Fake News Notes

An interesting pair of stories...

Fake Steve Jobs (Forbes writer Daniel Lyons) has been giving the One Laptop Per Child project a hard time on his parody blog (which is actually one of the funniest commentaries on both Apple and the rest of the Silicon Valley crowd you can find). And so someone from OLPC's PR firm started commenting on blogs claiming to be Fake Steve. And got caught. Whoops. Aside from all the reasons that this is stupid and plain wrong, if you're going to do something bad, at least do it competently so you don't get caught.

Whether you think the criticism of OLPC is fair or not, they just look bad, bad, bad here. Though I do appreciate the trippiness of someone pretending to be someone who's pretending to be someone else. (In fairness, Fake Steve Jobs has always been clearly fake; there's a "fakesteve" in the blog's URL, and now we all know who's writing it.)

Then there's this "look, you don't have to buy an iPod!" "news" story, talking about how fab all the non-iPods out there are, with nice pictures of Zunes and appearing on... MSNBC, a news outlet co-owned by Microsoft. With no byline - not surprising, would a journalist want their name of this kind of corporate hummer piece? Just incredibly embarrassing. The piece gets a harsh dressing-down from tech journalist Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle on his blog today:

And, as Fake Steve Jobs points out, there's no byline on it, just a vague "MSNBC staff and news service reports". Anyone who's been in the news business for any length of time knows what that kind of credit line usually means: This assignment came down from On High, and the writer is too embarrassed to put his or her own name on it, as well he or she should be.

Hey, as every reporter knows -- or will find out at some point in his or her career -- it happens.

The problem is, of course, that no one's fooled. If this story was indeed mandated by a Microsoft honcho, he or she should be smart enough to know that it's not going to sell more Zunes (or fewer iPods). Readers will see it for the infomercial it is and move on to more credible sources.

Instead of benefiting Microsoft, more damage is done to MSNBC's reputation as an independent purveyor of news -- at least where personal technology is concerned.

Considering that the Zune sounds like a decent product, even if it is a me-too entry to the digital music player market, and it's backed by a behemoth who can stay in that market for the long haul until they start eating away at Apple's market share - kind of inevitable, considering how insanely large that share is, there's nowhere to go but down, you have to wonder who thought it was smart to adopt the tactics of faltering also-rans.

What's really sad about it is that they went to the trouble of doing it, and couldn't get anyone to give them a rationale for choosing something other than an iPod than the stunningly uncompelling "I appreciate obscurity." That has the makings of some strong positioning, doesn't it? (I have an iPod and love it and I could come up with better reasons not to buy one than that.)

News should be news. When you find yourself doing something to corrupt that, just stop. Aside from the bad karma, it's unlikely to work well, and when people figure it out, you're likely to wind up with egg on your face. Or, horrors, a Zune in your Christmas stocking.

Rally round the team

As I've said before, and I will no doubt say again, there are few marketers as deft as those marketing professional sports teams. Maybe because I live in a city with big league teams. Maybe because I live in a city that's got a particular affinity for its big league teams. Maybe because these folks have actually moved me to purchase a bit of Red Sox merchandise. But all I can say is, these guys are good.

Witness last Monday's City Hall rally for the Boston Red Sox to celebrate their making it into the Major League Baseball play-offs.

Now, as excited as I was to be at Fenway Park for the game in which the Red Sox clinched their division title, and as hoarse as I remained 5 days later, it's actually not that stupendously big a deal to get into the play-offs. Eight teams out of 30 manage to do so, and while many of the races came down to the final weekend, that's still a reasonably high percent age (over 25%) of teams playing in October. In contrast, in the olden days of eight (later ten) teams in each league, only one team in each league moved on.

There are more teams now, so you do need to have divisions, but all this play-offs to get in the play-offs to get in the play-offs is largely a marketing artifact. More teams are winners. More teams play longer. There's more fan interest. There are more things to buy: divisional and wild-card caps and t-shirts. League championship caps and t-shirts. Tickets. TV revenue. DVDs of the games. Pennants. Cups. Bobble-headed dolls.

As I said, these folks are geniuses.

Back to the rally.

Now, the entire idea of a pep rally for a professional sports team might strike you as a bit odd to begin with - especially when said team hasn't won all that much yet. But MLB instituted the practice a while back of encouraging rallies in all the cities where a team has made it into the playoffs. This year, all of the cities obliged with the exception of New York, which is either too sophisticated and above it all to play this game - or which wisely figured that in a city where half the fans root for the Yankees (who made it to the play-offs as the AL Wild Card team) and half the fans root for the Mets (who rolled over, played dead, and squandered a big league to fall out of the play-offs entirely), it was best not to provoke anyone.

So, here we have a rally for professional sports team, to which thousands (maybe 10,000?) people show up to hear from the mayor, the owners, the players, the Standells ("Love that Dirty Water", played after games), the Dropkick Murphys (local Celtic punk band, with two Red Sox anthems in their repertoire, "Tessie" and "Shipping up to Boston", which was in the movie The Departed), and some country and western guy I've never heard of. 

The Red Sox and Major League Baseball get to whip their fans into even more buying frenzy. (I wasn't there, but I'm guessing that there was stuff for sale, there or nearby.)

When I worked at Softbridge, we used to give the customers who attended our user group some sort of shirt on day one, and we'd be pleased as punch when on day two, most of them showed up wearing it.

How must it feel to walk around Boston - or, I'm guessing, any other city, including New York - where there are teams in the play-offs, and see that every other person is wearing a Red Sox cap, t-shirt, or jacket. Or, in my case, a nice little lapel pin that my sister got me a couple of years ago.

Sure, it's easy to push the goods when you have good product, but I'll say it again: these guys are marketing geniuses.

Humanize Your Email

So much marketing email is written in the dreadful "Hi, I'm a corporation!" voice. Apart from being a bit painful to read, it blows a big opportunity to make a connection with the recipient and thereby increase the chances that they will respond in some way (for example, visiting your site, making a purchase, signing up for your event). That's the point that Nick Usborne makes in a MarketingProfs piece in which he offers some very simple suggestions on how to humanize your email messages.

(You have to be a premium member to read it - and being a premium members is worth it! MarketingProfs specializes in this handy pieces that give you some great tips you can put into use immediately, and you're bound to find a couple of worthwhile webinars out of their packed schedule... my big complaint is that I just can't participate in as many as I want. I recommend it.)

The tips are straightforward: write in a one-on-one style. Make sure the message comes from a real person, whose name is in the body and on the headers. And include contact information.

That last one is a pet peeve of mine; nothing will make me less interested in doing business with you than getting an email from a "send-only" mailbox. If you are going to email me, be ready for me to email you back. So many companies do this, and it's like calling a customer on the phone and then saying "Wait! Don't talk to me! This is a one way phone line!" Dumb, dumb, dumb.

If your email volume is high enough that this seems unmanageable, invest in software that will analyze inbound messages and take a first pass at classifying them or auto-responding with helpful information. (I am not annoyed when I get a message that says, "We think this might answer your question, but if not, just reply again and someone will get back to you." That's just a good time-saver for everybody.)

Nick's tips are great and if you're not doing these things already, you should start with your next email campaign.

Followup: CBS Doesn't Get It

A quick followup to yesterday's discussion of free content...

Mark Cahill at Vario Creative linked to a YouTube clip from CBS News about buzz marketing. It's a good little report. As I clicked the link to YouTube, wondering why he didn't just embed it in his post, I got an immediate answer to my question:


CBS News says, "If you want to see our content, you have to come to our YouTube page." No doubt so that they can collect stats and show you other CBS News content.

I can see why they'd do that, but my reaction to it as a user is "Why are you making me leave the site I'm on to see this?"

Which is why I'm not linking to them (but of course you can go to Mark's post and follow the link). I suspect the video would get more play if they allowed embedding.

Do you really value me as a customer? (Or do you just love me for my money????)

Mary Schmidt has one of her usual goodies on the care and feeding of customers, and you might want to head on over to Mary's to take a look at it. (Here's where to find it.) To summarize, she writes about a recent experience with Am-Ex, which has generously gifted her with an "almost" free appointment book and mini-scheduler. No wonder Mary got cranked up:

...while there is no charge for these (”in limited supply” heh), in the first year, I have to pay a “small fee” to cover the cost of shipping them to my home. That’s $2.79 for the Appointment Book (with a “luxurious” cover. Gollee!) and $1.79 for the Mini-Scheduler (that has calendars for 2007 to 2009 and “much more.” Oh, boy!) Then they automatically sign me up for following years and will bill my account for $26.99 and $16.99 for each of this nifty planners.

The little "fine print" - putting you on the hook for paying way too much in perpetuity for these "free" goods - got me thinking of a couple of other variations on a theme: the perpetual subscription that you have to call, write, and petition your Congressperson if you want to get out of.

A few years ago, when my 75 year old aunt sent me an e-card for St. Patrick's Day, I e-carded her back. What the heck, I signed up for $12 for a full year of e-carding, which I think I took advantage of once or twice.

Then, what to my wondering eyes did appear but another $12 charge for the service. Which I canceled out of, but too late to get my second $12 back. Grrrrrrrr.......

Then I wanted/needed/thought I wanted/needed access to something or other on the Fortune site that required the purchase of a paper-mag subscription. Again, it was one of those automatically resubscribe deals. After two years of receiving a magazine that mostly went straight into the re-cycle box, I wised up and sent a letter canceling my subscription.

Same thing with Consumer Reports. I can't remember now what it was that I was looking for - some appliance or electronics thing or another - but I signed up for access to the online info service. Well, during that year I had exactly zero need to check out Consumer Reports for anything else. (Hard to believe it was a zero-purchase year, but it might have been.) Then there it was on my credit card: $26 for the automatic renewal.

Talk about a real downside of not paying by check!

Now, while Fortune had no way or another to know whether I was reading their magazine, in the case of the e-greeting service (can't remember which one it was) and Consumer Reports, surely it must have been pretty clear to the service that I was not exactly using it. Shouldn't they have, at minimum, sent me an e-mail asking me to re-up. Or - during the year - sending me a note suggesting something that might be of interest to me, a little nudge to get back in there and use the service. ("Memorial Day's coming....don't you have a Civil War veteran you want to greet?" or "We've just come out with our new reviews of solar-powered idea generators, why not take a look."

Nope. I wouldn't swear on my life to this, but to the best of my recall the next time I heard from these folks was a charge on my credit card.

On the other hand, I renew my Symantech Security annually. With a month to go on my subscription, I start getting pop up messages reminding me to renew. Yes, they are a teensy-weensy bit annoying, but I do want to be secure. I will be renewing. And thanks for asking, rather than just tossing a charge my way.

I'm sure for those companies that go the if-we-don't-hear-different-we're-just-going-to-keep-on-rolling-you, it must be worth it. Or seem worth it. They must just make more on "the consumer" than they would if they asked them, pretty-please, to renew. Why chance a refusal, when you can just stick them. Enough of them must not squawk back, but must just go ahead and pay - at least for another year.

In the long run, though, which companies am I going to look more favorably on? Those who ask for my business nicely, or those who are so clearly just in it for the quick buck? Hmmmmm....

Content Is Free, But Nothing Else Is

I've been pondering this post from Mark Cahill at Vario Creative for a while now. Mark writes about the "cut and paste web," which is one term for a big idea: increasingly, content is not tied to the content creator or distributor's web site.

RSS feeds are a great example (and one that Mark talks about in his post). If (like me) you read all your blogs in something like Google Reader, you're essentially pulling content from one site (say, this one) and viewing it on another (Google's). The problem is that most of the ways that we make money from content require a user to come to our site to see it.

As I read Mark's post I thought about a Houston Interactive Marketing Association breakfast I went to earlier in the year where this same concept came up in a discussion of interactive ad strategies. The old approach was to design ads that people will click to visit the advertiser's site. According to the panelists at that meeting, this is no longer the case; increasingly the content lives in the ad itself and users never actually have to visit another web site: for example, if you're an insurance company, your ad could offer a free quote and include a form right there in the site to request it. If you're using creative tactics like interactive games or videos, they can be right in the ad also. So your successful ad might not drive any traffic to your own site.

There's a very good reason this is happening: users like it. Users are more likely to interact with an ad on their local newspaper's site if they aren't going to be whisked off somewhere else, when their goal when they sat down at the computer was to read the news on the site they started at. RSS aggregators make it possible to keep up with a ton of blogs and news feeds - sorry folks, if I had to visit all those sites, it just wouldn't happen.

So here's the big question: how do advertisers, marketers, ad sellers, and content owners make all of this work? In a world where your content is going to be consumed all over the place, how do you make money from it? Because content may want to be free, but there's no sign of that happening to the rent or the electric bill.

Turning a "Capital L" Loss into a "Small w" win

Let's face it. Nobody likes to lose. Even in those sales situations where you (oh, mighty marketing) have predicted that there is no way in the world that your company stands a chance of winning the deal, there is little satisfaction in saying 'I told you so.' Even the most jaded and I'm-so-right marketing person wants the WIN.

But ya win some, ya lose some.

Once the Closed - Lost stamp is on a deal, it's easy to surrender to the urge to just keep on moving forward, on to the next - forget about the opportunity just lost. That loserama deal: it is so yesterday. Let them go with the competitor. Their loss. (Well, not really. It's your loss...)

Marketing should let Sales go ahead and move on. Sales is the 100% worst group to ask why they lost the sale. If sales is doing the asking, you can almost guarantee that the answer is going to be the survey says: our product stinks. (Or the runner-up response, if we were playing Family Feud: our marketing stinks.)

No, it's up to marketing to get in there and start asking the one-that-got-away a few questions before the door closes on them.

Obviously, your not going to expend a lot of effort on a small, telesales opportunity worth a few thousand bucks. (Maybe an e-mail survey followup is worth a shot.) I'm talking about the BIG, light a cigar with a ten dollar bill deals that you lose, the ones in which you've invested a lot of time and effort. Putting just a little bit more time and effort can yield information that can help you improve your product, improve your marketing, and improve your sales process.

A few tips when you're doing Win-Loss analysis:

• Get in there quickly: You don't want to call the minute the Sales guy hangs up the phone with the prospect, but you do want to have the conversation within a week after you lose. (This assumes, of course, that you don't find out about the loss months later, when you find out about it in a quarterly sales report and/or an accidental hall conversation with the rep.
  
• Get to the right people: You may never have access to the ultimate decision maker, but you absolutely want to have a conversation with someone who was intimately involved in the actual decision process. If your sponsor was not part of this, you were probably selling too far down and doomed from the outset. Ideally, you'll want to talk to your sponsor, someone who was in on the decision from the business side of the house, and someone who was in on the decision from the technical side of the house.
  
  This may seem like you're asking an awful lot, but - especially if the sales process has been protracted and involved a lot of work on your side, your ex-prospect might feel bad enough that they'll be willing to spend some time with you.
  
• Make it worth their time: Amazingly, there are still some people out there who are generous and kind, and do not approach every human encounter as if it were a transaction in which the first question they ask is "What's in it for me?" In truth, there's not much in it for them beyond the pious abstracts of "helping us make better products that may someday serve your needs better." So, offer them something for their input. Everybody likes a $25 Amazon gift certificate. (And you might want to follow that up with a personal note and maybe even one of your corporate tschotkes - something that the person might actually use like a pen or pad.
  
• Ask good questions: Well, duh, this is kind of an obvious point, isn't it? But really think about what you want to get out of the time you're spending with the prospect. It may be that what you really want to do is go through a product features tick-list to help figure out what you need to do to make your product more competitive. Or you may want to cover more (and more general) ground about the entire process. This can be fairly structured - and with any kind of structured approach, you can report back on those all important metrics. So if you find that 98% of your losses are directly attributable to the fact that your product only runs on OS/2, or that 75% of the losses stem from dislike of the fact that Britney Spears is your spokeswoman, you'll have evidence that will help you make your case to management. (Maybe most of your potential customers prefer Kevin Federline.) A benefit of having structured questions is that someone can answer them via e-mail or on-line. You'll miss out on something by not having a direct conversation, but you may gain in having a lot more respondents.
  
  For my money, I prefer to go the every open question route, in which you really get someone talking. With this method, you have to be a very good notetaker or ask permission to tape the conversation, which I'd try to avoid. If you follow the notetaking path, have someone else in the room for the call who's also taking notes, which will let you pay more attention to listening and picking up on queues that will guide your 'move the conversation along' questions. Transcribe your notes and really go through them. It's amazing how many gems you might find. Maybe this company has never and never will make a buy decision when they can make a make decision. Maybe they never buy from companies under a certain size. Maybe they will reveal something that will yield product ideas that will give your an opportunity to sell them something at a later date - maybe even a sooner date. Open ended is not to everybody's liking - or everybody's ability to
  
• Don't be offensive (or offensive, for that matter): Who among us does not have the tendency to get defensive when someone is telling you something that is at least implied criticism of your company, your product, or your sales and marketing efforts. Hard not to jump in and defend yourself. But unless someone says something that is factually erroneous, don't bother. (And even when you make a correction, take this approach: "It's interesting that you weren't aware that our product ran on platforms other than OS/2. I'll make sure that we spell this out more clearly in our collateral and sales materials.")
  
  And, however condescending or nasty or jerkish the ex-prospect is acting, NEVER go on the offensive. If they're really that hostile, just thank them for their time and hang up. (And while you may think spitefully about not sending them that $25 gift certificate, don't give into that impulse. Unless they were really, really hostile....)

The bottom line is that you do want to salvage something from every big loss, and the only way to do so is to swallow your pride and your anger and find out why they don't think you're smart, funny, nice, and beautiful.