Influential Marketing Blog

What Do YOU Want On Fridays? (A Live Poll)

So today is the last Friday before many people in the US head out for a holiday (including myself) and over that time I am planning to make some changes to the content of this blog - followed by a long overdue design overhaul early next year. As part of that, my aim is to accomplish three major goals:

1. Blog more frequently
2. Share more useful content (worthy of bookmarking or sharing)
3. Feature more work and thinking from other smart people I respect (including readers like you!)

As the first part of this - I'm going to add an element of consistency to the Influential Marketing blog on Fridays. There are two concepts I am considering, and on this Friday I would love your help to decide which one you find more compelling. Here's a live poll where you can vote, and feel free to leave a comment on this post if you have more thoughts to share:

7 Destination Marketing Tips For Selling Your "Experience"

What if what you are selling is neither a product or a service? Most marketing advice is distributed based on the assumption that you fit one of these two categories. The unfortunate gap between them is the large category of organizations or businesses that provide an experience - which are often left out. If you were marketing a destination such as a city or country, for example, would that be a product or service? What about a hotel?  Or a conference? Or a sporting event? What these examples share is that might be described as both a product AND a service - or at least a collection of other products and experiences. They are all experiences.

For marketers who are focused on promoting an experience, the traditional product or service model doesn't work. When it comes to promoting an expeirence instead of a product or services, here are a few tips and examples that may help:

1. Create a comprehensive starting point. One of the toughest things about travel information online is that it is so spread out. To combat that spread, the country of Sweden created a single hub for everything about their country. From tourism to environmental belief to culture to migration. By putting all this information in once place, Sweden makes it easy for someone to learn about their country and culture. They offer a place to start.

2. Find your best ambassadors. When it comes to most destinations, the power of the experience usually comes most from the people who have already been there and talk about it. The benefit of social media is that you can find these people more easily. They are the ones that upload hundreds of great photos, or comment on message boards or write blog posts. If you can use these tools to find them, then you are in a much better place to think about how you might help them share their positive experience with your destination with even more people.

3. Offer an exclusive and talkable experience. El Bulli is the best restaurant in the world according to several food magazines, and has won that honor for multiple years. It is situated off the Costa Brava near Barcelona in Spain, and the cuisine is so unique the restaurant is closed for 6 months out of every year just so the chefs can develop and practice it. You simply cannot go to El Bulli without telling someone else about the experience - and you have to book far in advance to even get a reservation. That is a unique and exclusive experience.

4. Highlight your best stories (even if you didn't create them). In New Zealand, you can dine in a tree restaurant. You may have seen photos of it - but it is a restaurant that is built entirely in a tree in a New Zealand forest. The interesting thing about this restaurant, though, is that it was created as part of a marketing campaign for Yellow Pages to prove that it was still useful. The end result, however, was a destination that the entire country of New Zealand and the surrounding region could promote as part of their experience.

5. Translate one experience to another. Let's say you are trying to promote a skiing destination. In the winter time, your marketing is obvious. The problem is, you still have half the year when you need to drive people to come even though you don't have your best natural asset ... snow. What Keystone Lodge in Colorado does, is they change their marketing to use related experiences. For example, you may not be able to ski down their mountains, but why not mountain bike down them instead? By translating one experience to another, they can successfully give their customers another reason to visit, even without snow.

6. Focus on letting people share their experience LIVE. When it comes to travel, most people inherently WANT to share their experience. The main problem is that there is not always a way to share that experience as it is happening, and later they may not remember. What if you let people upload digital photos of themselves online directly from your museum? Or gave people free postcards with a picture of your store and free postage to mail them? The easier you can make it for someone to share the experience they have with you as they are having it, the more likely they will take you up on it.

7. Build engaging itineraries instead of listing of attractions. The normal way to promote destinations is usually from creating a big list of attractions and letting people select what they are interested in. Everything comes a la carte, and the only alternative is typically to take a guided tour. Instead, what if you were to create itineraries for people based on interests? The ultimate day for Clock Enthusiasts in Switzerland, or the Influence of Indian Culture Guide to London. These are itineraries that people could choose based on their interest - and do more than simply listing attractions.

 

Are You Accidentally Sharing Your Secrets Online?

There is a character on Dilbert called Mordac. If you've seen him, you know he is a caricature of an unfortunately real person in many corporate organizations who worries solely about data security at the expense of usability, accessibility and just about anything else:

We all hate Mordac. Of course, on a logical level, most of us know that we need him (or her). When it comes to sharing data online, most people behave with more risk than they probably should. As the places to share your personal data have grown, so too have the ways that you can accidentally share too much. The problem is, it is sometimes tough to spot those moments when you are sharing too much without meaning to. As each of us starts to live more of our lives and place more of our identities online, knowing the do's and don'ts of sharing personal information online will be increasingly important. Here are a few lessons I've learned and follow about what I share online:

1. Domain names. Registering a URL has become one of the most basic activities online and typically as part of the registration you need to enter all your contact details and a contact address for the URL. Unfortunately, unless you pay extra to have the URL kept hidden, this address will be publicly available along to anyone seeking more information about your domain name ... which means you can accidentally be posting your personal home address online without realizing it.
2. Google Keywords. Do you think your keword marketing program is between you and Google? Now there is a tool called PPCWebSpy which allows you to get a significant amount of background information about any online ad program, including how much others are bidding for certain keywords, which keywords they are bidding on and other competitive information. Though this may be unlikely to cause you to abandon your keyword marketing program, you may want to consider adapting your keywords or bidding structure to not give away any competitive information accidentally.    
3. Location Tweets. One of the features that is easy to enable on many Twitter tools is the location feature which will automatically update your location along with each tweet, using GPS from your phone or mobile device. The problem with this, unlike tweeting about attending a party or boarding a flight, for example, is that you may inadvertently share your location automatically in situations when you'd rather not as well - such as travelling to meet a potential client or visiting a city for a quick trip you'd rather not alert your entire connection list to since you won't have time to stay.
4. Your Birthday. On many social networks, it is easy to share your birthday online as well (and tempting so all your friends will know when your birthday is). The problem with this is that online identity thieves can often use a real name and birth date as a starting point to begin to steal your identity. And though you would not share your Social Security Number - treating your real birth date with that level of security is something people rarely do ... but more should.
5. Reading Announcements. If you are a user of a web based service like MyBlogLog and you visit a site that uses it, you will automatically show up in their sidebar as a "reader" of their site. There are other similarly reputable tools that can automatically track and record the sites that you visit. The issue this may raise, again, is that there are likely times when you are researching competitive information or reading about topics that you'd rather not broadcast to the world (such as how to shop for a diamond ring or take a weight loss class).                                                                                                                                                               
6. Screen Shots. When you do a presentation online to take a screen shot of a web page, you may often include detail from your own web browser, including a list of your favourites or other tabs in the browser that you have open at the point when you take the screen grab. The best solution is to  make sure all your other windows are closed before you make a screen grab  so you avoid sharing any browsing information or personal info.
7. Hidden Document Info. Every Word, PPT or Excel file has information embedded into the file about the file's author, date created and other information. If you are like most people, then many of your files may be based on files that you have created earlier, or been sent by others. This document information can be embedded into your files and give unwanted clues about the history behind a particular file and how you created it.

Any other situations where you have found yourself accidentally sharing secret information that you weren't intending to? Share your experience on any others I may have missed the comments and I'll add them to this list ...

Sealy Admits Reality: No One Gets 8 Hours Of Sleep

In the health communications world, there are some messages that you could call prevailing. Whether or not they are true, they are the ones that seem to stick in people's minds. Messages like getting 5 servings of fruit and vegetables a day, or trying to keep your daily calories under 2000, or getting 8 hours of sleep. The last one about sleep may be the most stable. In the last several decades, this message hasn't changed much. So when a mattress manufacturer decides to launch an entire campaign that finally makes it ok (though probably still not ideal) to get less than 8 hours of sleep, that's a big departure.

Sealy's latest campaign is all about taking a more real approach to how much sleep most people actually get. Based, presumably, on some believable research that demonstrates most Americans today just get 6 hours of sleep - the campaign is called "Get A Better Six" and focuses on how you can maximize your comfort for those 6 hours you actually do get. It's a brilliant departure from standard mattress and sleep related marketing that will likely drive their competitors crazy, because it's such as obvious message and one that anyone in the industry could have used.

To bring it to life, they choose to use some equally realistic language, instead of the usual marketing doubletalk that you can often find behind campaigns like this:

Remember the days of getting eight hours of sleep? Neither do we. Most of us these days are getting a scant six hours of sleep. The equalizer? The all-new Sealy Posturepedic.® Designed to eliminate the pressure points that cause tossing and turning.

How did we achieve such a miraculous feat? Well, the short version (there’s a more technical version below) is that it used to be, we either had push-back support or pressure relief. Never both. So, with some very smart guys called the Orthopedic Advisory Board, we made the push-back support/pressure relief dilemma history. And voilà, the new Sealy Posturepedic was born. Mattresses that make the six hours of sleep we do get, a better six.

The end result is that not only do we as consumers feel that a mattress company is finally adapting to the realities of our life and how much sleep we actually get ... but the voice with which the story is told lives up to that promise of "keeping it real." In a world where six hours of sleep is the new normal, it's about time someone in an industry focused on sleep was bold enough to admit it and tell us that's ok.

4 Social Media Ideas For The Reluctantly Social Brand

It is not easy to know where to start when it comes to social media. The stories of brands that have taken missteps with fake profiles, and become a lightning rod for negative comments are aplenty - causing more than one marketing team to take a big step back and wonder where and how best to get involved. Increased scrutiny by legal teams, the recession and a general fear of taking risks are also factors that are keeping brands from really digging deeply into using social media.

Yet for all this reluctance, there is still interest and a desire to start somewhere - coupled with a knowledge that all this social media "stuff" does actually matter when it comes to fostering customer loyalty and connecting with your best customers. So what's a brand to do? Here are four social media ideas tailor made for the nervous brand to start to engage online with social media tools without diving straight into the deep end. They are techniques that have worked in my experience to help ease the reluctance while still demonstrating the real potential of social media:

1. Internal Training & Experimentation - One of the often forgotten aspects of many social media tools is that they can very often be used privately. You can create a password protected blog, or a private corporate wiki. Just because it fits into the category of social media doesn't mean it needs to be public to the world. Starting with some internal training (bringing in outside folks on occasion) and finding a way to adopt using tools behind your firewall can be the ideal way for a reluctant organization to start to get comfortable with social media.
2. YouTube Channel (Without Comments) - Many brands have videos that were produced for some business reason, from sales training to advertising to customer interaction. Posting these videos onto YouTube can offer an easy way to start to share content that you already have. It's low effort, but gets you started with the process of uploading, tagging and sharing content. As I have said many times before, there is no reason for a brand to enable comments on a YouTube video, though it is advisable to have a way for people to share their feedback with you - potentially through a link in the description of your video.
3. Industry Listening Program - Though it is common advice to hear that you should be listening online, what many times is less discussed is how you can ease into this listening by focusing on keywords for the industry that you are in rather than just on mentions of your brand name. So if you are running a medical practice that specializes in lasik, see what words people are using to talk about this procedure and you can learn about how you might be able to make your practice more shareable without ever delving into specific conversations or even finding commentary about your practice.
4. Content Aggregation - One of the concepts I believe will be a huge force in the future of social media is the idea of content curation. The first step in that line is the relatively simple act of finding content that already exists and bringing it together in some sort of useful format. The nice thing about this activity is that it intitially requires no content creation or publishing of opinion, and also helps brands to ease into social media simply by finding what is already out there and bringing it together. This aggregation could be compiled through a page on an intranet site, or a tool like del.icio.us, or even with a Twitter account used to follow a selected group of content creators on Twitter.