Marketing Dissector

The Tao of Twitter [review]

If you're a B2B marketer, and you're not following Mark Schaefer's {Grow} blog and community, you should. Likewise, if you're active on Twitter and are wondering how to make all that time you're spending not only fun but productive, then grab a copy of Schaefer's new book The Tao of Twitter. You'll be glad you did.

Tao is an appropriate term for what Schaefer gives us in this book. It could have been "gestalt," but tao is probably more familiar to a wider audience. I like to think of Tao as the Twitter guidebook. The author literally walks us through his Twitter experience over the past few years: getting on, learning the basics, experimenting, sorting out unanswered questions, trying to keep up with changes, thinking through implications and discovering the meaning and lessons of this new way of communicating. Throughout the book, Schaefer continually asks, "what does this mean for marketers?" and gives his assessment.

Rather than lecturing, finger-wagging or boasting, he reports on his Twitter experiences casually and informally, like you would conversing with a friend. He exposes his goofs and hesitancies and offers sage advice based on learning by doing. Twitter is "learn-as-you-go" for everyone, but Schaefer's book tells us how he did it. If I'd had this book in '09, it would have greatly reduced my "time-to-effectiveness" as I fumbled around on Twitter.

As with his blog, which has gathered a big following in a short time, his writing is concise and clear. It makes for a quick and engaging read. Not only that, it's an accessible read. In my case I read the Kindle version. On my Droid. Mostly during down times at my daughter's soccer games and kung fu lessons. I love printed books--they take up enormous space in my office--but the mobile format allowed me to read Tao during a period when I really had no time at all to read a book.

Here are a few key takeaways from Tao for engaging with people on Twitter in ways that may help you develop your business:

• The 3 key elements of business benefit are targeted connections, meaningful content and authentic helpfulness (the latter being the secret sauce of Twitter)
• Being helpful fuels business serendipity. (How about "good deeds lead to good leads"?)
• Twitter is fundamentally a person-to-person medium (not broadcast)
• Start out small, and focus--a little effort goes a long way over time
• Choose your followers just as carefully as who you follow
• Be patient, plant seeds and allow them to grow (or should I say "{Grow}?)
• Where else can you, in effect, "pre-populate business relationships"?
• Once you get the hang of it, Twitter can be an amazing business networking tool, almost like no other

Anyone who has been active on Twitter for a while will recognize the paths Schaefer goes down and identify with his story. By its nature this book may be most valuable for Twitter newbies who are just getting started. (It's best to hire your sherpa at the beginning of your journey vs. three-quarters of the way through.) But even for very experienced veterans, there are insights and tips here that may be quite helpful--especially for marketers. Regardless of your Twitter skill level, most readers will find at least a half dozen insights and tips that are fresh and new and make it well worth reading.

As Schaefer says, on Twitter "There is a majestic random synergy that holds the potential to impact your life daily ... if you know what you're doing." So what are you waiting for?

The Double-on-Sax Effect: my secret formula for creative collaboration

My friend Tony and I have worked together for years. During this time he’s worn many creative hats: researcher, copywriter, content advisor, video producer, event stager and of course story teller. For the most challenging and subjective creative assignments, like naming a company or product, we’ve learned that we always produce better results if we collaborate. I always assumed it was a simple case of “two heads are better than one.” But recently Tony shared an insight with me about our collaboration that made a light bulb go on.

His insight was about the strengths we each bring to our creative “odd couple.” He is primarily creative and secondarily analytical, and I am the opposite. This was news to me. But as soon as I realized he was right, I began to wonder, “What is the advantage?” Is there an insight here that helps explain how much better we are as a team than as individuals?

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EVEN A PRESIDENT can double on sax (right). President Clinton at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1993. Photo Courtesy of William J. Clinton Presidential Library.

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As a result, I developed a theory I call the "Double-on-Sax Effect," which is a way to think about creative collaboration. (“Double-on-sax” is musician-speak for being able to play one or more instruments in addition to your primary one.) The idea is that if two people collaborate on a creative task, they may produce far better results if each has a secondary skill that complements the other’s primary skill. In effect, the skills are amplified. Here’s a simple way to look at it. Imagine the creative task expressed as distance. Say the distance from problem to satisfactory solution is 50 feet. If each of the collaborators is capable of advancing 30 feet, you quickly know two things. First, neither can reach the goal alone, but second, by working together, they just might succeed.

A possible lesson from this is somewhat paradoxical. Collaborating with someone fundamentally similar to yourself might still yield a better outcome than not—so long as there are some ways that you differ—even if the differences seem secondary or unimportant.

Our experience suggests that tight pairings or small groups of people tag-teaming a creative problem may produce better outcomes than say, the crowd-sourcing approach. With crowd-sourcing there’s a feeling of collaboration, but in reality you're still picking a winner Darwin-style from individual contributions. This is distinct from the wisdom of crowds concept, in which the crowd’s individual contributions are aggregated into a collective judgment in the form of a group rating, review or decision.

 

Among tech start-ups there's a common practice of naming the company or product by getting all the engineers together to brainstorm over cold pizza and diet cherry coke. In my experience, it always generates good vibes and but never a good name.  HR win, marketing fail.  (For more on this, here's an interesting post by @ProfessorGary.) Part of the reason might be because instead of collaborators with different, complementary views, you have lots of people with essentially the same mindset.  That doesn’t expand the consideration set.

If you're interested, there's a great book that leaves my amateur theorizing behind and delves into the science: "Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration," by Dr. R. Keith Sawyer, a professor at Washington University. In it there are examples of the power of collaborating in small groups, including the story of how "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Chronicles of Narnia" were not so much the result of authors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis working alone in their lofts, but of the weekly bull sessions they participated in at Oxford in the 1920s. They were more like collaborators and strongly influenced each other’s work.

It’s always difficult and subjective to judge a piece of creative work, whether it’s art or commerce, and whether it was the product of one person or a team.  But there are plenty of examples, in many fields, of outstanding collaborations.  A great recent example is this TED performance of Halvorsen’s “Passacaglia” by violinist Robert Gupta and cellist Joshua Roman (embedded video).  Listening to their performance makes it easy to understand how, despite their great individual talents, a solo by either would be so much less than the duet.

So take a look at your team. Or your extended team. And if you find anyone who "doubles on sax," whose skills or experience or viewpoint complements your own, why not try your own experiment in creative brainstorming? You might be in for a pleasant surprise.

"Defy Gravity: Propel Your Business to High-Velocity Growth"

Let me say right up front that I was blown away by Rebel Brown's new book, Defy Gravity. It's fresh, timely and very relevant. Ostensibly not a book “about marketing,” nonetheless it’s so packed with business advice that it manages to speak directly to marketers on many of the tough, strategic challenges that keep us up at night. 

The theme of Defy Gravity is about how to make business course corrections and it offers actionable advice on how to do it. That’s why the “flight” metaphor works so well to bring the point home and also tutor us in the practical aspects of corrective measures. Each chapter or section is followed by a specific to-do list that summarizes the strategic advice and how to act on it.

The author employs both passion and logic to make the case for business change--but does so in a much more positive tone than most business books. This isn’t the same run-of-the-mill “do-or-die” change-mongering that’s all around us. There are no throw-the-bums-out undertones here, but rather a cool, mature assessment of reality that shows us how to recognize when a company and its target markets are parting directions. For example, it points out the inherent problems with relying too much on data alone to drive strategy, with the admonition, "figures lie and liars figure." This isn’t “let’s teach the CEO to throw the bull,” it’s more like “take the bull by the horns.”  You could think of it as down-home, kick-ass cowgirl business acumen.  Without underscoring it, Rebel tells us in effect that reacting and adapting well to change that’s imposed on us is often what matters.  Not the measly amount of change we might be able to impose on the world ourselves.  Food for thought? 

What else is unusual?  Here’s more:

• There are no top 10 lists of shallow, pathetic tactics that hardly ever apply.
• There’s no narcissistic name-dropping to prove she consults with the rich and famous (even though in some cases she has).
• It walks the very fine line between advice that is specific enough to understand and act on—yet general enough to be broadly applicable. This is tough to achieve. Few business books even try let alone succeed.
• So clear and plain is the author’s writing that it’s lacking in buzzwords, slang and jargon. The index has no listing for best practices, social media, revolutions or branding (personal or otherwise), but you will find listings for eye openers like blowhard employees, ugly baby syndrome, brainstorming, just-say-no-triggers and keepers of the truth.
• It manages to carry off its reliance on the flight vs. gravity metaphor throughout the book without getting tedious or having to force-fit it into contexts that don’t work.

There is great advice, informed by her 20-plus years of business consulting experience, and there’s total candor when she has no easy answers.  Not only does she recognize that so much of great business strategy (and therefore, great marketing) is situational, but she often offers conditional, practical advice likely to match various situations.

If you’re a marketer who strives to contribute at a strategic level to your organization, you MUST read Defy Gravity.  You’ll learn more about business and marketing fundamentals in this one book than in any 10 books about marketing.  It might have been titled “Dogears Not Dust,” because when marketers see it on their shelves 20 years from now, that’s what they’ll see: a book that’s been used a lot--not allowed to gather dust in the corner. 

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The citations below are gold nuggets from Defy Gravity. I believe these are all what I call marketing fundamentals. Which means have all the tech revolutions you want—these babies are NOT going to change. (Kind of like gravity.)

“Our markets are dynamic. We aren’t.” p. 19

“If a customer perceives a competitor to be superior, they are.” p. 68

“The fact is that numbers are not always objective. Raw data may be representative of what happened in the past, but people are the ones who perform analyses. People tend to spin numbers to get the results they want.” … Even if the raw numbers are accurate, derivatives are based on assumptions we make.  If we have a faulty assumption, we have a faulty derivative.” p. 76-77

“Market experience trumps numbers every time.” p. 79

“Big bang changes wreak havoc on our ability to grow.” p. 89

“I don’t believe any of us clearly see our reality in the same way as our audiences.” p. 148

“Align[ing] your current value with your market opportunities … requires situational analysis. Every strategy is unique. That’s why creating a growth strategy is such an art. There are no set rules.” p. 157

[DISCLOSURE: I have become friends with Rebel on Twitter. We have never met nor done any business together.]

"Inbound Marketing: Get found by Google, social media and blogs"

As everyone knows, Inbound Marketing is a phenomenon. A force to be reckoned with. A major marketing industry trend. It's also: a point of view, a life preserver, a treasure map, an emergency beacon, a "university" and a host of other things. But most of all, it is a really good idea for educating new marketers and old, pro, semi-pro and amateur, about some new digital marketing practices they need to understand and know how to use.

That is Inbound Marketing: the idea. It's BIG. In fact, (B2B marketers, take note: there's an important lesson to follow here...) it's SO big that it's much, much bigger and more significant than its creators HubSpot will ever be. That's not a knock on HubSpot, but an observation. Truly successful market categories always far outlive their earliest ties to a single vendor--even when said vendor invented the category.  

Given all the above, one has high hopes for Inbound Marketing, the BOOK. Authored by HubSpot founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, it frequently does a wonderful job tutoring us on their brainchild. (In his book blurb Seth Godin called it a "trustworthy primer.")  On many subjects, it manages to do well what many marketing authors/bloggers fail to do at all. It tells us in very simple terms what we must do, and why and how. Without resorting to overly-technical gobbledygook (to borrow a favorite term from foreword writer and HubSpot advisor David Meerman Scott) or requiring prior knowledge of digital marketing, Inbound Marketing does a nice job of explaining the basics in plain, simple language.

That's the good news.

Unfortunately this book is also marred by some pretty odious flaws. I really wish this were not the case. Strong tutorial material on digital marketing best practices is really hard to come by. There's a LOT of material available now that everyone's a publisher, but there's still a shortage of high quality. Most of what's out there is pretty mediocre.

What should have easily been a 5-star rated book earns at best 3-and-a-half stars. This could have been such a great book, if only they'd left out the:

• merciless carping against traditional (outbound) marketing as if there were no difference between marketing best practices of 2005 vs. the 1960s. This reveals the authors' unfamiliarity with the history of the marketing profession, as does their mistaking PR for advertising (erroneously contending PR is one of the interruption-based forms. Entire books have been written about how it is not.);
• pointless name-dropping of pals, digerati, founders, VCs, business authors, academics and media;
• hype-drenched predictions of world domination like "the next 50 years will be the era of Inbound marketing" ... really, FIFTY years?;
• constant self-congratulatory references to HubSpot products and services;
• utterly ridiculous and out of place attack on the PR profession that shows their complete lack of understanding of PR and its past, present and future role in content creation (and therefore, in helping readers "get found");
• frivolous, often sophomoric recruiting and hiring tips; and,
• more 'out-with-the-bad/in-with-the-good' references than a CPR training class for lifeguards.

What's wrong with their view of PR? "PR agencies have two core competencies. They have a Rolodex of relationships with print media people and they are efficient at interrupting print media people in an attempt to get your new offerings in front of them."  I know a lot of PR people who'd be surprised to learn that we must resort to a Rolodex because we can't manage databases, that we never engage with digital journalists, online editors, bloggers or industry analysts--only "print"--and that the only basis of the relationships we form with media people is how "efficiently we interrupt them"--not the value, insights, content, access, stories we bring them or how helpful or responsive we are. For all Halligan and Shah know, we're all wandering around with Speed Graflex 4x5 cameras and wide brimmed fedoras sporting little cards that say "Press" tucked into them. Gimme a break!

And more: are PR agencies useful? "It depends," they say, on your company and the agency. OK. How do you decide which one to hire? "Run their web site and their clients' web sites through the WebGrader and choose the one with the highest score." And how do you measure their performance?  Just two things: site traffic (as in volume) and Google rank. That's it. (Sounds more like SEO tactics than PR and influence to me.)

The marketing worldview here reflects a shocking lack of understanding of the fundamentals of influence--digital or otherwise--from self-proclaimed world-beating marketers. As much as Inbound, this is the age of Content Marketing. After all, content is the mother's milk of Inbound Marketing if there is any. Yet from reading this book one learns virtually nothing about content creation, curation or distribution (aside from relentlessly beating the "remarkable" drum, that ubiquitous swiss army knife of a 2.0 term). We get no definition of remarkable and no advice on how to create "remarkable" content. In fact, no substantive advice at all on creating content. This makes Inbound Marketing a fishing manual with no discussion of bait. The gap will widen as more and more people come to realize (as I have) that Content Marketing is the dog and Inbound is the tail--not the other way around. 

Although the quality of the tutorials, tips and tool recommendations is very high, the advice and detail level in Inbound Marketing is definitely beginner level. I commend the authors for staying focused and resisting the temptation to dive into more advanced material that might have made the book less accessible for beginner readers. That was appropriate.

Experienced traditional marketers who know enough to detect and ignore the BS that didn't belong here can learn a lot from Inbound Marketing. If you're willing to sidestep the occasional opinionated drivel, you'll find that for the most part, the Inbound tutorial material here is 5 stars and worth the read. The trouble is, if you know that much, maybe you don't need a primer in the first place. Naive readers and marketing newbies, on the other hand, may be left with a view of the marketing landscape that's current but highly skewed to the HubSpot POV and totally dismissive of all traditional marketing practices as long dead branches that need pruning. That would be their loss since it's not true.

In the inevitable second Inbound Marketing book, we should hope for more in-depth exploration of intermediate level tactics, and a lot less of the preachy birdcage droppings and self-promotion that significantly detracted from an otherwise really useful book. 

Weak writing: the Achilles Heel of thought leaders

[Note: the following post is a commentary, not a book review. We'll post a book review of Engage! at a later date.]

Last week I started reading Brian Solis’ new book, Engage!  Well, truth be told, I only read Chapter 21 of the book, because I haven’t bought it yet—being so behind in my reading.  One of the social networking vendors made the chapter available to download.

Imagine my surprise and disappointment when the very first sentence stopped me dead in my tracks. Submitted for your approval, the opening sentence of Ch. 21 of Engage!:

“Depending on the drivers for engagement and the state of adoption in the Social Web, our first steps might require either the creation of a fresh social media plan or one based on the state of the existing program and the assessment of what is currently in motion, what’s lacking, and what it should include.” 

Say what?

Here’s an attempt to rewrite:

“Our first step would be to create a new social media plan, or one based on the strengths and weaknesses of current activities, depending on the level and quality of Social Web engagement.”

But even this rewrite bothers me, since his distinction between a “new” plan and one “based on the strengths and weaknesses of current activities” is a non sequitur. Whether or not the plan is based on current social outreach activities, in both cases it would still be new.

Other problems:

1. The “it” in “what it should include” is obtuse.

2. “Depending on the drivers” does not state a condition: is it that the drivers desired are not present? Or is it that unnamed drivers A are more desired than unnamed drivers B? In other words the language does not tell us whether the qualifying statement is looking for a met/unmet condition or is about a stated goal.

3. “State of adoption in the Social Web” on first reading sounds like it’s about the general state of usage of the entire Social Web, rather than a specific subset concerning the party in question.  And once you get past that snag, there’s a second one: it does not answer or specify adoption “of what”?

Unclear writing leads to unclear communication.  At its worst, it also leads to unclear thinking.  If your word choices lack precision, the chances increase that your thinking is muddy or flawed.  As a writer who struggles with my own run-on tendencies, I’m sympathetic when writers grappling with complex, difficult topics resort to them. And I'll grant that modeling new (and sometimes unprecedented) types of social opinion influence patterns is complex.

But it’s totally unacceptable and counterproductive when writers subject the reader to sloppiness like poor word choice, run-ons, imprecise terminology and faulty constructs. Weak writing fails to communicate the author’s ideas well enough to be understood. Unfortunately for the author, it also may flag other flaws. The reader first notices the problem with the writing and then perhaps, with the idea itself.

Brian Solis has contributed a lot to the theory and practice of PR as it intersects with social media. He deserves a lot of respect even if one doesn't always agree with him. Some of his ideas are genuinely leading stuff (like the Conversation Prism, which, although it seems unfinished to me, was original and a great start on an important idea). He's one of the most prolific bloggers and weighs in on many important topics. He's a thought leader on these subjects if anyone is. But his writing, IMHO, has never been his strong suit. It's too bad really, because his work would be more effective, more influential and more important if it was.

It’s unfair to rip Solis, or any author or book, on only a small sample. Let’s just say there’s more where this came from. On the writing spectrum from the extremely terse/Strunk-and-White to the extremely verbose/John Updike, Solis' writing is so far into Updike territory that he may as well move to Ipswich. Unfortunately, like most of us he is not blessed with Updike's unique gifts for deftly handling rich, complex, multi-textured prose or exposition. (This is quite apparent to any reader of his blog who cares to notice.) This book--or chapter at least--definitely should have been turned over to a ruthless copy editor.

So much for the genteel, now to be blunt:

What happened at John Wiley & Sons? Did they lay off all the copy editors?

Foreword by Ashton Kutcher: what--PeeWee Herman was unavailable? Any author who turns to @aplusk can only be after one thing, and it's not gravitas.

(Think anyone will still invite me to write sycophantic book blurbs?)