In 1994 I had the opportunity to work on the first hotel company website, when we pulled together 64 pages of brochure-ware for Hyatt Resorts. At that point, keyword advertising was years away and it would be another five years before Permission Marketing would be published. As people started to think of what marketing would be like on the Internet, mass marketing was the paradigm they used, because that was what they knew.

Looking back 15 years later, our mid-90s view of Internet marketing seems primitive. My opinion: In the future, our current view of social media is going to look similarly primitive, and this time we'll get smart much more quickly.

Like early thoughts about Internet marketing, popular discussions of social media tend to use a mass marketing paradigm. "Wow, there are 250 million active Facebook users!" "Twitter grew 752% in 2008. Incredible!" People talk about Facebook and Twitter user numbers with the awe that is usually reserved for late-January new stories about the power of Superbowl advertising.

More of my opinion: The big numbers won't be the big story in the future.

Already, the best uses of social media are not the mass uses. (Who cares if American Airlines has a Facebook fan page?) The best uses are the micro uses. Example: My 8th grade class, the 1973 graduating class of Lake Bluff Junior High School, has coalesced on Facebook and we're having a reunion. Now that's cool. I'll bet most of you have similar stories.

We don't know what social media's most effective marketing uses will be in the future. But if you want to get a hint of what it will be like, here's my suggestion: Don't think mass marketing. Don't think of advertising-type metrics, such as reach, frequency, big numbers, and "cutting through the clutter." Think micro. Think relationships. Think of a customer saying, "What's in it for me?" not a marketer saying, "Cool, I have another marketing tool!" Think of customers talking with each other, not companies adding social media to their "marketing mix."

Executives feel a need to be "On Facebook and Twitter," as if being "On" these sites signifies that they are up to speed on the latest marketing tools. But being "On" these social media sites doesn't mean a thing. When your customers use social media to talk to each other about you ... now that means something.

[Read more by Steve at Yastrow.com.]

This may not be true for you if you're a timeshare salesman, a clerk in a retail store, or an airline reservations agent. But for most everyone else it is true.

Examples:

• You are an independent graphic designer and you meet someone at a party ... the sales conversation is successful if the future customer enthusiastically remembers the conversation, and goes to your website to check it out when he returns home after the party.

• You sell large software projects and you have finally been invited to meet the CEO of a company you are trying to sell ... the sales conversation is successful if the CEO tells his team he really likes you and your offerings, and tells them to move forward with you.

• You are a CPA, and you have breakfast with a long-term client ... the sales conversation is successful if the client shares his fears about his own business, and gives you the name of a friend desperately in need of your services.

The common thread in each of these examples is that your relationship with the customer was better at the end of the sales conversation than it was at the beginning. Successful selling is usually not about going for the close. It's about advancing your relationship.

Try it today ... don't go for the close!

[Read more by Cool Friend Steve Yastrow at his website.]

Each of those campaigns has dialed into the values of its market—those things beyond the given baseline expectations for fair price and high quality. Today's consumers are really looking through any superficial brandwash in search of recognition and appreciation for who they have chosen to be as people. It all boils down to social values.

Research cited in a recent GreenBiz.com article by Sarah Fister Gale confirms that the new consumer is sticking to his/her beliefs and social values:

The 2008 Good Purpose survey from public relations firm Edelman overwhelmingly shows that buyers plan to remain loyal to products that they perceive to have strong social value.

According to survey results, 68 percent of consumers say that even in a recession they would remain faithful to a brand if it supports a good cause; nearly seven in 10 would be prepared to pay more for eco-friendly products.

Now, here's the thing: a person's core beliefs or values are not gendered. He may buy Brand X because he loves its green approach, and she may buy Brand Y because it reflects her belief in community—or vice versa. Social values are being raised up; they are becoming more of a priority and something that all consumers are using as a filter in their very deliberate purchase processes.

In order to reach these people, marketers have to make sure their brands reflect what their customers really want from the values perspective. This is indeed a more challenging battle than traditional advertising, but brands don't have much choice in the matter.

Certainly, the women these companies have been serving have been nudging them toward this values-based exchange for years, but there seems to be that much more urgency now that both genders are more careful about how they spend their money in tighter times.

Traditionally considered to be peripheral and perhaps irrelevant, the topic of social values was avoided by many businesses—they stuck to the usual facts and figures rather than "dilute" their brand message with such nonsense. But, women and men both are now demanding more accountability on a broader spectrum of "attributes," and brands must identify and reflect their authentic values throughout to make an impression. If they do it well, consumers will—just as with the American Express, Kleenex, and Rockport campaigns—see their own values within and respond.

[With this post, we are joined by Cool Friend Andrea Learned, who also blogs at her own website, LearnedonWomen.com. She has a Manifesto, "Beware the Gender Trap," at ChangeThis, too.]

sallyhogshead Okay, the gloves are off and I'm ready for "Super Bowl Smackdown" - live commentary with @steveyastrow at #tpsb43 and www.tompeters.com

sallyhogshead Quite the collection of advertising clichés in StateFarm spot: faux press conference, dream sequence, celebrity, mis-direct ending.

steveyastrow #tpsb43 This Audi chase ad may be exciting, but it is confusing, over done, and ... it includes car crashes! Car crashes in a car ad ...hmm

steveyastrow Hyundai is taking some risks by having multiple messages tonight - their Assurance program and the car of the year.

steveyastrow Remember Max Headroom from the '80's? In the future attention spans would be so short that TV ads would be 1 second. Future = now

sallyhogshead @steveyastrow Steve: What's your take on a $3M media pricetag for :30 (or $100k / second) during a recession?

sallyhogshead Always surprises to see CMOs spend top media $ without top-shelf creative thinking behind it. This pre-game work is rather sub-par.

steveyastrow Yes, I can't even remember what ads I saw in the pre-game, and I'm trying to pay attention!

sallyhogshead On average, Superbowl parties have 17 people. Will Twitter lower that number, by giving people a virtual party?

steveyastrow Yes, the audience is 100 million people, but 97 million are dipping chips in guacamole right now.

sallyhogshead I don't care if the media is cheaper, it's still a waste to have lame ideas in the commercials.

sallyhogshead I don't care if the media is cheaper, it's still a waste to have lame ideas in the commercials.

steveyastrow Sally, my take on $3MM for 30 seconds in a recession: Customers are so scrutinizing right now, spending 3cents each on 100 million people is spreading yourself too thin. They won't pay attention.

steveyastrow #tpsb43 This Audi chase ad may be exciting, but it is confusing, over done, and ... it includes car crashes! Car crashes in a car ad ...hmm

sallyhogshead Audi spot is great because it's so YouTube-friendly- you want to watch over n over. Highly crafted for Audi consumer tastes. #tpsb43

steveyastrow #tpsb43 Yes, if Iwatched the Audi ad 100 times on youtube, I might get it .... if.

sallyhogshead Hold on, deja vu, are we seeing two time-compression-technique spots almost back to back (Audi/Pepsi)?

steveyastrow #tpsb43 The Doritos ad was hilarious ... but will be the classic, "Who was that ad for?" conversation at the water cooler tomorrow.

sallyhogshead Recent study stated that a single Superbowl ad generates more sales than 250 regular commercials. I bet more.

steveyastrow #tpsb43 Sally, so why is reaching 100 million people at one time a good idea? Seems like a mile wide and an inch deep to me

steveyastrow #tpsb43 Sally ... but what are "regular commercials?"

steveyastrow #tpsb43 The bigger the audience, the more diluted, the more people watching who don't care about your message ... very few sales being made

sallyhogshead #tpsb43 Huge disagreement: SB is the ultimate shared experience in USA. Its power isn't the TV buy, but in the social currency afterwards.

Continued reading Sally H. vs. Steve Y....

Posted by Erik Hansen |

Everything is different now.

If you think of it as a recession, you may be tempted to "hunker down" and wait for the economy to cycle back.

If you think of it as a recalibration, you will be motivated to focus on what you have to do differently, since everything is different now.

The way your business generates results is different, now.

Your customers think differently, now.

Your customers care about different things, now.

Your customers act differently, now.

Your customers may actually be different people, now.

Customers aren't disposable anymore; more than ever, you have to create sustainable customer relationships.

Everything is different now.

I'm posting this on January 7, 2009. One thing I'm convinced of is that the world I am working in today is different from any world I have ever done business in. The world has been reset. We can no longer look at the "LY" column on reports to use last year as a benchmark for what will happen this year.

(Please join me on January 9th for my free 2009 Readiness Teleseminar. You can register here. I'll address six questions that you must answer, to thrive in '09. Please sign up, and if you can't make it live you'll receive an audio recording after the event.)

[Visit Steve's website and share ideas at www.yastrow.com. See his books at www.yastrow.com/products.html.—CM]

We can't afford to be sloppy right now, in anything we do. We can't waste resources. We can't let customers, in whose acquisition we have invested considerable sales and marketing resources, slip away, believing that new customers will show up to take their places.

In this economy, customer loyalty is one of the most important variables that will affect our success. It will be increasingly difficult to find new customers who can become big customers, so we have to get the most benefit out of what we already have. But ... we also can't afford to be sloppy with our concept of customer loyalty.

In so many cases, companies mistake promotional bribes for loyalty. But the kind of loyalty created by this type of approach is fleeting, and defenseless against a better offer from your competitor. (And you can bet that your competitors will be offering richer deals in the near future.) This type of loyalty, which I call transactional loyalty, can temporarily steer transactions in your direction, but keeps you very vulnerable in tough times.

The kind of loyalty you want to create in these times is what I call True Loyalty. When a customer is truly loyal, she is not loyal to your latest promotional offer, or to filling out her punch card to get her 10th smoothie for free. When True Loyalty happens, the customer is loyal to you. More specifically, she is loyal to her relationship with you.

This is a big difference. If a customer believes she is in a "We" relationship with you, her frame of reference is not the latest transaction, but the entire history of her relationship with you.

Soon, here at tompeters.com and at yastrow.com, I will share my thoughts on how to create True Loyalty. For now, what do you think? How do you avoid transactional loyalty, and create True Loyalty? Is True Loyalty a key to thriving in a tough economic climate?

Now I want to rant about how the word "loyalty" has been kidnapped. Loyalty has been dislocated from its true meaning and is now used to describe programs and promotions, usually supported by sophisticated software, that encourage customers to buy from a company multiple times.

Hey, there's nothing wrong with multiple purchases, but return visits don't necessarily correlate with true, meaningful loyalty. This kind of tit-for-tat transactional loyalty can be fleeting. Purchase intent one week doesn't automatically lead to purchase intent the next week, if a competitor offers a better sale price or promotion. This is the kind of loyalty that can evaporate quickly when another company offers better incentives.

The sturdiest, most indelible loyalty is that which is built from a relationship, and not from bribery. When a customer's frame of reference is her long-standing, ongoing conversation with a company, and not the gamesmanship of which company is offering the best rewards this month, she will not be easily seduced by a slightly better offer.

Can you use points programs, punch cards and repeat purchase incentives in your efforts to create true loyalty? Sure, but only if these promotions happen in the context of relationship-building encounters with those customers. And, what's most interesting, if you can build true "We" relationships with customers, you may not need to invest as many of your resources in these programs. Your customers will have more powerful reasons to keep coming back.

So, what's happening in your company? Are you creating solid, relationship-based loyalty, or are you continually wooing your customers with the latest new and improved, bigger and bolder, see-if- our-competitors-can-top-this promotion?

(Related question: Are loyalty promotions becoming a commodity?)

Yes. These are all possible goals of sales meetings. But there is another goal that transcends all of these. The goal of every sales meeting—yes, every sales meeting—is to create a relationship-building encounter.

This is not what always happens in practice. Sales training has taught us the value of a solid, sequential sales process, where we have learned how each step in that process leads to the next step: The purpose of a cold call is to get a meeting, the purpose of the first meeting is to get a second meeting, and the purpose of the second meeting is to be invited to make a proposal, etc. Of course, these are natural steps in the sales process. But what happens frequently is that sales people are so focused on getting to the next step that they miss the chance to have a great encounter during the meeting they are in at the moment. (It's also very obvious to a customer if a salesperson is more focused on what they can "get" from this meeting than on having a good meeting at this time. They can see the salesperson thinking ahead.)

What great salespeople know is that the sequential sales process is subservient to the current meeting. They know that the best way to get to the next step in the process is to create a relationship-building encounter in the present. (I’ve got a free ebook, Encounters, available by subscription at my website, www.yastrow.com if you want to learn more about creating relationship-building encounters.)

When you focus on "now," the future will come of its own accord.

I have asked this question in many workshops and speeches lately. Audience members have given very rich answers. "It's like a flow." "It's learning from each other." "What I say depends on what the other person says."

In his 1930 essay, "Dialogue," Martin Buber distinguished between genuine dialogue and "monologue disguised as dialogue," which he as "characterized ... solely by the desire to have one's own self-reliance confirmed by marking the impression that is made."

Continued reading Stop Telling Stories...

Posted by Steve Yastrow |

More or less took the words out of Steve Yastrow's mouth. (And words with which I agree heartily.)

What does this mean to your business? It could be terrible, but it doesn't have to be.

How can I say that?

For the last few months, I have been asking workshop audiences the following questions:

1. What percent of your customers are giving you all the business they reasonably could?

2. What percent of your referral sources are giving you all the referrals they reasonably could?

The answers to these questions have stunned me, because they have been so low. I knew they would be quite a bit lower than 100%, but I've found that most executives estimate that only somewhere between 0 and 25% of customers are giving them all the business they could. The numbers are even lower for referral sources.

So, let's say that the economic downturn has softened the market for your products or services by 10—20%. Yes, that's a lot. But it pales in comparison to the 75% of the business you are missing if your current customers are only giving you 25% of their potential business.

Here's the cold, hard (but potential-laden) truth: For most companies, the untapped latent profit in their existing customer relationships is much greater than the magnitude of our current economic problems.

The downturn is real. But so is the amount of business you are missing from your current customer relationships. How do you develop this potential with your existing customers?

Customers who believe they are in "We" relationships with you will give you a larger share of their business. They are willing to pay more, and they are less likely to leave you for a competitor. On the other hand, customers who are in "Us & Them" relationships with you are more likely to spread the business around among your competitors, and will also be more likely to bolt to the competition for a lower price. If you create "We" relationships with your customers, one relationship-building encounter at a time, you will go a long way towards making up for—and maybe even surpassing—the effects of the soft economy.

Tom Peters on Yes, You Are in Sales! from Tom Peters on Vimeo.

[If you'd like a transcript of Tom's message, you can download a PDF here.]

But, before my sentencing ...

I do an insane amount of shopping on the Web (I'd bet I go online 30-50 times a day if I'm not speechifying), so does my wife, for any damn thing-category you can name, from clothes to food to books-DVDs-song downloads to trips to used stoves, etc, etc. Moreover, her home furnishings company does 50% of its sales on the Web, and the share is growing. For me, tompeters.com, ad-free incidentally (I'll explain if you'd like), has become my best marketing tool ever, ever, ever.

But neither my wife nor I is a banner-ad user, and I admit to harboring suspicions that Google is over-priced. I am at work on a Japanese garden at home (or will be when the weather allows, a jillion Vermont days from now). Among other things, I-we want a little bridge over a wee stream, the sort I saw a picture of somewhere, Web, mag, whatever. Now what? Susan's and my "now what" is 100% Web, but 0% banner ad. And, indeed, God bless Google. I simply typed in the search box "build or buy little bridge to traverse narrow stream," or some such. As I recall I had 87,000 choices, a surprise, but no surprise, given the # of words I used. Obviously, most were useless-unrelated. But after 15 minutes, and digging waaaaaaaaaaaay down beneath the top 10 or 20 (I always look for stuff deep down just to see what's there), I had a nice starter list of perhaps 20 leads; better yet, my mind, re possibilities, had been stretched beyond recognition. Now to me (old, 65) and my wife (none of your business), that was truly wondrous—100% use of the Web, circa 2008. But not banner ads.

With examples such as the FedEx "Dean, I need you to continue not living up to your résumé" ad, which you might have seen, author Richard Rapaport shows how pervasive this trend is. "Take the culture's most facile minds, challenge them to pry cash from an increasingly tapped-out audience, and what do you get?" Rapaport asks. "Commercials built on sadism, on derision, on one-upsmanship—in a word, 'snide.'"

Rapaport is right. This trend is bad for business. So why does it happen?

First of all, let's not credit ad agency creatives with being "the culture's most facile minds." The advertising that major agencies practice is still based on the flawed notion that "brute force" wins the hearts, minds, and wallets of consumers. Snide is used because agency creatives (and their complicit clients) mistakenly believe that their goal is to "cut through the clutter." No, the goal is to create ads that blend with all other contacts the customer has with the company doing the advertising, in order to create a connection that encourages the customer to be more involved with that company and its products.

If these minds were so facile, they wouldn't miss, so completely, the point of what they are doing. Or, in a more cynical vein, we could say they know what they are doing, but are more interested in creating clever advertising than in helping their clients' businesses.

Advertising is a sick business. And it isn't just for the oft-mentioned reason that "consumers are using so many more media outlets—the Internet, hundreds of TV stations, thousands of publications."

It is because people just don't buy this way anymore. Customers—your customers—are scrutinizing, savvy, discerning, and self-reliant. They look beyond your promises, and consider every interaction with your company as a chance to evaluate you.

Snide advertising isn't only snide. It is anachronistic.

I disagree with just about all of this news. In this post I will answer the seven most common reasons people think Super Bowl advertising is a great marketing opportunity:

* It's the only time you can reach so many people at one time.
* A Super Bowl advertiser gets extra value because people are interested in being entertained by the commercials.
* But it worked for (insert company name here).
* They must know what they are doing if they are spending so much money.
* You have to be there if your competitors are.
* It's ok if you're a big enough brand and can afford it.
* It burnishes a company's image, and can even increase a stock price.

If you've purchase a 30-second spot for this year's game, prepare to be upset with me.

Continued reading Super Bowl Rant...

Posted by Steve Yastrow |

"By the early 21st century companies won't need to deal directly with customers anymore. Robotic computers, called CRMs, will handle all customer relationships. And, in fact, two companies will be able to create relationships with each other without any human contact, as their computers court each other to build a lasting friendship."

In 1973, delegating customer relationships to computers would have seemed ludicrous. 1973 was also the year Woody Allen introduced us to the "Orgasmatron" in his movie Sleeper. The idea that computers would some day substitute for human interaction was the stuff of satire.

But ...

Continued reading The Future Is Now...

Posted by Steve Yastrow |

As I left home in the north suburbs for day one of a two-day conference, I threw a change of clothes into the car. A late-afternoon snowstorm was forecast, and I wanted the option to opt out of a hellish commute home. At about 4:30 p.m., I exercised that option and booked the Palmer House on Hotwire.com for $93. That's a really low price for a great hotel. Unfortunately, they felt the need to remind me what a low price I paid.

Continued reading Transaction vs. Relationship...

Posted by Steve Yastrow |

Here's the rest of the suggested definition:

A relationship is an ongoing conversation with a customer, in which the customer never thinks of you without thinking of the two of you.

Comments?

What is a customer relationship? I will suggest a two-part definition, but I would like to offer it one part at a time. Here's the first part:

A customer relationship is an ongoing conversation with your customer ...

Comments?

In an age of interchangeable products and easily duplicated services, customer relationships have become one of the most powerful competitive advantages available to a business. Do you agree?

Continued reading Relationships: A Competitive Advantage...

Posted by Steve Yastrow |

Sentence #1: "The Wal*Mart Era, the retailer's time of overwhelming business and social influence in America, is drawing to a close."

(You know my biases ... I'm not surprised. "Lasting" is a chimera.)