The 10 Commandments of Freelance Marketing

Well, if the Vatican can come up with Ten Commandments for driving. (For those who missed it, Rome spoke a couple of weeks ago. My personal favorite: Thou Shalt Not Kill. That's probably because, as a product marketer, I'm all in favor of repurposing existing content wherever possible. Thou Shalt Not Kill is time-honored, proven messaging, that's for sure.)

In any case, here are my Ten Commandments for Freelance Marketing:

I.       Thou shall treat the customer's strategy, product,
           positioning, market, story, reputation, and budget as
           if thou worked for the company full time and/or as if
          any of the above are thine own.

II.      Thou shall not lie to the customer about their
            strategy, product, positioning, market,
            story,  reputation, and budget. (Thou shall try to be
            gentle with strong, contradictory opinions; unless,
            of course, gentle does not work with thy customer.
            Then thou can be more forceful and, perhaps, even
            raise up thy voice and  asketh, "Are thou out of thy
            mind?")

III.    Thou shall not lie to the outside world on behalf of thy
           customer, neither shall thou badmouth the customer,
            except privately to thy closest friends and family
           (even when thy customer seems to deserve it).

IV.     Thou shall strenuously advise thy customer not to do
            something thou think is stupid.

V.      If the customer decides to do it anyway, thou shall tell
           them thou can't be involved, or shut thy mouth and
          doeth the work.

VI.   If it fails, thou shall not say 'I told you so.'

VII. If it succeeds, thou shall admit that thou didn't think it
          would. (But thou shall abstain from flogging thyself in
          front of the customer. No needeth reminding the
          person paying the bills that thou can be as wrong and
          stupid as the next marketing consultant.)

VIII. Thou shall try thy damnedest to deliver what thou
            promised, when thou promised it, and for how much
           thou promised it for. If thou find thyself going off
           track on any of these dimensions, thou shall tell the
           customer as soon as possible.

IX.    Thou shall not help thyself to customer tschotkes
           unless they invite thou to.

X.      It goeth without sayething that thou shall avoid  
           getting thyself involved in any internal political
           struggles. This can getteth thou killed.

There is, of course, nothing holy about these particular Ten Commandments. No stone tablets. No Moses. No going to hell. They just happen to be mine, and there may well be some sins of omission here. Doest thou have any more to addeth?

Networks and Their Limits

I love this video from Lee Lefever that explains social networking, because I could show it to my dad and he'd understand it.

That said, it got me thinking about the limits of social networking.

As the video points out, the connections between people are valuable, and social networking is a way to make them more visible and usable. That's great. But it's obvious that all those social connections aren't equally valuable, and its worth considering what the source of their value is and what that means in the context of social networking.

Some of the value of a particular network connection comes from the skills, knowledge, and reputation of the individuals; let's call that the independent value that anybody brings to any social network connection. But there's also situational value that's we don't bring to any network connection; it depends on who is on the other end of that connection.

If my work life fell apart tomorrow, there are about four or five people I'd call and tell about it in brutal honesty; in return I'd get real help from them. There's a larger group that I'd contact and give part of the story to, perhaps not letting on how dire things were, and I'd get some help from them too. There are a lot of people who I'd approach in a more casual way.

Because, you see, the relationships are different. One of those top-level connections would go out of her way to introduce to me to people, putting her own credibility on the line. Those who are a few levels down in depth of relationship will make some efforts, but won't put themselves at too much risk. And so on.

And so there are two important points to keep in mind about social networking:

First, as Lee points out in the video, online networking makes hidden connections visible and usable but it doesn't increase their value. Digging up hidden value is different than creating value, and if you want to create a valuable network, all the effort that this required before the web is still required.

Second, there is a danger to social networking; with all those connections visible, it's tempting to assume value and shirk on the effort required to keep a network healthy. If somebody is one of your LinkedIn contacts but you haven't exchanged an email for two years, it's a crap connection. It means nothing; you probably can't depend on it. Yes, that person might be thrilled to hear from you, but you haven't been nurturing the connection, and there's an excellent chance it's atrophied.

Visibility and value aren't the same. If you want to make use of the power of social networking that Lee describes, you need to take care of that network. Go have a look at your LinkedIn page and ask yourself, without looking for the details, "Where does she work now? Did he get married? What's her latest project?" If you have no idea, you've got some work to do. It's nice to look at a long list, but like having four hundred "friends" on MySpace, it won't keep you company on a lonely Friday night.

It's the classic Web 2.0 problem; we've created great connections and conduits, but what are they filled with? Unlike many Web 2.0 idea, social networking is one where you can expend effort and see an immediate affect.

This is my networking resolution: over the coming weeks I'm contacting everyone in my LinkedIn network to catch up. If I can't track them down, off the list they go, because a sentimental memory of working together is not a connection. And the day I really need that network, I want to know it counts for something.

Help Your Customer; Help Yourself

The other day, I was talking to a client (let's call her Andrea) about a project that I'm working on when she made an off-hand remark. We had been talking about how soon her team was going to be able to provide me with some critical content for my project, when Andrea said, "We're so under-the-water here that I'm thinking of canceling all our projects with outside vendors. We just can't get them the information they need fast enough."

Needless to say, this wasn't something I wanted to hear. No, I wanted to protest, you might want to get rid of those other, know-nothing freelancers, but you can't possibly mean me."

Instead I told Andrea, "I know what you mean. I've been in your position myself. By the time I pulled all the resources and information together - half of which were my head - I might as well have done the whole thing myself."

Andrea assured me that she wasn't thinking of canceling the project I'm doing.

Thank you, Andrea.

But I do know that, given my long experience, I tend to be a very low maintenance vendor. A lot of what I work on is messaging, sales tools, web site content, etc. - items that require some degree of knowledge about a product.

So before I bug a customer with a lot of questions, I will review whatever material there is to be had. No, I don't become an expert overnight, but I do get a good sense of what the products do and how they're (currently) positioned. I then develop a list of questions for the internal product experts. The list will have questions specific to the product, as well as general questions about information I need for different marketing vehicles (data sheet vs. brochure vs. sales preso).

In some cases, I take a stab at the answer and ask if I got it right.

List in hand, I'll work directly with the product expert(s) to make sure I'm technically accurate and complete. My goal is always to not waste anyone's time by asking obvious questions that I should have been able to figure out on my own.

I also try to minimize the possibility that I'm going to hear the words "this isn't quite right" by being very explicit, early on, about what I'll be delivering - especially when I'm working on something new. I'll lay out my approach in some detail, and give a sample or two that reflects the tone I'm planning on taking. Better to hear "this isn't quite right" based on a page or two rather than after I've delivered what I thought was a near-final product.

Another thing I always shoot for is minimizing the number of iterations and reviews by getting clear up front who's going to be reviewing material and what they're going to be reviewing it for. When I hear that everybody and his brother have to look at everything, I shudder and sigh. Then I try to work back to what it is everybody needs to buy in on. If it's core messages about a product's positioning, fine. Let's get the fundamental story straight first. But I always try to get the customer to draw the line at "everybody into the pool" endless wordsmithing and nitpicking. Unfortunately, some people are so into trying to make everyone happy (or, politically, trying to keep anyone from undermining a project), that they stick with the must-get-buy-in-from-everyone approach. Uuugggghhhhhh.

I will be hearing from Andrea shortly about the next steps in our current project. I have suggested an approach that I think will minimize the time, hassle, and back-and-forth for her team. Let's hope she takes me up on it.

Beware of Blogstorms in the Weather Report

If you trolled around Blogland last weekend, you would have the impression that Apple and AT&T's iPhone activation process was a disaster. Assorted bloggers shared their tales of woe (very real); perhaps the most unfortunate was Josh Hallett of Hyku, whose activation took days. People who should know better cited web polls showing nearly 40% of users unhappy. (Of course, web polls are about as statistically valid as checking in with a Ouji board, but what the heck!)

That makes this news item in which AT&T says that there were problems with 2% of activations interesting.

Now, AT&T may be using some definition of "problem" that doesn't make sense, but for the moment, let's assume that not having a problem means your iPhone was up and running with, say, an hour. That's pretty reasonable.

2% is not something to congratulate yourself over; the goals should be 0%, of course. But 2% is not a disaster, either.

But if you were relying on blogs to find out what was going on, you'd have a rather different impression, wouldn't you? This points to the limitations of blogs as journalism. In the iPhone story, the big picture is important. That wasn't available by reading individual accounts, but that didn't stop a rush to judgment.

Note that I'm not criticizing anybody for sharing their story - that's interesting, that's appropriate for blogging, and that's potentially quite helpful to somebody experiencing problems and looking to see what's happening to others. It's the ongoing online conversation.

But the tendency to look to blogs for some deeper truth about something happening right now is troubling when that truth depends on taking a step back and looking at some quantitative information.

Meanwhile, for all of you who went through hell getting your phones activated - hope it's over and you are enjoying your new Object of Desire! It's made me a little bitter about my Blackjack, but I keep reminding myself that pre-iPhone it was doing everything I wanted it to, and that hasn't changed...

Marketing the Rockets' Red Glare

The Fourth of July is one of those holidays that you've just got to love.

It's summertime. It involves fireworks. It requires minimal shopping (other than hot dogs and watermelon). Other than making sure that you're wearing red and/or white and/or blue, you don't need to get dressed up. (Note to self: Once again, see if you can find a scarf to replace the nice Stars and Stripes one you lost when you went to hear Kerry speak at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. If not, wear LL Bean striped t-shirt and red-white-and-blue earrings.)

What is not to love?

Well, maybe it's the hokey ads that try to exploit The Glorious 4th.

I thought I'd do a quick inventory on the ones I've seen this year.

Southwest Airlines: You're now free to celebrate your birthday, America. I'm no big Southwest fan, and while the visuals are nice (all-American scenes), the kiddie voice-over singing "My Country Tis of Thee" is a tad cloying. But overall this is a nice extension of their "You're now free to move around the country" campaign.

Tide: Very similar in imagery to the Southwest Airlines ad: all shapes, sizes, colors of Americans wearing red, white, and blue.  But the song is different: "America the Beautiful." And the singer's a pro (Cyndi Lauper).  The ad has been running since the spring, but it seems especially apt this week.

And then it struck me that there just isn't that much to inventory of Fourth of July ads out there. All I've seen are the above and a few print ads for retail store sales.

Maybe it's because I'm not watching enough TV. Maybe it's because the only thing I do watch these days is my daily dose of Red Sox baseball. But there just don't seem to be enough red-blooded American marketers out there exploiting our Grand and Glorious 4th.

Good thing: reverence for our national high holy day?

Bad thing: can't make a buck off of patriotism?

In fact, it's probably not either. It may just be that we already have enough ads tooting the patriotic horn. (Think John Mellancamp's "This Is Our Country" ads for Chevy.)

In any event, here I was all to write a critique of all sorts of Fourth of July ads and there just aren't any in site.

Well, when in the course of human events there's nothing to blog about, there's nothing to blog about.

To all marketers everywhere, opinionated or not, American or not, have a Grand and Glorious 4th.

The Wisdom of Meritocracy

Last week I wrote about one of the inherent problems with brain-dead content gathering systems like Digg - they're easy to game, because they're dumb by design. But this is actually a bigger Web 2.0 issue; there's a mythology of the "wisdom of crowds" informing the ideas behind a lot of social networking and tagging that's fundamentally flawed.

(And which is not, I should note, what James Surowiecki actually meant by that phrase in his very smart book on the subject.)

Continuing on this general topic, Mark Cahill at Vario Creative talks about the "answer people" in social media - that small number who actually provide most of the useful content. He raises this point while commenting on some new research on the topic (which I haven't reviewed myself yet, but am going to), and wonders:

So what is the ramification for the new trend towards social networking? It certainly suggests that you will need a means to identify, motivate and hold onto these ‘answer people.” The truth is, that while social networking tends to carry a “mobocratic” stigma, we need to firmly embrace meritocracy to succeed.

Mark has more to say, and you should click over there and have a look.

If social networking carries that "mobocratic" stigma Mark refers to, it's in large part a chosen stigma. Digg brags about its lack of editors, YouTube is about broadcasting yourself without any gatekeepers, tech gurus traipse around Silicon Valley talking about the wonderful "democratized" future of media, and so on. Whether this makes any sense or actually will enrich us is not something that rarely gets discussed; it's an article of faith that this will be great.

And so it's fascinating to see networks self-organizing into meritocracies. Could it be that it's because this is what people naturally prefer?

I'm not trying to channel Andrew Keen, who's selling a bunch of books these days by reducing this topic to a simplistic "internet bad!" rant (and in doing so, taking a basic idea about which he's correct and undermining it through shallow arguments). There is value in disrupting the established meritocracy, which can become so ossified that it offers up Britney Spears, Fox News, and reality television as its editorially-approved, gatekeeper-checked outputs.

But what is the next step in all this? It's great to see people considering that question. What new meritocracy emerges, and will it serve us well?

This is, I think, the big topic of social media in the coming years.

Nintendo Wii Goes Gray

Nintendo's doing something fun and interesting with Wii, and that's introducing it to the elderly, which was reported on in a recent Boston Globe article by Robbie Brown.

Hoping to up the demographic boundaries of its products, Nintendo rolled out Wii in a retirement community in the Boston suburb of Hingham. The residents (average age: 77) are using a shared Wii, wired to a 68-inch TV, to golf, box, bowl, swing a tennis racket, and play baseball - providing an opportunity to get back into a game that an elder may have abandoned as they aged, to pick up a game they'd never played before, and to get some all important exercise. (And another all important: a reason to come out of their rooms and socialize.)

While the Nintendo was designed for entertainment, apparently a number of folks have jumped on it. With its motion-detection device, it's a natural for physical training, rehab, and just plain old exercise.

For Nintendo, giving the  Wii's to retirement communities is good business:

"Our strategy is making sure it's in the right place for the elderly to touch and feel the Wii for themselves," said Perrin Kaplan , a Nintendo vice president: "Our target is everyone from 5 to 95."

That upward limit is a market that Nintendo (and other gamers) have had a hard time reaching, and one they hadn't anticipated as anything that the Wii would appeal to. Wii "lets users create virtual characters to represent themselves, does not include white as a hair-color option." Nintendo had tried designing mental puzzles for the elderly, but it now seems the "killer app" for the seniors is going to be exercise. (Hmmm, maybe I should strike that term "killer app.")

Head's up marketing on Nintendo's part. It seems that they capitalized quickly on the Wii for exercise trend as it began emerging, and, as a result that can pretty easily extend their products into a new market. Not to mention benefit those folks who might have thought they'd never swing a golf club again. No, it's not quite the real thing, but that will change a bit as the simulations get better. Meanwhile, I'm guessing that Nintendo designers are picking shades of white and gray for those Wii avatars right now.