PR 101

I get an email from the friend the other day, asking about particular social media site. My friends will often ask me which sites I recommend or what I think of a particular site.

Well, as I confessed to my friend, I had never heard of this site. That got me thinking. It seems like new sites are popping faster than dandelions in my lawn in June. But is each of these sites necessary? If someone did a business study of every social media site out there could many of them make a case for their existence?

Obviously, I am active user of social media. I am a social media consultant. I blog, I tweet, I post on Facebook, I use Linkedin incessantly and I am moving more and more onto YouTube. I can make a case for all of those sites. A large part of their appeal is that they are the biggest and easiest to use (more about that second point later.)

I also am a member of Orkut and I just joined a Chinese site called Ushi. I joined Orkut because it has a large number of users in South America and India. Ushi is self-described as the Chinese Linkedin. I do not currently do business in any of those places. But there could time when I do, so I want to have a presence there.

The key to all these sites is simplicity and ease of use. I don’t have to do much to interact with them. Which is good, but I am very busy. The less time I have to spend getting the maximum benefit is what I look for.

I also belong to Plaxo and Xing, but I am not sure why. I really don’t get much out of them.

Frankly, I think I am connected to enough sites. I don’t need any more sites. Yet, I keep getting invited to join others – a couple everyday. The latest is Facebook’s BranchOut. I joined it because I was curious, but so far I see no value in it. It doesn’t do anything that Linkedin or a regular Facebook doesn’t already do.

That’s my complaint about many of the newer sites. They are just duplicates of what’s already being done. Yeah, they might a couple of their own bells and whistles, but not enough to make them significantly different.

I am all for competition if it improves things, but I don’t see any improvement coming out of any of these. They are just not unique. I think this is an area that pretty much been covered.

It kind reminds me of television. ABC has “Dancing With the Stars,” so Fox comes out with “So You Think You Can Dance.” How many cop and doctors shows are on network television. It is all about being a copycat. Eventually, the market gets saturated.

People keep talking about the new Facebook or the next Linkedin. But the sites that might beat those are going to be something entirely new. They are not going to be clones of what already exists.

The newer sites that have taken off, Groupon as an example, did something new.  I belong to Groupon because I reap the benefits.

As long as I am ranting here, I have another beef about the new sites. There are just to many hurdles to join most of them. You want me as a member – make it simple. I think Groupon took me about a minute to join. Not so most of these new sites.  Name, email address, and a password are all that is needed. I will decide if I want to post a profile or a picture. It takes too much time. Yet, they ask for a lot of information. It is not worth my time to supply it.

When the dandelions take over, I pull them out by the roots. When I get site requests, I just ignore. It’s the best of both worlds.

This happens often to everyone in the agency business. You walk into the first planning meeting with a client just after the contracts have been signed. You have an overstuffed bundle of charts and information under your arm, plus a PowerPoint presentation on all of the things you are getting ready to accomplish

Right after the welcomes and introductions are completed, you get ready to start the presentation. But before you can say a word, the CEO or CMO looks at you and says: “we want to triple our sales within six months. We expect that your marketing will do that for us.”

That statement makes your stomach jump your throat. Your heart starts trying to beat its way out of your chest. There’s enough sweat coming off your body to rehydrate Death Valley. You panicked mind asks what the hell just happened?

Well, what happened is you didn’t do a sanity check with your client. You did nothing to manage that client’s expectations. Here’s what you should have done.

The first we at JJC Communications LLC do after signing a client is do a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Trouble analysis. It is usually a called SWOT analysis. Such an analysis is not that hard to do.

The Wikipedia entry best explains what is a SWOT analysis:

The aim of any SWOT analysis is to identify the key internal and external factors that are important to achieving the objective. These come from within the company’s unique value chain. SWOT analysis groups key pieces of information into two main categories:

• Internal factors – The strengths and weaknesses internal to the organization.
• External factors – The opportunities and threats presented by the external environment to the organization.

The internal factors may be viewed as strengths or weaknesses depending upon their impact on the organization’s objectives. What may represent strengths with respect to one objective may be weaknesses for another objective. The factors may include all of the 4P’s; as well as personnel, finance, manufacturing capabilities, and so on. The external factors may include macroeconomic matters, technological change, legislation, and socio-cultural changes, as well as changes in the marketplace or competitive position. The results are often presented in the form of a matrix.”

We usually schedule one for a Saturday. It has to be done when there are no other distractions. It can get pretty intense. There is a lot of discussion and a lot of back–and-forth.

This is often the first time management has sat down and examined what they are doing. As that television commercial goes, this is often an aha moment. That CEO or CMO realizes that sales are not going to increase astronomically in the first six months of a marketing effort.

We are now adding something to the mix, something I suggest all of you out there do with your clients. We now do a Political, Environmental, Social and Technical, or PEST, analysis.

My thanks to Laura Schmitz, business development manager at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Small Business Development Center for teaching me about this. As a plug, I highly recommend if you live in the Milwaukee area and are considering starting a business, avail yourself of UWM’s Small Development Center.

What a PEST analysis does is tell you and your client about all those factors you have little or no control over. You want to know what these factors so you don’t waste your time on them.

Again because Wikipedia summarizes it better than I can, here’s what they say:

• Political factors are how and to what degree a government intervenes in the economy. Specifically, political factors include areas such as tax policy, labor law, environmental law, trade restrictions, tariffs, and political stability.
• Economic factors include economic growth, interest rates, exchange rates and the inflation rate. These factors have major impacts on how businesses operate and make decisions. For example, interest rates affect a firm’s cost of capital and therefore to what extent it grows and expands.
• Social factors include the cultural aspects and include health consciousness, population growth rate, age distribution, career attitudes and emphasis on safety. Trends in social factors affect the demand for a company’s products and how that company operates.
• Technological factors include technological aspects such as R&D activity, automation, technology incentives and the rate of technological change. They can determine barriers to entry, minimum efficient production level and influence outsourcing decisions. Furthermore, technological shifts can affect costs, quality, and lead to innovation

After the analysis is completed we create a plan. Of course, there are other factors that go into a plan, including market research, and analysis of the competition’s strengths and weaknesses. But SWOT and PEST (readers and insert pun here) are the most important. Do those two, do them well, and you will find you manage client expectations.

One of the key rules of marketing is never, ever, get into a fight with a client or customer. Don’t complain about them, don’t denigrate them and especially don’t say anything bad about that they are likely to find out about. After all, would you do business with someone who was rude to you?

My wife and I recently had an experience that drove that point home. It was a small incident involving a surly clerk. However, the same thing could easily happen to your business. In that case it might not be such a small incident. It could cost you a major customer. That is never a good thing.

Let me explain. My wife and I are wine aficionados. Recently we were at our favorite wine store, picking up an order and buying some wine for my wife’s book club. While we there, my wife wondered if they had more of really good red wine we had recently purchased. Neither of us could remember the name. But we knew it was a red and we knew it had a snake on the label.

So while I went to get the pre-ordered wine from another part of the store, a clerk headed off to search. While he was looking, my wife was one aisle over. As she browsed, she could hear the clerk complaining. “Why don’t people know what the name of the wine they are looking for,” the clerk said. He went on in this vein for several minutes. Mind you, he wasn’t muttering. My wife heard him quite clearly.

He never did find the wine, which wasn’t really that big of a deal. We knew it was a shot in the dark. Now, the manager apologized, and asked us  to call when we had the name so he could make sure he had the vintage. His attitude was much different from the clerk’s. That’s how you should handle a customer’s request.

I didn’t find out about this clerk’s complaining until we were in the car. Frankly, his attitude bothered me. That is not how you deal with customers. You do not verbalize your feelings in any way. You go out of your way to fulfill their requests. That is true whether you are a mom and pop store or a multi-billion company.

Before someone out there gets on me for not understanding life in retail, I should tell you my first job where I got paid a regular wage was in a grocery store. As I have written before store owner John Fanning drilled into us that the customer is always right. There are no exceptions to that rule.

I also worked as a bike mechanic a few years ago. People seemed to trust the mechanics more than the sales people. So we did quite a bit of selling. We always gave honest answers and advice no how silly question might have seemed. We knew that customer might be buying a high-end bicycle. The cost of such a bike could easily be over $3,000. We did not want to do anything to affect that sale. Those sales paid our salary.

So let’s blow my spouse’s scenario up a bit. Instead of a wine shop, she is a buyer for a major corporation. Her company is creating a second product line. It’s needs a customized widget, so it calls the company that had been supplying its widgets for decades. Since this is a new product, the specifications are still somewhat fuzzy.

Instead of getting the help she needs, my wife gets complaints from the supplier’s sales manager. The part is too difficult to make, or it will months to design and produce. That delay with the throw the buyer’s production schedule way off. Not a good thing.

Without naming any names, I know of companies that have run into this situation. What do you think they do? Of course, they find another supplier.

Sometimes the supplier make it even worse by complaining about it in a public way, like that wine store clerk did. That’s really dumb. Now, not only is the company likely to lose a customer, that customer is going to tell others what a bunch of jerks run that supplier. Probably more customers and sales lost. That means less money in the till.

So, if you have issues with a customer or client, go in the closet, close the door and scream. Just make sure the room is soundproof.