by Gary Mintchell | Jan 31, 2011 | Marketing
It’s January 31. Do you know where your New Year’s Resolutions are? Gone? Time to dream about what you’ll do in 2012 already?
(I don’t do them anymore. There are a few lifestyle changes I envision–improve fitness and drop some weight, for example–but I don’t write down a list of resolutions. I just have a vision of where I’m going.)
Last week was another one of those “visit the office” weeks. That means very little work gets done as I spend time in meetings. Late nights and early morning meetings ruin my discipline.
Readers of this blog come from a variety of professions and backgrounds. Some of you are marketers. I know my friend Walt Boyes sometimes posts to his “PR Wall of Shame.” Well, how would you like to be on the PR Wall of Shame of a blog that reaches something like a million readers? Someone hit a nerve with TechCrunch recently.
It’s a problem we face in our niche, too–press releases that appear to have information, but don’t in reality. In this case, a company’s PR people sent a release saying the company grew by x%. Well, percentages tell nothing. A percent is a ratio–it doesn’t have context. We get these all the time. Analyst firms are especially good at this. If there is no number or context, then it’s really worthless information.
Please, give the readers something. They know when it’s just general promotion without meaning. Readers are smart people. They’re hungry for meat, don’t give them a Twinkie.
I’ve written on marketing before–for example try this Marketing 101 piece.
by Gary Mintchell | Jan 25, 2011 | Marketing
Seth Godin draws marketing and brand management tips from the career of the man who started the fitness industry.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 23, 2010 | Marketing
Congratulations on the five-year anniversary of the Padilla Speer Beardsley blog on PR, The Lead. Keep it up, Matt.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 15, 2010 | Marketing
The buzz on social media keeps growing. Asok scored a book deal this morning. He’s the engineering intern on Dilbert. As the Pointy-Haired Boss was blathering on about customer non-service, the engineering team is tweeting his comments. Dilbert’s company hired a social media marketing manager. Marketing people evidently are under increased pressure to find new ways to promote the company message. Like converts to a new charismatic religion, they generate lots of energy.
People want to communicate. “Blogging” was developed merely as a method using the power of Web technologies for an individual to publish her thoughts. Others wrote articles speculating about just what it was–but that’s all. I can publish my thoughts on manufacturing, society, innovation, soccer…and need not be a magazine editor or famous author.
Then the energy took off–can we share photos (Flickr), videos (YouTube), short thoughts (Twitter), locations (FourSquare). It’s all about self-publishing and sharing.
Now for your advanced marketing course using social media–think back to “The Cluetrain Manifesto.” Markets are conversations, they said. Customers want to be treated like adults as part of the conversation, not to be talked at like so much that passes for marketing communications does.
Many rush out and start a blog. Start a YouTube channel. Get a twitter account and hashtag search term. Man, we’re in the forefront now. Some large companies have one person on twitter. Some have none. Some don’t know if they have customers and prospects who read their blog, check the LinkedIn or Facebook group.
Like everything, if you want it to work, you have to work it. A blog takes time to develop. I probably wrote for six months before many noticed. I’ll shortly complete seven years. Some tips:
If you are thinking about tools to promote an event, don’t start a blog three months before kickoff and expect to have a huge impact. Find a good writer with a clear voice. Start writing about cool things happening in the company, market, among customers, developers. Write several times a week. Promote the blog on the company home page. Link to it on your external and internal communications. Write informally with lots of information–not in marketing speak. Don’t be obnoxious. Try to engage your reader’s attention.
If you are doing Twitter. Sign up lots of people. Get 50 internal people. Get the important media people to recognize it. Get 100 customers. Teach them how to tweet. How to search. What those darn hashtags (for example coming up are #EMRex and #OpsManage–they are not case sensitive) are for.
Get people to put photos on Flickr and tag them to your event.
Most of all, like all marketing communications–be consistent. This is a year-round endeavor. Just giving a shot once in a while–like consumer coupon marketing–won’t give you the juice you need.
Take, for example, Jim Cahill at Emerson Process Management and the proprieter of the Emerson Process Experts blog. Last year his group put out clear instructions about using twitter during Emerson Exchange. I must have gotten at least 50 new followers from that. And, we could keep a conversation up during the event–cool things we saw, cool topics to hit, where to go. This year, he’s building on that success with even more instruction.
Check this out from a recent blog essay:
Visiting the Emerson Exchange Live and Virtually
For those who can (and can’t) attend this year’s Emerson Global Users Exchange in San Antonio, Texas, Jim Cahill is conducting a Twitter 101 Live Meeting session on Friday, September 17 at 10am CDT / 15:00 UTC. Click to join the meeting.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 11, 2010 | Automation, Marketing
I enjoy the high tech press (used to be called blogosphere). Sometimes I get news. Sometimes entertainment–abeit unintentional, I’m sure. There’s a heck of a flap going on about whether Craig’s List should censor certain kinds of content. Should prostitutes be allowed to advertise–even if it’s illegal? Should your buddy down the street solicit for sickening acts of inhumanity? The “Wild West” of the Internet culture still wants anonymity and the “freedom of speech” (wish these dunderheads could/would read the acutal words and meanings of the Constitituion) which they interpret as the right to say anything I please about anyone on any subject and you have to listen to me. Check this post for example.What about responsible speech? There comes a time in the progress to maturity in a human’s life when it’s not “all about me” but we discover there are other people. Most of society seems to be functioning at the level of 2-year-olds rather than 12s or something.
Now the report that Google Reader is down 27%, so RSS is dead and everyone gets all their news on Twitter. These people have taken the newspaper reporter’s skill of extrapolating a single data point into a huge distruptive trend. The best I can tell from statistics on this blog–which are a poor as about all Web statistics–is that about 20% of readers read from feeds. The rest visit the Web site from once to several times per week. I have been getting news (not just blogs, but The New York Times, Infoworld, CNET and others) on a feed reader since 2003. On the other hand, I sometimes go to an aggregator such as Google News or Yahoo News, to get a summary of general news. I’ve tried going to automation company Web sites for news, but that’s too hard to do. Mostly I rely on calls and press releases for industry news, that I can then filter and report back to you.
Some writers talk about getting their news on Twitter or Facebook. I get almost no value from Twitter “news” feeds. A few people whom I trust send me news links on Twitter. Sometimes when there is breaking news, you can follow developments on Twitter. I’ll be both reading and posting later this fall at the four conferences I’ll be attending–Emerson Exchange, IOM OpsManage, Rockwell Automation Process Systems Users Group and Rockwell Automation’s Automation Fair. You can watch for my updates at www.twitter.com/garymintchell.
I’m still having some problems understanding automation companies on twitter. I’d love to use my lists and searches to get news. Too many, though either send way too much stuff so that I can’t filter the new from the mundane, or they re-send old news or simple promotional items. Perhaps we all need to work on upgrading our use and expectations of twitter?
Facebook is for news from friends–or at least all the people whom you have friended. I have received only a little value from that one. Mostly learning things about nieces and nephews that I’d rather not know 😉
What do you do for news? How do you consume FeedForward, Automation World, general news, industry news? What can I do better to link up? Let me know.
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by Gary Mintchell | Aug 16, 2010 | Marketing
Actually, the headline could be a statement or a question. So far, manufacturing has been leading the recovery–such as it is. But the recovery is weak, and manufacturing activity remains fragile. However, I’m seeing signs of optimism for long term growth as I focus on leadership.
I live near Dayton, Ohio, so I get lots of news from there. Plus, at one stop of my career I sold automation and machinery to most of the automotive plants there. Most of them are gone now. They were GM, then Delphi, then spun into a dozen directions (but mostly winding up in Mexico and China). One plant was owned by Chrysler making air conditioners for cars. Like most of the vertically integrated component plants, it didn’t worry too much about sales or efficiency. Then came the brutal restructuring of the automotive industry when the top manufacturers decided that they would make only core competency products–bodies, assembly, engines and transmissions. The rest could be farmed out.
Management and labor in those plants were unprepared. The best Delphi leadership could do was lead the company into bankruptcy and splinter the company. Meanwhile, this ex-Chrysler plant got new leadership in both management and union, was sold to Behr, and Sunday, the Dayton Daily News reported that the plant has been adding customers and employees. (It’s a newspaper, so you may have to register to see the article)
Then I spotted this article about automotive manufacturing in the US showing a turnaround. And much can be attributed to tossing out the inbred car-culture guys and bringing in fresh thinking.
I sort of juxtapose this with the oil industry right now. Without a doubt, BP needs drastic changes at the top. Current leadership has allowed a lax environment for safety–and who knows what else. Plus the industry faces challenges both from the standpoint of declining reserves of petroleum and the politics of oil, which is unstable to say the least. Shell has shown signs of some broadened leadership thinking, but then it regresses at times. They had best take a lesson from the automotive companies.
