MarketingMel

I had the privilege of attending the first Hubspot Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston in September 2008. That conference was a true “game changer” for me as I heard both Seth Godin and David Meerman Scott telling those of us interested in social media marketing that we were on the edge of something big. It was a pleasure to return three years later to realize how true their words really were and to see how far we as professional marketing and communications people have come. (You can see my video interview from IMS11 on The Pulse Network here.)

Over the course of the next few weeks I plan to share nuggets of information about the outstanding thought leaders who spoke to us.

I’ll start with my favorite, noted social media marketing guru and author Guy Kawasaki. (Guy truly had “rock star” status at this conference as attendees, myself and friend Cathy Rodgers included, lined up to meet him.)

Guy Kawasaki at IMS11 with MarketingMel and 7wavesCathy

In preparation to hear Guy I read his book “Enchantment.” Like all authors, they talk about their latest book when onstage. But Guy has a disarmingly charming way about him that keeps you mesmerized by his stories. He is, well, enchanting.

Here are 10 of my takeaways:

1. Likeability: Have a marvelous smile (Mari Smith’s charming smile was his example), dress equal to your peers and pefect your handshake.

Facebook guru Mari Smith has a great smile

2. Achieve Trustworthiness:  Become bakers, not eaters. (Great word picture isn’t it?) Trust others. Default to “Yes. How can I help you?”

3. Perfect your product. He used the Ford MyKey program in which parents can pre-set the volume and top speed of a car as an example. Provide value. It is much easier to enchant with really good stuff!

4. Have a mantra. Guy’s is “empower people.” What’s yours?

5. Conduct a pre-mortem. Ask “why will our product fail?” Come up with all of the reasons beforehand to ensure its success!

6. Plant many seeds. I loved this one. Guy talks about how Marketing 1.0 meant “sucking up to a traditional media hierarchy.” Marketing 2.0 with the power of social networking is flat. The people make it successful and “nobodies are the new somebodies.”

7. Enchant all the influencers!  He gave us a homework assignment to watch Justin Bieber’s movie “Never say Never.” (I did Guy!) Justin and his team enchanted all of the influencers from viewers of his YouTube videos to moms, to girls in parking lots who wanted tickets.

8. Invoke Reciprocation: When you do something for someone and they say “thank you” say, “I know you would do the same for me.”  Think about the power in that line! Then enable people to pay you back.

9. Presentations: Sell your dream! Guy says that Steve Jobs didn’t sell an iPhone he sold something cool and thin and sexy.  Customize your introduction every time and keep your presentation to the 10-20-30 rule; 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font.

10. Use technology to enchant. Don’t make it hard for people to engage with you. He talked about removing the speed bumps and obstacles to communicating. What was really humorous was that Guy was given a stick mic for his presentation. He is used to wearing a lapel mic. so his hands can be free. After several comments from Guy, the conference organizers got the hint, removed “the obstacle,” and presented him with a lapel mic.  ”Social media is core to existence,” he said. (And Facebook has certainly proven that again with its recent change announcements at F8.)

Although Guy said much more these were a few of my key takeaways. Do you plan to move forward on at least one of these in order to become more enchanting to your employees, customers and loved ones? I do!

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Maria Peagler

Editor’s note: This guest post is by Maria Peagler (@SM_OnlineClass), founder of SocialMediaOnlineClasses.com, providing 24/7 online courses (where I guest teach twitter) and mastermind consulting on social media tools and strategies. After meeting on twitter, Maria and I created our own social media mastermind group and, although we have never met in person, we share ideas regularly via Skype and we hang out together on Google+. 

I hear a common theme among my clients: “Help! I’ve got a Facebook page but don’t know what to do with it.”

Sound familiar? This is especially true for the small business owner, who is already a jack-of-all-trades and now needs to add social media guru to that entrepreneurial tool belt. You’ve built a great brand; let people get to know it using these Facebook 10 Commandments that put you and your company in the place of most potential.

These guidelines cover a wide range of techniques, from starting out with the correct account type, to claiming a custom URL for ease of use and increased SEO, to incorporating your new social media platform into all of your marketing strategies. Don’t feel like you need to tackle them all at once: set small goals, about one per week, and by the end of 4th quarter 2011, you’ll have an outstanding presence on Facebook, and you’ll reap the rewards in 2012.

Note: 

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Friends Hands by Fabulous Shannen

The following is a guest post by SoloPR weekly twitter chat colleague, Judy Gombita. A Canadian Public Relations professional, she is also this blog’s first international guest blogger.

Many people had primary or secondary school teachers who left an indelible mark and provided unique life lessons; I was blessed to have several such guiding lights as I evolved into adulthood.

One was a wonderfully inspiring and creative, enthusiastic and somewhat eccentric English teacher named Mrs. Rusty Ross (no, she didn’t have red hair). Ostensibly, her incredibly popular class was on Shakespeare. But amongst our (often self-absorbed) teenaged selves, we referred to it as The Class on Life. Definitely we studied Shakespeare—with a rigour and comprehension that proved excellent preparation for my first-year university course a few years later. But the real contribution Mrs. Ross gave us was illustrating how Will’s own understanding of the world, in particular people and their ambitions and motivations regarding relationships, really weren’t very different from current times.

And just like William Shakespeare created new words and understanding of human nature, so did Mrs. Ross gift us. For example, how relationships with people scale, from early acquaintances to friendships.

Evermore inserted into my lexicon was her novel word and intermediary concept: “friendlies.”

According to Mrs. Ross, your friendlies are more than acquaintances, but haven’t reached the status of fully bloomed, time-tested lasting friends. You know, the “for life” kind of friend.

Channelling Mrs. Ross when it comes to online relationships

I’m a huge proponent of the power and possibilities of social media, particularly for info sharing, networking and cultivating relationships. But I also characterize myself as a social media pragmatist. Recently, I contributed Teasing out the potential of Twitter chats, Part I and Part II to commpro.biz. In fact, it was through #solopr (one of my “featured” chats) that I met Marvellous Mel, proprietress of this captivating blog.

I respect and very much like everything I know about Mel—her smarts, integrity, sector expertise, warmth, people skills and sense of humor. Yet in my mind at this stage I still classify Mel as a “friendlie” rather than a friend.

Why?

Simply because we haven’t known each other long enough to test the long-term strength of our online alliance. Yes, we’ve moved large amounts of our conversations offline, sharing more personal information and comparing thoughts, joined networks on LinkedIn, Circled one another on Google+, etc. Despite geographical challenges, we hope to meet face to face at some stage. Not once has a touch point with Mel given me pause.

But it’s still early days.

My analogy

An analogy I often use (I believe I’m the originator, but if I unconsciously co-opted it from someone else, it’s unintentional) is that relationships are like slowly peeling an onion. Most of the time an onion’s layers are fresh, firm and sweet smelling. But every now and then you peel an onion where you hit a brown and soggy layer—maybe even a bit musty and slimy. The question is whether the onion is mainly good (after a bit of judicious editing, talks or negotiations) or if it should be unceremoniously tossed away as largely unusable, i.e., not worthy of the work or consumption experience.

If you travel or live with people you quickly learn how their onion peels out. But online relationships are different. It’s a lot trickier finding out how authentic people are regarding their online personas: how much of what they share can be trusted, ego, their core values, how they treat people (online and off) and so on.

And of course, this works both ways.

Peeling into my thesis a bit more

Recently I’ve been openly critical about how fast people are to append the “friend” and “trust” tags in the online sphere. I believe we need to slow down online friendships and trust and stop devaluing these time-taking concepts.

A notable example: automatically curating blog posts of “tribe” mates into Twitter (even if oh-so-virtuously manually clicking the send button). Forgive me if I think it’s a bit musty and slimy when robo-curation perpetrators suggest we “trust” that their “friends” of three or so months produced posts warranting our valuable reading time. Why should I have faith in their curation decisions in regards to me, when the majority of people observed I’d classify as online acquaintances, not even friendlies?

When this objectionable practice of automating trust first impinged on our collective consciousness, Mel independently voiced the exact reaction as me (as did #solopr’s founder, Kellye Crane).

The fact that our tingly onion sense was the same moved Mel another step up the ladder from friendlie to friend, because critical thinking and articulating objections against perceived dodgy behaviour are things I value.

Offering up my onion for perusal

When Mel lobbied me to write a guest post on her blog, I was touched.

As thanks for trusting I’d contribute something of value, I decided to gift Mel’s space with some personal evolutionary history and a unique word and analogy—concepts I hadn’t fully gelled together or introduced in any other blog post: Mrs. Ross’ definition of friendlies, how relationships are like peeling an onion, plus a need to slow down online friendships and trust.

My hope is that these reflections help move me another step up her friendship ladder.

Some final appeels (sic)

Whether in your professional or personal life, lasting relationships take time; people who work in public relations certainly are cognizant of this fact.

By all means, explore possibilities in the online realm and make lots of new acquaintances. And if all the bytes are feeling right, proactively move into the friendlies phase. But take time to build alliances; maybe even pause to compare and contrast them with your offline friendships.

And never take time away from nurturing relationships that were earlier peeled and stood the onion sniff test of time.

Judy Gombita

Judy Gombita is a Toronto-based public relations and communication management specialist, with more than 20 years of employment and executive-level volunteer board experience, primarily in the financial and lifelong learning nonprofit sectors. She is the co-editor and Canadian contributor (since 2007) to the international, collaborative blog, PR Conversations. Find her on Twitter.

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Anyone who was an adult ten years ago vividly remembers where they were and what they were doing on September 11, 2001. Here’s my story.

It was a beautiful, clear and sunny morning in Johnson City, Tennessee, the place I had called home since moving south 16 years prior. I was the marketing director for Hunter, Smith & Davis law firm. We were hosting our large, annual employment law seminar at Millennium Centre in Johnson City. We had a good crowd that morning and things were moving along smoothly. I was standing in the back of the room watching one of our attorneys’ presentations when a Firm partner, Mike Forrester, slipped in the door and whispered, “Did you hear that a plane hit the World Trade Center?” Immediately my mind began processing this odd bit of information. My husband enjoys flying small planes for a hobby and I tried to envision some crazy pilot in a single engine aircraft hitting such a massive structure. “Is the weather bad in New York?” I whispered back. “No,” was his answer.

Moments later Mike and I and several others were piled out in the hallway watching the televisions that hung from the Centre’s ceilings. It was, in fact, a beautiful day in New York just as it was in Tennessee. And this was no small plane crash. As we watched the story unfold on CNN, reality slowly began to sink in. These were major aircraft and this was no accident. A secondary story unfolding before my eyes was the reaction of the people at the seminar. The attorneys kept their cool. One of our senior partners said, “If we stop now we give them exactly what they want.” And so the seminar went on. One person who worked at the Centre however was not so calm. I had to repeatedly reassure him that the world was not coming to an end. We did not all carry mobile phones with us ten years ago as we do today. I had to borrow a phone from a friend in order to attempt to reach my husband who was employed at a nuclear defense plant. His work voicemail said  that the plant had been evacuated and he would be in a safe area. And so I returned to the TV set and watched with horror as people ran from the World Trade Center and surrounding buildings. I recall feeling eerily that it was like watching a bad “grade B” movie. I also recall the calm steadiness of Scott Powers, an Annapolis grad and attorney for the firm as our eyes were cast upward. Our attorneys assured people who needed to go to check on their employees or loved ones to please do so but you would be surprised how many people stayed for the luncheon that concluded the session. There was comfort and assurance in being in a large group in a safe, secure building far from New York City or the Pentagon.

I recall that a close friend was very upset that her four year old kept watching the scene re-played as he stayed with his grandmother. “He keeps thinking it’s happening over and over,” she bemoaned. It was a very upsetting day for all of us who lived through it and a turning point for our country. Never again would we experience the freedoms that we had back then. If the United States were a dog we were probably a big, lovable Labrador until that time. After September 11th we became a snarling Pit Bull much more wary and cautious.

There were some good things to come from the tragedy. One first-hand example was our son. He was born in the baby boomlet that followed 9-11. He will never know the America I knew prior to that day. To him, removing his shoes at airport security is second nature, just as it is to have liquids over three ounces confiscated.

Each year when the video re-plays of the burning twin towers begin airing, I generally cast my eyes in the other direction or change the channel. “I was there. I lived through it,” I mutter, much as a veteran chooses not to watch a war film. This year avoiding the images will be nearly impossible as most every channel is already running features on the historic tragedy. Perhaps I will watch. Perhaps I’ll go for a walk with my son instead.

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