Just a few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend Ingram Micro’s Marketing Symposium in Anaheim, California. I particularly enjoyed hearing Gartner Vice President of Research Tiffani Bova address the crowd. She provided a great perspective and talked about how things are getting incrementally better. IT Budgets are coming back. She reminded us that just a few years ago, “flat was the new up and now 2% is the new up.” Things are looking a bit better, but we can’t afford to lose sight of the shifting landscape wherein “the company that was selling us books online is now selling storage as a service.” The survivors got creative. Just because it looks like the economy could be on its way back doesn’t mean we’ll ever see that old status quo again.

It’s Time To Kick Our Messaging Habits

If we’re good at listening, we shouldn’t need to be reminded about this next part, but my favorite part of her presentation was her advice to marketers about messaging. It’s so easy to slip into messaging habits. We change things up for a launch or when some aspect of our offering changes, but how often do we really put our ear to the ground and see if what we’re saying resonates with the CIOs and CFOs we’re trying to reach?  

Cost Reduction: Out – Growth and Innovation: In

If the primary messaging of your marketing collateral is all about how your products or services help reduce costs, according to Tiffani Bova, it’s time to do a refresh.  The conversation, she says, is moving toward growth and innovation. Companies are looking for ways to expand, become more agile, attract new customers and create new products and services. “Do you have the right message going to the marketplace,” she asked the crowd, “or are you still talking about cost-cutting?”

Catching A Wave Requires Alertness

As business slowly begins to pick up again, it’s easy to let out a sigh of relief and slip into the patterns that only a feeling of relative safety allows for. But we’re not safe yet. We’re like surfers who have been sitting on our boards for a long time with no waves in sight. Now that we see one on the horizon, we’d better pay attention, get into position and prepare for the moment when it comes. Just because the wave comes doesn’t mean that all of the waiting surfers will get to ride it. That’s a privilege enjoyed by the ones who were ready.

Today I joined Hubspot’s weekly Press Release Optimization webinar. It was the first time in a while that I took time away from client work to get back to the real challenge of keeping myself educated. I’ve been extremely fortunate, finding wonderful clients that offer me challenging marketing work in fields I find interesting. I’m especially excited to be working in tech again. But one thing I didn’t miss about tech marketing is the incredibly insidious gobbledygook. I forgot how prevalent it still is.

I Kind Of Enjoyed Life With Real Words

After having been immersed in the Mashable world of “business casual,” blog-style copywriting, it’s a strange feeling to go back to the channel and enterprise software. It’s like visiting a city that allows cigarettes indoors. I lived in Manhattan before the ban and didn’t think a thing of it. Now I smell smoke from a single passer-by outdoors and I have to cover my nose. The gobbledygook is everywhere and I don’t like it.

Like a good, creepy dream sequence, imagine yourself watching TV alone in your living room. In the middle of a string of long commercials, imagine someone looking out from the screen and addressing you – not someone pretending to address the audience – actually talking to you. It would be pretty startling, wouldn’t it? That’s what I imagine it would be like for someone who is accustomed to tech gobbledygook if they stumbled upon an ad that actually spoke to them – addressed them as if they were an actual person with specific needs.

Adolescent Fear and The Need For Gobbledygook

I believe that we hide behind gobbledygook for the same reason teen girls cling to the latest fashion craze. The last thing they want to do is really stand out. We write these things because if we didn’t, we’d somehow be excluded from the crowd. It wouldn’t be professional to talk straight, would it?

On the webinar today, we were challenged to stop using the phrase “cost-effective.” We were told, instead, to exclude that word and describe what the product actually does. As someone who writes regularly about Business Process Management and ERP software, if you take away the gobbledygook words “streamline, automate, optimize, cost-effective and integrate,” I’m out of a job, right? Or maybe I should just sit down and write about what my clients’ software actually does in plain language. One thing I know for certain – if I do, we certainly won’t be one of the crowd anymore.

(Click here to download David Meerman Scott’s Gobbledygook Manifesto – it will change your life.) [clouds part - cue harps]

Happy Friday! Here are a few closing thoughts on my topic this week: Google AdWords. Don’t miss this great post from Hubspot today: 5 Ways To Get Out Of The Pay Per Click Weeds.  Have a great weekend!

For everything there is a season…

…a time for every activity under heaven. (Ecclesiastes 3:1) Even AdWords.

Yesterday I wrote about how AdWords can be a black hole for a small business marketing budget. Today I want to point out a few circumstances in which AdWords makes sense.

Sometimes AdWords is the right thing to do.

According to a great post yesterday on Hubspot Inbound Marketing‘s blog called 3 Strategies to Run an Effective Google AdWords Campaign, one good reason to use AdWords is if your website is brand new and you’re not sure which keywords to focus on for your organic search efforts. AdWords gives you a chance to test different keywords’ popularity. Another reason to justify your PPC spending is if you’d like to reach “audiences different from those drawn from organic search and thus maximize your reach to potential customers.” (Hubspot)

Want better results? Let me show you the world in Google’s eyes.

If you need to use AdWords, a great exercise might be to put yourself in Google’s shoes. If Google isn’t seen as reliable, then Google goes go out of business. While we’re busy using them to market to our prospects, remember that they’re Google’s prospects first. If serving up our ads is not what Google thinks is best for their customers, they will either not serve them up at all, or they’ll make it much more expensive for us.

What makes a good ad from Google’s perspective?

A good ad is the sum of three parts:

1. The keywords we choose to target
2. The ad copy we write
3. The copy on the landing page

If Google doesn’t think those three things go together like a hand in a glove, then we’ll be paying more, or the ads won’t be seen much at all. There are many sources for information on what makes a good AdWords campaign, especially Hubspot’s post, so I won’t recreate the wheel. But the thing I think is usually underestimated is the power of keeping things simple and keeping these three elements in sync.

Keeping it simple: Now jump into the shoes of the searcher.

You need an A. You decide to look for A online. You type A into the search bar. You see ads come up promising a good deal on A. You click on the ad… but there’s no A. There may be lots of B, which is close, but you were looking for A. B might be on the next page or even implied, but if you don’t see A, are you going to stay on that page? Or click away as fast as you can to go back to the other search results because you have other things to do and you just need an A.

So the best idea for the vendor selling A is to target the keyword A, include A in the ad itself, then make sure that the promise of the ad is fulfilled on the landing page with lots and lots of good A. Google will reward you with a lower CPC and more impressions. They like it when our prospects are getting what they search for. That’s Google’s job. They want to help us do ours better too.

AdWords pays for things I love…

It’s the primary source of Google’s revenue, and I do love my Google. It’s easy to get the impression that AdWords is a necessary part of any web marketing strategy and that social media is sort of a poor-man’s alternative. For some, ads help bolster brand exposure and increase a certain kind of traffic, but for most, it’s a waste of valuable marketing dollars.

Today, a blog post on the New York Times‘ blog You’re The Boss called “Trial and Error With Adwords and SEO“ describes the journey of Catherine Wood Hill and mother Michelle Wood, co-founder of La Grande Dame. She spent thousands on Adwords and purchased email lists only to discover that:

• After spending $13,930 on AdWords, they made only $3,838 in sales.
• Out of a purchased e-mail list of 500,000 names, only 15 actually bought anything.

Not to be a complete spoiler (you simply MUST go read this article), but here is the juiciest bit:

Eventually, Ms. Hill chose to lose the P.R. specialist, ditch the e-mail list vendors, and skip AdWords altogether. “Now, I do everything myself,” she said. She concluded that successful S.E.O. had three components: the content on your pages; getting other sites to link to yours; and the way in which your site is coded. “I can control the first two on a daily basis,” said Ms. Hill, who has no coding background.
(From Trial and Error with AdWords and S.E.O. By ADRIANA GARDELLA)

Interested in more success stories like hers?

I’ve been a fan of Bernie Borges’ podcasts for some time now. On his website, Find And Convert, he has a section called Success Case Studies Podcasts where you’ll find a treasure trove of great examples like Ms. Hill’s.  Don’t miss these favorites:

• Florida Aquarium Dives Into Social Media Waters – how a local aquarium went from a simple website and traditional ad platforms to using social media. One of their tweetups more than doubled their forecasted attendance over a 10-day period.
• A Step-By-Step Social Media Development Plan – Perfect for anyone who thinks social media will never work for their industry. See how David Carothers becomes a “Marketing 2.0 Maven” in the sexiest industry of all: risk management.

Would you send an intern, alone, to your industry’s most important event?

Would you allow an outsourced contractor to get on the phone, 1:1, with a promising prospect?

We don’t need one more thing to do, but…

As a marketer with a specialty in social media best practices, I’ve come across many businesses who tell me they’d like to have their networks set up and managed by someone else so that they don’t have to think about it. This is so understandable. Most business owners and employees are more exhausted today by their jobs than at any other time in recent history.

But according to a recent article in the LA Times, small businesses are still starting up and even succeeding because they’re focused on “working harder to build relationships that fuel sales.”

You can’t outsource a relationship.

Outsourcing social media is just a bad idea. People out there in the “socialsphere” logically assume that when your company name is on it, someone from your company is behind it. Realizing this, you might seek to control what the intern/contractor does by giving them approved messaging – which is the equivalent of ad copy, which has no place in social media.  Hired guns don’t have the expertise to answer your prospects’ questions. There is no substitute for a real, dedicated, knowledgable employee when it comes to relationship building with clients and prospects.

What about Brand Evangelists?

You might get lucky and find a consultant with vast experience in your industry. There are some who look to hire a “brand evangelist.” This is a very special kind of relationship between a brand and a consultant that involves a great deal of access and trust. But most small businesses I’ve come across aren’t looking for such heavy involvement.

What is a social media consultant good for then?

One of the things we do that can save you loads of time is keep up with all of the latest, most excruciating details about what works best. We sit on long webinars learning about where to put keywords in LinkedIn profiles. We eat this stuff up. A good consultant will help you set up your profiles, then teach you the importance of learning to use them yourself. Unless you’re looking to hire someone to be your official brand evangelist, the person you hire to help set up your social media presence should be, first and foremost, a good teacher.

Remember this game? It’s time to play!

Which of these pictures represents something completely different from all of the others?

If you chose LinkedIn as the one that does NOT fit in, you’re right!

There seems to be a lot of confusion out there about how to use social networking to promote business. But before we can even talk about that, it’s important to be very clear about what social media is not.

Social Networking Sites Are Not Ad Space

You’ve worked hard on (or paid well for) your marketing copy. Maybe you use it in ads, postcards, yellow page ads, pay per click and e-mail blasts. But social media will never fit into the category of places for you to distribute well-crafted marketing messages.

It’s tempting to see status updates as a wonderful place to display your marketing messages. Lots of people do. But just because someone else runs the social media aspect of their marketing campaign off of a cliff doesn’t mean you have to.

Social Networking IS A Virtual Version Of A Face-To-Face Interaction

Imagine yourself in a room with your customers and prospects. What do you talk about? Do you spout memorized marketing copy to them? Probably not. In this room, you’re essentially doing PR, customer service and lead nurture marketing all in one. In a business environment, that’s what social media can be used for at its best.

Examples Of Human-Sounding Status Updates

You can be human and promote your business at the same time. Remember, if they have any relationship with you at all, they already know what you do. They’ve probably seen your postcards. Here’s your chance to show that you’re forward-thinking, considerate and an upstanding member of your community. Here are a few ideas to get you started thinking in a new direction:

• If you’re B2B and serve a particular kind of business, tap into their industry news and share interesting articles with a short comment about why you think they’d like to read it.
• If you’re attending an event or reading a book that’s provided you with new insights on a problem you solve for clients, share short tidbits of that knowledge to let them know they’re always on your mind.
• If you have a store front, check the local paper. Touch your customers’ sense of community spirit by giving kudos to a local hero or charity.
• Give advanced notice about a new product coming in.
• Offer up unsolicited solutions to every-day problems. For instance, if you sell technology-related services, send them info on local charities that help recycle old monitors and printers.

“How do we get the best minds, including young people, working on the biggest problems – poverty, global health, education, energy, and climate change?” Bill Gates posed this question to students at UC Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago and MIT on his College Tour back in April of this year.

Most would probably assume that the conundrum lies in financing. The brightest minds have the opportunity to work for the biggest payday. Sure, they could work for a charity on the side, but they have to pay off those student loans somehow. The end result, then, is that the brightest minds work to solve problems for the smallest percentage of humans on the planet – the rich ones. Right?

Wrong.

TechCrunch LA Meetup embraced a social business

Last week I attended the fifth anniversary of my favorite blog, TechCrunch. There were 360 TechCrunch meetups all over the world with over 4,400 individuals in attendance. Hundreds of people signed up to attend the free meetup at Coloft in Santa Monica (there was a hefty wait list). The demo floor was filled with  enthusiastic entrepreneurs pitching their start-ups. At the end, one start-up would be chosen as the favorite and win prizes from the event sponsors.

The winner: Inventure Fund: “a micro venture capital fund that empowers businesses to lift their communities out of poverty.”  (Join their Summer Fridays fundraising events in LA and NY!)

I’m excited by their win because the bright minds filling the room that night chose poverty alleviation over all of the other amazing technologies presented. The concept itself isn’t necessarily new. Inventure Fund is often compared to Kiva, although it definitely has its own distinct function. I left that meetup confident that the brightest minds are already working on solving the problems of the masses.

Not only did these bright minds vote for good, they do good

While most of the other demos at the meetup don’t aim to do good by directly addressing poverty in developing nations, many have created software that empowers small businesses like yours and mine. They’re busy creating tools that anyone can use to solve problems that used to require huge investments. For example, Stiqr makes it possible for any small business to have an amazing, professional-looking “Web 2.0″ homepage still powered by our favorite blogging platforms like WordPress or Tumblr. They, along with Codeita, were tied for second place in my opinion.

The best part: this is not charity work

These bright minds on the floor that night may be starving a bit now, but their incentive to keep going is the fact that there is money in doing good. I used to think that in order to really become a part of the solution to the world’s most serious problems, I needed to go back to school for a degree in public policy or economics. What could a lowly tech marketer bring to the table? (And still be able to eat?) The answer is simple. Business needs to keep doing what business does best. Solve problems. Meet needs. Find ways to sustain endeavors through for-profit channels. It’s called Social Business.

We’ve all seen how business can wreak havoc on the world when the goal is to put the brightest minds to work puffing up the wallets of a few. But the tables are turned. Social media is on the cutting edge because the basic philosophy is different. We know that in order to succeed in this new world we have to ask our consumers every day: what can I do for you?

The web is full of strangers – a whole world-wide-web of them. I don’t blame anyone for being a little nervous. But even with all of the talk of privacy violations these days, social media participation (yes, even Facebook) is on a steady upward trend. It’s still important for businesses to get on board.

If just thinking of putting your information online where strangers can see it causes your stomach to do flip-flops, I’m hoping this exercise might help calm your nerves. For this little mental experiment, let’s just assume your primary concern is building your business presence on a professional network like LinkedIn.

Professional social media profiles as virtual event booths

When you show up to an event dressed for success with roller-bags full of marketing materials, aren’t you hoping for a sea of unfamiliar faces? We attend these events hoping to find people who have never heard of us so that we can wow them with our amazing value propositions. But somehow, the idea of strangers seeing us on the internet is still a little frightening.

What do event booths and LinkedIn have in common?

1. A Self-Selected Audience

At an event, you can look forward to meeting a room full of strangers interested in a common industry or service. Your presence there tells them that you’re relevant to that topic and gives them their first reason to be interested in visiting your booth. The strangers landing on your LinkedIn profile are also visiting your profile for a reason. They may have searched for a set of keywords that appear in your profile. They may be a close connection through one of your colleagues or friends looking for someone they can trust. (And don’t forget, you can choose how much or how little complete strangers get to see by altering your settings.)

2. Your marketing materials

Your table, like your online professional profile, is empty without basic marketing materials clearly stating your value. Hopefully you’ve brought along fun give-aways or a contest or demo for your visitors. You’ve prepared these specifically for strangers’ eyes. You can offer all of these things on your social profiles as well, but these elements alone do not a successful event booth make…

3. YOU

This is the scariest part – but the most important. An actual person needs to stand at the booth and talk to the strangers who pass by. Visitors need to be engaged – human to human. Imagine someone at a booth repeating a memorized marketing script and nothing else? Would you stop to listen? We understand engaging as humans at event booths. It’s silly to think otherwise. But it’s somehow scary to imagine engaging as humans on social networking sites with total strangers.

“Name the devil and he will flee”

Do we even know why we’re afraid? Maybe it would be a good idea to sit down for a few minutes and let the actual questions surface:  What will they find out about me? What will they say to me? Will they try to take advantage of me? Will they shame me in some way? Do I really know my stuff? Will they think I’m not qualified? What other questions come out for you? Write them down. Post them in the comments section below so we can all learn.

Now put yourself back in the event booth. You are in a professional environment. You know how to conduct yourself at a professional event. You dress appropriately. You have your materials prepared. You’re a nice person and know how to engage in professional conversations. If someone asks about your background, you can give as much or as little information as you please. You’re not planning on talking about your love life at the event booth. You’re not planning on talking about your political or religious beliefs. Why would you? It’s a work event and you are a pro.

It’s important to decide whether fear or business acumen will win the day. Ultimately, you do have control over what you post and how you shape your online presence. But as David Meerman Scott declared today on his blog: “I Do Not Friend Logos.” We don’t add marketing pamphlets to our contact lists. We add people.

I’ve been living in a social media ghetto. I’ve officially consumed the kool-aid and I love it. I started my consulting business like the over-zealous religious convert ready to save me some souls. I wanted to work with small businesses in Los Angeles and OC – to show them all of the cool, nearly free things they can do with social media to increase awareness and give the big box stores a run for their money. But then I discovered the deep-set fear so many have of the social web. I wasn’t ready for it.

Many of my favorite blogs have great advice, especially for the corporate world. One of my favorite blogs published an article today, Top 5 Social Media Myths Debunked. Instead of calling them myths or fears, many social media bloggers call them “objections” and deal with them in a very matter-of-fact tone. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I want to have a different conversation altogether. Objections are different from fear. Objections are based in logic and good business sense. A good sales person can answer with logic from great lists of come-backs if she’s done her homework. An objection is something like, “But I can’t measure ROI.”  I can answer that. But when it comes to social media, I don’t see objections as often as I see true fear. In those moments, it’s not about come-backs or lists of answers. It’s about putting myself into that person’s shoes, slowing down and listening.

I’ve decided to dedicate a good deal of time writing about this fear over the coming weeks. For many people, anything else I babble about will mean nothing if this isn’t addressed first. The fact that someone with a fear of of social media is even making an appointment with me is a ray of light – a sign that it’s worth dealing with on a deeper level. So I’m going to address the fear of social media as best I can from the perspective of the small business owner, the sole proprietor, the minister, whoever can gain the world by embracing social media, but fears losing his soul.

Be sure to subscribe to see some new perspectives on these topics:

• Fear of the people outside of your business circle finding their way in – Can the idea of the world wide web seeing  you suddenly cause paralysis? Is every single person we’ve ever known now going to find their way to your virtual door? Why is that scary?
• Fear of misrepresenting yourself by making a social media faux pas – Even after getting a run-down on best practices and learning to use social networks, does it feel like visiting another country? Does it feel like being in a totally different culture speaking another language and you’re not sure if you asked for black coffee or a roll of toilet paper?
• Fear of losing control of who sees you – Is just knowing that total strangers could be out there looking at your business profiles causing distress? What drives this fear of being discovered online? How is it different from someone seeing your ad on a billboard or discovering your flier?
• Fear of people saying bad things about you or your products – Over-analyzed, yes. But even with all of the great resources, case studies and hard proof that social media can turn the biggest complainers into the biggest fans, people are still frightened of this. It’s probably still a top reason why some small and even mid-sized companies won’t dip their toe in the water.
• Fear of wasting your time because no one will care what you do online – If your industry is not represented in social media, does that mean none of your prospective clients would ever use it to find you? Is the true nature of this fear that you’re afraid you’ll have a party and no one will come?

Have you or has anyone you know experienced this kind of social media paralysis? Let me know if I’m missing anything.