Uncovering possibilities, purpose, passion for leadership, marketing, sales
The secret to selling a screenplay in Hollywood is writing a great one-line, says screenwriter Blake Snyder, author of Save the Cat: the Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need.
Creating a great one-line is invaluable for marketing anything, whether it’s a company, product, service, book proposal, online community, a vacation spot or professional services.
You see, the one-line tells people what the product/service/screenplay is so they can quickly decide if they’re interested or not. Make it too hard for them to understand the “what it is” and they’ll simply ignore you, no matter how brilliant the product and supporting marketing programs.
Snyder says that a great one-line:
“Concentrate on writing one sentence. One line. Because it you learn how to tell me “What is it” better, faster and with more creativity, you’ll keep me interested. And incidentally, by doing so before you start writing your script, you’ll make the story better too,” advises Snyder.
The second most important screenwriting lesson that also applies to marketing: tell people what your product/service/book is most like and how it’s different.
In screenwriting, the more you understand the genre of your concept, the more likely you are to sell the script and write a great movie. Ditto for marketing. Help customers understand where you fit into categories that they understand — and then tell them how you’re different.
While creating new business models or wildly innovative products is admirable and noble, most don’t take off because the buyer can’t understand “what it is.” And those that do, have brilliant one-lines, like Salesforce in the early days — software you can rent instead of having to implement.
Another example is Communispace, one of the most successful private online community companies. In the early days of the company, long before terms like social media or Web 2.0 were around, Communispace CEO Diane Hessan explained that their communities were “like focus groups on steroids, only different.” Marketing decision makers got it, and bought. While many other early community pioneers no longer exist. People couldn’t understand the “what it is.”
I’m working on some new concepts and starting with my one-lines. Who knows maybe someday I’ll even be able to pitch a screenplay.
I love seeing patterns because it helps me learn and teach. A couple of years ago I found the nine best story lines in marketing and PR. Today I put together the four things people write about the most in social media. Breaking it down like this helps folks new to social media get started. It’s not too complicated.
Getting people to talk to strangers and participate in online communities and social networks can be challenging. The number of communities that have failed is astounding.
There is no easy way to create an environment where people feel comfortable sharing and talking with new people, but a project that Nina Simon led with 13 grad students from from the University of Washington provides some lessons relevant to marketers and community managers.
The challenge to the students was to create a $300 museum exhibit within 10 weeks that would get strangers to talk to one another. A full report of the project can be found here at Nina’s wonderful Museum 2.0 blog.
Some relevant highlights:
1. Ask provocative starter questions and make it easy for people to respond. In the case of one of the museum exhibits, the grad students asked a few seed questions, like “how do you mend a broken heart,” and put them on signs behind glass. People passing by stopped and wrote replies on post-it notes, read other notes and created conversation chains and spin off questions. The lesson for business is that provocative, open ended questions that appeal to widely or deeply felt issues elicit responses and help to jump start participation. (We’ve seen too many business communities that are bland and boring. No wonder people don’t talk back!)
The whole exhibit modeled the potential for someone to respond to your query, and as it grew, the sense that you would be responded to and validated grew as well. We saw many people come back again and again to look at the post-its, point out new developments, laugh, and add their own advice.
2. Someone from the company doesn’t need to provide the advice: The team created an Advice booth and found that the best advice came from strangers helping strangers vs. staff helping strangers. (In fact, one eight year old liked being able to give advice so much that he came back the next day.) The students found that it was more beneficial for the facilitators to be “part of the experience vs. the focal point.” Good advice for companies in managing communities.
Because they were a part of the experience rather than the focal point, they could impart an air of friendliness and participation without making people feel that they had to participate. They reminded me of street vendors or great science museum cart educators, imparting an energy to the space without overwhelming it.
3. Good things come from talking on the bathroom stall. An undirected part of the project was letting people write anything they wanted on a bathroom wall, which elicited many responses, none of them offensive.
But the bathroom wall turned out to be a brilliant exhibit element. It was a release valve that let people write crude things and draw silly pictures. The bathroom wall was “anything goes” by design. And while the content on it was not as directed and compelling as that on the post-its, it served a valuable purpose. There was not a SINGLE off-topic or inappropriate submission on the post-it walls.
The bathroom lessons for business: people want to have fun and be able to be creative in unexpected ways. Mix up the ways they can participate. (Like the story about the chair in the corporate lobby.) Second, fears about people writing offensive or negative things are usually unfounded — even when you go so far as letting people write on the bathroom wall.
We’re meeting with many companies who are having a tough time getting their people to write for the corporate blog. The most common challenges: finding ideas to write about, finding a voice and style that is conversational, finding time to write, and overcoming fears about putting your own views and ideas into the public.
One way to add to “bloggers’ block” is to impose all kinds of “keywords-to-use-in-every-post” guidelines. I recently heard a corporate blogging manager talk about his top priority: making sure bloggers use keywords to raise the brand’s search profile. Of course, you want to increase search rankings.
But be careful about starting the blog this way. Instead, help your bloggers get comfortable with finding ideas and writing. Once they get in a good groove — which usually takes several months — then introduce the idea of how to incorporate certain keywords into their titles and posts.
Another thing to keep in mind is that being interesting and providing value to readers is far more valuable than raising search rankings with boring, bland content.
Kudos to Rob Cottingham over at Social Signal for this illustrating the issue so well.
We’ve just release a new study on emerging best practices in social media monitoring, engagement and measurement based on interviews with large corporations like Cisco, Intuit, GE and with the top monitoring technology providers (Visible Technologies, Radian6, Cymfony, Market Sentinel), who have fascinating stories based on existing clients and from the RFP/sales process.
(Economy be damned, one technology provider even had to fire a big brand company because its agency was basically spamming bloggers and Tweeters.)
The report includes sections on:
What I found especially interesting:
To get a free copy of the report, click here.
Would love to hear your thoughts about these best practices based on your experience. What’s missing?
It’ no surprise that the diverse plays that were awarded Tony awards last night all share one thing: a context that people today can relate to. In accepting the award for best musical revival for “Hair,” Oskar Eustis, the N.Y. Public Theater’s creative director, summed it up:
“If the theater is going to matter, it has to talk about things that matter to the people.”
Whether marketing art or widgets, the need for context and relevancy is huge, but often overlooked. On Friday a firm called me to discuss their marketing needs. As they explained their business, I realized that what they do is in the collaborative innovation and enterprise 2.0 space, concepts they were aware of but hadn’t really given much thought to.
Because the firm isn’t marketing within the context of today’s corporate decision makers, their sales and marketing messages just aren’t resonating. Nor are they in the right marketing conversations that can result in leads, nor are they getting invited into big deals for which they’re qualified.
For people to find your company and consider your services, you need to market within their context. Of course, this isn’t essential, but you’ll spend far more on marketing and sales if you try to create a new category or context of understanding.
A new “buzz action score” from researchers at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management shows that positive and negative online conversations are leading indicators of sales performance.
The research found that a relatively small group of people in online communities can have a substantial influence on purchase decisions, much like in face-to-face word of mouth.
Some implications for marketers:
Good brand positioning should be easy to talk about, especially since word of mouth remains the most effective marketing principle.
Many of these brand positionings exist and don’t need to be overly “created” — just ask a couple of straightforward questions and tune into what people knowledgeable about the brand say. Yet many marketers ignore these conversational jewels, instead creating starched, politically correct and bland positioning statements that people rarely use in conversations.
Here are a couple of good examples.
Before a recent talk at Fisher College I asked an instructor two simple questions: “Why do people come here? What’s the appeal?”
He didn’t even have to pause before answering: “It’s like a good community college but the students get much more attention and hand holding here.” How interesting.
I asked similar questions at University of Massachusetts and got great though “off the record” answers that I use in explaining the university when the topic of colleges comes up with friends. (Talk about colleges dominates the conversations of parents of teenagers at social gatherings.)
University of Massachusetts Lowell is like a MIT-light, a great science and technology education with very successful alumni but at a state school’s lower tuition. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth is like a small, private New England liberal arts college. Good programs, lovely campus by the sea.
What I especially liked was that the explanations were grounded in meaning making: they explained the brand in context of the category and then said what’s different and relevant. Meaning sticks, where buzz and traditional marketing materials usually do not.
Over at the School of Thought blog Andrea Jarrell explains that the best school marketing publications “intrigue, inform, and entertain.” Amen. And the best positioning statements do the same — and are “talkable.”
Last week I talked with another smart company that got sucked into what I call “stupid social media tricks,” those one-off tactics that have a “cool and wow” feel, but don’t actually provide any business value. Sort of like stupid pet tricks on Letterman, fun but not really valuable entertainment in the way say U2 is.
Here are 13 pragmatic social media marketing ideas, and the associated cost and business value of each. I welcome any additional ideas you may have!
1. Social tagging: add social media bookmarks/functionality on every page of your site. This will increase your keyword relevancy and organic search rankings, reducing paid search costs. Value: High/Cost: Low
2. Social mediafy your campaigns: create content people want to share; tap into right social media rigger points, places and people. This will increase viral effect, getting greater reach for less than paid media, traditional PR. Value: High/Cost: Moderate
3. Badges, widgets, ringtones: make it easy for people to promote your company “wearing” badges, sharing branded music. Value: Low/Cost: Low
4. Embed customer reviews/recommendations in your site. Online reviews are second only to personal advice from a friend as the driver of purchase decisions. So why not make it easy for people to decide when they come by your site? Value: High/Cost: Moderate
5. Create a YouTube channel, strategy: We live in a video world. Marketing needs to, too. Value: Moderate/Cost: Moderate to High
6. Take blogging to the next level: move from corporate mouthpiece to more of an online media property with high value to customers and prospects. Value: Moderate/Cost: Moderate
7. Use social sharing sites: Got great content? Share it and tag it where people can find it. Like on Slideshare.net. Value: Low/Cost: Low
8. Create a Twitter channel, strategy: There’s a reason why Twitter, which has grown from 4 million 54 million users ini the past year, is disrupting Facebook, email and blogging. Head on over to Pistachio to get all the stats and good business cases on this trend. And then just get on so you experience what it’s all about. Value: Moderate/Cost: Low to Moderate
9. Create ambassador programs: So many of your employees and customers want to help your company by commenting on blogs, Twittering, facilitating communities. Figure out a way to make it easy for people who love you to share the love. That’s word of mouth at its best and social media makes it easy to activate. Value: High/Cost: Moderate to High
10. Create a system to monitor social media conversations: Track issues and trends good and bad to be able to react; “see” how campaigns working or not and adjust; get competitive insights, nip problems before they’re big problems; inject Web 2.0 into customer service function. Value: Moderate to High/Cost: Low to Moderate
11. Tap into the wisdom of your crowds: hold webstorm brainstorming sessions and online raves to get ideas from employees, customers, partners on how to solve problems small and big, how to do things better, how to stop doing things that aren’t so valuable. You’ll be able to cut costs, prioritize more easily, find new ideas. Plus when people participate and feel heard they’re more likely to share positive word of mouth about your company. Value: Moderate to High/Cost: Moderate to High
12. Map your social media ecosystem: use social analytics to understand what’s being talked about in your industry about your company; your social media hot spots; who your advocates and detractors are, and what content your audience likes. Value: Low to Moderate/Cost: Low to Moderate
13. Bring people together: develop specialized communities for like-minded people to share advice, get help, offer help, learn, solve problems, be entertained, create new business models, or change the world. One of the secrets to community success: tapping into deeply-felt and/or widely-felt issues. Check out The Tribalization of Business site, with results from last year’s study and the 2009 survey to learn more about communities. Value: High/Cost: Moderate to High
One last note, if you can’t see the value in a new social media idea, talk to a few more people for their take. If it still sounds irrelevant to your business, rely on your good common sense.
