Shake The Tree

Looking at the following facebook page – basically waiting up late tonight so that I can give my facebook page a custom URL.

The username needs to be 5 plus characters, or I’d be in competition with my boss for facebook.com/seth.   But the fascinating thing to me, is how the facebook PR team took a plain old feature, one that should have been there from the beginning, and have turned it into an event.

This could have easily been inserted as a feature that just appeared, ready to use, it’s not a huge departure from how people will use facebook.  Nobody looks at the url bar after they login, anyway, and everyone goes to their homepage, so it’s not really much of a feature.

Except for the fact that we’re allo meglo-maniacs, who are desperate to be unique, and the Facebook marketing team has done a top-notch job of tapping into this, and making folks scramble to ‘grab’ their facebook name.

1. They’ve set up a counter page – (seen above) so you can see how long you’ve got to wait.  Delayed gratification, check.
2. You can’t grab a name until midnight.   If it’s worth waiting up for, it must be good.  Anticipation, check.
3. Bribery of the press.  The oldest trick in the PR book – if you want ink, give a writer something free.  Exclusivity, check.

Well done, Facebook.  Now lets hope that your IT staff has been as diligent as your marketing folks, because you’re about to get slammed.

Lately there’s been a lot of hullabaloo on whether newspapers can rescue their dying print divisions by erecting subscription barriers to their online visions. Will readers subscribe?  How much does the reader value the journalistic integrity of these publications over their blogging brethren, and will that be enough to support the massive editorial departments they have?

I’d make an argument that this is, in fact, the wrong argument. The problem is, of course, the first penny problem.

The First Penny Problem.
This is a constantly overlooked maxim by marketers – that the biggest hurdle to getting a customer is getting that first penny.   We are trained to think about what our product or service is worth – is it $9.95 a month, $199.95 for a product, or $68,000/year for a B2B service.  The thing is, engagement with the customer hinges on that single moment of ‘yeah, I’m in,’  This tipping point has so much more with being on board than some sort of rational monetary valuation they’re willing to pay.   It’s not whether the article is worth $0.49 or a subscription to the gated content is work $199/year. It’s the first penny. Convincing someone to sign a contract, hand over their credit card, or get on board for a subscription to a magazine is a much greater hurdle than the associated monetary cost.

The AOL example:
In the late 90′s, I was able to experience direct marketing nirvana, with, of all places, AOL.
I was deeply invested in the consumer electronics industry, and more than any other customer, AOL knew how to forcast.  They’d order 1,000 pieces of a product, do a test, and then order 89,452 more. They knew, from their statistical profiling, how many would sell through to their end customers.  Why were they so damn accurate? Because the biggest barrier to entry was gone.

AOL already had the prospect’s credit card number, they billed the dial up service to it every month.  All the prospect had to do was click ‘OK’ – these orders had an extraordinarily low barrier to entry.  Instead of 18.99, their next bill was 72.95, and that was it.  Since this payment barrier was eliminated, AOL could get a pretty idea on how many people would buy strictly by how compelling the offer was.

AppStore lubrication hardware.
Another example?  The iPhone.   Once you’ve entered your credit card into an account, all you needed to do is click ok – but you really needed to be motivated to give that first cc #.  My Credit Card bill is riddled with incremental charges that would never be there if I needed to engage with the brand for payment individually.

The Book of the Month Club model for online publishers
So what’s the lesson the newspapers should be taking?  Move your customer along in value buckets that divorce the payment method from the incremental charges, and give them something really valuable and with low risk for that first penny.  Then upsell.

1. Give them something of value for free – as long as they provide you their email address.
2. Once you have their email address – get them to contribute, or become a ‘vested’ member.
3. Then offer a can’t miss opportunity – a la the old book of the month club, where you can cancel at any time, even delay payment up to a year, but need to provide your cc# to get the gated content.
4. Then you’re in.  The first penny is overcome, as they’ve given you much more, their commitment.
5. Continue to offer low hurdle ‘click to add to your account’ up-sells, content, alerts, etc…
6. The pennies, and dollars, follow.

What’s your biggest obstacle to getting a new customer to commit?  And can you solve it with the first penny principle?

Usually it’s along the lines of – “I can’t understand why anyone would want to (tweet / post on facebook / join a linkedin grou).   What a waste of time.

I hear this a lot – and I can’t say as I blame the people who are saying it – from the outside these social media networks look like a colossal time sink, with very little ROI.   There are an awful lot of unsubstantiated fad marketing tactics, and you’d be crazy to not be skeptical.  My response is usually something along these lines:

“It may be asinine to ‘tweet’ that you’re heading to the bathroom.  But if you’re Charmin, it’s a great opportunity to interact with your brand.”

I got this full force while I was doing some research for marketing automation providers.  This is an amazingly complex undertaking – with suprisingly few areas where you can compare vendors.  In any case, I happened to post on my twitter account that “Evaluating Marketing Automation solutions at 11:15 on a Friday night. WTF is wrong with me? ”    My boss reads my twitter account. 

Next Monday – I got three calls from marketing automation vendors.

If you’re skeptical about social marketing working for your organization, do the following:

1. Head over to search.twitter.com
2. Type in your brand
3. Add the Feed to your favorite RSS reader.
4. Repeat a couple of times for keywords of interest for your product.

If you watch these feeds over a couple of days, and aren’t convinced you need to be interacting in social media, call me.

I came to a realization recently while I was working on a project for Conductor on the natural search visibility of the Fortune 500 – All marketers should learn and use mySQL.

Ok, not all of them.   There are a certainly marketers who don’t regularly deal with lots of data – whether that’s leads, or research, or a need to do some data analysis that is beyond Excel’s capabilities – but I can’t think of a lot of scenarios that wouldn’t benefit from some serious data manipulation.

I do sympathisze with those who rely on others to do their analysis – but et me make the following arguments on why it’s critical that a good marketer can roll up their sleevs and dig into the a pile of csvs or premade databases.

1. If you’re outsourcing your data analysis to an IT department, they’re going to give you what you ask for.  And not a lot more.  And probably not very quickly.
2. It’s hard to know what you’re looking for – and even harder to be inspired on what to look for – if you can’t take a look at the way the data is structured, you may be missing some intesting and valuable insights.
3. The very process of creating your own databases, and mining valuable business information from them expands your horizons on what’s possible.  Trust me – you will aim higher.

Now I’m not making an argument that all marketers need to be database experts.  You really shouldn’t be worried about performance, reliability, or redundancy.  If you’re worrying about these things – call in your IT department.  But next time you’re thinking about picking up the phone and asking an analyst for some info – try it yourself.

Getting started:

The easiest way to jump right into it is to download mySQL and run it on your machine.  (A development machine if you have one).  It’s free, and supported by the open source community.   There are two pieces – the mySQL engine itself, and the Query browser – the GUI that you’ll use to load, manipulate, and yes, query the data.

mySQL download
W3Schools mySQL tutorial

And as a final piece – you get major street cred from the ‘real’ developers once you start throwing ORDER BY arguments when you’re talking at the water cooler.

I got this Direct Message about 9 hours after I followed someone on Twitter recently.  Let’s call him “Twidiot,” for short.  You’ll see why in a second.

I first found Twidiot’s stream when he followed our corporate account, @conductorinc, – and when we followed him back, we received a personal response.   “Thanks for following! Looking forward to getting to know you. How’s business?”   Wow – what a nice thing to say to someone who follows you.  Well done, Twidiot.

Now, this is a person I’ve bumped into at a couple of search conferences, and I wanted to check and see if he was coming to New York for SES.   I’m a big believer in sending messages from personal twitter accounts, and using the corporate accounts for more of an alert channel.   So since I wanted to send Twidiot a message,  I followed him with the @dotterer tag.  If he’s interested in chatting, he can follow me back – and I’ll reach out.  If not – I was interested in seeing what he had to say anyway.

So I get a follow back on @dotterer, and send a direct message asking Twidiot if he wants to meet in NY.  We’re having a networking dinner, and I figure I’ll invite him.  Message sent, and back to the marketing automation project I’m working on.

Several hours after that, Twidiot reaches out to me.  “”Thanks for following! Looking forward to getting to know you. How’s business?”  The SAME response as to the corporate account, but on a nine hour delay.

Ok, so I get you’re busy and all, but seriously, either just have the bot say “Thanks for following, ” and get on with it, or don’t have a bot.

But if you’re going to add ‘How’s business’ – you better respond to the DM.  Otherwise it’s just bad personal branding.  I’ll run into this person multiple times at conferences again – and every time I see him I’ll think ‘phony.’

Thanks for reading, looking forward to reading your comments.  Do you have similar stories?