Jason Collis' Internet Marketing Blog

According to a study done by George Washington University, the leading organization when it comes to social media is… as you can guess from the title NASA.  The article, written by the Washington Post, can be viewed here.  In the study, the top five organizations rated were all non-profit seeking groups.

What did they all have in common, well that brings us to the lesson learned.  What makes them the best at social media?  They don’t say in the article, but I am going to assert that it is because they were all groups that had something interesting to talk about and were not trying to sell anything to the public.  People are not very interested in engaging as much with companies, who try to tell us that they are not trying to sell you anything, they just want to open a dialogue.  I think that people see through that messaging.

A professor of mine at UBC Sauder, Paul Cubbon was asking us in class the other day, why would someone be interested in the Telus social media campaign, why would someone sign on to their Facebook group?  He was not trying to pick on Telus, he was trying to point out that their needs to be a good reason other than buying the Telus products.  Their needs to be a good reason to talk to these companies.

NASA and the others on the list have these advantages.  They are Government funded, so their idea to engage people in a social media campaign are obviously to get support from the population so that NASA continues to be supported, but on the other hand this is not direct selling in the same way that companies do it.  Also, NASA has really cool stuff that they do and people want to talk about it.  In the article the head of social media for NASA said that they just started this campaign, so they must be getting a great response very quickly and easily.  This signifies to me that it is an easy sell.

So what can companies learn from this?  I am not entirely sure, it definitely re-inforces what most of the experts are saying about social media in that it has to be a dialogue and not a sales pitch.  I think that the key lesson might be to give up control of your social media to the public so that they coordinate and add most of the content and make sure there is interesting content for your intended viewer so that they are compelled to add this content.

Jason Collis

I was just checking out Twitter and I saw about 5 different people that I follow talk about “lean start-ups”.  There are lots of new concepts out there, and while doing my MBA, I have been exposed to countless ideas about how to do business.  I have to sort my way through the ideas and pick the best ones to invest my time in.  There is a lot of noise out there as Seth Godin recently blogged about.  I saw this concept a while ago but didn’t pay much attention because I thought that it was just another buzz word and seemed a little bit gimmicky.  However, I have recently been bombarded with messages about this concept from people that I respect.  Their opinion carries some weight with me.  Based on this I decided to look into this technique a little further and if I like the ideas I will try to use them.  This is the power of social media.  The new generations are much more selective with what they pay attention to and marketers and entrepreneurs need to understand how they make these decisions so that they can cut through the noise and have their message heard.

Jason Collis

There is a great article posted recently on this debate and I just wanted to show it here and add to the discussion.

The reason to go with electric golf carts over gas is because they have many advantages and their disadvantages are manageable based on the way the carts are being used in this market.

Driving a gas-powered golf cart vs an electric one is like driving a Hummer vs a Prius.  The energy and cost efficiency of electric golf carts are vastly better than their gas powered counterparts.  The energy requirements for electric is 85% less than gas, and the cost for that energy is far less as well because the power is coming off the grid at low rates.

The advantages to gas powered carts is the extended range, however, this is not necessary for golfing.  That is the beauty of this market.  The issues with electric powered cars is that people feel that range and changing time are limiting factors to the adoption.  In golf carts, these are not concerns; the range in electric is sufficient for completing 2 rounds and the re-charge time is fine because the carts are left plugged in overnight.

The great thing about the grass roots environmental movement is that social media is able to galvanize the thoughts of many people.  Everywhere you look you see messages created by people who are trying to make a difference.  Change is happening because the population has an idea and they don’t want to wait for the government to react because that process is too slow.  This is one of those ideas that, on its own would not make a huge difference but it plays its part in the grand scheme of things.  The switch makes sense from a financial and an environmental standpoint and those are the ideas that are going to catch on in this economy.

Jason

This is one of those stories that seems to be extremely simple.  We as consumers should want the government to protect us against monopolistic internet service providers who have a conflict of interest in the service that they provide.  Before I get into this I want to say that this is my opinion and you can get both sides of the story here.  I got the idea to discuss this from reading a recent story at FT.com, which you can read here.

I want to give my opinion so that you know where I stand on this issue.  I agree with Net Neutrality (NN).  I think that companies who control the internet like Comcast and others are going to have a conflict of interest when it comes to what content they allow through to their customers.  Comcast was just taken over by NBC Universal and the U.S. government is concerned that they might favour their content over that of other companies.  A company’s mandate is to provide value to the shareholders, not the customers and if there are limited options available to the consumers then they will be able to get away with it.

People that are arguing that they will switch are being naive in my opinion.  As someone who lives in Canada and has a cell phone, I know all too well how that argument works out.  We have a few very large cell phone service providers and they are all equally horrible in terms of price and customer service.  I have switched between them and found them all to be bad.  In Canada we have some of the most expensive mobile rates in the world.  This market is very similar to the ISP market in the U.S.  That means to me that these ISPs will be censoring content from competing companies and the internet will no longer be a place that people can go to get truthful information.

Another point is that these companies will not be as blatant as blocking companies altogether, they will just give more and faster bandwidth to preferred companies.  People will not know this is happening and assume that these other companies just have terrible websites and stop paying attention to them.

What does this mean for new businesses is that it will be much harder to crack into an incumbent’s market because getting out the message will be much harder.  They will not be able to use their social media and internet marketing as effectively and that might be the only way that they could compete in the first place.

For a country like the U.S., which prides itself on competition and free markets, this NN regulation seems to be a step in that direction.

Jason

In a blog post by Lynn Terry (http://www.clicknewz.com/2553/how-to-promote-products-via-social-media/) on how to promote products using social media, as well as many other sources, she stated that the difference is “With Content Marketing you are the one doing the talking, by creating content and leading your visitor into a decision. With Social Media you are joining their conversation, usually on their terms and in their space.”

This has a really strong connection with what a lot of the gurus in the start-up space are discussing right now.  Steve Blank and others talk about lean entrepreneurship and customer and market focused start-ups rather than product development companies.   Let me explain that concept a little further; what I mean to say is that instead of spending millions in angel and VC capital and 2 years in the lab creating the next big thing in the world that, it turns out, nobody wants, it is a better idea to start with a hypothesis, then go into the market and see if people are receptive to it, and if not, change it.  The key is to get into the conversation, sound familiar?  The new entrepreneur needs to go into the market and see what is happening, examine and become the expert on the industry eco-system so that pain points can be routed out.  This takes a lot of listening, sound familiar again?

In social media the experts are saying that the way to market here is to join the conversation on the customers terms and see where they are hurting to try and solve those problems and the new entrepreneurship material is saying the exact same thing.  These two areas of business can work together very well, however, I don’t see them talking about each other very much, I find that fascinating.  Entrepreneurs need to start utilizing social media, even though entrepreneurs are notorious for not having enough time for anything.  They need to realize that understanding their customers and the industry is their number one priority.  They need to have a presence here and use this media effectively.  Also, it has the classic reason of being a relatively cheap way of getting your name in customer’s minds, which is extremely important for start-ups where cash is king.

I was reading a prominent blog by Eric Ries who is a startup expert.  He discusses the issue of truthfulness at talks given by successful entrepreneurs (http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2010/10/stop-lying-on-stage.html).  He is arguing that when these people give talks they gloss over the issues that they had and celebrate their successes to a greater degree then might be warranted.  This is of course because they want to make themselves look more in control then they might have been during the process.  Eric was saying that when you actually sit down with these entrepreneurs after their talks in a dinner setting you get a more true picture.  He thinks that this is ultimately hurting the startup community because it gives an unrealistic view of how good you have to be to start a company and challenge an incumbent.  I tend to agree, but aside from that, this brings up a few points that I want to discuss.

Truthfulness:

When I worked as a project manager in the Hedge Fund industry, I was constantly battling with this issue.  I had to really dig at what people were telling me to make sure that they were giving me a clear picture.  There were many reasons why someone would not be perfectly clear and they are not all self-serving.  My job was to get through all of this haze and try to get as clear a picture as I could so that I could develop a good plan of action.  One of the techniques for doing this were to get the opinions of several individuals that were looking at the problem from different angles.  I was sometimes able to piece together a sufficient picture from many smaller and often overlapping versions of the true story.  I was able to reciprocate when I was given true information and call people out on misinformation.  Because we were in a work/community setting this process tended to work quite well.

Social Media Relevancy:

The many versions of the truth example that I just gave seems to be a recurring theme in my life no matter what I do and that got me thinking about the value of social media.  The goal of marketing communications for a business, in my opinion, is to create a truthful dialogue with the customers so that each party can find out what the other is really all about.  The customer wants to know the company in terms of values and qualities and the company should be seeking out the opinions of the customers to understand their wants and needs.  The goal is to get this information in its truest sense.  Everyone knows that people are going to bend or cloud the truth for one reason or another and the goal of the marketing communications is to cut through that to get answers.

Cutting Through the Fog:

The question is, is social media a good way to cut through this fog?  There are a few attributes of social media that lean in that direction.  There is a certain level of anonymity so people are more likely to tell the truth.  Although these days people are trying to build their online brand, so it is less anonymous.  The lines between the online and offline worlds are blurring and people are less likely to say something that will get them into trouble.  They are less likely to have their drunken picture on Facebook where their employer might see it.  Social media does present a great opportunity to have a greater dialogue though, where people now have access to others that they would not normally had.

Conclusion

People are always going to obfuscate the truth when they communicate, it is as old as language itself and even though there were opportunities for a more truthful dialogue online at one time, I think that has largely evaporated.  The big key is the access and increased communication overall.  If we get back to my project management experience, there are ways to get at the truth that are not always easy but we as marketers and entrepreneurs needs to take the increased communication as a positive and employ the same filters and techniques for sorting through the information that we always have.

There was a great blog that was posted recently by Matt Mullenweg called 1.0 is the loneliest number(http://ma.tt/2010/11/one-point-oh/) about the advantages of shipping your product as a new company instead of waiting until it is perfect.  He was talking about the fact that the product being out on the market is like oxygen and without it the product will suffocate.  The imagery is perfect and gives you the perfect sense of urgency for releasing the product.

Seth Godin wrote a blog posting called Alienating the 2% (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/11/alienating-the-2.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader) where he talked about the fact that when you release something then 2% of the customers are going to be unhappy while the other 98% are going to be thrilled with your improvements.

I think that these concepts obviously go together in the fact that you can’t please everyone when you release a product, but if you don’t release the product then you are pleasing no one.  The companies that hold onto products until they please everyone are missing a few key concepts.  The idea that you are going to please everyone with a product that hasn’t been tested in the market is naive and so the extra effort that you are putting in might not give results.  You might be working on concepts that are not going to be well received by the market anyway.

The other takeaway is that the 2% that are unhappy are not the problem, this is your feedback mechanism.  You want to put the product out in the market and see what people are saying about it.  That is the biggest advantage of a social media marketing strategy.  This gives you the opportunity to quickly get feedback and adjust your product for another release.  In the extreme sense there is the concept of agile development, where software is released many times per day sometimes, they get instant feedback and they adjust the product according to the customer’s needs.  This technique is growing in popularity.  The biggest issue to this is to make sure that you are not developing to please the 2% of naysayers and not to satisfy the happy 98%; this is a balancing act.

Jason Collis

I want to start a business, so I of course am interested in learning what internet marketing strategy is ideal for this type of situation, I will focus my discussion on a B2B environment..  I have done some research and talked to an industry expert and I have come to some conclusions.  I have used the following blog posting as research:  http://blog.score.org/?s=Larry+Bailin – this is a blog written by Larry Bailin, who writes for SCORE (the Small Business Success Blog).  The interview subject was Vicky Bagwalla – The CEO of U214 – a Toronto based business technology company, which specializes in website design and business technology consulting and implementation (www.u214.net).

Add value to the existing conversation:

Internet marketing for a small company is much the same as any type of communication in this space.  The person that is trying to market this startup needs to first know what they are talking about and have interesting insights into the industry.  The industry players are very experienced and savy and have heard it all before.  There is no sense in talking to the industry insiders and then putting their thoughts up on your blog, they will already know these things and you will turn people off very quickly.  The trick is to take what people are saying and then add your value to the conversation.  The key is not to sell people through the blog or facebook site, but to add value to the conversation and then provide a place where industry people can learn more about the space.  In the B2B environment there are only a few customers for the blog or Facebook group, you are targeting a very small and distinct group of people and your goal is to generate credibility so that when you get the chance to meet with them you will have a foot in the door and you will not be making cold sales calls.  Also very important is to keep the content consistent and fresh on all of your marketing sources, if you don’t have a lot to add to the conversation then you need to spend more time on it generating ideas.  You should only be getting into areas that you can add a lot of value so this shouldn’t be too much of an issue.  Another trick is to space out your message a little bit, especially on media sources like Twitter, just give snippets and not your entire databank of ideas in one go, the goal is to show that you have a lot to add consistently.  Lastly if what you want to say is not adding a lot of value then refrain, because it takes a long time to get someone to consistently follow you, but if they get bored they can jump ship quickly and it will be very hard to win them back.

Focus:

There are a lot of places that someone can create content for social media and internet marketing but budgets and time are very short for entrepreneurs.   The draw of social media is strong because you think that you can have an internet ad go viral and get a huge bang for the buck, however that happens quite rarely and there are studies that show that it is just as difficult to pull off a viral add as a widely popular bricks and mortar add.  To be successful in internet marketing for a startup the entrepreneur needs to be realistic about the potential of the marketing and the time commitment that is necessary for it.  Another key is to see what is working and what is lagging with the strategy.  This is where the web analytics comes in.  The marketer can see where the majority of the hits to their website come from and focus on courting those sources.  They can also see how well their twitter account is being followed as opposed to their Facebook account, etc.  These focused efforts will give the entrepreneur more value from the time that they spend.

Consistency:

Vicky Bagwalla talked to me about his top 3 rules: Consistency, consistency and consistency.  This comes back to the point that, this is something that people will always look towards to see if they trust you, and that will only happen if you are being consistent.  The difference with the social media world is that there are many more chances to be inconsistent because there are so many outlets and touch points for the consumer of your media then there used to be, so it is even more important to stay as consistent as possible.

Bottom line:

According to Larry Bailin, the best book ever written about how to be successful in internet marketing was written over 70 years ago called – Dale Carnegies, How to Win Friends and influence People.  Basically what he and I are saying is that social media is not the silver bullet solution, the same tried and true efforts that needed to be done before are what is needed in this space as well.  The entrepreneur needs to put the effort into learning about the customer and understanding them so that they can be convinced that what you have to offer is of interest to them.  Social media just gives the customer more of a chance to see what type of person you really are in a less formal way.  They can easily check in on you and they have a way easier way to form an opinion of you.  The good news for the entrepreneur in a startup is that it was very difficult in the past to show someone from a large customers who you are and try to convince them that you have value to them, now the internet and social media has created an easy and liquid way to facilitate this new connection.