CharlieMoger.com

Marketing and advertising advice for owner-operated businesses

What can a Yahoo! shift teach you?

Radio use is declining. Newspaper circulation is in free-fall. Television ratings are collapsing. There is a common-thread to these three story lines. It’s not the internet. And, it carries a profitable lesson for you.

Shrinking audience share isn’t confined to traditional media. Yahoo! is shuttering its paid search to concentrate on display advertising and develop more and better content. Speculation by the internet cognoscenti points at this change as more evidence that Yahoo! will outsource its search functions to Microsoft’s Bing. But, that’s not the story that matters where you’re concerned.

Yahoo! bungled their early advantages by failing to generate sufficiently compelling content. As Google PacManned one user-driven experience after another, Yahoo! reacted by taking their eye off the content ball. The rest is a matter of journalism.

Compelling content is the missing ingredient in television, radio, and newspaper. It’s what Yahoo! is now scrambling to generate.

How compelling is your content?

Droning on about your company’s experience, your selection, your staff, your sales isn’t compelling. Content becomes compelling when it matters enough to become more interesting to your customer than what they’re already thinking about. All the search engine management you can buy won’t net conversion results if you don’t give visitors a meaningful payoff for their search.

Compelling content centers on your customer’s hopes, dreams, and felt-needs. Does yours?

Measure your content’s focus using the We-We Monitor from Jeffery and Bryan Eisenberg‘s FutureNow, Inc.. Enter your URL and company name, click submit, and pucker up. The Customer Focus Calculator‘s results will point you in the right direction. What you do with this new awareness will determine what a Yahoo! blunder teaches you.

Was this helpful to you? I’d appreciate your feedback.

Do big budgets beget better ads?

You have no idea how lucky you are to work within a limited advertising budget. More money doesn’t buy a better message. In fact, I’d wager the contrary is more often true: awash with money, the urgency of making each penny count matters less. Seemingly untethered from budgetary limitation, AT&T’s advertising braintrust birthed the following convoluted say-nothing ad:

..

What are they advertising?
What are we supposed to do or believe?

The lockout attempts to mop up the mess by saying, “your windows stuff goes with you.” (I suppose that includes viruses.) I’ve watched it a half-dozen times and still don’t get it. Is it an ad for windows mobile as a platform? Is it an ad for the phone? Is it an ad for AT&T’s mobile service?

Creative’s cardinal rule: one ad, one message.

This one is a train wreck of messages: platform, product, and carrier. The more messages you mash into one ad, the more muddled the message. Instead, keep it clean: Say one thing. Say it well. Shut up.

High-dollar ads like this fail because creativity hijacks the message and focus is lost. Bottom-line sales impact, meanwhile, gets shunted to the back of the bus right next to the customer’s true felt-need.

The ad also fails to show one application that isn’t already mobile without Windows Mobile. Even if you don’t tote a Blackberry, Android (Google), or iPhone, you can twitter, email, surf, etc. on most phones. What’s my plus-up for getting Windows Mobile? Beats me. I only know what the ad told me (or didn’t).

Focus where it matters

Because you probably can’t afford life-sized dancing icons in leotards, you wouldn’t get distracted creating a message like this. You’ll just have to settle for focusing on telling a compelling story based on the genuine felt-need of your customer in a way that more directly leads to a sale.

Those are the breaks when you advertise in the real world with a real budget. And, I’ll bet you didn’t realize it was a lucky break at that.

Social media success tastes like bacon

Justin Esch and Dave Lefko love bacon. This is a story of how conversation and social media transformed their lives. It’s a business development success story that will give pause to even the most jaundiced observer of social media.

bacon salt site

On the fence about Facebook and Twitter?
Here’s a dollars and cents example to ponder.

“Wouldn’t it be great if there was a powder that made everything taste like bacon,” Dave jokingly asked Justin one night over a beer. The two, employees of a high-tech company, took what must have seemed the next obvious step: check it out online.

A survey of MySpace users uncovered over 35,000 interested bacon taste lovers. Their experimentation and exploration (online) ultimately resulted in a product now sold in stores nationwide. Eric Qualman, in his book, Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business, says their initial research practically pulled the product to market,

“They began reaching out to these people to gauge their interest in Bacon Salt, and not only did they find interest, they started receiving orders when they didn’t even have a product yet!”

I’m skipping a ahead (read their whole story here), but the point remains: social media transformed idle curiosity into a profitable business and made their bacon savoring dreams come true. Adding to the improbability of it all, Justin and Dave got their start-up investment when his 3-year old son Dean won $5,000 on America’s Funniest Home Videos. See for yourself:

A lesson —

What’s bacon have to do with your business?

What Justin and Dave demonstrate goes way beyond start-up success. It is a clinic on how your business can tap social media to build trust, credibility, rapport, and relationship. Consider this:

  • Their idea was authentic; they made an honest inquiry
  • They isolated and tapped into a genuine felt need
  • They crowdsourced development soliciting feedback
  • They generated demand and leveraged it at retail
  • They continue providing updates to fans: recipes, new products, etc.
  • Their transparency cements customer allegiance

What part of this can’t you do right now?

Opening yourself up to dialog has some risk; customers may vent or complain. Chances are, they’re doing so now somewhere anyway. Providing a forum and constructively responding not only neutralizes damage, but creates transparency. You also create a place to get input, share new products, and positive experiences. It’s just a matter of organization and focus. I can help you make it happen. Let’s talk.

One more lesson from the bacon boys:

There’s another tasty lesson for you in Justin and Dave’s success. They’re not just successful, they’re happy to share. How much more transparent can you get than explaining point-by-point how to do what they did; reaching up with one hand while reaching down to lift up others.

Justin and Dave are my kind of crazy.

Bungling burglar bagged by social media; who’s stealing your customers?

An Italian robbery victim sat in stunned disbelief. When his computer screen flashed to life, it displayed Facebook’s familiar wall. Thing is, this 52 year-old baby boomer isn’t among the world’s 300,000,000 Facebookers. Turns out the 26 year-old Gen-X’er who robbed him is. And, he stopped in mid-theft to post some updates to Facebook. Police saw the errant thief’s name on the screen and simply went to his house, finding the thief and his ill-gotten goods.

Where it a country, Facebook would rank fourth in the world ahead of Mexico, Japan, and only slightly behind the United States. And yet, countless business ignore it? Ditto Twitter. Social media is redefining how people live. Shouldn’t it redefine how you reach them?

This video, sent by my partner Roy H. Williams sent this Monday morning, is a clanging bell of dawning reality for those still nestled in an old-think advertising dream-state. Grab some coffee. Watch it. Grasp the historic pivot-point on which we stand. If these numbers don’t leave you slack-jawed, hit the snooze button and continue Rip Van Winkling. On the other hand, if they sit you up double-latte awake, call me. I will put them to work for you.

Grooveyard of posts past