Two Hat Marketing -- Smart Marketing For Small Business

This Video Almost Makes Me Want To Stop Using My Electric Razor

If you haven't watched this video from the Dollar Shave Club, watch it right now! I'm serious. Click the video Play immediately. It's only 1:34. And don't tell me you don't have time to watch a 1:34 video. Watch it NOW.

 

Sorry, Gary Vaynerchuk. This Time You're Wrong.

Gary Vaynerchuk is a really smart dude. He calls himself a "self-trained wine and social media expert," and he might be. Gary built a name for himself as the energetic host of Wine Library TV, a massively successful online video blog. He finally shut down production in March 2011 after the 1000th episode! Many of you, I'm sure, have also read his bestselling book, Crush It! If you haven't, I do recommend it.

I say all this to stress that I like Gary and I have respect for his opinions. However, even really smart people are wrong sometimes, and this time Gary's wrong.

I refer to a blogpost yesterday on Smartblog On Social Media. Brooke Howell reported on Gary's recent speech to small business owners attending America's Small Business Summit in Washington DC. Unfortunately, if Ms. Howell's reporting is accurate, Gary gave some harsh, in-your-face advice that is simply off base. 

Gary's main point was (no surprise here) that small businesses should be actively involved in social media. He rightly pointed out that it isn’t helpful to disparage social media when you haven’t even tried it out. Howell quotes: “I love it when people have a whole lot to say about Facebook and Twitter and they don’t even have an account. Shut your mouth!”

But he then goes into bad advice territory. First, Gary claims all business owners are just in one business: the attention business. Well, no, they're not, Gary. Businesses are in the business of creating customers (I didn't say that, BTW, Peter Drucker did). I can get all kinds of attention through all kinds of media, including social media, and be out of business very quickly. Attention is a tool, not a purpose, nor a strategy. Anybody who's taken a Marketing 101 course knows this from the age-old acronym A.I.D.A. - Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

Vaynerchuk also said companies had it easy when they could take a broad-sweeping approach with billboards, newspaper ads and television commercials. (Say what? Since when have small businesses relied on billboards and TV? What audience did he think he was talking to?) He went on to say word-of-mouth is on steroids, but it's not being done face-to-face so much now as it is on social media. (I mostly agree with this.)

Here's the danger with Gary's perspective. It's really narrow. He puts down traditional media and touts social media as the be-all, end-all answer, which is simply not true. There are many positives for using traditional media these days. And apparently big guns, like Google and Facebook, agree since they're now using direct mail to reach prospects.

Gary's most egregious error comes in his "four simple tips for using social media:"

• Don’t worry about what you’re going to say; just get started and build from there.
• Don’t focus on trying to win new customers, but instead on treating your existing customers well so you can keep them and inspire them to endorse your business.
• Don’t obsess about ROI. There’s a certain amount of serendipity in word-of-mouth marketing, and the numbers don’t always tell the full story.
• Don’t ignore what people are saying on Twitter. It’s a great source of information about what consumers like, think and do.

With the exception of the last one, these aren't simple, they're both cavalier and, pardon my bluntness, dumb. 

Don't focus on winning new customers? Don't obsess with ROI? What kind of business advice is that? If I gave that advice to my clients and in my speeches, I would have been out of business a long time ago. And I would have deserved it. Listening to this type of advice and perspective is a lot like watching Fox News. Fair and balanced? Uh, that would be NO.

For those of you still reading, I am not drinking the social media kool-ade and I don't think you should, either. I started taking the "I'm not 100% sold on social media" stance in a recent post titled, If You Aren't Aggressively Using Social Media, You're An Idiot. Or Not. Quite unexpectedly, this was my highest-read blog post ever. At recent speeches, I've voiced my own concerns and have had a lot of people agree with me and even thank me for speaking out.

Here's the thing. These people aren't naive, nor are they uneducated regarding social media. Most people I've spoken with have tried really hard to understand it and use it. It's just not as simple as so many social media "experts" would have you think. Social media takes a tremendous amount of time and cannot be ignored for any stretch of days. It's a crying baby screaming for attention.

I will say it again. Social media is a tool. That's it. No more, no less. It can and does work great for some companies. It sucks for others. Billboards work great for some companies. Newspaper ads work great for some companies. And, yes, even TV commercials work great for some companies. There are many roads to the top of the mountain.

As I said, Gary Vaynerchuk is a very smart dude. But there are still a myriad of other marketing tools that work really well and social media doesn't work for everybody.

What do you think? Why don't we get a real conversation started about how social media works or doesn't work for you. How have you tried to use it? How have you created new business? And don't give me some generic pablum like, "You should first have a clear strategy." Talk to me in meaningful specifics, not vague generalities.

Creative Cross Promotion

'Nuff said.

The Avengers Deliver The Unexpected WOW

My smoking hot wife, Kay, and I saw The Avengers this past weekend. It was one of those fun movies -- lots of action, awesome special effects, and a great example of what I call the Unexpected WOW.

(Note: I know it was Mother's Day yesterday and maybe Kay would have preferred seeing Dark Shadows or some other chick-flick titled something like, When Harry Met Pretty Woman In The Twilight Of Four Weddings & A Funeral. But as she says, she's not my mother and her other child, Kelly, did surprise her Thursday night coming home and spending Friday shopping downtown and seeing Titanic 3D.)

But I digress. Back to The Avengers and how it relates to an embarrassing incident in my life many years ago. 

I was scheduled to speak in Orlando for the Mobile Modular Office Association, which doesn't exist anymore. The night before I headed over to Paradise Island's Adventurer's Club, which also no longer exists. The Adventurer's Club was great fun. Designed to look like an old English hunt and adventure club, the public co-mingled with Disney cast members acting as both club members and staff.

That night I had an entertaining one-on-one with the "club's" butler. We bantered straight-faced for several minutes seeing who could make the other one laugh first. Finally, still in character, he said, "You seem to be a funny fellow. How would you like to compete in tonight's amateur comedian contest?" I, naturally, said no, but then he said, "Each contestant gets a free drink," to which I quickly accepted.

How hard could it be? It was only five minutes and I AM a professional speaker, after all. I have dozens of hysterical stories. All I had to was pick one, hit the stage, kill them with my natural wit and story-telling ability, get my free drink, and bathe in the adulation of new found fans.

Five competitors. Five minutes each.

I was third. Yes, I was a little nervous, but nothing I couldn't handle from years of speaking from the stage. The crowd was good and liquored up and eager to laugh. I grabbed the mike and launched into one of my signature stories guaranteed to bring the house down.

Crickets. I swear, 90-seconds into the longest five minutes of my life, I heard crickets. For some reason my can't-miss story actually missed them! How was that possible? I'd told that story hundreds of times and hit it out of the park every single time! Three young women in the front obviously felt bad for me and tried to laugh. It was that "We feel pity for you" heh-heh, that actually made things worse. I probably sweated more in that five minutes than the photographer for this week's Time magazine cover.

I came in fourth...out of five competitors. The guy who came in fifth didn't even bother to come back for the voting. I was emotionally rocked.

Trying to figure out what went wrong, I inserted that exact same story into my MMOA speech the next day. I set it up the same and delivered it the same.

It killed. People were wiping tears from their eyes. They were laughing so hard that a table of monks in the back who all swore a vow of silence were on their chairs screaming for more. Women threw their mobile modular undergarments at me.

So the lesson I learned at the Adventurer's Club is also one of the reasons The Avengers is doing so well in the box office. I call it the Unexpected WOW.

After my debacle in Orlando, Kay pointed out that I am not presented to my audiences as a comedian. I am a marketing, innovation, and branding guy. My audiences' expectations are to hear solid content for growing their businesses. They don't expect me to be funny, so when I am, that's an unexpected bonus. I catch them off guard. Comedians are expected to be funny, so it's much harder to make people laugh. 

Leaving The Avengers, Kay said she especially enjoyed the movie because it was unexpectedly funny. When the Hulk sucker punches Thor after they teamed up to beat up the bad guys, the audience (including me) exploded with laughter.

In my speeches and, I hope, my messages to you, I stress that your brand must be DIFFERENT in the eyes of your customers. What Unexpected WOWs are you delivering to your customers? Unexpected WOWs come out of left field. They make you DIFFERENT than the competition, not just better. If you simply work to be better, that's not really unexpected, is it?

 

Would You Dare Argue With Peter Drucker?

You know who Peter Drucker is, right? He was (and probably still is) the godfather of management theory and practice.

And if Peter Drucker gave you some great advice, would you dare argue with him?

Don't be crazy, of course you wouldn't. Even if he is dead, I'd still be afraid of finding a horse's head in my bed tomorrow.

Which leads me to a rather disturbing discussion currently on our Two Hat Marketing Network* group on LinkedIn.

Actually, it's a non-discussion, evidenced by the glaring LACK of active participation. And this disturbs me. Let me explain.

I'm keenly interested in helping my clients, audiences, and readers grow their businesses. I truly want them (and you) to succeed. As a Gunslinger, I strive to be that outside force that causes massive and positive change. I don't hew to the masses and spew out common pablum and marketing speak. I don't kiss my clients' or anybody else's butts. I think people and companies need to be whacked on the side of the head...shaken out of the mental, day-to-day doldrums that grasp so many of us.

Why do I feel this is needed? Because the real shame of business today is its blind acceptance of low productivity and efforts in those areas of business that actually make a difference.

Marketing and Innovation.

If you've followed me for any time now, you know I'm a Marketing and Innovation evangelist. Put those two together with Branding and you've found my happy place. I love working on and talking about Marketing, Innovation, and Branding. I think those three legs of my own Gunslinger's bar stool are the most important factors in any institution's success.

Let me emphasize that again:

MARKETING, INNOVATION, AND BRANDING ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT
FACTORS IN ANY INSTITUTION'S SUCCESS.

Most people agree these are extremely important, but the befuddling fact is that most, repeat most, organizations do not put these very high on their action list. But we should, shouldn't we? Marketing is that daily function that fills the funnel. Innovation is that daily function that separates us from the competition. These aren't "nice-to-do-today-if-I-have-time" things. They are essential to our future success.

Back to my LinkedIn group non-discussion. I asked the question, "What do you do every single day to generate new business and/or new customers?" 

How many responses have I received? Three. Just three. Two of them gave me specific, excellent answers to my question. Seven days went by with no further comments, so I added,"I find this very interesting. Either the rest of you don't have a daily routine for drumming up new business or you don't want to share it."

The third was a brave, honest response, "Silence sometimes means shame. It is in my case. Shamefully I don't have a conscious daily routine. I'm also interested in hearing from the people who are faithful to their daily prospecting efforts, but in how they do it during their busy times to avoid the peaks and valleys of sales." There have been no further responses. 

I suspect my third respondee is not alone. I suspect most people run into the peaks and valleys of sales on a regular basis. But then I ran into the Big Guns -- Peter Drucker and Nido Qubein.

In his riveting, 576-page 1974 classic, Management, Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, Drucker wrote:

There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.

(And) because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two - and only these two - basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are "costs."

(Note: this key section was also included in Drucker's more recent The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management (Collins Business Essentials)) 

Gold! This is gold, I tell you! Marketing and Innovation aren't just important, they are THE ONLY TWO BASIC FUNCTIONS of any business!

Then I heard Nido Qubein speak back in 1986. He was talking about the typical swinging pendulum of feast or famine so many professional speakers go through. You market like crazy for three months. Then your calendar is full for three months, so you stop marketing because you're so busy. Because you stop marketing your calendar is empty the next three months, so you market like crazy. The pendulum swings back and forth, back and forth.

Nido (we are now BFFs, so I can call him Nido) said, "The most important time to market yourself is when you are at your busiest. You MUST make time to market when you are busy and when you aren't. You must market all the time...every day."

More gold! Pete (we aren't BFFs, but he's dead, so he can't get mad at me) and Nido sent the message and I saw the light. I became a born-again Marketing and Innovation Evangelist! (I later added Branding, because I painfully learned there was no such thing as a two-legged bar stool.)

I know we all get caught up in a To-Do list that is crammed with Urgent matters. Like my honest respondent said, "...I'm also interested in hearing from the people who are faithful to their daily prospecting efforts, but in how they do it during their busy times to avoid the peaks and valleys of sales..."

As Nido pointed out, you simply cannot allow the peaks to interfere with what are the most important factors in your success. We all get done those things we decide to get done...those things we deem as priorities. But for some unknown reason, most of us don't put Marketing and Innovation at the top of those daily lists. I want to change that. 

I've decided I'm going to fight the good fight. I'm doing more webinars - some free, some not. I'll be holding a very way cool conference in Seattle this Summer, I am creating new products (books, ebooks, CDs, online, etc.), and maybe even some coaching or mastermind groups for my new M.I.B.E.'s (Marketing, Innovation, & Branding Evangelists).

Want to join me in my crusade? If you do, send an email to me at mibe@theadventure.com with the message, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

No, wait, that doesn't make sense, don't write that. Just tell me you want to get better at Marketing, Innovation, and Branding. It'll be fun and we'll all make more money. And BTW, if you do send me an email, I'll send you a password to watch my recent webinar, "From Improvement to Innovation." It was awesome! Eric Sullwold said, "I watched almost all of it." And if you already saw it, well...watch it again.

* Please join us in our small, but mighty group on LinkedIn. Click this link: Two Hat Marketing Network.