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Does Your Brand Promiscuously Sleep with the Whole Football Team?

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Here Everyone Gets It All!!

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Will take a trip with me into ancient history?
I was in my early twenties. A friend, a young lady who was unique, beautiful and fun to be with, was insecure about her personal value. She couldn’t see why any guy might want to be with her. She had a string of bad relationships. She’d meet a guy and almost instantly sleep with him. The next day she’d call him a “boyfriend.”

I would watch it happen over and over. What she wanted was guys who’d get to know her. What she attracted was a huge following of guys who wanted to sleep with her. Some of those guys told me later that they didn’t even like her.

She was promiscuously giving away the wrong thing.

Is Your Brand Guilty of Promiscuous Giving

Now I go to events and trade shows and sometimes I see the business version of the same thing. Big brands and small companies not thinking through their “offers.” They put out samples that attract people people who want “free” rather than people who want a relationship with their brand and their products.

It may be easier to plan one giveaway for a population. But it’s not necessarily the best way to connect with people who want to “love” your brand. That single giveaway is likely to attract people who take anything free whether they need it, want it, or can use it in any meaningful way.

How many bags, water bottles, t-shirts, and hats end up left in hotel rooms because suitcases had no room when they were packed for leaving?

Here’s how to avoid promiscuously giving away the wrong things.

Don’t give everything to everybody. No one wants to marry the girl who sleeps with the entire football team. Have something for the people who are just meeting you. Have a second thing for the folks who’ve tried something in your product line and are beginning to like you. Have a third set for the folks who are madly in love with you.

How Might Brands Do that?

  • The People Who Don’t Know You Ask them about what they love in their current favorite product. Invite them to be on an advisory board that will get special offers and invitations to meetups in their town. Recruit them as “nonusers” to review new products from your line — for internal publication only if they prefer. The best swag for this group might be an elegant portable screen cleaner kit that carries your logo or maybe that flash drive that is huge enough to back up an entire computer. Everyone can will use those and see your logo.
  • The People Who Like You, But Aren’t Customers Introduce them to a service person on a first name basis. Take a hint from the car companies develop a serious test drive offer. Invite the folks who use your competitors to a demo to compare their product with yours. For those who attend extend a special limited price offer. Match them up with the machine that perfectly suits their use and needs. Invite them to test drive your machine for 30 days trial. Give them a price point that they can’t help to talk about. As a swag gift for their participation, give them that screen cleaner kit and add to that a portable power pack with adapters for every gadget in their repertoire. Who doesn’t need more power?
  • Your Loyal Customers and Those Ready to Become One Have your database ready when they walk up and talk about the products they already own. Get to know their favorites and their wishes. These are the folks who should go home with the special new product that you’re just releasing. They’ll talk about it with their friends. It might even work to give them two or three coupons to pass on to folks they know would use your products and talk about them. Let your true friends decide who should be the ones to get the super swag. They’ll choose well for you and you’ll win their loyalty for it.

People get to know people and brands in small steps that break down boundaries and build relationships. If you overwhelm me with too much too fast, it’s hard to trust that you value what you give or that you value the relationship. I don’t want to you see me as the girl who sleeps with the whole football team and I don’t want to see you like that.

How might you step the swag you offer to meet the needs of your fans?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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9 Truths About Social Media Big Business Wants Us to Know and 2 Proofs They Want from Us

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Let’s Start Over with Them in Mind

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It’s a typical conversation. Try to explain why the conversation with with customers has changed and often the person listening will tell you why he or she can’t listen. It might sound something like this.

Chief Marketing Officer: [confused, frustrated] I don’t understand why this doesn’t work. I’m an intelligent person. I should be able to do this. Why don’t customers behave? Legal will never go for this.

Social Media Practitioner: Let me tell you what to do …

Chief Marketing Officer: [Not listening] But I have a business to protect and employees that I care about. I know my market and I’m fairly sure what they want. I have to manage up. Where’s the ROI?

Social Media Practitioner: Let’s start over. … Let me listen first. What are your goals?

That last bit is the moment at which you will get the attention of a big business.

9 Truths About Social Media Big Business Wants Us to Know

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Take a minute to to tap into the the CMO’s feelings of confusion, disappointment, and frustration. Everything that has made him or her successful is being challenged by social media and the Internet. Some of us find that exciting, invigorating, and inviting, but at times when we see our friends without work, it’s also downright perilous. Every marketing manager is being asked to succeed at things that have never been tried.

We sometimes act as if what big business needs is to learn from us. That’s where the misconceptions start. Here are some cold truths every big business wishes every social media marketer realized. By now it’s getting to a point where …

  1. Big Business “gets” that social media is not about broadcasting. They get that it’s about listening to customers. Great CEOs listen long before they make suggestions.

  2. Big Business brings an entire culture to the social media playing field. It’s a problem of training and re-processing, not just un-siloing and re-tooling.

  3. Big Business understands that we need to connect with individual solutions. Great social media practitioners offer a unique strategy to each company — one tailored to their goals.

  4. Big Business “gets” that content and networks connect. Yet, a social media strategy and the tactics that draw from it has to fit naturally and move slowly through a business culture that will execute it or the strategy will fail.

  5. Few big businesses undervalue their customers. That’s how they got to be big companies. The older and larger the company, the more they value and want to protect what they have. That they want to mitigate risk is a good thing. To value their hesitance can raise our game.

  6. A social media strategy is a business deal on which people’s jobs, people’s products, and customer’s satisfaction depend. Great social media marketers never lose sight of that.

  7. A business that already understands its community and it’s brand message knows more about how to lead a social media plan than we usually give them credit for.

  8. If you’ve not worked inside a company and talked to their customers, it’s naive to act as if we better understand how best to serve their national or international market. We can offer new options, choices, and opportunities that might suit them. We see from outside the system that’s our value and our flaw.

  9. Businesses dream about social media folks who do their homework, know the competition, and come to the process ready to join a working relationship.

“Great” social media strategies don’t mean much, if the company isn’t built with the processes to sustain them. You can turn a house into a houseboat without investing time. Great social media starts with understanding how a company functions and what is possible within the culture and the people who drive it.

The 2 Proofs Every Big Business Wants from a Social Media Mentor

So what does it take to get get the confidence of a big business?
You can overcome these cold truths with two proofs.

  1. Prove that you can connect with customers in ways that make the big business a hero, make the customers lives easier, faster, and more meaningful.
  2. Prove that you can listen long enough to understand the business, you’ll be pleasure to work with, and bring value to the process.

Want to teach social media to big business? Are you willing to prove it?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.

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Should the Conversation with Big Brands Be Going Two Ways?

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Flashback: We were sitting in a lovely Italian Trattoria. I was hot-shot Executive Editor in my thirties with my editor team having lunch with the President of the company. He asked us what we thought of a competitor’s product.

Replies came from around the table. All responses were negative observations.

He listened without remarking until every person had finished their critiques. Then he simply asked one question, “If their product has so many flaws, why do you suppose they sell 100,000 copies of each of the 104 little book in the series every season?”

One question pointed out that we didn’t know as much about our competitor as we thought.

What about Big Brands Are Social Media Folks Missing?

After SOBCon and BlogHer and recent conversations with Becky McCray, Stephanie Smirnov, and Sheila Scarborough, that story has been coming back to me. We’ve been talking about how big brands have been going after bloggers with a clearer intent to capture our page view and sometimes even gather our ideas.

For some of us, it’s become a heady experience. For other’s it’s lead to some regrettable behavior — we all know the stories.

What stands out is that the focus seems to have shifted hugely in one direction. Sometimes it can appear as if new social media folks are only here to learn. We know the culture. They don’t.

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Hmmm.

My curiosity leads me to my own questions …

If the big brands are so confused about serving customers, how did they get to be big brands?

If we only see what we’re good at fixing, we’re overlooking a huge opportunity for cooperative learning.

Flash Forward: Now I sit at a meeting table with a Branding agency, a PR agency, a traditional marketing firm, a direct mail expert, an email expert, a radio and TV person, and two other support team members. We’re writing the strategy and tactics for a huge product launch. Most of them don’t know much about social media beyond that it exists, but they know their own specialities deeply. But they build on what each other has planned and they learn from what each other has to say.

Presentation is a one-way communication. We talk and they listen. We broadcast and call them to action — in a mainstream advertisement or in a meeting, the goal is the same.

A conversation is a two-way communication. Both parties talk and listen. No one is in control.

Have we stopped listening to the big brands? Is it time to start listening again? Should the conversation with big brands be going both ways?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.