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Seriously, How Credible Can You Be?

January 31, 2012 by Liz 10 Comments

You Don’t Even Know My Name

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Many years ago, when telemarketers began the annoying practice of interrupting dinner, I decided to change the name on all of my credit cards. Since that day the cards read with two initials and my last name. It’s been fun to receive the “personalized” calls, direct mail, and email that comes to me with a hello that has been chosen just so the sender can’t call me by name.

Then a friend told me how, whenever she is asked to give up her contact information, she customizes her name in such a way that she will know who sold her name to that business spamming her when she never opted in.

Do you think those business count my friend and I when they quote their reach?

Yet,the basis of relationship — inside or outside of business — is credibility.
The offers that succeed are those in which our credibility is at least as big the size of the investment we’re asking.

Buying my information and marketing to me isn’t that different from starting a first conversation with “I think you’re sexy. Will you sleep with me?”
Who knows if you’re a theif, a slasher, or someone with some pernicious disease?

What good is reach if you don’t even know my name? Credibility is what makes the sale, not reach. Reach is not credibility.

How Credible Can You Be?

It’s no longer about only about how far our message can reach. Has it ever been or was that the only measure we could think up then? It’s not even about how many people will receive our message and consume it. Just because I understand what you said, doesn’t mean I’m inclined to do as you ask or even remember the message when 10 minutes have gone.

The question is whether a clear, credible message can travel far and still be believed.

Steven M. R. Covey, who wrote, The Speed of Trust, points to 4 Cores of Credibility — integrity, intent, capability, and results. Together they carry the four reasons we trust ourselves, our friends and the people and companies with whom we choose to work.

  • Integrity. A guy runs up to you on the beach, opens his coat and says, “Wanna buy a watch?” Your response is likely to be negative. It’s hard to believe that watch is the deal that he says it is. A man of integrity probably wouldn’t choose that form of approach. Integrity is the ultimate of walking your talk. The etymology of integrity is “wholeness, soundness, uncorrupted virtue.” It’s a person’s character who gives “his word,” shakes a hand. makes a promise, and signs a contract. Integrity is the conviction to always choose for your values no matter what people are around you.

    Do you show up as the same person everywhere people find you?
    Do you live your message with the people you work with and with your customers?
    Do you keep promises to yourself, your friends, your family, and your colleagues?
    Do you tell the hard truth as easily as you tell your best stories?

    How do your actions demonstrate what you believe?
    BE what you believe. Stand for something.

  • Intent. Ever get an email or a request from a friend that sounded as if it was sent just to you, then realized that he or she send the exact words to a whole list of people with a personalized greeting? A situation like that can make us wonder about what his or her someone’s intent. Intent is the reason we do what we do. It’s good intent to understand the power in partnership that is forthright and mutually beneficial. People and companies with good intent build relationships before promoting self-interest. Think of the respect Warren Buffet has earned. He’s a great combination of integrity and intent. Through demonstrations of good intent, Warren Buffet accomplishes many things that benefit others and his own companies.

    Do you reflect on what motivates you and how that might work for others?
    Do you move yourself outside the center to get a more balanced view of world?
    Do you make the success of other people mission critical to our own success?
    Do state your true intentions to yourself and to others before you act?

    How do you make it easy to see what you’re up to?
    Share your plan and your purpose. Focus on mutual benefits.

  • Capabilities. Think of leaders who inspire. They have knowledge, talent, skills, ethics, attitudes, and identity. It’s not simply that they’re intelligent and visible. They attract us to follow because they are good at what they do. They have means and the confidence to do the job and the way they talk about their capabilities raises everyone on their team.

    Do you know your strengths, talents, what comes naturally, and why people follow you?
    Do you have the expertise to do what you set out to do?
    Does your style attract and encourage relationships and learning?
    Do you establish a culture that is open and supportive?

    How do you use your abilities to inspire confidence and leadership?
    Know what value only you can bring. Do the same for others.

  • Results. Talent and skills are nothing, if we don’t do, produce, and respond to the right things. People and companies we trust focus on delivering right results that meet the highest expectations. They fulfill their promises — faster, easier, and more meaningfully than anyone might expect. Their record for results precedes them.

    Do you show up, make clear decision, and put your best work into all you do?
    Do seek out a team of people who are smarter and more experienced than you?
    Do you focus on delivering outstanding satisfaction to every customer?
    Do you look to consistently raise the bar higher?

    How do you make outstanding and successful things happen?
    Be engaged. Take responsibility with intent to win.

The difference between reach and credibility is the difference between Handing out flyers to every person who passes on the street and developing relationships with people who who value integrity, shared intent, competent commitment, and consistent performance.

Credibility is trust without fear or worry of the wrong results. Credibility means we don’t have to prepare for consequences because positive outcomes don’t hurt us. Credibility relieves us of the burden of having to build extra safety nets because we know that you’re looking out for our best interests — you’ll still be there if something goes wrong. Can’t say that about the guy on the beach offering to sell us a watch.

Reach is only valuable if it stands on a foundation of credibility.
Seriously, how credible can you be if you bought my information and you don’t even know my name?

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

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Filed Under: Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, credibility, LinkedIn, reach, Speed of Trust

Good, Great, and Irresistible Marketing Businesses

January 24, 2012 by Liz 2 Comments

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When I pay attention to your message… when I watch your commercial, read your ad, listen to your presentation, can you assume that you’ve reached me?

Only if you define reach in the most literal sense.

And trust me, you’re reaching to believe if you believe that attention is synonymous with trust.

Trust isn’t a numbers game. Trust takes time to be established — it always did.

Good, Great, and Irresistible Marketing Businesses

We talk with thousands of people throughout our lives. Now that the social web has amplified the speed and reach of communication, it could be argued that some social folks online “talk with” thousands of people in a week. Certainly many businesses talk with thousands of people in a day. Some corporations easily talk with millions in a day. Still the fact remains that the ability to reach millions with our message means hardly anything if those millions don’t trust the people or place the message is coming from. Communication only helps a business when people trust what we’re saying.

  • Good marketing businesses know how to reach customers. The marketer shows how the product offers will solve a customer’s problems, how the offers will take care of the customer needs and desires at the right price in satisfying ways. Satisfying solutions at a good price will get people to buy in. Price is an important part of this mix.
  • Great marketing businesses know how to reach ideal customers and build values-based relationships. They find the people who share the marketers’ values and never make an offer larger than the trust they’ve built. The shared values make it easy for new customers to trust what the marketer says, to see the value in what the business makes, to value products and services that incorporate those values in everything. What we value is always worth more than the price.
  • Irresistible marketing businesses know how to reach ideal customers, build a values-based relationships and show customers that it is always easy and safe to work with that business. They invite ideal customers into a relationship bigger and better than simply a customer-fan. The business trusts and values customers by involving them in future plans — customers participate in having ideas, building content, sharing products, access to feedback loops that value bad news — and and holding customers in the highest esteem because they help the business thrive. That’s where the deep trust and irresistible attraction comes in.

The best form of attraction is built on trust — consistently proving that your business does business even better than any customer might think business would be! Business moves faster and with fewer micro-decisions when we can depend on people we trust. With trust like that customers tell your best true story for you.

Reach out to meet needs is not nearly as powerful building values-based relationships. Values-based relationships aren’t nearly as irresistible as the attraction of being a first trusted resource who consistently surpasses the standard.

Have you found your irresistible offer yet?

Be irresistible.

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

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Filed Under: Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, communication, LinkedIn, reach, trust

Even Cheap Is Expensive When the Model Doesn’t Work

January 17, 2012 by Liz 4 Comments

What IS Reach?

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Once upon a time, I subscribed to the Chicago Tribune. (I apologize to the New York Times and my friends who Yankees fans. I also live in Wrigleyville.) I subscribed to daily delivery during the period that the Tribune won 11 Pulitzer Prizes. I’m not certain that I read any of the winning articles. Though the paper came as promised, with a job in the city, my schedule often didn’t offer me the time I wished to read it. Even when it did loosen a bit, I didn’t read every word of it.

So though the paper reached me. I wasn’t exposed it. I was on their list and I would bet that I was counted in their ad fees based on circulation.

My point is that reach only meant I was paying for it.
They didn’t have my eyeballs, impressions, or attention.

The traditional model of impressions, circulation, subscriptions has always been false.

The model of impressions and circulation numbers sold ads and justified advertising costs. I was the product the Tribune was selling. I was the demographic they were basing their numbers on. The people who bought the ads knew that I was supposed to be seeing, reading, and paying attention to those ads, but that there was know way to know if I was.

They were access to subscribers — much like the subscribers to my blog.
Do you believe for a second that they got access to every subscriber? Do you supposed every subscriber read every ad in every paper. Do you read everything you subscribe to — even most? (If you do, perhaps I should talk with you about some ads in the email that goes out with my blog.)

The impression, circulation, subscription model never delivered the numbers that it sold.

Now we’re applying that model to social media.

If I pay close attention and “prune” my power network just right, I should be able to connect to the perfect 150 power people who have each also connected to another 150 power people and so on outward. A mere two generations out would be a network of 3,375,000 power people. But just to hedge the bet, perhaps I should connect to 150,000.

Thing is any message I send to my own group only gets read the same as the Tribune did … when they have time. I’m not foolish enough to believe more than that.

Reach is not a guarantee of engagement, participation or even exposure.
Reach is merely a possibility.

Andrew Smith at marcom international points out,

“For decades, PR has been seen by many marketeers as “cheap reach via editorial” – in other words, the goal of PR was to gain editorial coverage that provided the greatest number of opportunities to see – at a significantly lower cost than advertising.”

But even cheap is expensive if no one is paying attention.

How do we tell the folks who don’t want to know?

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

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Filed Under: Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog Tagged With: Attention!, bc, LinkedIn, Marketing /Sales / Social Media, reach

The Crucial Differences in Reach, Outreach, and Reaching Out

August 17, 2010 by Liz 4 Comments

Reach?

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Changes, variations, mutations, and interpretations have arisen around business “reach.”

Marketing, I think, can be divided into two eras.

The first, the biggest, the baddest and the most impressive was the era in which marketers were able to reach the unreachable. Ads could be used to interrupt people who weren’t intending to hear from you. PR could be used to get a story to show up on Oprah or in the paper, reaching people who weren’t seeking you out.

Sure, there were exceptions to this model (the Yellow Pages and the classifieds, for example), but generally speaking, the biggest wins for a marketer happened in this arena.

We’re watching it die. — Seth’s Blog, Reaching the Unreachable, May 03, 2007

Reach, as in Circulation

In the world of getting a message out to many people, the word reach has traditional meant “circulation,” how many unique people will receive the message we send out. That number has never been truly quantifiable because …

Basically reach is about broadcasting.

  • Consumption of the message is not guaranteed. We all know about TV and TIVO, and newspapers people don’t buy but read … but perhaps a more interesting example is SETI has been broadcasting active Intersellar messages since the early 1970s. No one knows if any have yet been received, decoded, or understood.

    How do you know anyone is listening?

  • Communication is uncertain. We can’t measure whether the message sent is the one received unless we check. The audience may consume a message other than the intended message. The words carry different meaning in different cultures and for different individuals. Voice, tone, word choice all work together within the context of the receiver’s experience and emotional relationship to the message content. A great example is the effect of the Motrin ad on the Motrin Moms.

    How do you know the audience received the message that you sent?

  • Response is unclear. Once the data requires testing samples, the very act of surveying flattens our understanding of the human response. We lose the singularities that add deeper meaning to what moves individuals to act as they do. The trending line graph that shows your message is having an effect doesn’t explain why that’s so. The particularities and individual responses have been leveled out.

    How do you know for certain that you can repeat the same response?

Reach is NOT the number of people who actually are exposed to and actually consume the message, but rather the number who have the OPPORTUNITY to see or hear the message. It might be described as absolute number (1,284,793 million) Twitters, a metaphor (the population of the state of California) or a portion of demographic (74% of the male population between 18-24).

Whether the reach was effective might be a function of time spent with the message or times exposed to the message.

Reach goes broad and far, but establishes minimal relationship between the sender and individual receivers who can inform the process. Relying solely on reach / circulation will always be shooting in the dark.

It’s naive to confuse the act of reaching to actually touching an unknown someone’s mind and heart.

Blogger Outreach to Spread a Message

In the place where Marketing and PR cross the social media, the term, blogger outreach has come to mean identifying bloggers who reach the same audience you do with your products and enlisting (or pitching) them to talk or blog about your products and services to their communities. Done well blogger outreach has the power of moving a message from one trusted friend who knows many to a group of trusting friends who may tell even more. Done less well it can be someone who is simply broadcasting in a new way.

To my mind, blogger outreach is the art of asking people to evangelize to their networks for you. It’s crucial that such things include three things for the message to come through whole, authentic, and as intended.

  • To ensure the message is consumed, the blogger-brand match has to be true and lasting. An authentic message spreads more quickly and more deeply though trust agents who have a mutual commitment to the brand and its values. Campaigns and contests that go quickly don’t really seal the connection between the audience and the brand. It’s easy for a gift meant as a ‘thank you,” to be turned in to an expectation if it’s delivered in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong way.
    Unsophisticated bloggers with no P&L experience can find the attention heady, competitive, and begin to over-value their input. The act of outreach has to be a relationship — an example of your message in action — not a single date meant to get your message out.

    How do you identify the right partnerships in your “grassroots” blogger outreach efforts? How do you invest in bloggers as partners rather than as channels of distribution?

  • Every outreach interaction has to underscore the credibility of the message. Bloggers are experts at the needs of their communities. Great bloggers have earned their reputation and influence by being filters and standards of visible authenticity. Those bloggers can extend and enhance the power of your message.

    The right bloggers understand the businesses that are a good match for them and their readers in product, service, and philosophy. Tap into their expertise, rather than just a blog post, and you’ll have lasting value and a relationship.

    How do you demonstrate your message by the way you bring partners into your brand?

  • Authentic, relevant experiences inspire messages that communities want to share. Many companies simply hand a product to a blogger and ask for a review. It takes more creative time to develop an experience and a community that connects people around a product, however, those memorable experiences show people how products and services naturally fit into their lives. The time invested in putting things where people need them and use them is appreciated. The Tweet to Drive program that GM is doing in Chicago has fabulous potential for doing just that.

    How do you use all of your creative resources to make your outreach experiences most relevant and authentic?

Leaders are learners who let people participate in building things no one of us could build alone. Don’t just reach out, but bring bloggers into your brand if you want them to understand, own, and protect your message, to stand up for your intentions. Then when a message gets misinterpreted Actively investing time online and off listening to each other and sharing expertise and you will give them reason and opportunity to own, protect, defend what you build.

Reach Out and Touch Someone …

The power of connecting people to people is not a new thing. In 1979, AT&T needed to soften it’s image as a possible monopoly and reconnect with it’s customers in a more human way, Ken, D’Ambrosio, Marshall McLuhan, and N.W. Ayer all contributed to what became the famous “Reach Out and Touch Someone” media campaign. Reach out and touch someone …

Though the AT&T commercial is still broadcast and still the idea of reaching out to touch someone is a great example of what a traditional campaign in as part of an integrated marketing effort might look like today. It shows people connecting because of the experience a product allows.

Reaching out to connect is the goal.

  • Clear messages reach out to connect minds, hearts, and lives. A great message connects minds, touches hearts, and has meaning in people’s lives. It’s about what moves them; not about how we want them to move. Build a message like that and folks will join you.
  • Clear messages get consumed and passed on when they are about the audience. We can grow our businesses by understanding that it has now become easier than ever before to connect. We can to reach out to find great minds who have been where we’re going and invite them to participate in what we’re doing in new and exciting ways that benefit us both.
  • Clear messages reach out to connect through outstanding behavior and satisfying, meaningful experiences — in ones, some, and masses. True relationship one-on-one may not be scalable, but experience, behaviors and values are. We can reach out person by person and throug every action can demonstrate the values we respect to offer outstanding experiences. We can set a standard for what and our customers can count on and expect from us. We can do that in stores, on the phone, via email, in meetings, at trade shows, in all online venues, in every visit off line too.

When we know we’re about growing their business, we listen, use their language, and choose the right tools to meet their goals. Reaching out becomes connecting to their need in a way that lowers the risk and shares the benefits. We raise the goal to something bigger than we could alone.

The crucial differences in reach, outreach, and reaching out are the differences in how well we communicate what we do and how deeply we demonstrate that we do it.

Do you have reach, do outreach, or do you reach out? Do do you all three?

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

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Filed Under: Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, LinkedIn, outreach, reach

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