Marketing Dissector

When is ignorance bliss? When it helps you ask the right questions.

One day, while writing a press release announcing a new software product, I learned that lack of knowledge made me the most qualified for the job.

This was many moons ago while working for a hot software startup. The product was an assembly language utility (or “assembler”) that translates code to give hardware-level instructions to the microprocessor. 

You practically had to wear an Intel bunny suit just to think about this stuff. It made your brain hurt.

I was interviewing the product manager and struggling with the subject. I wasn’t a coder at any level, beyond playing with a few lines of Basic.  I couldn’t visualize how the process worked or what the software did for you.  In the middle of this interview the product manager said something that stunned and educated me about what I was attempting to do. 

He said, “Steve, you’re worried that you don’t know anything about assembly.  But that’s what makes you qualified to write the release.”

To which I replied, “Huh????”

He repeated.  “That’s what makes you qualified.”

On further investigation, I discovered what he knew that I didn’t.  This guy was very smart.  Before joining my software company, he taught English as a second language to Taiwanese students. In Taiwan!  Here’s how he saw it:

• He knew about assembler and about the product (obviously since he was the product manager);
• He knew a great deal about translation, which, as it turns out, is what assemblers do (and also why someone with his background was hired for the job);
• He knew I had no prior knowledge or experience with assembly language programming;
• He knew the trade press editors I was writing for also rarely had hands-on knowledge or experience with assembly language;
• He knew I had basic journalistic skills and experience to ask questions and capture information and report it coherently IF I understood it;
• He surmised that my lack of knowledge would cause me to ask just the right type of questions to act as a surrogate for my audience;
• Being a decent writer himself, he knew that my asking the right questions was the key factor in gaining the kind of information I needed; and,
• He reasoned that I would probably present the product information in ways the editors would understand better than anyone else at the company, who all knew more about it (and therefore wouldn’t ask the right questions). 

So those were my “qualifications” for the writing assignment.  What looked like none actually were some.  I couldn’t see it until he pointed it out with clever irony.

I’ve learned a lot from some great product managers over the years.  But this had a big impact on me.  I never thought lack of knowledge could be an asset.  But it can.  Anything that helps you ask the right questions, capture the information you need and tell the story in a way that makes sense in context to your intended audience is a very important asset for content marketers.

That’s what makes it fundamental.

"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. 

Fresh from the content pastures

NYU Professor Jay Rosen posted a fascinating interview yesterday at Read Write Web with Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt.  The subject was, of course, "content farms" and the question of whether or not they in general or Demand Media in particular are filling up the Internet with crap content. Rosen's questions were pointed but fair (he avoided using the term "Demonic")--and Rosenblatt's answers were surprisingly plausible as he defended his company.

It went something like this (100% paraphrased):

Q:    "Word has it you run a sweat shop and abuse the cows."

A.    "Not true. Our content cows are contented.

Q:    "Word has it you sells lots of flavors of milk.

A.    "That's right. We research what flavors people want and then produce them."

Q.    "Is your milk safe? Word has it you cut corners in the production process. What does that do to the quality?"

A.    "We only sell safe milk. We only produce milk that people want AND that can be produced within our low cost structure. And we have a lot of QA and quality control measures in place."

Q.    "Word has it your milk business is a slave to the search engines."

A.    "No. Our milk can be found by search, but also by individual human referrals (like Bit.ly) and social search as well."

Q.    "Any interest in getting into the news business?"

A.    "No, there's too much competition--too many news farms. Plus we haven't figured out a way to produce news within our low cost structure."

Given our previous post ("The abundance of scarcity"), we think the interview is a must-read. (Thanks to @ConversationAge for tweeting this.)

Don't be a white paper barracuda

We've all experienced it ... the bite of the white paper barracuda.  You do some research on the Web and find a handful of articles and white papers that might offer some useful advice.  So you download them, and BAM!!  Faster than Emeril can toss pepper, some marketer yells at his telesales team, "Sic 'em!"

Back in the staid and leisurely '90s, telemarketers would make follow-up calls like this after a semi-respectable period of time had elapsed.  Three, five, maybe even 7 days after you download their paper.  In any event at least long enough to read the bleeping paper!

 Not any more.  Now they're pounce calls.  As soon as the bits hit your desktop, some sort of Web-enabled Rube Goldberg contact management machinery kicks into high gear, slaps outbound callers on the butt and hands off a robo-dialed phone connection.  And you know how these call scripts go .....

"Hello, Mr. Parker.  I see that you've recently downloaded Worldwide Amalgamated's white paper on the strategic advantages that only left-handed, bifurcated red-and-yellow blinking KVM status LEDs can bring.  As the global leader in the LHBRYB KVM LED market, we're constantly trying to help our customers with the most advanced solutions.  As a matter of fact, we happen to have a team of 30 pre-sales engineers in your neighborhood as we speak, so we were wondering if you'd like to sign up for a pilot project at the low, low price of $90,000 ..."

"No thanks.  I've only had your 36-page white paper for six minutes.  Why don't you let me read it first?"

And so it goes.  Have you noticed that as the economy has gotten worse, that the callers' desperation levels get higher and the lag times shorter?  Maybe Marketing Vox needs to follow a new metric? 

"White Paper Barracuda Latency."