Justice Mitchell's Blog

What Horror Movies Can Teach Us About Marketing

2012-05-17T12:14:56Z

Don't go at it alone

Integrated marketing requires more than one channel. That's where the "integration" comes from – duh. Look at your advertising campaigns like a theatrical performance; everyone plays a part to tell a much larger story.

Don’t do open doors with giant locks on them

When marketing a campaign, a shiny object or easier path can easily distract you. This typically makes your story more complex and fragmented. Once your campaign is rolling, don’t derail the outcome – unless of course the metrics tell you to redirect the campaign due to weak performance or inefficiencies.

People who get caught having sex will always get killed

Don't put your genitalia on the Internet, no matter how good the idea may seem at the time. The last thing you need is to get fired and waste money rebuilding your credibility in the process.

Never get drunk and curse a lot

This still holds up. Nothing like dropping a couple of F-bombs to kill your campaign, career and possibly the integrity of the client’s brand.

Not everyone is who they seem to be

Trust within your fan base is super difficult to accrue – and easy to demolish. When building on an integrated campaign, it's exceedingly important to have a GREAT community manager on the case.

<tangent> I attended a recent webinar that included the outline of a McDonald’s Twitter case study. In a brilliant move, Mickey D’s puts a face on the social team. What I like about this is that it makes McDonald’s "human." It's easy to get mad at a big, bad, faceless corporation. But creating a genuine face-to-face feel on Twitter makes the company more relatable. </tangent>

Back to trust: Think of your community as real people with no genuine ties to your brand. You must constantly maintain and incentivize conversation, communication and feedback in order to maintain that trust. Ignore the community and they will turn on you like Wilfred Brimley’s character in "The Thing."

DIABEETUS!

Reading the text of ancient demons can lead to a blood bath

Watch out for trolls who attack your thinking. While it's important to take action, it's also important NOT to react in a way that could cause or incite further provocation. Take time to research your enemy and act accordingly – often that means you shouldn’t act at all.

Demons never die, forget or care

Trolls are like cancer that is in remission. They can return at any time and turn on you with 10x their previous power. So maintain a constant connection with problems and bad PR. That way you don’t give the trolls a reason to attack. It also speaks volumes to your audience that you're actively improving, optimizing and evolving your channels of engagement.

Demonic possession is 9/10 of the law

The sad thing is that we all have competitors vying for market share. Therefore you need to be consistent in your messaging and progressively optimize your campaigns. I constantly ask other agencies about the size of their intelligence department. And when they look at me as if I'm a federal agent, I explain. I want to know if they have people who pull data to make campaigns better throughout the lifecycle. A/B tests and post-campaign wrap-ups are simply not enough anymore. Your marketing company should use these, as well as a fleet of social media monitoring tools (AKA: "listening tools").

Is it better to stick to the path - or go in the woods?

This is an interesting point that can go either way. Traditional marketers will say you start at "A" and end at "Z." The transmedia storyteller will say you start at "A" and end at "9YU."

Wait, WTF are you saying?

The targets of your storytelling and social efforts are more than an “audience.” They are passive "participants" in your campaigns. This is hard for traditional agencies to put their heads around because it conflicts with the nature of their creative. If at the end of “Romeo and Juliet,” the star-crossed lovers absconded with a spaceship, then circled back and attacked their families with nerve gas – tickets might sell out. But most agencies are ill-equipped to pitch a story without an ending.

This is, however, becoming easier. Clients are now more likely to understand how audience reaction is used to modify and improve a campaign. For more on this idea see "transmedia storytelling."

Without weapons you will most certainly die

Chainsaw – check. Boom stick – check. Social Monitoring – check. SilverPop – check. You can see where this is going, right?

The basement is where it all goes wrong

Clients often like the comfort of going down to the cellar so they can blow the dust off old ideas. This is bad, bad, bad.

I recently heard an awesome quote: "They don't put rear-view mirrors on a 747, because there's no time to go looking for what's behind you."

That statement holds up in our current marketing climate. Clients that want to hang their hat on previous campaigns or creative that worked five years ago will be shocked when they find it no longer works. Why? Because the audience is smarter, faster and more apt to sniff out tired old strategies. Give them the respect they deserve or you won’t get the attention.

The house on the hill does not have gas for your car

Be careful with whom you align yourself inside a campaign. It's easy to think, "If I get a partner for this portion, it could offset the costs." That might be true, but remember that when you drive a complex, integrated marketing campaign of your own engagement and conversation, you ramp up the complexity when have to maintain and evaluate third parties.

Of course you will need some key affiliate relationships and partners in a great campaign. But the more you can control the conversation, the more you can prevent a potential collapse. Thing of controlling vendors within a campaign as a joint venture of sorts, or the dreaded word "silo." Yeah, I said it.

They want your brains

Outside of an awesome product and great customer service, your audience wants you to be smart. Products these days are lead by a great deal of intelligence. As much as customers don't want to be sold to, they DO want to be told how smart they are for buying a particular product. Additionally, they want to be told about what you have planned and what’s coming up next. And they will expect favoritism for the brand loyalty.

Watch large tech brands. When they launch a product, they tease us with new ideas, and give us a behind-the-scenes look at what the future might hold for users. While these techniques are not all that new, utilizing your social channels effectively will give you the most bang for your proverbial buck.

Where there is one, there are more than likely many

Just like a crisis and bad PR can spread like ripples in the water, so can good news and positive messaging. If you impress one person with your killer customer service or authentic personality in a social channel, it’s likely they will expand the message for you.

So while it's incredibly important not to “sell” within your social channels, it's just as important to ask for your users to help spread the message. This can be as simple as a question: “Have your friends or family ever use this product? What were their thoughts?”

Should we stay together, or divide and conquer?

While it's important to keep your community happy, it's also important for you to serve them with the most appropriate information. Ask your group periodically if they're getting the conversation that they want. If not, it might be time to fragment the brand into silos of conversation.

For instance, Nike can't simply talk about Nike as a whole and expect to sell all of it's offerings. It needs to break out the messaging based on the differences in various product lines and user demographics. Marathon runners and soccer players might both love Nike products, but they care about distinctly different parts of the product line. Both groups should receive some of the same core messages. However the specific product information and training tips will be vastly different.

Social Media - Generation II: The Social Business Archetype

2012-05-03T14:49:48Z

Something immediately pops into your mind when you hear the term “social media.

But your definition might differ from that of your boss, or your neighbor, or Seth Godin. The fact is that social media is far more nuanced than most people realize. This topic is near and dear to my heart, and I’ve been preaching about it for the last year – "social business."

Now it’s time to bring it all together. <cue music>

Social Media - Generation II: The Social Business Archetype

View more presentations from Justice Mitchell - Big Block Studios, Inc.

Most people consider social media to be the handful of channels they hear about in the mainstream media. Because of massive adoption or socially relevant trends, marketers and business people "feel" that those top-tier touch points are important because everyone else is doing it.

This is the wrong reason to adopt a social business model.

However even a misguided social model is a step in the right direction. With the experience and momentum garnered from managing a company Facebook page and Twitter account, the strategy begins to evolve. Savvy businesses take what they learn from social media and implement it across the board to other marketing channels. They apply a social meter to the effectiveness of almost all processes to determine if they are optimized.

All this means we're on the cusp of Social Media 2.0. Moving to Gen. 2 means the proverbial nuts drop and people finally understand it’s about more than numbers on the evening news or something your hip friends do. It's a discipline that's worthy of staffing and focus.

Therefore I intend to bring you up to speed with what will be the hot topics in social media over the next few years:

SOCIAL MEDIA MESSAGING

This should come as no great surprise. You're probably doing it now in some context. But are you doing right?

Well that depends on your goals and whatever measurement you've assigned to yourself or your team. Typically it's more or less about people still using the medium for "push" messaging, notifications, basic PR, and some semblance of conversational implementation. Nevertheless, I maintain (at least up until the date of this post) that if your objective here is to increase sales – you will not get the ROI claimed by the pundits.

“NATURAL” SOCIAL CHANNEL ENGAGEMENT

People frequently confuse conversation and messaging. Think of messaging as someone telling you they're open for business or greeting a customer with, "How can I help you?" Whereas natural engagement is the ensuing conversation launched from the first message.

I joke in my speaking engagements that you'd never scream "BUY NOW! TWO FOR ONE! EVERYTHING MUST GO!" at someone who walks into your store. You would simply introduce yourself and find out how you can help them. Adopt that same approach with social.

For marketers you would construct campaigns around the design, development, deployment & optimization (DDDO) in creating messaging to thereby seed conversational engagment. Don't confuse the two, they're very different.

SOCIAL PRODUCT & EDUCATION

Social product and education means using the channels at your disposal to interact with and educate the consumer. Jason Eng runs Sony Pro USA's social channels, and he uses a mixture of education and conversation about the massive product mix Sony has in its arsenal of toys. They advocate feedback and engage in discussions while continually showing products in use.

The byproduct of this is passionate feedback and discussion from Sony Pro’s growing audience base. The company understands that while their product set is complex, especially to a novice user, they can still create a massive brand impression by simply being approachable and responsive.

"At Sony Professional, we're trying to engage our users as much as we can so that we can take their feedback and use that to deliver products that they want. We're also trying our best to educate our fans and anyone interested in Sony about all of the quality products and solutions that we have to offer. Engaging in conversations through social media avenues helps us to accomplish this goal." ~ Jason Eng – Marketing Specialist & Social Media for @SonyProUSA

SOCIAL CUSTOMER SERVICE

Anyone who says they're only concerned about the customer who picks up the phone and calls will be left in the dust as social customer service hits its stride. From the customer’s perspective, a Tweet, post, upload, rating or comment is the current equivalent of what calling customer service was just a few years ago. They expect to get your attention by expressing their opinion through a wide variety of channels.

Your customer also has a trusting base of friends, fans and followers awaiting your response. That extended group’s trust in your product, brand or service is going to be affected regardless of whether or not they are an existing customer. If Sears screws over my best friend and doesn’t fix the problem – it’s like the same thing happened to you!

SOCIAL COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT

Now that you've created your posse, keeping the members happy is the next step. I've written a number of posts about community management, but what you need to understand is that you've won the trust of these followers – at least temporarily.

Treat that loyalty and conversation as sacred. The honeymoon is over, and you must keep people engaged through myriad methods. It's important to treat your community like an extended family. And don’t overlook their power when it comes to things like crisis management. They often will control an issue independent of your intervention due simply to their feeling of belonging and ownership.

SOCIAL TRAINING, EDUCATION AND ENCULTURATION

A mature approach to social media should include serving your internal customers as well. Things like group education and enculturation can be more easily distributed, managed and incentivized using preexisting tools. HR and senior management can use groups and private, community-based tools to communicate in a way more conducive to conversation, and thereby encourage feedback from employees.

There is a growing understanding that the collective thought power of your group is more than the sum of its parts. The old-fashioned "suggestion box" has come a long way. But you have to harness that power, and then use the knowledge to revise your legacy processes.

Examples:

Put all your SOPs and employee documentation in a socially accessible location.
Continually advocate staff participation in company decisions, surveys, questionnaires and internal focus groups.
When developing customer-service initiatives, actively perform due diligence from within.

"Trainers should believe the use of social media as an extension of the classroom, whether face-to-face or eLearning (synchronous or asynchronous), should be considered priority one for those who are training multi-generational learners. Millennials are a generation who will seek information quickly and will expect that it is easy to find. Furthermore for businesses seeking it for internal training, the use of portals for forms, documents, online paystubs, etc. are becoming commonplace for HR departments." ~ Shauna Vaughan - Curriculum Quality & Instructional Systems Design Manager - The Institute of Internal Auditors

BRAND PROTECTION & CRISIS MANAGEMENT

I've spoken repeatedly on creating a dome of brand protection simply by listening to your audience. Most businesses do this too passively and still view the practice as a tedious time-sink – which it is. But the rewards that come from immediately engaging your consumer are second to none in the real-time world. Integrated agencies, and companies staffing social efforts, need to remember that nothing is more important than listening to the pulse of conversation and sentiment toward the brand.

If the above is done properly, than a crisis is often seen as an opportunity to make impressive waves over your competition by quickly servicing the issue in a way your community shouldn't perceive as firefighting. No matter how bad a situation looks on your screen, it will get worse if you let the digital bacteria fester. Treat it immediately with a defined crisis management SOP and well-trained contact points.

SOCIAL CUSTOMER RETENTION

The next generation of customer retention will look far beyond the simple “pre, during and post” customer-service surveys. Successful models will include a continually passive conversation steeped in an attitude of, "what can we do better?"

Businesses presume they have to continually feed the customer base with a backhoe in order to show up on their radar. But if marketers continually use social touch points effectively and truly "act" on the conversation, customers will reward them with undying loyalty.

<tangent> SIDE NOTE: Nothing tickles me more than corporations that pay focus groups to get a “real” opinion about their product or service. Yet they seem reluctant to tie into the active social conversation that offers both positive and negative feedback. I will never pay for another focus group again. Not when I can create a private “group think” environment and randomly invite people into a forum where their voices are heard. </tangent>

FUTURE BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

When you can harness the power of your actual customer/user/fan base (your "F3" - friends, fans and followers), you have an incredible opportunity to develop future products and applications in a far more efficient way then you have before. Surveys can help you better understand the mindset of your current customers. Then seek out the best-in-class friends, fans and followers to create micro think-tanks for various initiatives.

Here's where it breaks for people. Someone inevitably asks, "Would they really want to help us and not get paid?"

This statement is as old as, "Why would anyone who isn’t a paid writer want to post a blog?" The point is simply that if you have an active community, it's your duty to harness it. Forecasting, prototyping and accessing objectives are things many smart companies do via social media. Are you one of those companies?

SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE

Don't ignore the countless tools at your disposal to aggregate all the social data we're talking about within this post. There are so many ways to tap into your audience and monitor your competitors. Never before have we had the ability to make such strategic marketing decisions with real-world data. Sadly, most of this data still goes unused while many of our peers continue making marketing assumptions using ineffective techniques from the past.

The world is changing, and the future of all marketing will be bound within the strategic directives created throughout the life of any given campaign. It's not enough anymore to simply see a positive return at the end, when a campaign (if progressively optimized with social intelligence) could have produced an exceptionally higher ROI.

"…basically, what's happening in social media is real-time focus groups and media planning. The data that is being generated by consumers, is moving at a pace that companies, agencies, and even technology can't keep up with. However, once platforms are in place, and companies/agencies are willing to throw out the old models, we should be able to automate much of our advertising to be extremely well targeted and relevant. Well, at least for all the non-emotional advertising." ~ Iain Lanivich - Group Creative Director, Interactive at Campbell-Ewald

BUILDING THE PERFECT BEAST

This post was written as a way for me to spotlight what I see coming at this given moment. For me, social business is already here – it’s just not firing on all cylinders. Businesses are not taking all the potential parts of the giant social robot and putting them together correctly.

How do I define “correct?”

It's ever-changing. Today's social SOP is tomorrow's punchline (640K ought to be enough for anybody! ~ Bill Gates ) at Starbucks when we joke about, "Can you believe we even did that?" But that's what makes this interactive, real – and really valuable.

Businesses of the world, hear me: Your competitive edge is ready and waiting. It’s time for you to execute! Give me your take on Social Media 2.0!

Social Duels and the Guide to Fighting with Etiquette

2012-04-17T11:55:52Z

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the University of Central Florida's COMM DAY, which is a personal-development event for students transitioning into the real world. I was a little concerned that they just wanted me for the “after” example in a before-and-after comparison, but it turned out the whole thing was legit. The students from UCF’s Nicholson School of Communication were a fantastic audience, and even a slightly older dog like me learned a few things.

When It's Best To Socially Expand Your Brand

2012-04-12T17:06:50Z

From time to time I look at a client’s audience and realize it is far too broad for just one social channel. This often happens with travel, destinations, trending products and seasonal variances that can attract a broad demographic.

Old-School Selling Addiction Meets No-Sell Social

2012-04-02T12:53:45Z

I just completed a great run of presentations over the past couple weeks. Each successive audience offered up a new challenge or dilemma I didn’t anticipate. I actully LOVE this! As a recovering co-dependent hell-bent on saving the world, I had to resist the urge to rewrite the deck after every event and subsequent comment.

Tales From Performing A Flawless 10 - 90

2012-04-02T12:35:21Z

I talk – a lot. But I hope that you guys also get a lot out of my endless babble about the integrated marketing world. Let me talk to you about the "10 - 90." Part of getting sales if giving away your smarts first to prove your metal. Often it's better help a little and show people what to do as the end payoff is, far more than likely, going to be greater.

Dino Dogan, Triberr & The Future Of The Free World

2012-03-29T13:15:46Z

So Dino, tell me what is "Triberr"? Triberr is a weapon that helps small bloggers effectively compete for attention against large media properties, like Mashable, Huffington Post, NYTimes, etc. It's interesting that you should describe it as a weapon seeing as that's how I've seen it since day one. Berrie Pelsner was kind enough to invite me into the beta fold and I've been a hardcore advocate ever since.

How NOT To Use Your Pinterest Account

2012-03-19T18:35:21Z

Having started all willy-nilly with Pinterest like Joe-Joe the idiot circus boy, I put absolutely no thought into what I was doing while kicking the tires. Now that PT is hotter than Canadian Maple syrup at a swingers party I can tell you what I did wrong.

Where in the World is Justice Mitchell?

2012-03-14T12:50:07Z

I know that I've been bad about posting the past two weeks. I've been buried in a ton of interesting things. Let's recap shall we?

You Want Real Social Business? Done.

2012-03-01T01:53:06Z

I get a lot of questions frequently that seem to pile up. In the "social" aspects of what I do professionally it seems that there are no concrete answers. Everyone answer is vague and tirelessly noncommittal. Instead of trying to chip away at each one, I took a big stab at aggregating as many as I could think of and putting a bow on em'. I know the deck seems needlessly massive but I think there's some great takeaways in there no matter what level you're at.

The Fine Art of Pitching Your Creative

2012-02-17T13:58:35Z

In the life of a professional advertiser, web/mobile designer, integrated marketer or creative director, there are few things more intimidating than preparing and pitching the first round of creative. It’s kind of like being a football coach who is designing plays for a big game – but with a lot more caffeine.

What the Bar Scene Can Teach Us About Social Media

2012-02-10T19:02:48Z

A couple years ago I tried to explain why a client needed to understand that each social channel has its own communication style. All the client wanted to do was shoot out a message that said, "Go back to our website and buy shit!" Because, of course, social media would then become a river of gold.