FUSION MARKETING WORKSHOP
“A Book – A Product – A Process!”
“Should Your Marketing Be Accidental Or Deliberate?”
“Your Marketing Future Is In The Cards!”
“The cards are the tools. The connection between the cards are the tactics. The Wheel Is The Strategy.”
This is audio of an actual workshop I did with the marketing / branding company; Heasley Partners in Scottsdale Arizona. Heasley Partners specializes in what they call “Heart / Mind” corporate branding. They have performed worked for companies such as Cold Stone Creamery, Massage Envy, Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad, Poor Dad), and Donald Trump and is mentioned in Donald and Robert’s collaborative branding book, “The Midas Touch”.
Chapter 1 – Introduction
HP: Let’s start by asking you “What is social media”?
LS: Social media is the media we use to be social.
HP: (Laughter)
LS: No really, it’s the technology that we use to provide two-way communication which builds relationships with customers which eventually builds trust which leads to revenue. That’s really the crux of what social media is and what its value is.
I actually discovered this idea as a result of working with a client doing social media marketing consulting. We started at the beginning where I said, “Okay, well there’s 20 major categories in The Social Media Bible, let me give you kind of a once over of each of the different categories.” So, I’m ten or fifteen minutes into my explanation and I’m looking at him when I see that he is staring right through me. Talk about a deer in the headlights! I just knew that I lost him somewhere, so I stopped and I said, “Where are you right now?” He answered, “Well, I’m not here.”
HP: (Laughter).
LS: So I said, “So what’s the deal”.
He replied, “Huh? I’m a visual learner, I’m not an audio learner and you’re telling me all these concepts, but frankly I’m just not getting it.
I said, “Okay, how do we bridge that gap?”
He replied, “Do you have an image of social media? What it looks likes…”
And you know, no one has been able to come up with a decent image of what social media looks like. There’s tons of images on the internet but I think they all really kind of suck. They don’t really encapsulate what social media is. It’s just usually a pinWheel that has a bunch of different social sites on it, but that’s not what social medial is.
So he continues, “I could try reading The Social Media Bible, (and he’s got the book with him), but you know, I just don’t have the time to do that.” I responded with “I understand. Look, I’ll tell you what, let’s just cancel this meeting, I’m going to go back to my office, and I’m going to take this on as a challenge… of actually coming up with a good image that represents social media.”
I worked on it for days when I first did wrote The Social Media book. I tried it again when I wrote the second edition, and just like everybody before me, I was completely unsuccessful. So I decided to go back and try it again.
Chapter 3 – Traditional Marketing Imaged, Everything At A Glance
LS: I thought to myself, “Okay, how do we start?”
The first thing I realized was that this guy knew traditional media and traditional marketing, cold. He’s done it for a lot of big companies, Avnet and TGIF, and now he owns his own consulting company. So talking about traditional media is a piece of cake to him because he’s done every single thing there is to do. So what I did was start with…we’ll call it a starburst for fun.
So I thought, “Okay, even though I don’t really want to end up with a starburst (because that’s what everybody has done), but let me start here anyway. This is called a starburst… you probably know that. So I started with this image and I said, “Okay, let’s put 20 points on it. The reason I put 20 points on it was, it happens to be the 20 major categories that I identified in The Social Media Bible. That way, I can take the two images; traditional media and social media and overlay them. It was a start.
What I did next, was I created 20 of the top things that we all do with traditional marketing. We have product packaging, customer service, warranty, events, trade journals, newspapers, public presentation, radio, business cards, marketing, specialty advertising, telephone solicitation, etc.
I created this starburst; a Wheel. I thought to myself, ”Okay, nothing special here. This is pretty much what everybody’s been doing right along. I decided to finish creating this Wheel and then create an identical Wheel, where I’ll put the 20 chapter titles… the twenty categories in The Social Media Bible around the Wheel.
I looked at it after I created this traditional marketing Wheel on the computer monitor and I said, “Okay…but…it really does not explain what traditional media is.” That’s when it hit me. That’s when it happened. That moment of inspiration; inspiritu, innovation, the eureka moment!
I quickly realized that’s what was missing from everyone’s marketing campaigns. From the Fortune 500 companies down to the individual entrepreneur, the problem was that when marketing people are looking at social media nowadays they are saying, “Okay, we’ve got Facebook and we’ve got Twitter, now what do we do? They call this their strategy. What the heck! You can’t take a tool and turn it into a strategy. It’s not going to work. The Wheel was what’s missing!
A strategy is that “I want to drive more traffic to my e-commerce site”. A strategy, a logical strategy, is that “I want to increase the number of “Likes” on Facebook.” A strategy is that “I want to increase the followers on Twitter.” A strategy is that “I want more people to stop by my trade show booth.” The strategy is…. and it goes on and on and on. Facebook and Twitter is NOT a strategy.
These are logical marketing campaign strategies that everybody in marketing and sales has to choose from. So you start with what you want to accomplish, your conversion strategy. First, take a step back and look at all the tools in our tool chest and figure out what tools are the most appropriate ones to use to accomplish that strategy. Secondly, take a look at each one of the tools and decide how we actually use that tool to accomplish that specific goal… that conversion strategy.
I never really thought of marketing linearly or two dimensionally. I never thought of it as a process either. The next thing that happened to me was that I realized that most of us, when we do marketing and we develop strategies, just rely on what we’ve done in the past, or what we’ve read other people have done, or something we took out of a textbook, or what we did last year. And we just re-implement that strategy with a twist or two.
But now as I am looking at this thing I am saying, “Wow, I really think there is more to this than just this image. It’s starting to click and I know there’s more in there!” I’m looking at all of these tools around the Wheel… I’m thinking, Facebook again, isn’t a strategy. Using Facebook to drive more traffic and to get brand engagement, now that’s a strategy!
I realized the first thing people have to understand is that everything around the Wheel is a tool and everything around the social media Wheel is tool. The center of the Wheel is the strategy! So now I say, “Okay, I’m starting to kind of close in on this.”
Let’s actually use the Wheel I brought and demonstrate how it works using your own marketing strategies for this year. I’ll put the Safko Wheel on the conference table and place the 20 traditional marketing media “cards’ around the points on the Wheel. I’m going to start the process by using the tool “business cards” because that’s the first tool I originally began making connections with.
Business cards… If I looked you right in the face and said, “Business cards, the process to achieve your strategy,” you would say, “Your, crazy!” And that’s because, business cards are not a strategy. But they are a marketing tool. So I’m thinking to myself, “Wait a minute. We never really look at business cards as a marketing tool. It’s stationery, overhead cost, a necessity that everybody uses, but hang on a second…. Let me explain this and work with me while I extrapolate.
This, right here, business cards are probably the highest ROI lead generation tool that we have in our marketing arsenal. The reason is, business cards are free or near free. You can get them on the internet for free! Most online business card printing companies will give you up to 1,000 of them for free just because they want to get your business. When you are looking at “free” your ROI is off the charts because, anytime you divide by zero , the ROI is infinite!
Now, let’s just focus on the least important of any of these tools… business cards. How does that work as a lead-generation tool? Well, everybody at this table has business cards.
The thing is, that because you take any size company from an entrepreneur to a Kraft Foods’ with tens of thousands of employees… think about the number of business cards that are handed out every day, month, and year. Think about the purpose of what business cards are… why business cards are actually handed out in the first place. They’re lead-gen. You give them to somebody that you have met that you think might have a reason to contact you… or even better yet… eventually is going to be a purchaser of your product or your service. Business cards give them an easy way to contact you, call you, mail you, to go to your website, to email you.
Wait a minute! They really are lead-gen! Wow! I never thought of that! I never looked at them that way!
I’m looking at business cards and going around the Wheel and see all the other categories; tools…. and say to myself, “Yeah, these are all typical tools.” So how many business cards on a daily basis are handed out by all of the employees of Kraft Foods? Wow!
What if, rather than just accidentally handing them out business cards at events…what if all the employees were instructed that any time you meet somebody new, that it’s mandatory that you hand out business card. You know business cards can sit on somebody’s desk for a long time, they can go into Outlook / Entourage, they can get scanned… I mean, OMG! This is a residual marketing tool that keeps working for a long time. It’s a residual marketing piece… business cards.
HP: There should be goals for handing out business cards because, I cannot tell you how many people give me only one card. I cannot tell you how many business cards in boxes we have created and how many we’ve thrown away. We should set goals for people. They have to get out… 10 a week… at minimum. Yes… something!
LS: You see what I’m talking about? Because what does it cost for one business card? A tenth of one cent? And, if you get it for free there is absolutely no cost. In a way it’s a mini brochure, it’s a mini-catalogue, it’s… a branded take-away!
And I’m not here selling business cards; it’s just one of the tools on the Wheel to show you that eventually when we get to the end of this process you going to be thinking about marketing in a completely different way.
HP: But when you think about them, instead of waste, you’ve got to include on a list of marketing tools you really need…
LS: Yes!
HP: …of stuff you need.
LS: Yes. They’re not a cost…
HP: …as a business system.
LS: Yes, yes!
Okay, so we’ve discussed business cards. Let’s go around the Wheel again… “Let’s get into the weeds with some of the other tools. The next revelation was, that while looking at business cards, I realized that we design business cards… and I’m just going to use the business card analogy just because it easy to understand.
We design a business card by accident. We put our name on it, and put our address, and we put our telephone number, and the reason we do that is because that’s what we’ve always done. You don’t think about your business card really, when you design it. You usually take a template from the one you used last time and update if anything has changed. That’s how we create business cards.
Actually, you can go online to buy business cards and see where it says, “Put your name here, put your city here, put your state and zip.” Why? It took us almost a decade before business people even thought to put their email addresses on their business cards. That’s because, up until then, their whole career we’ve never put emails on business cards, so we never thought of it. Think about it, their whole career, they never put emails on their business cards. So it just wasn’t something that we thought of.
That’s the key! This is where I’m taking this whole new concept. We had a formula that we just instinctually remembered. Put the same stuff on our business cards and that’s what we did. Your email and your web address really has to be on your card. There was a time when I consulted, I would go into a company and we start talking marketing, the first thing I would do is say, “Give me your business card.” Inevitably, either their web address is missing, their email address is missing or often; both. This is as recent as 2005. You cannot do this. What are you thinking? Because if you want people to communicate with you, you’ve got to provide all of the different channels that they prefer.
Personally, I hate talking on the phone with people, but I love email. I think about the conversation or response ahead of time. When I want, I respond. About a year ago, I estimated that I have somewhere between 140 to 170 email conversations going on at any on time with companies, prospects, and people that I working with. About 140 conversations going on simultaneously. I could never do that on the phone. So my emails are constantly going back and forth. I say something; they say something. This form of communication gives us the opportunity to prepare. So email, you’ll agree, is incredibly important.
Chapter 4 – Interconnection, Traditional Media Revelation
LS: Okay, so now I’m looking at business cards and then…here’s where the next revelation comes in. Literally it was like a spark of inspiration… I’m looking at the business card and I thought… ”Wait a minute. What if I took business cards, connected it to coupons? Is there a logical connection between business cards and coupons?” My first instinct was no. I relied on my old school thinking and thought there was no connections between those two tools. But, wait! What if I forced myself to find a connect? What if I simply put a coupon on the back of the business card?
We’ve decided that we’re going to encourage people to use business cards as marketing tools. We’re going to encourage them as a lead gen. We know it costs either nothing or nearly nothing. What if we just printed… just automatically printed out our plain old business cards every thirty days. It’s a heck of a lot cheaper than paying someone to update our websites. It’s cheaper than doing a direct mail piece. It’s cheaper than doing almost anything.
It’s still cheap, even if we printed them every thirty days. Only now, on the back of the business cards, we printed whatever we were currently promoting. Now imagine your card with your offer. Not only do you meet somebody… which by the way, builds trust because in order to get a business card you had to make a face-to-face relationship and that builds trust… and remember, trust leads to sales. Not only does this connection come across in a very highly trusted manner, which is much more effective than direct mail, or even a telephone call. You’ve actually met and touched the person.
Then, when they take the card and turn it over they’ve got your coupon. That’s going to encourage even more now that you’ve built this trusted relationship, to exercise the coupon and become a customer, if they’re ever a customer at all. And if they are not, you haven’t lost anything but a small, free piece of cardboard. If they are, they’re going to be a new customer.
Wait a minute! OMG! I’ve got business cards in here which up until now, I’m been handing out haphazardly. I’ve got coupons over here, which I don’t even know how our customers are getting them; maybe they download them. I don’t know. Maybe you send them out in direct mail pieces. Now, just by simply putting the two of these together I’ve got a business card that is so much more significantly… significantly effective at actually closing sales, because I’m taking two things that I never would have thought of connecting and putting them together. It’s taking your marketing from to being accidental or deliberate!
Everything that’s on this Wheel is a tool! It’s not a strategy! The strategy is in the center of the Wheel, the tools are around the circumference of the Wheel and the connections between the points or tools are the tactics! This Wheel, The Safko Wheel, representation “Tactics, Tools, and Strategy” of traditional marketing! The Wheel is a process!
Okay we all agree, right?
HP: Yes!
LS: Okay. So take that card and put it there. Let’s now look at catalogue.
I’m just randomly picking stuff. Take your business card and connected it to say “catalog”? What if you had a link on the back of the card with an image, where customers could download the pdf of your product line catalogue? Has anybody ever thought of putting a product catalogue link on a business card? I certainly never have.
Yes, scan a bar code for the pdf or web address so that the customer can either download the pdf, print it so they can have a hard copy.
Now you’re deliberately encouraging your employees to hand these out and every time these thousands and thousands of business cards are handed out they’ve got their potential customers encouraged to download your catalogue.
Let’s pick something else. How about say, customer service. Let’s put that on the back of a business card. Why not? You know what it would tell me…”Wait a minute, customer service right on your business card? You’re going to dedicate 50 percent of the entire real estate of your business card just to your customer service message and hotline? OMG! You are customer-centric. You really care about our customers. If you’re willing to do that I’m going to buy from you!
Isn’t that the message in a sense?
Before we proceed with two different examples, I want to take the time to point out whole other level of this Wheel. We just spoke about putting a catalogue link on the back of a business card… now, what if we stayed with those two tools for a moment. Can we reconnect those two tools, backwards? Well… yeah… kind of. Some connections are very rational while some… you’ve got to stretch a bit; however, let’s take a look at this new relationship.
Business cards with a catalogue on the back; now a catalogue with a business card on the back.
HP: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking…
LS: And what is that? Well, at the bottom of the catalogue you’re going to have your name, telephone number, your email, and postal address. So when you’re doing your next catalogue the Wheel will make you remember to put all of your business card information on your catalog. See… so it depends on how you look at it. Now only do we have this amazing exponential relationship in one direction, but now simply by reversing the connection you blow it up another level!
Go ahead and pick anything, connect anything to anything on here and you will get this exponential effectiveness in your marketing campaigns. I mean my head exploded at that point. I said to myself, “I can’t believe this!” “We will never look at marketing the same way again!”
Okay, let’s pick something else…
HP: ….an isolated thing, we have never combined before?
LS: You just summarized it. That’s it! That’s the… “Pick something else… Anything, even if you’ve never combined it before?”
Pick anything; any tool and then pick any other random tool, and let’s take a look and see what we can do to make that exponential increase again.
HP: How about direct mail?
LS: Okay, direct mail. Pick something else.
HP: Let’s do… Response cards.
LS: OK… Response cards. Now as an activity with your marketing department, it may be a one-person show, but if you have a marketing department or an agency… Let’s randomly pick those two. There’s no rhyme or reason; what can we deliberately do with them?
So let’s see if we can do this? So we’ve got direct mail and response card. Response cards usually go inside of a product that, when you’r customer has it, it asks you some marketing questions (which I think, stink). I hate response cards, but some people use them because they are really good for getting market demographic and other types of information through direct mail. Well your direct mail really is kind of a response part. And you, a lot of times will actually create direct mail that has the content of a response card. So instead of just haphazardly creating your next direct mail piece with random questions, think of it in terms of a response card so that you don’t miss anything. If you’re only looking at one or the other you haven’t taken the time to fully develop either. If you use the Wheel, you are encouraged to take time and you’re really focused on the things that you need for both.
If I’m just now starting this, I’m looking at a direct-mail piece that I want to gather demographic information. I want the piece or campaign to be designed deliberately… and that’s the key word… deliberately couple those two together… so that when my direct mail piece goes out I don’t miss accidentally miss anything that I’ve taken for granted. I’ll take the time to design a well-designed well-intended response card like, direct mail piece.
Now does it work the opposite way? Okay, we have a response card… is there anything that I can do to tie in with my direct mail? Yes! I can include “Call us or go to the web and get on our direct mailer so that we can give you continue updates, sales, discounts, etc.” Now is that something that you would always remember to put on a response card?
HP: No.
LS: You’d never think about it. But if every customer got a response card and that said, “Please give us your email address or your direct mail address so that we can give you product updates…” think of how many more sales you’re going to make as a result. I mean, isn’t this just a most bizarre freaking thing you ever saw?
HP: It forces you to think about what you don’t normally think about.
LS: Absolutely! That’s the power of the Wheel!
HP: It forces you to think about each piece in relationship to other things vs. “I wonder what I should put on here?” (Crosstalk)
LS: Exactly!
HP: (Crosstalk)
LS: That’s exactly right!
HP: (Crosstalk) It makes marketing strategic…. if you actually start to think about it.
LS: That’s the thing. Without the Wheel… I mean for me I can’t remember all the other possible connections… If I was designing a catalogue I’m not going to remember what the other 19 connections I can make (39 if you count reversing the connections), but by creating this Wheel, taking a pen, and doing a workshop like we’re doing right now…. Wow!
Let’s do another set of connections. Let’s start with public presentations. And here comes the fun part… public presentations. I’m now randomly going to connect that to print ads, that makes sense, right? I mean if you’re going to have a public presentation you want to do print ads. And then I’m going to connect it to telephone… Well if I have outgoing telephone solicitation and I’m doing a public presentation in a particular area, I’m certainly going to tell my staff, “If you’re talking to somebody in that area…”
Then I start here and I just kind of do string art to all the other ones. Now there may be some that just simply don’t make any sense whatsoever, in which case…. What I found was is that not making a connection really was the exception more so than the rule. Don’t be fooled and say “Aw crap! I don’t know how I’m going to connect these.” Force it a little.
Like earlier, when I just thought about it for a few seconds, all of a sudden it became logical. So you do this string art in one direction with little arrowheads. Then the next step is put the arrowhead backwards and see what you can find in reverse. And if you really want to go insane to the point where you’re going to really need some kind of medication, work your way around the Wheel and continually make all of the possible connections!
Chapter 5 – Digital & Social Media, Word Of Mouth At The Speed Of Light
LS: So that’s traditional marketing on steroids or actually on The Safko Wheel. Now, let’s take the time to set up the social media Wheel, it’s exactly the same thing. It’s the 20 major categories… yeah, let’s just put them out there. I chose these 20 categories from The Social Media Bible, because I still had to logically group them one way or another.
HP: Would you see this as the “old” vs. the “new.” Isn’t it?
LS: Wow! Isn’t that something? I know. I thought so, too… Yes!
HP: Fascinating to see it laid out. You often see them in pieces or combined in pieces. You never see them all together on there.
LS: Exactly. So in the book and what I suggested is that you go through this process, again. Go through this as a team exercise and look at all the different connections. As we’ve just proven, I guarantee that it’s going to make you look at all of your marketing deliberately and exponentially, not accidentally. It’s going to open it up for you.
Chapter 6 – Digital Marketing Interconnection, A Digital Synergy
LS: Okay, so now we are just going to take a look at this so that the question is, “We pick two off of the social media Wheel.” Pick any two and let’s see how… if it makes any sense to connect. And some will have no rationale at all and others really will…
HP: Virtual world?
LS: Virtual worlds…and let me cheat and pick websites for the example…web pages.
HP: I’ll take “Websites” for $400, Alex!
LS: Exactly! (Laughter) We can pick something else next as part of this exercise. I picked these two because, what happened next while I was developing this Wheel process was… I’m twitching because my head is ready to explode… I couldn’t wait to actually draw the social media or the digital Wheel because this is where I play a lot. This is my specialty. And, I just knew that if I could do with social media what I just did with traditional media, and expand it…OMG! I was so excited!
The first thing I did was, I randomly… and I’m not kidding you… just randomly picked those two. As you know I have a strong presence in Second Life, the virtual world. I have the granite mansion with two stores… the island. Where you can come and see presentations and hold meetings… teach classes.
You can go to all of my web properties and there isn’t a freaking word about anything that I do in Second Life. Not a mention. There’s not an image, there’s not a link, there’s no mention. Why, I thought? Who the heck thinks of putting those two together? They have no commonality and no logical reason to connect them.
By creating this Wheel I’m encouraged to see the connections. So, the first thing that I did was I went out to my property in Second Life, virtual world, I did a screen capture of me (my avatar, my cartoon) looking out of my virtual office…
HP: Very handsome!
LS: Well thank you very much! (Laughter) I tell everybody that, that’s me 25 years and 25 pounds ago!
HP: (Laughter!)
LS: So, I took this image and placed it on my web properties, on the top right, there’s a picture of me and it says, “Visit Lon in Second Life” with a clickable link.” Within 24 hours… A four hundred percent increase in my Second Life traffic, 400%!
HP: Wow!
LS: What the heck! Never thought of it before. Never… I couldn’t have lived long enough to make that connection between these two completely random and unconnected topics (tools). I thought with the traffic going to my website, why don’t I convert people who are interested, or at least make them aware that if they wanted to visit me in a virtual world that they could. Four hundred percent increase in 24 hours just by putting the picture and link on my website.
The point of that was that I never would have thought about it. But, by doing this it encouraged me to makes this connection. Now, would it work in reverse? Is there anything that I can do in my virtual world to drive traffic to my web properties?
LS: Yeah! I went into my store in Second Life… I was so embarrassed. There was absolutely no mention of my speaking web page and no mention of my two other company web pages. So I created a picture the size of the painting behind you on the wall, in the Virtual World, (and I cannot believe I didn’t think of it sooner) that says www.ExtremeDigitalMarketing.com, which is my product site, www.LonSafko.com, which is my speaking site, and www.TheSocialMediaBible.com, which is my book site. And it’s a giant banner now that hangs in my store. The store was there. but I never promoted the fact that I had these product websites… Oh geez! I was so…
HP: And you sell product, but you didn’t have them in your property.
LS: You go into…
HP: Your store…
LS: Yes, and in that virtual store (crosstalk)…
HP: You had no merchandising! (Laughter) No merchandising in the store!
LS: Isn’t that hysterical though? I mean…
HP: It forces you to think about what you don’t know. Well, it forces you to think about how you wouldn’t think about what you don’t know…..Does that make sense?
It forces you to see what’s not there. Right?
LS: True! Isn’t that cool?
HP: Like, you know… making the connections between the old and the new. You know, like I have a speaking engagement, a couple of speaking engagements, and I thought about it, but I didn’t get a chance to email you. You can even get those up on a website.
LS: Yeah.
HP: It’s off hand.
LS: Off hand… yeah!
HP: Oh, by the way… that is like it being a trigger. Like a process. Technically speaking these are all the things we need to do.
LS: A trigger….yes! A system, a method, a process!
HP: Uhh haa!
LS: A process…. which we have for just this. We now have a process and I have a process just for… websites. And it’s a wonderful process.
HP: ….linking everything together.
LS: Linking everything. You want your marketing to be haphazard and accidental or do you want it to be deliberate? Do you want to just accidentally remember what you should remember? Do you want to actually make deliberately see it?
HP: That’s like the hardest part, to think of. Marketing within a company is keeping up with the thought behind everything… like all the moving parts.
LS: Yes.
HP: Do you know what I mean? It’s like… it’s not that you don’t remember to post onto Twitter (or whatever) it’s that we’re not making the super consistent connections….
LS: Correct…
HP: …that leverage… You know what this really means is…
Leveraging… coverage.
I mean that’s how I would also research this.
Chapter 7 – Traditional & Digital Integration… “Fusion Media”, &
LS: Absolutely. Now let me put all of the traditional cards (categories) around the Wheel we just created with the 20 social media categories on it. Now we have 40 different cards (categories)!
HP: Oh my gosh. Look at all that!
LS: (Laughter)
HP: How can you keep that organized?
LS: Isn’t that wonderful! I so happy you asked….
HP: That’s wonderful….!!!!
LS: …because that’s Chapter 7!!!!!!
HP: (Laughter)
LS: Okay, so…
HP: Holy Crap!!!! That’s what you should call it! The Holy Crap Factor! (Laughter)
The thing too is that…. (laughter) it forces you, also, to make choices.
LS: Ahhh, yes!
HP: Because you cannot obviously do….
LS: all of it…
HP: It’s a business.
LS: By the way… if you did what I asked you to do on the previous Wheel… start with one and make logical connections to everything else on the Wheel and then work your way around the Wheel, only one direction connections at first. I’m just talking about going one way only. There are 8.2 x 1047 connections on that Wheel right now.
That means that you would have to write the number 8.2…. and add 47 zeros after that and that’s how many possible connections there are!
Can you comprehend that number? Eight with 47 zeros after it! That’s how many combinations. And now you are also seeing a really scary look at how my head, my brain works.
HP: I’m sure your life is exhausting! (Laughter)
LS: In social media words… OMG! What would happen if you actually combined them all? So I did this Wheel and, of course, it has 40 different categories or tools… because there’s 20 top traditional and 20 top social media… which gives you the 8 x 1047. It’s just not going to happen. The human brain cannot even comprehend a number this large, and, to try to do this in a workshop would be insane.
Chapter 8 – What’s Not Working, Cost Of Customer Acquisition
LS: The next step is to revert back into the Five Steps… remember the Five Steps to Social Media Success from The Social Media Bible of how you put together a plan.
Step 1 was to determine the Cost of Customer Acquisition. Now let’s get this other colored Wheel and let’s take a look at everything that you did last year in traditional media. Because we know the implementation of social media doesn’t cost anything other than labor; it’s just the implementation cost with no media buys. But the difference between traditional media and social media is the implementation of conventional media…. television, radio, newspaper, print out…has a very, very high associated cost with it. Often too high for most companies.
Because we do not have a cost associated with social media… we don’t have media buys, let’s just take that out of the equation. This is what the book is going to do. Now let’s take a look and we can do with your traditional media. Look at… over the last 12 months, what has Heasley Partners has done in traditional media? And we’ll just create headings across the top of the pad or whiteboard
Maybe you did a direct mail piece. Maybe you did some public speaking. Well, what we have to do is take a look at these little red tags and really just kind of leave the important one s and remove the ones that are most appropriate.
HP: That should be easy. (Laughter)
LS: Okay.
HP: But we can also look at doing it…
You said… are we talking about doing… (Crosstalk) Do we want to do…
LS: In the past year. Just for right now. In the past.
So…just write down a couple.
HP: Oh, not our clients, but our marketing…
LS: Right now let’s just talk about you, because once you totally buy-in and understand this, now we can implement this for your clients; which by the way…
HP: But we’re looking at the traditional media cards just for Heasley Partners?
HP: Well I don’t know if there is anything here that is like “speaking engagements.” I mean our presentations. (Crosstalk)
LS: Let’s go around… direct mail…
HP: (Crosstalk)
LS: Print ads, trade journals…
HP: Well we wrote for trade journals.
LS: Yeah but did you take ads… (Crosstalk). Telephone solicitation no, warranty no, catalogues no. Response cards, no. Product packaging, no. Billboards, nope.
HP: (Crosstalk) We’ve done product packaging for our clients. Okay.
LS: Just for yourselves. Radio, no. Coupons? Any kind of specialty advertising, Squishie-balls?
HP: We have…. (Crosstalk) (Laughter)
LS: Yeah, and marketing….
So here’s your major categories.
HP: More than we thought.
LS: Yes.
HP: See, and that’s the other thing too. (Crosstalk) That’s a lot. This will be easy. There’s two things…
LS: This little paper Wheel is forcing us to look at everything you did. (Laughter)
HP: Forcing us to look at ourselves. (Laughter)
LS: Part of this exercise that you’re going to do… I don’t have to be here for this and you can take it as granular and serious as you want, you don’t have to get real granular…What I want you to do is go through each of these categories. Let’s say “events.” You have an open house and that’s how you… define “events.” And you can put “Open House”; how many did you have just over the last 12 months and what were all the associated costs with that open house?
Now, when you do this, personally I would say get as granular as you can. You had to have food and some kind of refreshments. Okay, so if that’s the most obvious and probably the highest expense, but you might have had either an email campaign or a direct mail campaign associated with this. How much time went into that? Did you have photography; did you have text; copywriting; layout; other types of images? Estimate how much time was spent on it, not only from the actual creation but how much time did you spend managing it, looking at it, approving it, and directing it?
HP: Eventually, what I would like to see, is us getting so good at this that we can then take this program to our clients and ask the very same questions.
LS: Then, if you’re really wanting to get granular, prorate yourself on this. You’ve got to cell phone. There is no direct ROI on a cell phone yet it’s one of the most expensive marketing tools that we use. But no one’s ever questioned the ROI on a cell phone, but there isn’t any. Or at least there’s not any way to measure it.
What about your rent? If you spent 20 hours of your time, you know, that’s a half a week…
HP: So we’re basically trying to figure out what the cost of those activities are vs. the return.
LS: Yeah! Totally… Totally! Because, what I want you to do is… and you don’t have to get real granular… but if you managed it what was your time worth? If you billed that time to a client, how much would you bill that client? Because if you’re not billing a client and you’re working on the open house, that’s time that you’re not billing to a client. You worked for a law firm. Was billable hours like, more important than air?
HP: It was God!
LS: It was God to those attorneys, absolutely! So think about it in those terms. If you managed this project and spent time on it, what’s your billable hours? And by the way, don’t forget to add 32 percent to that because that’s your cost… your indirects. That’s your FICO, and your vacation time, and sick time, and everything else. Also rent, telephone, IT costs, computers, lights. You know, even your car. Your car is expensive.
HP: Where would we put networking? That’s one that we spend a lot of time on.
LS: That should be on there. You know, I would throw that maybe in the marketing/public relations category. Networking is kind of P.R. so I would put it under here.
Okay so now, what we’re going to do for each of these categories… and again… get as granular or as accurate as you want; or just estimate. Because, even if you just estimate I want you to think of those cost categories. Write down your costs for each one of these.
Now here comes the part that most companies… as a matter of fact, I have never walked into a company and gotten an answer to this… what is your cost of customer acquisition? Nobody knows what the heck I’m talking about. Well, they know what it means, but no one wants to know what that answer is, because it doesn’t look good when you start doing this.
At your open house, how many new customers did you sign as a result of only that? You don’t have to answer, but that goes next. That’s going to go on the bottom of your cost column as a result of your specialty advertising. How many customers can you attribute… new customers, last year, to handing products out these. Then, what you can do is estimate the number of new customers that you gained last year and if you cannot remember, stick them into any category you want.
HP: What if it’s a combination of things?
LS: And, it could be. So that’s why I say we…
HP: So maybe it’s like working in PR and Public Presentation. These two things are what…
LS: It might be. Yeah. At the bottom of a column maybe connect the two.
HP: Yeah, you could actually say these are so intrinsically wound…
LS: Yes.
HP: They’re not separate.
LS: Absolutely.
HP: In some companies it might be.
LS: So you know what you do? I want you to add up the columns… all the public presentations you made last year, all the PR and social events that you participated in…give me the cost for both. Draw a line under both of those columns and then give me a combined cost and tell me exactly how many new customers resulted from these two activities.
Okay. So here’s what’s going to happen. Again, even if you don’t do it granularly… you’re going to say, “Holy Crap!” That “open house” was a lot of work, it was a lot of expense (especially when you consider the amount of time that we spent on it), and we got nothing out of it.
Okay, let’s see. These two here, the public presentations and the PR. You know those are good. We got most of our clients out of there and it was the least amount of actual out-of-pocket and time. I like that. Did we see business cards? Sure, that’s cool. The specialty advertising? Geez, we spent thousands of dollars on Squishie-balls. We can’t attribute a single customer to it. That isn’t going to happen again.
Oh wait a minute! So now what’s going to happen is when you look at this column you’re going to get it down to… ”These are great because the return on investments were awesome. These weren’t bad; maybe we can do better at it but we certainly should not stop doing it.” “let’s keep doing this, and this, and this, but there’s no way in heck we’re ever going to do that again!” Most of the time the “No way” falls into direct mail. Direct mail almost always gets into the category…. Out! Not going to happen! It doesn’t get you new customers and has a huge cost. Or maybe it does.
HP: I have a challenging question for you. What about brand awareness?
LS: That’s going to fall out of everything we do anyway.
HP: Right.
LS: So the cool thing about brand awareness… I love that… Even when you screw up and you’re really lousy at what you do, you always have brand awareness to fall back on as a return. And, if your good at what you do, brand awareness just explodes. So, brand awareness could actually be a conversion strategy if you want to make it that.
HP: Let’s stop there for a second, okay? That is interesting when you think about it. Like when you send out direct mail for example… in the old days we sent out direct mail… we did not get very much response. It was like, “Well you know we’ve got to do it more because we have to develop brand awareness. So brand awareness became sort of a fallback… ummmhuh… but when things did well, no one really talked about brand awareness. It’s a result of…
LS: It’s a residual…
HP: Yeah, it’s just sort of there… because it’s there. You know what I mean? So it’s kind of a bogus…
Well, is it kind of like…
LS: Impressions in newspaper and television?
HP: It’s like keeping top of mind. We used to send out… we used to do both… you know we always struggled with sending out invitations for that Heart and Mind…
LS: Hard copy invitations?
HP: Or electronic invitations. We always struggled with that and so, you know, this is at the law firm. And it was, “Well you know I like that they are personal, touching people, and do not end up as a lot of spams.” So we did both. So we ended up doing both and we…
LS: What if you ran that through this analysis? If you said the number of people… your conversion strategy is the number of people that attended whatever event that you’re doing. And you did it electronically and it had its costs, it had its problems… going into spam and the lack of personal touch.
HP: “How many R.S.V.P.’s did you get from them?
LS: Thank you! There’s your ROI! There’s your cost and your definition… because were defining it as a conversion strategy. The number of people that showed up as a result of this campaign. We look at the ROI (which is defined by our R.S.V.P.’s) on the hard copy mailed ones and we look at the number of people that showed up as a result of electronic mail… and you’ve got to ask yourself…”I’ve got five with the hard copy invitations, but I spent over $1,000. I got 81 with electronic invitations and it cost me nothing.”
But if you don’t take the time to go through the process…
HP: Yeah, we never did that. Yeah.
LS: Yeah, nobody ever does! That’s the thing.! That’s what this process does! When you do that you are going to say, “You know what, for the $1,000 or $500 or whatever the heck it costs for the hard copies, I could do without those five people showing up and save $500 for each person.
HP: So, getting back to branding. Where is this? Is this kind of a residual? But that’s how you used to sell to the attorneys… like, okay… we need to be top-of-mind. If anything… if we send out 5,000 invitations and we get 150 people to come, at least with those other people we’re keeping top of mind with them because our envelope goes across their desk.
LS: Absolutely.
HP: But, see that would be a strategy.
LS: Thank you!
HP: In other words, instead of it being like… we expect good returns, responses, we expect R.S.V.P.’s, we expect followers maybe the strategy is awareness…. period! And, just how often we’re gracing their desk, email, and reminding them…
LS: Yes!
HP: Our newsletter… is our newsletter really put out there because we expect people to click on it and call us and say, “I’d like to work with you.”
No.
It’s just to keep us at top of mind and keep us in front of everyone’s mind. Yeah. So our goal is to… or our strategy is, we use a newsletter… because we want to.
Or maybe when they do think about needing help with their brand and they think Heasley Partners. I really do. I think brand awareness is a Kleenex box. It’s over there; it’s always right within my eyeshot no matter where you are pretty much. And you don’t even think about it until you sneeze… or until you think you’re going to sneeze… and then you’re like…
LS: Ohhh no!
HP: Right! Oh, there over there. So how do you do ROI on top of my business strategy? How do you measure that?
LS: Well, that’s always a problem. Let me give you an example. Kraft Foods has 180 products… and when I first went to them they said, “Do we need to create a Facebook page for all 180 individual products? I said, “Yes you do.” So they went out and they created pages… one of the first pages they created was Oreo Cookies because Oreo was one of their leading brands. I just checked this morning…23,975,000,000+ friends. There’s brand awareness! OMG!
Now there’s more than brand awareness. There’s actual brand engagement which is significantly more valuable. Because you have 24 million people that look for it, found it, and are participating in that brand.
HP: How can an Oreo cookie more inspiring, interesting? (Laughter)
LS: Is that crazy? (Laughter)
HP: I don’t get that.
LS: Comfort food. (Laugher)
But you’re absolutely right. How do you measure it? The cool thing about social media and really what drives social media is it’s not sales first. We’ve learned that. It’s really about brand awareness and band engagement because if they’re aware of your brand that’s building a relationship, that builds the trust. And, when they’re ready to buy they think of you first.
That really is the definition of how to properly use all of the social media tools. So how do you measure it? It’s difficult. Any more than you can measure television campaign. If the phone rings more, it’s working. Or a newspaper campaign or a trade journal, or even being at a trade show… if you see an increase in activity.
The cool thing about social media tools is that you can measure it because it’s… for example… if you send out a tweet you want to measure your brand awareness… or more specifically brand engagement… you put in your tweet, “Hey, if you want our free coupon or if you want more information or if you want something of value to you, the reader… Click on this Bit.ly link and take a look.”
And, you send out your Tweet and now all you have to do is tomorrow morning check your stats on your server and find out how many people actually went to that web page. You will know the number of people that went to that page as a result of your one tweet, right down to the exact number. So we’re not talking impression like you do with T.V., we’re talking 941 people have looked at your page in the last 24 hours. Not only did you increase brand awareness by that much but it also increased your brand engagement…because they had to actively go and do something; similar to the brand engagement that happens when you get a direct mail piece and you say, “Call this 800 number.”
So you can measure it. And, even if you cannot or don’t define it in such a way where you can measure it by default, everything that we’re doing relates back to brand awareness.
Social media… we throw stuff at social media because there’s no cost, so we don’t have to measure it and you know that it’s extremely effective. You get 24 million people on a cookie page… it’s really effective. But I guaranty that you won’t get 24 million people reading your newspaper ad.
So what’s going to happen in here is that you’re going to take the Wheel of the 20 categories and you’re going to probably narrow it down to five really good solid strategies. You might pick out one and say, “You know we’ve never done billboards, but why don’t we put this into the mix.” But, for the time being we’re going to look at this. The idea of this is just so that you can get these “aha” moments of what’s working and what’s not. And, you do that through cost of customer acquisition.
Okay, so now we’ve got this.
HP: In our system it going to be easier for us to track customer acquisition because we track all of our hours. (Crosstalk)
We know from the time, especially with our events and speaking… like we have categories for those things that we are speaking… and then let’s say a person pops out and say, “Hey, I want to talk”… we start tracking their time. And, so we know that it cost us $450 to get that $25,000 job.
LS: You’ve got it! That’s it!
HP: We know that specifically.
LS: But, 100 percent of other companies don’t have any clue about, or even how to get there. They cannot get there from here. But you guys got it, because that’s the way you think and that’s why this is going to work really well for you.
So there we are… There’s the categories that we look at over the last 12 months that we think either have a really good, or at least a marginally good ROI. And some of the other stuff that you might have done that doesn’t have quite as good ROI. We’re just going to take those out of mix for right now.
Chapter 9 – Revealing The Trinity Of Social Media
LS: So here’s your traditional marketing… right there. The next thing is you cannot do all 20 things in social media either. It’s not going to happen; it’s just insane. So what I say is that I want you to take a look at the three big ones; which I call the Trinity of Social Media in The Social Media Bible, social networks, blogging, and microblogging. See social networks in the cards?
HP: One thing we should… and I don’t know if this is the time… but we are committed to those.
LS: Thank you. That’s what I’m saying.
HP: You better stick that in there because it’s going to be impacted by those three blue cards cards.
LS: Either it’s marginal… or it’s great, which is a no-brainer; if it’s marginal but worth looking at and it’s also (by putting into the marginal category) going to force us to say, “How do we get this from the marginal category up into the great category?” But then here’s something we’ve never done, but we darn well better do it. So that’s got to go into the traditional mix. And that’s where we’re headed. Alright?
HP: Well, we’ve done it, we’ve just haven’t done it well.
The party that we’re doing… because we’re doing a workshop.
LS: Right, exactly. The point is with the events you’re saying, “I want some emphasis that this year.” That’s a great excuse! That’s a great reason to put that into the mix. So there’s that.
Okay, so now what I say with social media is… the three most important categories are blogging, microblogging, and social networks. And I’ll be a little more specific. You need to pick out the Twitter one here. If you can do just these three things and do them fairly well then you’ve got a good handle on starting to entrench yourself in social media. Now there’s other things, I guess… let’s see, “Okay, you need to do that.” and let’s assume you did; you really should be considering mobile because that’s the fastest growing segment of any marketing…
HP: What do you mean by mobile? You mean mobile aps?
LS: Yeah, you can do a mobile ap or here’s the first thing. You people… I just met you for the first time… and you’re trying to pitch me. You have to go grab a phone call. I pull out my smart phone and look at Heasley Partners. Does it look good or does it look like crap?
HP: It looks good. Oh, I see. Okay.
LS: Yeah. You need to be absolutely sure that it looks good.
HP: One of our clients, the one I’m working on…
LS: It doesn’t work?
HP: It doesn’t clash. Can there be a clash thing going on?
LS: You’re working an iPhone?
HP: It doesn’t show up on the iPhone and it’s too fast anyway. You cannot read it.
LS: Yep.
HP: It cycles too fast.
LS: So aps are cool if you can think of one… because you can get them developed now a day’s really inexpensively. But the most important thing is… is your website mobile compatible… because it has to be!
Also not just compatible in the way it looks but can I click on your telephone number to call you… I mean can I go to your telephone number, touch it, and have my cell phone automatically dial you…
HP: From the website?
LS: From the website. I mean, these are…
HP: I don’t know.
LS: And you shouldn’t necessarily know. (Laughter) Because those kinds of questions are in the weeds and nobody really focuses on this very much!
HP: But I have to tell you when I do get a phone number, like a restaurant or something, and I find it on a website and I try it… because….
(Crosstalk) I’ll call and make reservations. I look them up and get it and then I’m like…and then I have to memorize it. It’s so irritating. So irritating!
LS: Okay so you want your very first relationship with your new customer to be irritating or pleasant? It really is just, that simple.
I’m going to take mobile and we’re going to stick it into the mix because we talked about it and we all agree. Now there maybe some other things. There may be video sharing or creating podcasts or videotaping your presentations.
HP: We actually do a lot of that.
LS: Absolutely. Okay. Wait. Which? The video?
HP: Video sharing…
LS: Okay, so…
HP: Can we have video sharing… well… webpages?
LS: Yeah, for right now because web pages are kind of static.
HP: Video sharing, would you say? Or we could….
LS: Yeah, but you’re not doing it yet. So…
HP: But are we doing photo sharing?
LS: Okay. So now on the social side because I’m keeping them separate for now, we’re going to pick out the three most important social networks; Twitter and blogging, because I just know that they’re ROI’s are the highest… these three out of all of them.
HP: Social networks are…
LS: Maintaining Facebook, LinkedIn… yeah…
HP: Those…
LS: We can even be more specific. I mean Facebook is in here somewhere but…. or that’s why we have so many of the blank ones. We can actually… if social network is too generic a category and you want to say, “Look, we are Facebook fanatics. We do maintain other sites, but Facebook is really where we want to be. Just take the social network card, throw away, and fill out one of the blank ones.
Chapter 10 – Fusion Media Marketing, The Best Of All Worlds
LS: Okay, so we’ve got our traditional Safko Wheel based on cost of customer acquisition and what we really want to focus more on this year… and we’ve got the three most important… picked out randomly… three things that we’re kind of doing but this year we probably ought to pay a little more attention to. Okay?
So now I’m going to go back… you can see where we’re going on this. Okay, wow! That’s a lot more manageable than that ridiculous Wheel with everything else on it. You cannot do this with all of those categories. But you know you can do this. That’s not even the original 20 that we were looking at.
So now what we do is we play the game again. Let’s pick something. Go ahead, pick something. We’ve decided that this year our marketing campaign… Guess what? If you’re doing a marketing plan this is how you’re going to do the marketing plan. These are the major categories in you plan and for yourself or for your clients. This is what we’re going to focus on. Let’s not focus on the marketing plan so much as on this. If we do this and we can really do a good job, it’s going to be plenty enough for this year. And that doesn’t mean that, March, we cannot stick in billboards. But for right now just to keep your plan manageable, that’s plenty… enough!
So now let’s take a look. Randomly pick two cards (categories).
HP: Can they be different colors?
LS: Yes… How about Blogging…
HP: And, presentations…
LS: Okay blogging and presentations. So let’s put them back here and yes, this is where we talk about what we have now. We had a traditional media, and we have a digital media; we now have Fusion Media. This is Fusion Media. And really what that means is is that two, maybe three years from now there will be no such thing as social media anymore. It’s going to be “Media.”
HP: Media. Yeah!
LS: It’s going to be part of marketing and PR. There will be no Vice-President of Social Media anymore than there’s a Vice-President of Newspapers.
HP: …or a Vice-President of billboards!
LS: That’s insane! Yeah, or Vice-President of billboards (laughter).
HP: Media Plan. Which we kind of figure caught on to that with Public Relations. (Crosstalk) Put is under here. Most people are… ”We need to get going on social media, more.”
LS: And, “I need to put together a social media plan.”
HP: Right, right…
LS: When I walk into a company and they introduce me to the Vice-President of Social Media, I put my face in my hands and think, “Boy, where do we start? They don’t know what they don’t know…”
HP: That’s like when we needed a client to go… ”Here’s the Vice-President of Sales and Marketing. We know you know nothing.” (Laughter)
LS: That’s exactly right. (Laughter)
(Crosstalk) You know nothing!
The idea is now, you knew instinctively that we were heading towards marketing. This separation… and trust me every company in American has had this mid-set… ”Don’t let my peas touch my carrots!” It’s kind of that mentality. They never let them touch. I’ve actually seen even big companies were the V.P. of Marketing and the V.P. of Social Media are in separate buildings!
HP: Well sometimes, too, it’s the turf wars related to it.
LS: Totally. I want you to do this deliberately and from now on, realize this is where we’re going to be. You might as well move ahead. Don’t follow the herd. Take your time and think of this as completely different process and it is… And that’s the next part of the exercise.
So I want everybody… you, your clients… everyone, readers of the book to understand that there is no separation between these two. The only difference between digital media and traditional media is that digital media has no cost of implementation and it provides two-way communication. None of this… open house… yeah kind of; but really not. Public presentations: you’re a talking head. Product packaging…
I mean, think about it. You know “traditional” is one-way communication, push and almost everything in social media is two-way communication.
HP: It’s funny when you think about it.
We’re using traditional media… the most two-way communication that there is…. with all of it. You know, just like natural selection. That’s what we have turned towards. I’m not just saying that we couldn’t have done direct mail. We had plenty of people come in here that have worked with… (Mockingly) ”We have to use direct mail…” Because I’ve always been kind of like, “Yeah well I don’t know about that. I think we need to get the Velcro off your butt and get off the chair.” Right? Of course I didn’t say it that way.
LS: But that’s what you were thinking.
HP: But, I would when we talked personally.
LS: Or get off your butt and let’s do a customer acquisition analysis on it and see whether your past direct mail was effective.
HP: They just wanted the phone to ring and the reality is, you know, you’ve got to get out there and get the phone to ring. But it’s funny because as people who are in the marketing business we are trending toward that. Are we surprised, then, that some of the most desirable methods are digital?
LS: Digital…
HP: Digital. It’s where people really are going.
LS: Yes.
HP: Even more fully.
LS: See how you just voiced… what you just said. This exercise… that’s what I want. I want you to come to those realizations. Because you, instinctively, knew that the blue cards were more effective than the red ones.
HP: And we did as much as we could with the red ones to get some of that give-and-take and naturally against the ones that we’re just blurting out there.
LS: The push market… because it’s not effective. Now here’s another difference. Customers / prospects… they won’t tolerate push anymore! They will not tolerate push anymore. We’ve got TiVo so that we can remove your television commercials. We’ve flipped… and we don’t even buy newspapers anymore. We skip the on-line ads even when the ads are only 10-second ads.
HP: Skip, skip, skip, skip!
LS: Oh my gosh! This morning I was reading Discover Magazine online and there was a video I wanted to see and this ad started up and it says, “Your video will start in 10, 9, 8…” I closed out of it. I don’t want to read about it nor watch an ad for even 10 seconds. And after that I said, “Boy my tolerance is… Wow!” That’s awful.
HP: True, I’m the same way.
LS: These methods are dying. You still have to do many of them though, in a lot of cases, especially if your cost of customer acquisition is pretty good. I mean, you’re not going to stop doing events. That was a good one we picked out. You’re not going to stop customer service. You’re not going to decide never to do business cards again.
So there are some of them that are rational, that do have a good cost to customer acquisition.
HP: But also, too, looking at the red cards; when you think of time the red cards are more of a time suck. Red is much more of a time suck than the blue cards.
LS: Yes.
HP: So you have to even think about that, from that standpoint. And costs; the red is much more… I think that has to do more with audience type. You know if you have a mass-consumer audience you’re not going to get to them in a couple of presentations.
LS: Right.
HP: If you have a mass-consumer audience…
LS: If you are selling R.V.’s you’ve got to do direct mail. Sorry, it’s just….
HP: They are just things that relate to audiences, still.
LS: Right! But you know what? Five minutes ago, the previous chapter, the previous step says take a look at your cost of customer acquisition. If I were an R.V. company I would do my cost of customer acquisition and compare it to everything else. Direct mail floated to the top.
HP: Right, right…
LS: And not only did I realize that but now I can feel confident to go into this next year, instead of doing one piece a month I may increase to two because of its results.
HP: Also, we hit clients who haven’t done much of anything (then) we can talk to them about… ”Okay, the first six months is going to be… we’re going to basically, on our best guess based on experience.”
LS: Right.
HP: We’re going to choose these three or five things…
LS: …and monitor the results.
HP: …and monitor the cost of customer acquisition. And then do the best…
LS: Wouldn’t you say that applies to the size of your clients?
HP: You mean do the stuff that’s working, and trash the stuff that isn’t.
LS: Thank you!
HP: I always told the clients that they always want the crystal ball… And I always say that the only time you have a crystal ball is when you’ve actually paid the money to do the research.
LS: Right.
HP: …to actually create the crystal ball. But most small companies do not want to do the research. They don’t want to put the money into doing the research. So in essence they’re real time marketing is their research.
LS: Yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s what I’ve done in my career.
I never paid for research.
HP: Yeah.
LS: Just do a direct mail and see if it works. Because it’s sometimes just as cheap to try it to see if it works.
HP: There’s no such thing as “no research.”
Sometimes it happens in real time; sometimes it happens in advance of actually… the real campaign. It’s the choice of the customer. But there is no crystal ball. You always have to do the research and so this, in essence, would be the real time research. Make the best choices that you can, align them in the most positive way and then monitor the cost of customer acquisition.
LS: You’ve got it! That’s exactly it. Totally. Do your marketing deliberately, not accidentally.
Chapter 11 – Interconnecting Everything, Extraordinary Effectiveness
LS: Okay, so now we filtered out the traditional, we filtered out and we picked the best of the traditional and the best of the digital / social media and now we have them on the Wheel, it’s a heck of a lot more manageable. So now let’s just pick two just for the heck of it, just two, just for conversation, just randomly pick two cards.
HP: Twitter.
LS: So we’ve got Twitter… so I’ll must put that on the Wheel and…
HP: Product packaging.
LS: Product package, okay. Now let’s go through the same process. Let’s draw a line from Twitter towards Product Packaging. Is there anything that we can do as a company on Twitter that would make Product Packaging more effective? I don’t know the answer.
HP: This is where creativity comes in. I mean, this is where it forces you to be creative other than just like, “We can put our Twitter handle on the package…” you know what I mean.
LS: Yes.
HP: In order to promote the package or the product that’s on Twitter maybe there’s like something cool that you do. This is where you focus activity….
LS: Okay. And what we’ve got to do is force ourselves in only one direction because the two examples that you just gave was the opposite in direction. Force yourself in only one direction first. What can we do on Twitter that we can get better… what if you were thinking about changing your product packaging and you sent out images to your Twitter followers saying, “Which ones do you like better?” And win a prize just for responding to a webpage so you use the “wisdom of the crowd”. You do “crowd sourcing” to design your product packaging.
You can sit here all day and guess what your customer’s will like or we can just ask them? Which color do you like better? Which images do you prefer?
HP: Well, even if you extrapolate product packaging to the product itself, asking the Twitter people, “So what would you like the next ebook to be on?”
LS: Awesome!
HP: I mean we’ve never asked anything. It’s always sort of like, “Guess, Push.” “I don’t know.” “Maybe we’ll try it this way…” I can write on anything.
LS: Ask what your customers wants…
HP: If it leads to sales…hey!
LS: How much more effective… Yeah!
HP: Plus it would be more purposeful for me instead of pulling something out of nowhere. Yeah…
LS: Exactly. Okay, so guess what? This year… guess what one of your campaigns…specifically… I mean now we’re down into the weeds. Now we’ve got strategy and now we talking tactics.
HP: And now it’s like we’re going to do six ebooks this year, I’m thinking. We need six topics and we need to have them sourced through social media, whether it be Twitter or…
LS: Isn’t that wonderful! Did you just see how you pulled this out of process? Thank you!
HP: I never would have thought about it this way. What should we write about? Should we write anymore of them?
LS: Yes.
HP: Yeah. I mean my guess is that they are going to be more effective when we can market them better. But this is all part of marketing, only a little bit better. It’s like telling people we have them more. We don’t tell people we… This is meaningful… this is meaningful!
LS: Yes. And there’s a piece of gold that you would not have just stumbled on unless you had this metal detector. And that’s what this is. This forces you to see the success in front of you, which is just buried by all of the noise.
HP: Well, buried by the norm…
LS: Yeah!
HP: The norm… and the noise…
LS: I love it!
HP: When you think about it. It’s like, “I’ll go along with whatever you can do. I guess we can post on Twitter about our products… And we can pull that search on the products and see what’s out there and then link to those and people will say, “Wow, this is like this is the most brilliant thing I’ve ever heard of. I have to have more.”
LS: (Laughter!) As if…
HP: As if…
LS: Now reverse it. Reverse the tactic.
HP: Product packaging… Product packaging on Twitter or for product on Twitter.
LS: The most obvious is to make sure your Twitter handle is on your, well… everything. Yeah. All of your… everything. Yeah. I mean your brochures, your website, your product packaging, really everything you do; your business cards, your everything…
So we’ve got that. Now let’s leave Twitter in the mix. Let’s go to here (pointing to the blogging card). You are blogging. What can you do starting with Twitter to help your blog?
Ask for guest blogs; make people aware, and your Twitter followers, that you even have a blog. Maybe they don’t know. Remind them to go over and take a look.
Run a contest off of your blog to drive it from Twitter. Go over to the blog, read this blog, and at the end there’s a summary. The first five people that… whatever…
I just did a contest… the first time I did it was on LinkedIn, just to test it. I said, “The first five people that can tell me the very first officially named social network can go to my Extreme Digital Marketing website and pick out any $50 DVD.
Within the first 20 minutes I had 57 responses. Just like that!
HP: One of our goals… we sat down and we established our priorities for this year. We narrowed it down to like four or five, consulting, Heasley conferences division, events and service branding. Those were four areas that we’re going to focus on… consulting, the conferences we said we’re going to be doing. What’s the difference between events and conferences? Oh, an events division. We’re actually doing more events work with clients. Yeah. Okay, so that’s what we need to do, to look at.
LS: Go now…
HP: Like what it takes to do these things? You know, so if…l et’s say… umm… we thought what if we had blogging and Twitter. So, you know, if blogging is to show our expertise in branding… Oh… we also said we wanted to increase our database. We wanted to get our database to 5,000.
LS: Email?
HP: It’s a big goal.
LS: Yeah.
HP: So that we can do more of these.
Chapter 12 – The Tools, Tactics, & Strategies
LS: Okay, then the cool thing is that what we’re looking at, at the Wheel… You’ve always got to remember the Wheel can be used as a strategy, it’s simply a tool to define your tools and tactics for a particular strategy. So what we then do is we take your strategy…now this is another way that we can use the Wheel. We can do this… before I jump to that you can see now that we can do this and connect Twitter to everything.
HP: Right.
LS: …and then move up the Wheel once and do it again. We can do this… forever.
HP: See to me, these would go, like, okay for our service branding effort…
LS: Yes, strategy….
HP: What do we need to do? You know, in other words each one of these, I think, would have its own Wheel.
LS: Oh… Gosh… That’s exactly right!
Okay. The center of the Wheel is the strategies, the cards are the tools and the lines in each direction is the tactics!
HP: Well, what were we talking about…events divisions…
LS: Okay…
HP: Because that one would be still…
LS: Okay so we’ll just pick one of these. Just pick one of the strategies.
HP: Because eventually with our conferences we’re actually going to have to hold an event.
LS: This is… okay… so let’s do that. I’m just going to take these strategies out; I’ll take this one out too. We’ll just stick with one strategy. Okay? So you’re going to have to hold more events.
HP: Yeah, we’re actually going to have an event or two.
LS: Okay, so now as we’re developing our marketing strategy and we’re looking around this Wheel… here’s our strategy… what are the best tools to pick to implement this strategy.
HP: And we create another one we call networking. That’s the…
LS: Yeah, networking. Okay, so the first thing is we’re going to have to do more events. There’s no doubt about it. So what other tools…. again… I’m forcing you to look at these tools to see which ones were most appropriate.
Is there anything that you could do with mobile to increase…? Well, heck… sure! I want you to use QR barcodes; I want you to use them everywhere. I want you to use them for your events. I want people to be able to get the event and see it on their mobile phones. I want you to maybe make sure that if events… if there’s any charges… that they can actually log on with their mobile phone and register online with their phone and not have to go to a PC or pick up a phone to call. I want you to… oh… get one of those short codes… I think that mine is Lon Safko 72727…
HP: Oh…. A short code.
LS: Short code. Which all you do is dial that and then all the information about Lon Safko…all of my addresses, or everything about an event, just comes right up. You just dial 72727…
So, yeah. Short code. What you do is with this… I then want you to work your way around the Wheel to see which are the most appropriate tools to achieve that specific strategy.
HP: The interesting part here is, you know, our ability to do this well is the message, too.
LS: Always comes down to that. Totally. Content. The content is always the most important final part of it all.
HP: I mean our ability to execute this well is the message, or our ability to execute other things well for other people. Ummhuh…
So let me ask you a question then. Heart and Mind Network. Where would Heart & Mind network fall in this? It’s that one. OK. Yeah, yeah. So maybe make me one of those cards that is called Heart & Mind Network right now.
LS: So that’s the final stage. We’ve determined the tools that you want to work with, both traditional and social for this year. We then looked at each of these tools, generally speaking on how can we utilize these tools better; and exponentially work one off of the other. You came up with the list of conversion strategies. These are strategies. These are tools. These are the tactics. You pick one of you strategies and put it in the center of the Wheel and now worked it…. went around the Wheel and we take each one of these and say, “What can we do in each one of these categories?”
If you’re going to do network events as part of achieving this network goal, then we’re going to make sure that you’re going to do a set of business cards for everybody with (on the back of them) a list of all of your events… or whatever your next event is. Some nice images… QR Codes, links to videos, whatever. So that every single time any one hands one out they have a current reminder of your next event.
HP: And we should probably have, you know, “Register with this promo code and get… a certain amount off…”
And, on the business card we’ve got the promotion of the event and you have the coupon.
LS: Yes. (Laughter) Yes! And this is available via mobile! And you should be blogging that! And don’t forget to put it on Facebook.
Do you want me to go around the rest of the Wheel?
HP: And remember to mention it in your public presentations…. Kathy’s the worst!
LS: I always, always forget to do that. This process just showed you that you need to create a slide in your presentation that reminds you to remind the audience. You have to create something.
(Laughter)
One of the things that I’ve done is I created a slide at the end of my presentations so that when I see it I say, “Oh, heck… I forgot… Oh by the way… come to the back of the room and get your book and education DVDs.
Another thing I do is throughout my presentations if I’m talking about email, I’ll put a little picture of my email DVD in the bottom right-hand corner. So that when I see it, I am reminded… ”And oh by the way if you’re into email, I happen to have a four hour DVD just on email marketing.”
Because there was no way in heck I was going to remember any of that. Because when you’re up there and you’re in the zone, you forget.
HP: Teaching mode.
LS: Yeah. So by doing that, which I did accidentally and haphazardly because I realized all of a sudden I wasn’t doing it… it forced me to implement a process where I couldn’t forget to do that anymore. And of course, sales increased significantly.
And the other thing I did was I take a copy of the book and put it up on the podium.
HP: Oh yeah. That’s what Robert Kiyosaki does with his “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” book.
LS: He’s a beast when it come to doing that. When he’s on PBS or anywhere else he’s got that book and…
HP: The thing about it is that he is not the top seller at events. There is no doubt. He does great but not like some people who are up there just hawking.
LS: Yeah, I cannot do that.
HP: But what he does do is he’ll talk and he’ll just look and see, like… he’ll get the book out as if he’s going to talk about it and then he’ll just talk about stuff for….
LS: …ever!!!! (Laughter)
HP: Forever. And he’ll just…
LS: And he’s holding it though!
HP: And he’ll talk about something completely different. And then, you know, he’ll be like, “By the way… this has all that in it; or this has a good bit of stuff that covers it.” But he holds it there for a long time instead of talking and being hard-sell…. ”Oh, by the way I have a book and…”
LS: And coincidentally that’s how I learned… from him… when I saw him on PBS and he was constantly holding the book. And he wasn’t talking about the book. (And I thought) isn’t that a wonderful subliminal way to sell.
HP: It’s like “billboard there”… he’s holding the billboard.
LS: Yes. So I’m looking at this face, I’m looking at the book, I’m looking at the face, I’m looking at the book…
HP: Hey, where’s the…. we only have 100 copies and there are 4,000 of you…
LS: Yeah…
HP: …and the first five people get one free… so run now!… It’s true! I’m up late watching those informercials.
LS: So what do you think? I mean, do you think there’s anything to this process?
HP: Oh yeah!!! Oh yeah!! If you think about… and then you take your model. I mean putting it all together into… either you have three or you have four different ones… or you have four that all connect. You know, you have a… because we have four strategies.
LS: Yes.
HP: We have four Wheels with, you know, a handful of things on them.
LS: Yes!
HP: Not too many to be overloading, but… you know… and then I would imagine that once you get into the swing of thinking…
LS: Yes. Most companies won’t have the time or the resources to implement everything. Use the Wheel to create many different strategies… Try them all. Then develop lots of different tactics for each. By the end you will have way too many to implement. That’s okay. Prioritize! Take each of the strategies at the end and prioritize them from 1 to… Whatever. The for each strategy, prioritize each tactic. You will quickly see a manageable, best in class marketing plan emerge.
HP: …like this… vs. like, “Hey by the way we probably should, you know, do a QR code for our event, so take this little image.
And then it’s like, “Okay, so what. Let’s not even do it.
Yeah, I mean it’s just disjointed. So okay, so we have this Wheel, we go like this… we put these ones here… like main branding…
LS: Yep. Deliberate, not accidental. Okay, then the next step is just what we’re doing right now. You set aside some time and just for brainstorming. You go back through this process… what we’ve done… and it’s easy enough to remember because we’re going to start with traditional, do your cost of customer acquisition…pick the ones that you really want… and you’ve already got the traditional cards all the way up to six anyway. Then with the digital cards, just pick the chapter headings and just reproduce what we’ve done with real, live cards.
HP: Okay, okay.
LS: So that eventually you’re going to come down to the Fusion. You’re going to come down to, ”This is what I picked out of traditional; this is what I picked out of digital; this is what we’re going to focus on for this year. These are the tool that we’re going to use.
Then if…
HP: So…well go ahead…
LS: I’ll just finish real quick…then create your strategies (and those are) what are the most important, prioritized strategies. You’ve already done that anyway.
HP: Ummhuh.
LS: Okay, so now as a kind of a team effort pick one just like we did. The first thing is (to) come in here and just generically make these connections like we were doing before. Just start with any two… or start with any one… connect it to blogging and brainstorm. Is there anything logical that we need to talk about, just like we did a minute ago? Then work it in the opposite direction from blogging…. is there anything we do with Twitter? Then move around the Wheel. Photo sharing… We decided that photo sharing is important for your strategy this year. What can we do to promote photo sharing from Twitter first. What can we do on Twitter that’s going to get people to take a look at our happy customers… or whatever you want… and then work it backwards?
You know photo sharing sites… do we have our Twitter account? So if someone is looking at our photos can we direct them back… and just move around the Wheel?
HP: Okay, so my question… my question would be then… all of these kind of become a plan.
LS: Yes! That’s the whole idea…. that’s what this does. It creates a best in class plan for every vetted and prioritized strategy, using the very best and most appropriate tools, and developing the most effective tactics for each.
HP: This is what I was going to say. So our presentation place would include all the things that we connected with.
LS: Then what we’ll do… the very last step is to take each of your strategies, put them in the center and then you just do what we did… starting with this… Because with this the first thing (without the strategy) is going to develop your tools. It’s going to get you flexible; it’s going to get you thinking…
HP: We’re willing to do…. we can afford to do…. We have the capacity to do…
LS: Yes! And if you do each one of these separately you’re going to have a fixed cost for each one. If you connect them the way I’m saying, you’ll get exponential more effectiveness, but there’s NO additional costs. It’s just making each of them more effective.
HP: It’s just leveraging them.
LS: Exactly! Okay, so now that you’ve done your tools and you’re like, “Wow! I never looked at it that way”; your mind now is opened up to all these different possibilities. At that point where you’re fresh I want you to take whatever you are prioritizing… take whatever your most important is… throw it in here and do what we just did.
Start here and then connect the center of the Wheel back out. If I’m going to do this, how can I use this tool to maximize what we’re doing with that strategy? If I’m going to do this, how do we take mobile (like we were just discussing)? What are all the things that we can do with that…
HP: I wonder… if these are plans, okay… these are tools… but we’re going to have a plan for each tool.
LS: No, a plan for each strategy. Your strategy is your plan.
HP: Okay.
LS: Because what you want to do is you want to the Heart / Mind Network and that’s going to be… Your overall plan is everything, but this is going to be one plan, one campaign…
HP: And with this tool we’ll have all these ideas that are there as to how to utilize that tool.
LS: Yeah, all of your tactics. You already have…
HP: Because we’ve already connected this…
I just want to make sure I get this right.
LS: Right.
HP: …but you have, you know, tactics under each one of these. So the connections are the tactics. The cards are the tools. And by connecting all of them we come up with the tactics.
Then when we throw the strategy in the center, the tactics are already defined for us. The tools and the tactics are already defined for us! We’re going to do one blog a week and here’s what the editorial calendar’s going to be, and we’re going to link to…
LS: You get into the weeds.
Chapter 13 – Getting Granular, “Going Fractal”
LS: And that’s the other… and that’s actually the last couple of chapters. What I then say is, “Now that you’ve got this and you’ve got your individual plans, you can then come back and do the same Wheel and we just call it Q1.”
You know… Q1-A… we’re not going to get into… we’re not really going to get into a focus on photo sharing in Q1. We’re going to do it but it’s not going to be our primary goal. The primary goal in Q1 is launching events… or whatever.
So now let’s just do a Q1 Wheel and get rid of all the other noise, get rid of these. We’re not going to do any of those in Q1. Or just these two.
What if you took and created a Wheel had your very best contacts, customers, vendors, business associates and tried to make connections there? What would that kind of fractal Wheel show you?
HP: Well the other side of it is some of them will be more really robust and others won’t. My customer service might be…”Look, we’re going to definitely follow up with everybody, and anyone who complains gets their money back.”
And so then that’s market… but the thing that I see this is… you know how we’re doing our brain breaks and we have all these recommendations and sometimes we just overwhelm people with all the stuff they need to do and…
LS: Yeah!
HP: It’s kind of… it can be overwhelming…
LS: Yes. So how we got back to the beginning of the story with the guy who turned into the deer in the headlights? He was overwhelmed and I was just talking social media. He was completely overwhelmed. There was no way that he could grasp all this stuff without this process.
HP: You know we actually work through this exercise with a client in mind. Do you know what I mean? We worked through it in order to develop it, that Heart / Mind process.
LS: Well I can see this with a big heart in the center of it and your logo around it… the Heart / Mind…. around the center. I can brand this for you.
HP: Because the thing about it is is that, you know…. this is a very mind-based activity but once you get these things out, then it becomes very Heart-based activity.
LS: Yes.
HP: What do you mean?
Well because you’re figuring out, you know, return on investment and all that kind of stuff is very mind / brain work, but once you say, “Okay, well these are the things we’re going to do,” then all of a sudden it starts to become very Heart-based…. because it’s like, okay, “How are we going to connect product packaging with Twitter well.”
That’s where we’re going to talk to people and we’re going to, like, you know, as them what they want.
LS: You shake hands with them, you do business cards… You have events and you have… speaking so they can connect with us on a personal level and do more open houses so that we could schmooze and build trust…
HP: And the messaging that goes in there. That would be very Heart-based…
LS: Yeah.
HP: I mean the plans are definitely Mind based; the dates and times and deadlines and the phone.
LS: Costs.
HP: Costs. Return on investments, and all that’s necessary because you’ve got to have a roadmap or otherwise all you have is a bunch of ideas. I hate that.
LS: Yeah.
HP: And I’m guilty of that. I would walk up to my employees and go, “Hey you know what we need to do. I just was reading this cool article and we need to do this.” And those employees are going, like, “Yeah, like how does that fit into anything?” You know what I mean?
For me if we needed that I would go, “How much of this is a priority and is she really expecting me to get this done?. (Laughter) Like, does she want this next week? Is she really serious? How much of this is a priority over this other thing that she said before.
I had a lot of trouble with that in the beginning…
LS: “Campaign du jour”. I have a lot of those. This is a great idea today but tomorrow…
HP: People are notorious for that.
LS: So the three dimensional thing is however you want to set this up. You can do… I suggest maybe you do traditional, you do social, and then you can do strategy. And the reason that I like 3D is to exemplify that we’re really looking at this… not just in one dimension anymore. We have… because we’re taking… I mean we really metaphorically took traditional and social media and we interconnected them. Those two Wheels. And then we’re also adding strategy Wheel on top of it.
So it’s kinds of a metaphor and I don’t expect a lot of people to actually create a three-dimensional model. I also suggest to use the alternative where you just take the three Wheels, and that’s probably all you might want to do…and just glue them side-by-side…this way… so you don’t have the difficulty of trying to build something three dimensional. And then just put your cards around the outside of the Wheel and put that up on the wall. That becomes your plan.
And every time you walk pass it you’re going to see these connections. You can see what you’re talking about. And, you’ll see new connections.
HP: So let me ask you… is there a limit on the strategies we should have?
LS: Once you have this Wheel; once you have what you think is the most important, I want you to just keep doing it.
HP: So is it effective for a company to have… not that we would but let’s say 12 things that they’re going to get done?
LS: Only if they have the budget and human resources. With all marketing plans that’s what it’s going to come down to… resources to implement.
HP: Well, on the other side of it, too, is how intense each of them gets. Like blogging might be super-intense and the photo sharing might be, also super-intense but customer service is not very intense. It’s sort of like, “We’re going to do whatever it takes.” And also somebody has to say who and say, “Don’t be afraid, we’ll help you…. or jump how high.”
Chapter 14 – A Micro-Fractal Look, With Amazing Clarity
LS: Well you know customer service, too… one of the things that I try to get into as well is the who, what, when, where, why. I love the Five W’s. When you think about customer service the first thing we always think about is angry people and we try to make them happy. Customer service is actually al lot more than that.
And it’s “Hey, I heard about you. What kind of services do you actually provide? If I were to hire you… can you do this; can you do?”
The website is a good place to find out what your services are. You’re a great place to find out because you’re the first point of contact. “We’ll send you a brochure.” That’s really customer service as well. So it’s not just the angry part, but customer service is before the sale takes place… and during the sale. Just like you guys, you’re awesome at scheduling and if I cannot make a date, you’re right back to me with another date… you pick times.
HP: Yeah, that’s great customer service. (Crosstalk)
LS: So when you’re looking into these don’t do the same thing that we started with… such as business card is just a business card… and only has six pieces of data. No, no, no. Really take a look at customer service, it’s really cradle to grave.
HP: Ummmhuh. Right, right.
LS: What you may want to do with each one of these really is, fully go around and define it more than just what comes to mind that first moment. Try to push the envelope on how you can really stretch the definition. Customer service… when I first put it down there…I thought…”I don’t even know if I’m going to really put it on because it is just kind of fixing angry people.”
HP: Right.
LS: But then I forced myself to go beyond that and I thought, “Wow, any time you touch your customer…
HP: …anytime.
LS: …anytime… that’s service. So you’ve got to look at it that way…
HP: (Crosstalk)
LS: Yeah, a reminder about a meeting, a follow-up on a meeting that you already had… billing… it’s all customer service.
HP: Well the interesting thing too is some of this allows us to set policies. And I hate to sound like, you know, we’re a big gigantic company with our policies, but it could also be called “standards.”
LS: Sure.
HP: Standards of quality, standards of customer service. But, yeah, I mean I can see this really taking the rote out of things, taking the ambiguity out of things, forcing us to choose and prioritize.
LS: I just want you to look at all this stuff that we take for granted differently, because we’ve been doing it the same way our whole careers. I want you to look at it in a completely different way, because when you do… we’ve seen how many revelations we all found, honestly…
Thank you for this opportunity… because believed that this had value. But I just realize how much until today. But watching it develop with you… Wow! I consider you some of the most brilliant marketing people that I’ve met… to actually watch it unfold here with you… how you came along with it… that was really valuable for me.
HP: So when are you going to do the ap?
LS: Yeah, no kidding!
HP: This is a really good ap, ap.
HP: The workshops we’re doing…
LS: Okay, so we’re doing the workshops, we know that we need to use videos as tools. Okay, so we’ve got our strategy, we’ve got our tools… now give me the tactic… just for your next event….
HP: So the tactic… instead of it being a, “Hi, I’m Kathy and I’m going to be holding an event.” It would be like, umm… me or you working with a client, but not just “in” and, you know…”The video you are about to see is real.” It literally is that moment of a person realizing like, “OMG!” Like today. That passion and that excitement, you know, is showing vs. telling.
LS: Yes!
HP: That’s it! The showing vs. telling! Showing vs. telling!
LS: Yes!
HP: Because the other tactics are “telling.”
LS: Yes!
HP: Just “telling” them…
LS: Yes!
HP: That’s why I also think about, in videos too, with Heart /Mind network… so we have our workshop and we’re talking about peppering in real-life stories. You know how we were talking about me talking about “in the trenches.”
People love that. She says, “I love the idea of peppering in instead of just “saying” about these.
(Crosstalk)
So if we have these workshops and we videotape me or you, we be might be a good “pepper-in story,” you know… Videotaping that and putting it up there… this is not your ordinary workshop.
You know, get down to what people… get down to the heart of… and actually have videos of people talking about their stories instead of just “data.”
LS: Yes!
HP: This is where, you know, to be honest with you I’ve always said, “We need to do videos.” We need to do videos, but I’ve never pushed like Katie….” Come on let’s get the camera, let’s do it. Let’s get it…” because I’ve never felt comfortable being a “me-too-video-talking head” on the Internet. I don’t feel that necessarily is who we are. There’s nothing wrong with it but it’s not necessarily who we are.
Now it’s been sitting there in front of us.
LS: It doesn’t go with the sales part because remember with the new direction is to get away from selling. You cannot tell people that you’re the best thing since sliced bread. Nobody cares. You’re going to offend people… get “flamed!” But if you have a customer talking about a revelation that you brought them to… you win!
HP: Or even just, you know… I mean, I think that that’s more relevant than… or even like… ”So Kathy was “What was is it about Heart / Mind brand? We’re trying to be a newscast… we’re not a newscast. Right, right, right, right.
We’re not trying to be something we’re not.
LS: You don’t want to come across that way. You’re not going to build trust by being a talking head.
HP: The thing about it is that when you do things that are different, there really is maybe only one topic in the Heart / Mind branding world. For other people that subscribe to Heart / Mind branding… they may buy this thing and they may go, “Oh yeah, we’re going to do five different videoblogs and I’m just going to read my, you know, blog and I’ll try to remember it, or I’ll just read it.”
And you know that will, pretty much, suck. But at least it helps them figure out, you know, how to do it. And maybe they’ll get some traction. You never know. But in our world, because we do things differently, we look for the heart-based moment… you know… the genuinely meaningful…. in different ways for each and every one of these things.
LS: Yes!
HP: …and how they’re combined.
LS: And that’s your heart, okay.
HP: And that’s the heart tactic. Yeah.
Is the one working… maybe we don’t call it “heart-tactic” but maybe, you know, there’s mind-based and there’s… but wouldn’t that work for everybody or every organization?
I’m just saying people who really don’t work with us.
But could you put it in a, you know, dealing with a feeling….
LS: Hummm…
HP: You know. Is what you do…. what emotion are you evoking? What I’m doing or feeling? I just think of it as so much, because so many people are just so mind-based (that) they are going to just take this and it’s going to be…. so mind-based. And it’s not going to be heart-based.
Yeah, I almost feel like you have to put what feeling are you wanting to evoke and then what you’re going to do…. to evoke that feeling.
What are you doing and what feeling you want to evoke. (Crosstalk)
Chapter 15 – Moving From 2D To 3D, Exponential Opportunities
LS: When you create another small Wheel. It’s exactly the same thing.
Well, one of the things I did not get into was the fractal part of this. It’s that you can drill down deeper and deeper and deeper into this Wheel process. For example, if combining just two things like customer service and video sharing and you actually create a Wheel with just those things.
What you do is just go to Google and type in, “top ten customer service” or top ten Facebook.” This is exactly what I did for my PowerPoint presentation. What are the top ten customer-service things that successful companies are doing? I typed in “top ten customer service” and I got some really nice lists. Things I never would have thought of, because I don’t do customer-service 40 or 50 hours a week. And then I took Facebook. What are the top ten things that you can do with Facebook?
And honest to gosh, there’s probably five out of 10 of them, I never thought of.
HP: Oh yeah. There’s so many top tips that you can just pick and choose.
LS: Just by taking two of the cards I then (in doing the top 10) I now created 20 to fit the Wheel and I intermingled them between customer service and Facebook. Then I made all of those connections. What can I do with customer service that has to do with, or more specifically… telephone conversations with customer service can drive people over to my Facebook page… that will have 10 things that you need (or five things that you need) to be aware of when using our product that will help you more effectively…. you know… or something similar.
What I did was I took only two and then created this other Wheel, and got down into it. What I’m saying is… what if you just took these two cards (categories), and gave me everything that you can think about (as far as how the heart works) with video sharing…everything of how the heart works with this and create a Wheel and start connecting all of those new cards that you start making up like you said.
I can show customers that are happy. I can show interviews. I can show revelations. I can show videos of our open houses. I can…. what are all the different things that invoke the “heart” that has to do with your customers. Give me 10 that have to do with video sharing.
Now let’s take “events.” Give me 10 things that you can do with an “event” that makes your customers endear you through the heart…. and then put it on a Wheel and see if you can connect them.
It actually works! That works too! It’s getting further down into the weeds; fractal.
HP: Right.
LS: And that’s where your brain actually starts to bleed. You can go down even another level by just picking two of those cards. And you’ve seen we’ve gone from all of this to this, and now we’re just going to take two of them and we can create a whole other sets of Wheels at a deeper level; that can be the Heart Wheel.
HP: Hummhum. Well, what it says, I mean, is that there’s so many options today. In the old days with the red cards only (traditional), a lot of those options were closed to most people. There were only a handful of things, just like we’re doing today. In other words, we’re doing the things that a company our size can do.
LS: Exactly.
HP: So a lot of the choices were eliminated just because of costs. But today now, we’re doing the things that we can do which used to be pretty manageable, but because now we have all these blue cards (social media or digital), the whole thing gets exponentially more complex.
LS: It does! That’s what this Wheel does. Makes a really complex situation, really easy and really effective.
HP: And that’s where all of our clients are, “We don’t know what to do. We don’t know how to fit it all together.” That’s where the confusion is…
LS: Honestly!
HP: Because if those attorneys, for example, that we work with… If all there was was networking and public speaking…
LS: They can wrap their brains around it.
HP: What do they need us for? Except for maybe to help them with their message, you know. Well, here… here’s what you say when you’re in public, when you’re networking. Here’s what you say when, you know, but because there’s all these other choices now that are open to them…
LS: And combinations!
HP: And combinations of things, it’s intricately more complicated. And then, of course, if you added our methodology, you have to actually connect heart to heart (which means you have to be genuine and meaningful and different) and lead with your heart and not with your head… that adds another layer of complexity because people who are in business aren’t trained to think that way.
Right, right, right?
LS: That’s why I’m thinking if we created a “Heart” Wheel for each of these… picked out some of the most important categories… even if you just went through the exercise once or maybe twice with two little cards and showed that “heart”… they are all practical examples… they will get it.
Because when I heard you talking about that, I was thinking “Okay, we’re going to create videos, but we’ve got to touch the heart. Well, using videos, how many different ways, how many different applications of touching the heart can you think of that uses video?”
HP: Well, you know if you think of it in terms of “moments” then, you know, it starts to become a little clearer… like blogging. How do you create a moment in blogging?
“Well, you know, first of all you try to write a good blog that people will find interesting… and meaningful… and that they’ll remember.
But the other part of it is, you know, when people comment or when people say something… you connect with the personally. You know, and say… and answer them… have a two-way dialogue.
LS: Excellent point.
HP: A two-way dialogue that would be creating a moment for each individual person… “I cannot believe, you know, …”
LS: People freak…
HP: I respond, “It goes on all the time.” No one ever replies me. You know.
LS: Right.
HP: You know even when we do our… again… we needed to kind of probably keep that up too. It should be on the Wheel…. but our Heart / Mind branding group. You know people would be… blown away when they would join our group and I would send them a personal email.
LS: Yeah.
HP: And it was just like a personal note. It wasn’t like, “Thanks for joining.” It was, “Hey, thanks for joining. I noticed you live in (where ever). Or, “I think your company’s sounds really interesting. How did you get going in the gum business?”
LS: Yeah.
HP: It wasn’t because I was trying to be superficial about it. I just…
LS: You were being genuine.
HP: I was being genuine about it.
LS: And that’s what sets you aside, by the way.
HP: Well, people were like, “Wow, I’m doing like 10 groups on LinkedIn…. no one’s ever a greeting to me, let alone… personalize it. And, bothered to look to see who I was or what I was doing.
Well like your example about Pandora. Whenever anyone says anything to Pandora, the CEO replies.
LS: Isn’t that amazing!
HP: And it’s because once you send something out, you’re sending something out about the product, “If you’re not happy, email me.”
And it comes from him, the CEO. And it really comes from the CEO. It’s not something… a website… a bot… or anything. It actually comes from the CEO and he really does contact me. It does not say, “Do not reply in the subject line.”
LS: Right!
HP: It’s like, “How more impersonal… when you talk about customer service… you send email that says, “Do not reply.”
LS: Yeah.
HP: Well, the other thing he said (and I don’t know if I should share this with you guys)… Or maybe you’ve heard this part. But if for some reason, I’m out or busy or whatever and Katie replies… it’s like, “Hey, I’m Katie. I work with Kathy. I’m helping her answer some of her email and we’re thrilled to have you contact us… etc.”
You say what you need to say and feel free to keep in touch with us. Or, you know, just be warm. Oftentimes it’s just being acknowledged.
LS: Absolutely. We all love that.
HP: Again when we think of it in terms of the simple things on the hierarchy Maslow Hierarchy and you realize that these things are not complicated. They are simple. They are usually free.
LS: Yes! But you have to think of them and it takes the effort.
HP: But you have to go through all of that to get to this “simple.”
LS: Yeah.
HP: You do. And that’s the thing, people are, “Oh, well video sharing… we need to create a library of how-to videos that…” And for some people that might be exactly what it is, but if we approach it from the hierarchal chart… What would make a person connect? What would make a person connect is actually see another person, recognize their higher purpose and feel like there’s some aspect to that, that’s real, valid; and be able to say, Oh my Gosh, that’s what I’m missing! That’s what I’m happy for in my life.”
It seems like an a-ha moment, and so forth… Just an example of this.
Well this is really interesting. We have some work to do. Yeah, and I really see sitting down with again as a company and I want to sit down with several of clients…
And…. saying okay, how does this all work for us and them.
Ummhun. Okay.
LS: Alright!
How about those apples?
HP: Cool. I think it’s… you know… I thinks it’s a good… cool tool. A cool tool. The problem is that most people come up with a book and then they haven’t an application… The tool is really helpful.
LS: It was for me. Geez, every time I write something or I look at this again I say, “Why are you doing that?” I should have thought of it this way! But, like you said, “No you should not have thought of it because it’s just too complex nowadays to think in that many levels.”
HP: Well it used to be pretty straightforward although it felt complex then. It doesn’t feel complex now.
LS: I think compared to what we have… right! Well, okay!
HP: Okay, so my last question is, “How do you get to this whole three-dimensional thing? The model?”
LS: Well what you do is you take and you create your traditional Wheel, your digital Wheel, your… strategy Wheel.
(Crosstalk)
You cut the center of this out them and on one of them… just cut out these lines…. The solid lines…
(Crosstalk)
What you do is you just take this out and slide the other into the center of the first one and connect them… You can see it’s interlocked. And then take the horizontal one and just push it in, slide it into place.
HP: So one of these is traditional and one of them is digital media?
LS: Yes, and the third Wheel can be anything you want. Whatever you want to focus on. If you want to focus on your strategy of creating events then create a Wheel just for events… all the different things you can do to promote that event. And then when you put it all together you can actually take a step back and look at your year’s entire marketing plan in a three-dimensional Wheel or Heart and turn it and see how many other ways you can connect your third Wheel with your first two.
Or you can just, as I suggested, lay them on the table side by side to make it a lot easier. The thing is that when you have these Wheels and you created a marketing plan based on this… now you have a piece of art that is actually a three-dimensional representation of your marketing plan. Unlike a report with graphs that sit in your inbox, you, your team, and your CEO can visualize your plan in three-dimensions and see it all day, every day.
HP: Right, right, right… That’s what I like. Yeah. And you walk past it and you sit there and you go, “Okay what do we need to do to promote this?” And you look at the Wheel and you look at all the things in there.
LS: Yeah!
HP: “What are we going to do for this?”
LS: You’ve got to do it anyway, so….but now you’ve got a piece of art that represents your plan… that you can refer to. That’s why this is so awesome!
Fini…
