SAY ANYTHING

This started as a comment for Chris Brogan’s latest blog, titled “Become the Buyer”, but it quickly got too wordy for the comment section. If you haven’t read his post yet, click here…it will give you the background for this post.

First, let me start by saying “I don’t know Chris personally.” I’ve read his books and subscribed to his blog(s). I’ve followed him on Twitter. I think I even “became a fan of” his Trust Agents Facebook page.

Chris has (indirectly) been a part of my business education for quite some time now. As a result, I have formed a mental image and profile based on everything he has publicly shared. My “view” of Chris may be skewed, and I acknowledge that fact. But, sometimes you just have to work with what you’ve been given.

Most of the time, I think Chris gives pretty sage advice. Social media marketing is Chris’ wheelhouse. He’s also pretty relevant when he talks about the human side of business. When Chris shares insight on those subjects, he does it superbly.

His latest post was focused on SELLING, and trying to get into the head of the transactional buyer. As a result, his post (while well written) may not be the best source of sales information or sales strategy.

In his post, Chris states, “my 'buyer' is a very diverse crowd, ranging from Fortune 10 companies to mom and pop companies.” He further goes on to say, “Unless you’re selling a simple transactional product or service, something that’s throwaway, then it’s vital that you become the buyer.”

First, Chris has established himself as a social media industry leader. He’s written best selling books on the subject. He’s been a featured speaker at events all over the world. He is a contributing writer to various nationally published magazines. And, he owns and operates several businesses within the social media industry.

His “buyer” already knows what Chris is selling…advice and services related to social media. His “success” isn’t from getting into the head of his buyer. His success is from continuously reminding buyers (potential and actual) of the “benefits” he offers.

I would challenge his argument that you have to “become the buyer” by offering that you have to “know who and what your company is from a fundamental standpoint” and you need to “sell your company on the benefits of your products and/or service.”

What makes you, your products, services, or company different from the competition? And why, as a consumer/buyer should I spend my money with you instead of XYZ company?

I have spent my career working on answers to those two questions. Not surprisingly, when we have developed a clear and concise message that allows potential consumers to know who (and what) we are, and how our products can benefit them, we have seen enormous success. When the message is confusing and complicated, usually the path to success is too.

Developing a clear, concise and simple message is no easy task. It takes continuous work, evaluating responses on a regular basis and making changes when necessary.

It’s good to try and put yourself into your buyer’s position, to try and think of how best to get your message across. But, you cannot fall into the trap of selling “you” on your own message.

Too often we become so familiar with our marketing messages that we make assumptions and overlook obvious errors…especially when the message we’ve developed isn’t a simple message.

Simple. Consistent. If you want to break down a successful marketing strategy into two words…those two would be my pick.

Chris, if you’re reading this, let me thank you for your original post. There is no “set” answer for a successful marketing campaign, and I am sure your ideas/strategy work for your set of circumstances. But, I would challenge you to try and approach it a little differently.

Instead of trying to figure out what is happening in your buyer’s mind, focus on the benefits your product/service offer. What makes “you” unique versus your competition? Then go out and sell that uniqueness. If your message is clear, you might notice something interesting…pricing will very quickly become a non-issue, or at the very least a minor issue.

Obviously, this is based on my personal experience over a number of years. Your results may vary, and you may completely disagree with me…regardless, thanks for reading this far.

Bonus Question:

The 1989 movie, “Say Anything”, had one of my ALL-TIME favorite lines…John Cusack’s character (Lloyd Dobler) offers up, “I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.”

Who wrote and directed the movie?

Not sure? Click here for the answer.

THE SECRET OF MY SUCCESS

I’m back in South Florida after spending a few days in Fresno, California. As much as I enjoy visiting the valley, and eating at some VERY cool restaurants, I am always excited to make that turn over the Atlantic Ocean right before touching down.

This time, “touchdown” occurred in West Palm Beach, so I was treated to a beautiful view of The Breakers Hotel and some of the Palm Beach Mansions. If you find yourself in Palm Beach, make sure you do the drive over to the island and down the coast past Mar-A-Lago, Donald Trump’s Palm Beach residence. It’s not the biggest in town, but it is one of the nicest.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was in California to ensure our ThirsTea® concentrate flavor profiles are consistent among the various formulas and packaging options we offer. We want to make sure that our customers get the same glass of iced tea whether they utilize our bag-in-the box concentrate, our 4x1 gallon program, or our 4oz high-yield product line.

Since taking over the company in 2009, we haven’t had the opportunity to undertake this task until now. However, I am going to recommend we do this once a year. The project allowed us to try all our products. Believe it or not, that doesn’t get to happen very often.

Don’t get me wrong, we drink lots of our iced tea, but it’s typically our 4oz high-yield line. We don’t often get the opportunity to try all our products side-by-side with each other. The experience was not just helpful, it allowed us to catch a minor discrepancy in one of our formulations and make the changes necessary to standardize all our flavor profiles.

After, as my management team was discussing the day’s events, I began thinking about how what we had just done, with tangible products, is very similar to what many of you social media marketers do on a daily basis with your intangible ideas and blogs.

You develop. You launch. You market. You monitor and evaluate. You modify and repeat.

Each step is important by itself. But to be successful, you need to incorporate ALL parts. The same is true in the Foodservice Beverage industry.

You can develop THE BEST shelf-stable orange juice concentrate. One that tastes like FRESH SQUEEZED Florida orange juice, but if you don’t launch it, or let people know it is out there and available, you won’t sell a box. (I have friends that have accomplished this feat, and it is the BEST tasting concentrate I have tried. This product will significantly change the juice portion of our industry.)

Once you’ve taken those preliminary steps of manufacturing and launching your product, if you don’t monitor the effectiveness of your launch (or marketing strategy) and evaluate what is working (or not) your product sales could stall, or worse disappear.

Those of you who have written books based off your blog postings and have tried (or are still trying) to market and sell them, probably understand this process better than anyone.

I am sure each of your marketing campaigns is tracked and regularly analyzed to determine which programs have been successful and which need improvement. Right?

When you started the process of writing, didn’t you feel like THAT was the most important task? You wanted to get those thoughts on paper (figuratively speaking), and probably spent an enormous amount of time editing and rewriting. At some point during the process I am willing to bet you thought, “If I am able to effectively get my thoughts organized and written, this book will be a powerful tool and will help a lot of people.”

I’m also pretty certain that, at least up until the book went to print, you may have thought, “This book is going to sell thousands of copies simply because of the content I am providing to people.” (C’mon, at least one of my readers is a published author…)

But then the book is printed and you get ready for the initial launch. The butterflies start fluttering and you start wondering if what you’ve written is really THAT good.

About then, your publisher starts to kick in their marketing program…and you write a blog, post to your Facebook page, tweet about the book…monitor, evaluate…and sell.

It’s the same for us in the beverage world…although sometimes our butterflies feel like eagles (subtle shout-out to my American University family).

--My title is based on the 1987 Michael J. Fox movie. For bonus points, what was "Supergirl's" character name in the movie? Anyone...anyone...?

Social Media for OLD people

Anyone who has followed my blogs knows that Chris Brogan has had a significant impact on my social media education. The amazing thing is, he and I have never met nor have we even talked on the phone to each other.

I was sent a link to one of his blog posts. I read the post, liked it, and then searched his archives. Some of the suggestions and tips he offered were useful in our “everyday” business of selling iced tea concentrate to foodservice operators. Some of his ideas and postings were completely new revelations to me.

You see…I am old. Well, I’m older than Chris. I learned spreadsheets on Lotus 1-2-3. I did not have online access to research sites and news archives. I had to look stuff up in encyclopedias (real books) that required you to correctly spell the thing you wanted to research. For news archives, we would sift through hundreds of microfilms looking for a particular picture or quote. It was tedious and sometimes painful.

I love what the Internet has developed into so far. With news apps, search engines and alerts, we can filter information to specific key words so we don’t have to read the “fluff” until we get to something that is personally useful and/or relevant.

As a marketer and brand owner, I really love that social media is reshaping how business gets done. We have heard the term “social media marketing” so often that we blindly accept the phrase without really understanding what it actually means.

The concept of social media marketing is not an easy one to understand. (At least not for my age group.) We can define it as “marketing strategies utilizing the Internet and social/community websites”, which sounds pretty, but what does it mean?

Initially I looked at it in the context of traditional marketing. I tried to figure out how our print and word of mouth marketing campaigns would fit within the social sphere. To put it simply, I tried to fit a square peg (traditional marketing) in a round hole (social media).

It wasn’t until after reading Chris’ book (co-authored by Julien Smith) Trust Agents and then the book Socialnomics by Eric Qualman that the proverbial light bulb went off.

Social media marketing is not so much about marketing as it is about communication.

Reading those words now, I feel pretty silly. And I am sure a few of you out there (Chris, Julien and Eric most likely) are probably in disbelief that I didn’t just KNOW this simple truth.

Facebook, Twitter and the like are not about forcing a brand or product upon the consumer. For the companies who DO employ that strategy, IT IS SIMILAR TO WRITING AN EMAIL IN CAPS…it’s just not very professional.

Social media sites are about communicating. Sometimes you communicate with your clients and consumers. Sometimes you communicate with your peers. Every once in awhile you may even communicate with your competitors.

The marketing aspect comes from keeping your brand and/or product in front of consumers. By engaging in conversations about your product/company/ brand/ or even personal interests, you develop (or enhance) a relationship with your customer. You get to know more about the people using your product, and they get to know more about the people making the products they use.

I still have a lot to learn about social media marketing.

Thankfully, BECAUSE of social media, I have an almost unlimited supply of reference material and expert advice available to me.

Is social media viable?

Every once in awhile a question comes up on LinkedIn and I feel compelled to add my two cents worth. Most recently it was a question that came up in a food manufacturers forum. There were about 10 other answers before I added my thoughts. If you’d like to read the entire discussion, here’s the LINK.

How do you feel about the potential viability of "social media" communications in the food service channel?

The fact that we can have this discussion on a social media site IS pretty promising. And yes, I agree with the comments about it being more difficult to figure out the B2B strategy as opposed to the B2C one. But, I believe our industry needs to figure out an overall social media strategy (and soon) because consumers (both operators and ultimate end-users) are getting information differently than they did a few years ago.

As manufacturers, what we need to understand is social media is about communication. People are having conversations about our company, our industry, and our brands. They're talking about us 140 characters at a time. Some of the talk may be good. Some of the talk may not be as positive. But the talk is happening.

One of the questions I am asked by my peers is, "how do you monetize social media?" Since you can't measure the ROI on an investment in social media the same way you can measure the investment in a new piece of manufacturing equipment, most manufacturers seem hesitant to commit.

Personally, I think it is because they don't fully understand the dramatic changes in communication that have taken place over the last few years. And of course, there is always the comment about, "why would I care that you are standing in line at the grocery store waiting to check out? Do I really need to know that much about your life?"

10 years ago I would have answered, "absolutely not!" But today, yes, I want to know that you are in a grocery store. Not only that, but I want to know WHICH grocery store you are in, and if you geo-tag your tweets, even better because I will then know in what state and city you're currently located. And, if I have a coupon going with that particular grocery store where you are standing in line to check out, I can send you a quick little note to remind you to purchase my item and take advantage of the coupon.

Communication.

We, as an industry, need to figure out how to communicate more effectively with the actual people who are purchasing and using our products. Then, we will see the monetization of social media and the more traditional return on our investment dollars.

I ended my response there, but I apparently I had more to say on the issue. Here is what I haven't added to my LinkedIn response...yet.

The foodservice manufacturing industry consists mostly (if not entirely) of digital immigrants. We, myself included, grew up without instant access to information. My first computer had to be started with a 5 ¼” floppy disk, and I needed to know how to write DOS to get the computer to do ANYTHING.

The young men and women coming out of college today, our children, are digital natives. They have never known anything other than instant access to information. They embrace transparency in every aspect of their lives, because that is all they have known. The Internet has provided them a way to find out almost anything. Want to find out the annual sales revenue for a privately held company? It’s out there and available if you can ask the right question. Want to read classified communications between government agencies? You can find that too. Want to see how intoxicated “Jamie” was at last weekend’s house party? There are probably pictures and a written account of the actions online.

These “natives” live in total transparency and expect everyone (companies, brands, products and even government) to be just as transparent…just as honest…just as raw. If you want to know an opinion, just ask them. They won’t hesitate to tell you.

Over the years, I have spent small fortunes on market research…polling groups about a label design or a flavor combination. With the advent of social media and sites like Twitter and Flickr, I now have a much bigger audience to poll, and will have instant feedback from that audience. And, I will have access to this information at a minimal investment cost.

Social media is a tool. It’s a way for us to communicate. It can be used effectively by the foodservice manufacturing industry, for both B2C and B2B communications. But we as an industry need to understand the way we do business is changing...140 characters at a time.

Relevant Content

A few days ago, while scrolling thru my RSS feeds, I came across the following header:

Ben & Jerry's Drops Email Marketing In Favor of Social Media

I had to read the article.

It appears that in the UK, Ben & Jerry has decided to drop their email marketing strategy. The article stated that customers “disliked the email despite loving the brand.” But, the author didn’t go deeper to try and find out WHY the newsletter was disliked.

Many social media experts have argued that traditional marketing is intrusive: your program is interrupted in order to bring you a commercial; or the magazine article you are reading is continued on a page following some advertisements.

The email newsletter, although not considered “traditional” marketing, could also be seen as intrusive or interruptive marketing. But, it still doesn’t make sense for a company to drop the entire email marketing campaign when all the quantifiable metrics still show it to be one of the most effective forms of communication marketing.

My question to Ben & Jerry’s is: why was the email newsletter disliked? Was it a technical issue? With more and more people checking their email on mobile devices, was the newsletter formatted for the proper delivery vehicle?

Was the issue content? What kind of information was being disseminated in the newsletter? Was it geographically important information, or was everyone in the B&J database getting the same information, regardless of where they lived? Were they offering “relevant content”, or were they just using the newsletter to keep their name/brand in front of customers?

I can’t answer the questions because I have never gotten one of their email newsletters. Right now, I wish I had...just to see why it was so disliked by customers who clearly love the brand. As of this writing, I have signed up to receive future ChunkMail…you can too. Just click here.

Regardless of the reason customers disliked the email, you shouldn’t just drop the campaign. You should work on integrating email and social marketing so they work in conjunction with each other and with traditional print marketing. According to Information Week, “Almost 40% of consumers consult Facebook and Twitter to complement the information, deals, and news they receive from companies via e-mail marketing…”

No matter the delivery vehicle of your message (social, email, or traditional marketing channels), the single most important component should be content.

Is your content relevant? Are you talking about noteworthy issues like new flavors or new sales promotions or new location openings? Or are you talking simply to hear yourself talk?

Gen-Y consumers like their content in 140 characters or less. As marketers, we need to be brief, concise and most important…relevant. Our customers will eventually stop listening to us, or (worse) listen to someone else, if we are providing information and content that is both useless and irrelevant.