Archive for March, 2008
March 28, 2008
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
Posted by Kevin | (0) Comments | Print This Article
Sue wonders if meetings should ban communications devices, while I wonder if that’s just a way for people who host boring, un-compelling meetings to blame their attendees.
March 28, 2008
Desperation Marketing
Posted by Kevin | (2) Comments | Print This Article
Got another email today from a group I used to do business with. Subject line: “We want you back!” I only had a brief second to think “Who cares what you want?” before my trigger finger had deleted it.
Tip on marketing to former members: The message should not be about you, it should be about the recipient. (But then, that should always be the case.)
Plaintive appeals like “We miss you” are somehow hard-wired into our genes. I’ve written them before, too; it’s like something we instinctively do, like scratching at a wound even though we know it’s just going to make matters worse. Perhaps we all sat through a class that was so dull we’ve blocked the experience from our memory, except somehow in the back of our minds we remember one ill-informed point the instructor had made. “People like to be wanted,” this otherwise forgettable teacher said. “They especially like to be wanted by faceless membership organizations who can’t take a hint.”
The best return I ever got on a piece of direct mail was perhaps the least sentimental appeal I ever made, and it went to a few thousand companies we like to call “hard-core non-renewers” (companies whose membership had been dropped over the course of many years and who had managed to ignore every appeal and marketing piece sent ever since). Its headline was “Your Competitors Thank You” and it simply listed the names of those companies in the recipients’ area who were still getting leads from our website because they were members. I can’t recall offhand what the final percentage return was, but I know it exceeded 13% and paid for itself many, many times over.
It did cause a little consternation; one member asked why we couldn’t just send a nice letter listing benefits and saying (this is a quote) “We Miss You.” I said, “Because we have, and it didn’t work.” This piece worked because it was true, and it hit on one particularly important benefit that we offer that is objectively valuable.
I’m not saying that every association can try this exact same sort of thing and get away with it (running a series of tests with this same message, we found it definitely doesn’t work with people who have never been members, and won’t work on the same list more than once). But every association can (I hope) find at least one specific thing that former members no longer get which is of sufficient value that you can make a big deal out of it.
Then the message becomes, “Don’t you wish had access to this?” Which makes it about the recipient (and thus of interest), not the association.
(Note, I’m talking about messages sent to former members, not expiring members — often people do forget to renew despite your many notices, and there needs to be a slightly more gentle period of reminders, but even those should be focused on the benefit that the member is either about to, or recently did, lose.)
Finally, if you’ve tested “We Miss You” against different kinds of messages and found it works best for your organization, then knock yourself out with it. Test; find what works; repeat.
March 25, 2008
So We Might Get Sued, and In Exchange We Get … Something Really Cool, I Promise
Posted by Kevin | (8) Comments | Print This Article
I had entirely too much fun trashing Twitter yesterday. But, I am now beginning to regret it, because I feel compelled to finish my thought by talking about this “Fear of Social Media” thing that has apparently been discussed to death in the Blogoclump. And I’d promised myself I’d stay out of it because there is nothing more boring than bloggers talking about blogging, which is essentially what this is.
But, here goes.
If your goal, for whatever reason, is to get more associations (or just YOUR association) to use social media, then the first thing to do is:
Quit talking about some fictional “Fear of Social Media” as if it were a bona fide cultural phenomenon. This is an old trick that always backfires. Defenders of something accuse their detractors of being “afraid” because “afraid” sounds irrational and easy to deal with.
But detractors know full well that they are not being irrational, which makes them suspect that the defenders are being either disingenuous or stupid, and this makes them more resolute in their opinion, not less. No satisfying resolution can be reached because the key to a real resolution is understanding what your opponent thinks about an issue and why — and in this case, both sides have decided to view their opponents’ perspective in a way that does not gibe with its reality.
Which means the winner in this discussion winds up being whichever one has the power to say, “Because I said so.”
According to the many conversations being held about this specific issue, the “defenders” of social media have the severe disadvantage in most organizations because it is the “detractors” who either sit in the corner office or have the ear of those who do. Specifically, the discussions have focused on “fear of legal ramifications.”
The problem is that the defenders are not actually listening to what the detractors are saying.
Just like any other business, associations do things every day that they might get sued for. Companies, and organizations, get sued every day; the only way to avoid legal problems altogether is to not operate at all.
Just like any other business, associations decide to do these things based on an assessment of risk and reward. We want to minimize the risk even though we know we can’t eliminate it, but we also want to maximize the reward — and this always requires risk.
If you want to get your association to engage in “social media” for whatever reason, and the response you hear is, “We are concerned about the legal ramifications,” then there are two things you can be sure of:
What they are ABSOLUTELY NOT SAYING is, “We love the idea, but are afraid we might get sued.”
What they are 100% DEFINITELY SAYING is, “So, the downside is we might get sued, and the upside is … absolutely nothing.”
Your goal, if you want “social media” (or just about anything else) done, is NOT to strategize on how to overcome fears of legal ramifications. It’s a pointless endeavor because you can always get sued over just about anything, and there are always ways to minimize those risks. No, your goal should be to figure out what, if anything, that upside is. Because if you don’t know what it is, and you can’t explain it in a really clear and compelling way, then you frankly don’t deserve to win the argument.
Compounding your problem is that many of the “detractors” you’re dealing with already have an opinion of “social media” — which is the real reason they are not particularly interested in your request — and if you want to know what that opinion is, read the last half of my last post on Twitter.
Your “upside” needs to be clear and compelling enough to overcome that.
March 24, 2008
Who Cares?
Posted by Kevin | (6) Comments | Print This Article
Cindy is obviously a much nicer and more succinct person than I am.
Twitter asks, “What are you doing?” and Cindy’s one-word response is, “Why?”
My two-word response is, “Who cares?” (And that’s censored down from a three-word response.)
Seriously. I really don’t care what you’re doing right now. I don’t care that you’re stuck in an airport line (and “boy doesn’t security suck”); I don’t care what you had for lunch; I don’t care how many pounds you gained or lost this morning; I don’t care that you’re having computer troubles at work; I don’t care if you find something funny or sad; I may be a mean ol’ SOB but I just plain don’t give a flying $%^&.
BUT — here’s the thing: I COULD CARE about all of the things I just mentioned if they were written in an engaging, thoughtful, and meaningful way that used the scenario in question to engage ME and strike a chord in ME and make ME think about something, anything in a new light and ponder how it might apply or in any way affect MY life.
Which is pretty damn near impossible to do in 140 characters or less.
And if you think that all the capital ME and MYs make ME sound selfish, then you are completely missing the point — not just of this blog post, but of COMMUNICATION in general.
Here’s my point: I’m not anti-Twitter. I don’t care enough to be anti-Twitter — never joined, never subscribed, never had any interest other than the occasional bemused look at people’s “feeds” on their blogs. If you think it’s a great tool and resource for your life, then terrific! Use it to your heart’s content.
My point is that it represents exactly what is wrong with “social media” in that it is all SOCIAL and not enough MEDIA. By “soclal” I mean social like a bar or a cocktail party, where the conversation goes something like this:
YOU: Say something witty, engaging, and downright near profound
SOMEONE ELSE: Says something else while you wait for them to shut up so you can talk about yourself again
When folks scoff at the concept of social media, it is exactly this sort of thing they’re talking about. Don’t believe the legal questions and roadblocks that get thrown up; what they are really saying is, “Isn’t that stuff just a bunch of small people with big egos who like to talk about themselves?”
In his comment on Cindy’s post, Jamie Notter said, “People said very similar things about blogs a few years back.”
Guess what? They were right.
While people lately have been posting ad nauseam in the clump about “fear of social media” what seems to have been completely missed is that sometimes people have bad impressions of social media … not because they’re “afraid” of it … but because social media has EARNED those bad impressions.
All too often it’s a bunch of people talking about themselves, posting videos and podcasts that amuse themselves, continuously segregating themselves into those who “get it” and those who “don’t.” They’re not communicating; they’re talking.
Which may be a surefire way to amuse your friends, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a communications strategy for your association.