Experience and Synergy
There was an interesting blog post entitled “The Social Media Country Club” the other day, that got me thinking. If many people, experienced in connecting and growing an audience online, are not marketers by education or previous direct work experience, does this mean what they have to say is invaluable?
The value of information, of opinion and points of view needs to be evaluated by everyone. It is a caveat emptor (Let The Buyer Beware) world more than ever before, and there seem to be fewer trusted filter points, so how do you know what advice any guru spouts is worth the weight or price of their book? How do my clients have any idea that I know what I am talking about?
After all, I have a law degree, not a marketing degree. I read voraciously, and through talking with experts and research for the LD Podcast, I have expertise regarding how kids learn and process, and how attention works (and doesn’t).
What I will tell you is that at its core, marketing is about capturing the attention of an individual and making the case why your product or service is the best, or should, at least, be on their choice list. Books like “Made to Stick” by Chip & Dan Heath, lay out a great formula, based on their expertise on what makes urban myths so memorable, on how to make your information equally as engaging. It may not come strictly out of a marketing class, but ou can bet all that information is useful, no matter what field you’re in.
When I teach students math as a tutor, when I talk to my kids about something important, and when I have speaking engagements in front of adults, I want my message to be compelling. Whether it’s why you need to be quick with your times tables and why you will use math every day in your future, why cleaning up your room and doing your homework has some larger, valuable purpose, or why social media may or may not be a great addition to your business strategy- I need to get that message across so it resonates with my audience.
My experience may not be directly in purchasing ad space in magazines. But from law school, I do know the importance of making your case. You need to tell your client’s story, using compelling facts, and make the judge and/or jury see your side of the case as not only more compelling, but more just- building up your case with support from outside resources, previous cases and pieces of information, to come up with a conclusion that benefits your client. This, I would argue, is marketing at its core.
In marketing and public relations, your client has to be able to make their own case. They have to know what makes them best and special. Why should someone care about my business over the one down the street? What can I do, or what am I willing to do to differentiate myself from the competition? How can I make choosing me over them an easy and logical choice? Clients need to know their own story, have their own elevator pitch- have a core sense of who they are and the personality of the business or corporation, because that’s what is engaging.
Law school teaches us that corporations are legal persons. They are “straw men” able to do business separate and apart from the individuals that make the company function, day to day. And the people who make up the company need to treat the company and shareholders as if they were real people, looking out for their best interests, as they would their own. What most of us involved in online business and marketing are simply trying to say is that you have to find the voice of this straw man, and be able to deliver his/her messages to the public.
The internet has changed competition because for many products, the shelf space is now infinite. If I can’t find what I want in a local shop, I can probably find it online. I can find rare items, discontinued items, virtually anything I want, if I’m willing to pay the shipping.
The infinite variety of choice makes differentiating between the hundreds of soups and spaghetti sauces alone a complicated experience. (There’s a great TED Talk by Malcolm Gladwell explaining the advent of the plethora of choices, in part due to Howard Moskowitz.) While this means we can all choose our favorite items, it also means drowning in choices about which jar do you prefer today, whether the new and improved flavor really still mets your preferences, and the like.
This means that differentiating yourself from the competition is becoming more and more about making an emotional connection to a consumer, and less an intellectual argument based on quality and price alone. The emotional connection will bond someone to you, you become a friend and a reliable source. Without a connection to the Straw Man and his Voice, you are just another jar on the shelf, largely interchangeable with the one next door. The quality is acceptable, the price is within the band consumers are willing to pay, but to stand out, you have to be really different and special.
Standing out isn’t easy. It can be risky. What if your voice isn’t popular? What if you choose one, but you can’t back it up? If you say “the Customer is always right” that means you have to let the customer be right even when they are SOOO wrong, or even crazy. Voices that seem unauthentic, that seem forced, or don’t match up with your product fall flat. Voices that match the product or service delight. You have to find that core voice.
And even worse, everyone in the organization has to buy in to this. It has to become corporate culture. Because otherwise, one bad experience with no effective resolution can equal a world of pain and bad press for a company. United Airlines experiences this recently by not resolving a musician’s request to compensate him for having broken his guitar .
This led both to the musician getting satisfaction from United, but it also put him on every news show, a viral video on YouTube. This simple video and song, which the artist told United he would do if they couldn’t resolve the situation, appeared one year after the incident. It was so wide spread, now almost everyone, as well as Google, knows about United’s issues with transporting guitars, and got people to question whether United would take care of their stuff, or compensate them if something bad happened.
Knowing something about how the internet and reputation work, stitching together past cases with present situations, knowing how to grab people’s attention and sustain it are skills that are not solely the property of marketers and business schools. Knowing about marketing ideas of any shape and size is something that everyone needs to know about, because we all have to build our case of why we are important, why we are a good choice, and why people should believe us.
In the end, synergy, coupled with experience, is probably closely equal in importance to niche knowledge. We can learn a lot from people outside our own niche, but we have to also apply this in a bespoke, case by case manner to our own situation.
As a friend commonly says “This is what worked for me. Your mileage may vary.”
