections than you’re making. You need more customers and you need those customers to spend more money, and it would be helpful if they were less of a pain in the ass.

It’s possible you also just like stock photography of monkeys.

Being scared is part of the price of admission. If you aren’t scared, you probably should crawl a little further out on that limb. Everything worth doing will scare the shit out of you.

One nice thing about not being 20 any more is I can look at all that fear and say, Oh, right, that’s just fear. It goes away. It may not be comfortable (actually it may feel a lot like being eaten by fire ants), but it does, in fact, go away.

Being remarkable is deeply scary. That’s why big dumb companies do such a crappy job at it. There are too many people involved who have to be willing to tolerate that discomfort, to feel their pulse pounding in their ears and that strange feeling in your scalp that suggests your hair might be starting to fall out.

So what are you doing lately that scares the crap out of you? Drop me a comment, we’ll cheer you on.

Filed Under: connection, eclectic, remarkable, small business Tagged With: , , ,

Relationship Marketing Series #1: Create a Human Connection

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love-monkeys

This is the first in an occasional (in other words, whenever I get a wild hair) series on the essentials of relationship marketing.

Relationship marketing focuses on nurturing ongoing relationships with customers, instead of strip-mining prospects for one-time purchases. There have been dozens of riffs on this over the last 15 years or so, with labels including one-to-one marketing, permission marketing, share of customer, and referral & retention marketing.

They all boil down to the same idea–create a stronger emotional connection with existing customers, and turn them into loyal advocates. Not only is this more fun, it’s much more profitable. Selling to someone who knows, trusts, and likes you takes a lot fewer resources than selling to strangers.

If you’re a giant conglomerate, this is important. If you’re a tiny little business, it’s vital. Small businesses don’t have the capital or the momentum to attract an unlimited number of new prospects. Fortunately, it’s also a lot easier for tiny little businesses to relate to customers on a human scale. Forget about looking big. If you’re a one-person shop, you can get tremendous mileage out of turning your human individuality into your remarkable brand.

We’re hard-wired to relate

Legendary cranky old ad guy Gary Halbert said that if you had a star, a story, and a solution, you had what you needed to create a viable business. (I’d argue that you have what it takes to create a viable marketing campaign, but that’s not such a different animal.) The “star” part comes from having a human being to hang your story on.

There are plenty of examples of successful faceless companies, but having a person (or persona) that customers can relate to is one of the easiest shortcuts to building a relationship. People, fictional or real, are easy for us to understand and identify with.

For example, I became a Squidoo enthusiast partly because I’m a Seth Godin enthusiast. On a lizard-brain level, becoming a Squidoo lensmaster was a way for me to participate in a quasi-relationship with Godin–to become part of his story.

Consider the brilliance of Apple’s campaign pitting the cute, hip Apple guy against the schlubby, hapless PC guy. Those characters embodied the qualities Apple wanted us to believe about each product. We instantly got it (even those of us who happen to prefer PC guy).

Tony Robbins and Dan Kennedy and Martha Stewart have something in common: their customers feel like they know them personally. Those customers will forgive foibles (most of them), and they’ll accept modest glitches in service. Now think about service problems you might have had (or heard about) with AOL, AT&T, or Comcast. It’s much easier to hate those folks. They lack a human face, and we have no inclination to give those companies any benefit of the doubt.

We’re hard-wired to gossip

Not only do we have an innate desire to relate to other humans, our DNA practically compels us to tell stories about them. We yak endlessly about who we hate, who we love, and what we think of their choice in shoes. We have opinions about Warren Buffett and Lee Iacocca and Bill Gates, and those opinions color how we feel about their companies.

Having a human identity to hang your brand on makes you intrinsically more remarkable–that is, intrinsically easier to tell stories about.

Does it matter if your company’s face is a real one? I wish I could remember the source of the quote “there’s no difference between Betty Crocker and Madonna, cultural impact-wise.” (Leave me a comment if you know it!) Our reactions to the human-ness of another person work the same way with real people as they do with fictional characters. Our conscious brain knows the difference, but our unconscious lizard brain doesn’t seem to. The only caveat is that, if you’re a small business and you create an elaborate fictional representative of your company, you should make that fiction plain. People like to be tricked (up to a point), but they don’t like to feel like they’ve been tricked.

Why did I use two monkeys to illustrate this story? I’m talking about human connection, but that connection goes deep to our monkey brain. Remarkable communication is, at its essence, about speaking to the heart of what drives us. It’s not about about rationality and analysis. This is fundamental mammal stuff–connection, love, and belonging.

The Relationship Marketing Series

Related reading:

Filed Under: connection Tagged With: , , ,

Top 10 Stupid Online Business Ideas that Made Someone Rich

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Funny, interesting, and smart. A good whack on the head to get us out of stale thinking. Who knew you could get rich selling plastic wishbones?

read more | digg story

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Use the language of power

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Istock_000001746586xsmall We writers in English are lucky ducks. We almost always have the opportunity to choose between at least two options for a word. We can choose the elevated, elegant word that impresses, or the blunt, pushy word that has power.

Let me give you an example. Two words with the same meaning. The first is fornicate. Its roots are in Latin. It’s a fussy word, old-fashioned, embarrassed by itself. It is a word for those who are more than a little worried by the subject.

Then there’s the other one. The one that got you smacked when you tried it out in the fifth grade. The one with all the power.

That, my friends, is the difference between Latin-based words and the Anglo-Saxon.

Words with power
All the good curse words come from Anglo-Saxon. The Angles and Saxons were Germanic tribes who invaded Roman Britain in the 5th century. They were hairy. They smelled bad. They made good beer. They conquered the most heavily-populated parts of Britain, and brought the character that developed into Englishness with them.

Then in 1066, good old William the Conqueror came over from France, carrying archery, table manners, and euphemism.

This rough marriage birthed the English language in all its glory. French gives English its perversity of spelling, its most delicate shades of meaning, and much of its nuance. Anglo-Saxon gives it muscle.

When you are writing to persuade, go with muscle
Consider these examples:

The language of the Angles gives us face, house, smell, ask, room, wish, and anger.

The language of the French gives us visage, mansion, odor, inquire, chamber, desire, and choler.

Readers of this blog have a perfect right to laugh themselves sick just about now. I suffer from what is called "writerliness." I take pleasure in words. I weigh this one against that looking for the perfect shade of meaning. I take words like "kerfluffle" to heart because I love their sound. And I use more than my share of words that are obscure or unusual.

Do I use these when I write professional copy? I do not.

Advertising and other persuasive copy depends on connection, and to make a connection you must speak directly to the heart of your reader. As the Eisenberg brothers said in Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results, when you’re writing to drive behavior (whether it’s in an ad, a Web page, a sales letter or a shopping cart screen) you have to speak to the heart of the dog in the language of the dog. No matter what kind of dog you’re selling to, the language of the dog is simple and straightforward.

Persuasive copy takes every indulgent tendency to use fancy language and translates it back into Anglo-Saxon . . . or into something that feels Anglo-Saxon. (No, I’m not asking you to pick up a copy of A History of English Words, although if you’re as geeky as I am you will be tempted.)

If you doubt me, pick up a copy of David Ogilvy’s brilliant Ogilvy on Advertising and read his ads for Rolls-Royce. Elegant? Undeniably. But most of the words Ogilvy chose to convey that elegance were muscular, sinewy, and pure Anglo-Saxon.

When in doubt, choose the word that is short, punchy, and powerful.

Take a pass through your copy and look for words like fornicate. Then replace them with the other one.

Filed Under: connection, copywriting, marketing

Social Media Marketing: Why You Should Learn and Master It

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Dosh Dosh is always good for smart, thoughtful posts about social media, blogging, and how to use Web 2.0 to your advantage. This post on social media marketing is a good example. “The process of promoting your site or business through social media channels is a powerful strategy that will get you links, attention and massive amounts of traffic.”

read more | digg story

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Does Your Agency Make these Boneheaded PR Mistakes?

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Istock_000003420564xsmall Something’s in the air lately. I’ve seen a good half-dozen vitriolic blog posts this week about clueless PR pros, ham-fisted pitches, and birdbrained astroturf attempts. And while a journalist just throws a bad pitch away and rolls her eyes, a blogger will take positive glee in blogging your cluelessness for all to see.

  • The Long Tail’s Chris Anderson loses his patience with PR spam
  • Technosailor roasts the clueless in an Office Space-inspired post
  • John Scalzi shreds a particularly inept (appalling was the word he used) pitch, as well as praising one that worked
  • Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, a person you do not want making fun of you, making fun of a laughably transparent astroturf campaign conducted by someone who read half a Seth Godin book once
  • Social Media Today on why WalMart’s Facebook campaign tanked and Target’s succeeded

Anderson took a particularly harsh line, publishing the email addresses of dozens of inept pitch perpetrators (maybe I need to start rolling out IPP as a meme), and thus subjecting them to spambots harvesting their addresses and ensuring that they never again run out of offers for free all-herbal VIGARA.

What’s interesting is how many of these big, bad bloggers took the time to point out how to do it right. Here’s Anderson he had to say about it:

So fair warning: I only want two kinds of email: those from people I know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what I’m interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that (I love those emails; indeed, that’s why my email address is public).

Now here’s the thing. Any decent PR pro is supposed to know better than to pitch (to anyone–reporter, blogger, whatever) without doing some homework. OK, the client wants you to send out 1,000 press releases on his rollout of new HR policies in his Scranton cube farm. If the client wants you to prank call Katie Couric, do you do it?

Every one of these pitches not only makes the agency look terrible, it makes their client look terrible. "Making our clients look stupid in new media" is probably not one of your agency’s tag lines. So knock it off.

Know Thy Customer
One of the most common mistakes in media relations is forgetting who your customer is. Here’s why it gets confusing: your customer is not your client.

If you’re in traditional PR, your customer is the reporter. You give that customer what she needs. You respect her time. You develop a (wait for it) remarkable relationship.

If you’re in new media relations, the norms and the standards are different, but you’re operating under the same principle. Your customer is the blogger. You take the time to read her blog carefully. You look over the About page. You come up with a couple of interesting questions. You read a dozen posts and look for themes and interests. You post some comments. Then, if you think this is the right blogger for your client, you can pitch a story or send a product for review. You might even ask for a guest post.

The vast chasm that divides traditional and new media
Much is made of the massive differences between new and traditional media relations. One of the ways I make a living is capitalizing on the differences between the new media and the old. I once told Lawrence Ragan, mostly joking, that the problems he was having with a particular blogger came from the fact that "there aren’t any rules in a knife fight."

But that was a snarky line, not the truth. The truth is, whether you’re talking with customers or journalists or bloggers or nonprofit donors or anyone else you want to persuade, you have to learn the rules before you’re going to meet with any success. You have to approach a human being, not a "target." And you have to start with that other human being’s needs before your own.

But what the hell, if you know a smart PR agency who’s looking for a kickass new media relations expert with a clue, I’d love to talk. That’s not the world’s worst strategy when you don’t have a clue–hire someone who does.

Filed Under: connection, marketing, PR, socialmedia, Weblogs Tagged With: , , ,
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