last week i was on the marketing 101 panel at the startupLA conference. it was
actually a lot of fun, and there were some great questions afterwards. here’s some of my favorites, and my answers:
Q. what’s the fastest way for a new company to get exposure?
A. look for existing communities that are comprised of your target demographic and approach them. if there’s already a connected group of folks that you feel will be interested in what you’ve got it’s a lot faster to generate authentic exposure through that network than trying to aggregate a community from scratch. from a completely different perspective, cliff allen of suretomeet.com who was on the panel with me, said the fastest way for a new company to get exposure is spam. so there you go. choose your own adventure.
Q. is social media, like facebook, going to be the future of advertising?
A. its impact on the process is hugely important. i think it’s certainly something that now needs to be factored into any kind of advertising plan. but i also think it’s completely foolish to altogether write off exposure media (which is what advertising has been primarily dependent on up until like yesterday). it’s not a battle between whether engagement or exposure media is better adapted to the natural selection of marketing, it’s about pursuing a symbiotic relationship between the two, and developing integrated strategies that are overall more effective. that’s the future…. or at least it ought to be.
Q. what’s one piece of marketing advice that is most important for a new company?
A. know your audience. really really understand who you’re talking to. or who you should be talking to. the danger in making a message that isn’t relevant or that isn’t approaching your audience on their own terms is not just that we, as consumers, “tune it out,” it’s that unconsciously we translate messages we don’t relate to as being “not for us.” that’s the #1 thing to avoid.
(and my #1 favorite…) Q. if you had $10,000 to spend on advertising and you couldn’t use any of it on the internet, what would you do?
A. throw an event. and if you’re targeting people over 50, buy some print.
yesterday a new client pointed me in the direction of reverbnation.com, and while i don’t usually write about websites, this is different–i can’t even help it. launched just under a year ago, “ReverbNation.com is a Music 2.0 company that is responding to the changing music business paradigm.” except, when they say it, this isn’t just nonsense hippie talk. they mean it:
We believe:
• Nothing is more important to Artists than the relationship with their Fans….We call the total value of these relationships an artist’s Band Equity™, and it is our mission to help artists maximize this.
• Active Fans are the best promoters of music on the web. Fan attention has become fragmented across the web in a way that mass marketing no longer makes financial sense (see the demise of radio, music TV). Today is the age of social networks. Artists cannot be everywhere they need to be at once, so they need to focus on activating their most rabid fans to promote them in every corner of the web.
• A Music Community is more valuable if includes all of the members of the community. We believe that fans, labels, venues, and other folks all deserve a voice in the community if it is going to be representative of the entire music ecosystem. At ReverbNation, we invite all members of the community to take part.
at first glance you notice a slick design, and an interface that makes, as the client said, myspace look like fisher price. but 10 seconds later the extent of the sophistication going on here begins to dawn, and as you continue to discover what reverbnation is actually set up to do, you understand that this is way beyond just another community site, this is an incredibly powerful broadcast tool. one developed with an impressive understanding that the new channel is now a fragmented channel. this, by the way, does not mean it’s a broken channel, but rather it is a new kind of channel. one that broadcasts like a prism rather than a laser beam, and exists, as the reverbnation mission statement points out, “everywhere at once,” rather than being confined to any one particular medium.
if you are a musician, or if you are responsible for developing the strategy for how brands spend their advertising money, you really ought to check what reverbation is doing, as it is a model for how to approach the business of message dissemination in the future–and by that, i mean now:
ReverbNation provides innovative marketing solutions that musicians need to compete, cooperate, and differentiate in an increasingly noisy online environment. Unlike typical “closed” communities, artists use ReverbNation as their home base for approaching marketing and promotion across the Internet as a whole — be it via social networks, blogs, or the artist’s homepage. Tools like TunePaks, FanReach, and Widgets give the artist the power to spread their music and information virtually anywhere. Real-time stats then provide a 360-degree view of how the music is spreading, who is listening, and which fans are actually passing it on to their friends and posting it on their pages.
the most impressive offering for artists through reverbnation, isn’t even the array of features, but the way all the tools are enhanced through a seamless integration into the rest of the social media world. a strategy that can be summed up in one word: widgets.
here’s an example of a widget in action on a facebook profile:
in one slick little box you get:
the band’s upcoming show schedule–which is incredibly easy to create since reverbnation also has venue profiles, allowing you to add ten shows in about 2 minutes.
direct links to buy tickets to upcoming shows
an email list signup form– reverbnation’s free FanReach email service allows artists to create targeted messages to fans based on age, gender, and location which is more sophisticated than the offerings of many email list service providers, and their service also lets you include music and a show schedule automatically in every email.
the widget even has a freakin “Also join Street Team” option for people signing up!
to get all these features before you would have had to go running around to a bunch of different service providers, and then work to continually integrate all the features individually into every online location where your band had a presence–and that’s all resting on the assumption that all those features were compatible with each other, and most importantly, that a bunch of musicians had the necessary marketing acumen to even understand all the features they needed in the first place.
of course, it doesn’t stop there, this widget slices and dices and plays music too. here’s another example from one of the glitch mob’s member’s profile:
it doesn’t just let you embed a playlist, it lets you create portable online music player! this means that folks don’t HAVE to stay on your profile page to listen to your music. they can be doing anything else on the internet and still listening to your serenade.
the fragmented channel, remember? it’s everywhere all at once.
there are sooo many more features that reverbnation offers that to even get a grasp on all of them would take me the rest of the day, and then i’d have to spend more time tomorrow writing about them, but i should think you get the idea at this point.
i can imagine part of the hindrance in reverbnation’s adoption is the sheer complexity, and wide array of their offerings. it’s been confused for a myspace competitor, but in reality that is a complete misconstruction of what it looks like reverbnation is setting out to do. during the many company-wide conference calls that took place in the process of House of Blues’ acquisition by LiveNation, michael rapino, livenation’s CEO, continually stressed the importance of the consumer relationship to the future of the concert promotion industry–about which, as the largest concert promoter in the world, livenation has a right to claim to know a thing or two. (if “reverbnation” picked its name in complete ignorance of “livenation” i would be tremendously surprised).
the big difference, of course is that livenation owns the venues. but in reverbnation’s case, they are setting up to own a channel. one that is deftly suited to broadcast to a fragmented audience. and if you were paying attention then you’ve also realized that it is a model for the future of message-distribution itself, also known as advertising. connecting the needs of artist, fan, and venue into a symbiotic “ecosystem” is the same as connecting the consumer, the brand, and the “venue” for a brand experience into one constant feedback loop.
One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that “you are not the user.” If you work on a development project, you’re atypical by definition. Design to optimize the user experience for outsiders, not insiders.
– jakob nielsen
much the same way that the developer is not the user, the marketer is not the demo. being a marketer does not actually make you so atypical, (anyone who has given thought to what they put up on their social network profile, and why, suddenly understands the concept of “branding”), but being who you ARE does. to a certain extent marketers address the fact that not all markets are made in their own image, but at the end of the day, despite all the demographic research, despite all the focus groups, and everything that the nielsen ratings have to say, it is, inevitably, still individuals who design the ad and its messaging. individuals whose natural tendency is to take for granted that their own identity defaults are relevant to other people. the tricky thing, of course, is that since they’re defaults, it’s quite hard to recognize their personal and non-universal nature. and since we generally tend to hang out with the kinds of folks that reinforce our own identity and worldview back to us (our “community”) we often end up viewing the people who don’t agree with us as “wrong”–just think about people with political leanings or musical tastes that are incompatible with yours….
well, it’s those same people thinking about your political leanings and musical tastes right now, and comparing how incompatible they are with their own, that are designing the marketing message that’s gonna speak to you.
as humans we define our modern identities by our cultural affiliations and lifestyle choices, and the more we are identified with them the more it can get in the way of understanding what resonates with the people who do not share our community’s language and values. as marketers–who still happen to be human–this poses a particular problem.
unlike, say, the perspective of danah boyd, i don’t subscribe to the worldview that american society is so easily split up between the “hegemony” (dominant class) and the “subaltern” (subordinate, lower class). perhaps it’s like that among high school kids, since that’s whom danah studies, but i still doubt it. if this simple split between the popular kids and the burnouts castes was a hugely relevant definition of identity then all marketers would need to do is keep cranking out hegemonic “aspirational” ad messages, go home, and call it day. the reality of ad messaging, however, seems to have gotten a bit more complicated than that since the 1950’s, and then even exponentially MORE complicated since the 1980’s. there is no universal influencer anymore. there are instead tribal market segments, and the tricky part is translating between, and even within them.
ok, i don’t know about you, but if i have to slog through reading a lot of abstract theory i tend to zone out and go skipping stones across my mozilla tabs, so how about a practical example?
The Web’s chattering classes tend to be overly engaged in the “Internet elite experience.” They actually care about the ‘Net for its own sake, and go gaga over new ways of showing maps. In contrast, average users just want to complete tasks online. They don’t particularly like the Web, and they’d like to get back to their jobs or families as quickly as possible.
i’d add that they want to get back to their own identities as quickly as possible. the “elite internet user” is a kind of identity/lifestyle/community unto itself, and it’s not that the “average” user is just a wannabe tourist in this clique, it’s that the average user isn’t even INTERESTED in being part of the clique. the average user probably has interests and ways of defining their identity that the “elite internet user” couldn’t even care about, much like an “elite soccer mom” probably doesn’t give a shit about the “Net for its own sake”–except for the times when it’s in any way involved with sex offenders, maybe.
that photo at the top of this post is for a spanish-speaking morning radio show in l.a. hosted by piolin, and i think it’s absolutely hilarious. this message, which proclaims in a broken english that “we espeekinglish tu!” is in no way aimed at convincing any native english speaker to listen to the program. this is, of course, a more dramatic example of translating between market segments since it actually involves a product and a message that, literally, speaks to a demo in a different language–but it’s not spanish. it’s spanglish.
these billboards are all over l.a. (including an even funnier one that involves the phrase “free toes free hole es” smack dab over hollywood blvd.) these are not messages relegated to some “subaltern” niche corner, they are actually pretty brazen displays of a very inside joke that is only supposed to resonate with a particular kind of identity.
even though markets are increasingly defined by their individuals’ identities, it is impossible for any one individual marketer to be able to understand and speak the language of EVERY identity out there. the first step to learning anything new, however, is to simply accept that you don’t know it. accept that you are not the demo. EVER. even if you fit the profile, it doesn’t matter. it’s not the point. it’s just luck. (like it’s lucky that you, reader, happen to be part of the 35% of internet users who are familiar with “blogs”… if you’re from the west coast, 18-34, college educated and male, you’re also likely to be a part of the paltry 16% familiar with “wikis”…. and if you happen to be surprised that those percentages are so low, considering how much impact you might feel these channels/tools carry, then it’s even more proof of why taking your personal self out of the equation when developing a strategy is crucial.)
nielsen says that the antidote to the elite “bubble vapor” problem is user testing:
Find out what representative users need. It’s tempting to work on what’s hot, but to make money, focus on the basics that customers value.
in marketing it’s not specifically about what the “user needs” but what they “relate to.” it’s not about what you think is “hot,” it’s about distilling a message and an approach that resonates with a particular identity.
i don’t have much time to write here at the moment (and there’s a very good reason for that, which should be ready by next week) but i just saw something in a business week blog that begged to be mentioned.
at a very interesting meeting with ignited earlier this week, when i presented my perspective that real life events are just as much “social media” as anything online, jason turner, the VP of interactive, called me a “channel agnostic.” i instantly loved this phrase.
Bottom line here is that many big ad agencies are making a huge mistake. They are pushing their corporate clients to chase technology, not their consumers…. For example, sending big b2b companies who sell to 45-year-old men and women to FaceBook or Second Life is just nutty.
Different demographic groups participate in vastly different ways across the spectrum of social media. And they are constantly moving through it as they age, change careers, have families, etc. You just can’t send everyone to “social networking sites.” Companies and their ad agencies have to identify their consumers and locate their communities. Then they have to understand the culture and rules of these communities because they differ dramatically.
What you have to do is get to know their customer culture…. A different way of connecting to the consumer.
What ad agencies need to learn is how to do this. They have to connect their clients to their customers, not the latest technology. And if they do their job right, they might even discover, heaven help us, that some of them belong in print. Because that is where most 40 and 50 year old managers in the US, Europe and Asia spend their time. Still.
connecting clients to customers, not the latest technology…. this channel agnostic couldn’t have said it better.
