Dance With Strangers

It’s event season for most B2B companies, particularly in the technology world. In the next six weeks I’ll be going to a bunch of shows for BreakingPoint, mainly to demo our cyber simulation capabilities to folks. As you prep for your upcoming schedule of events how are you telling your community that you will be out and about? Couple of suggestions:

• Blog about the events you are attending, why and what you will be doing at the event.
• Set up Twitter searches for the show names or hashtags, connect with people talking about the event.
• Post events to LinkedIn (groups and their actual event feature).
• Send out an email to segments who may be attending certain shows with an offer (we have a super cool t-shirt).

If you don’t tell people you are going to be someplace, don’t be surprised if they fail to show up.

Last night it finally happened, the Dell Inspirion that I had been using for the past six years (not to mention three house moves) gave up the fight. First off, this was a solid computer. Used for nearly every facet of my life during the past six years including:

• Partitioned web server when I started my own consulting business in 2004.
• File server for 100+ GB of pictures, music and video, including a huge growth in files with the births of two sons (‘06 and ‘08).
• Accounting system for the entire family.
• Gaming system before I bought a Wii. My wife and I spent many an hour playing Civilization I, II and III on this piece of hardware.
• Home office computer part deux when my wife started to work from home after our move to Austin.
• Learning platform as I played around with education myself on the innards of computers, programming, HTML/CSS and networking.

Alas, all good things come to an end. The research towards a new computer begins today, but I’m looking for suggestions from all of you, who know me fairly well at this point. Tell me what computer would work best for my family, here are some critical points:

1. I use a MacBook Pro for work and love it.
2. My wife has a separate Dell for work now and she loves it.
3. We need a central computer in the house to serve as a primary system to hold all of pictures, videos and music for networking throughout the house.
4. The computer does not necessarily need any “Office” applications.
5. I need the computer to be partially partitioned as a web server to host my blogs, including this one and several family blogs.
6. I would like to start doing the family video editing on the home computer, whereas today I use FinalCut on my 15″ MacBook Pro.

What say you loyal reader?

What is the one habit you can’t kick? You have one; at LEAST one. Want to know one of mine? I have to drink two cups of coffee in the morning and then one diet Coke with lunch and then one more coffee at 4pm. There you go, I’ve included a habit with my obsessive compulsive disorder. Habits come in a variety of flavors, ranging from innocent to life-threatening.

Habits are often placed in a negative light, and in most cases rightfully so. Yet as a B2B marketer one of your goals is to create habit-forming campaigns in order to lead generation and cultivation. Why do you use drip email? Why do you execute webcasts on a monthly basis? Why are advertising buys predicated on daily, weekly or monthly runs? The list goes on and on, but ultimately you should be planning out your activities so that you can take advantage of the natural habit behaviors of humans, which I assume your customers are ultimately, until the robots take over.

The first time I came across this concept was after reading Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore, a terrific look at how marketers ignore this natural human instinct. Using habit-based marketing techniques is more than simply throwing out materials on a regular basis. Let’s look at five keys to creating habits through your marketing in order to generate more and more qualified leads.

1. Be Regular–put out content on a regular basis.
2. Be Different–use different platforms to put out the content, not everyone likes eMail and not everyone knows what RSS can do.
3. Be Consistent–your company voice should have a consistency throughout the different content and throughout the year.
4. Be Creative–encourage resourceful design to make emails easier to read, use audio/video to make more personable, etc.
5. Be Useful–don’t put our content for the sake of the first four points above. Before you send anything out ask, “Will this help my customers?”.

It’s time to introduce habitually good marketing to your audience.

Conversation is defined, in many dictionaries, as the “informal interchange of thoughts, information, etc., by spoken words; oral communication between persons; talk; colloquy”.

Communication is defined, in many dictionaries, as the “imparting or exchanging of information or news”.

Let’s agree that the definition of Conversation should change a bit, to at least include “written words” along side those that are spoken.

Now, a question for you.

On Twitter, do you have Conversations or Communications with people?

On Facebook, do you have Conversations or Communications with people?

On eMail, do you have Conversations or Communications with people?

On the phone, do you have Conversations or Communications with people?

Our jobs have always relied on the proper use of tools, but for a long time we did not concern ourselves with any of the technology behind these tools. Today, we do not have that luxury, nor would we want to ignore the underlying technology for at that level are the opportunities for you and your business to truly differentiate yourself. Tools will always be a manner in which to implement tactics stemming from sound vision and strategy, but ultimately marketers, you must learn how to better use your tools.

Yesterday during Jason Stoddard’s Ubiquity Marketing unSummit I got a fantastic reminder of how important this notion was from the always poignant Michelle Greer. During one of the panels Michelle quite adamantly reminded all of the attendees that they have to learn how to use these tools, and she wasn’t talking about Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Michelle was talking drupal, APIs and at the very least HTML.

No longer can you be a marketer that simply comes up with big ideas (see my post about marketing people that are all talk and no action). Instead we must come up with smart ideas and be able to implement them at some level. If you want to build a blog for your company don’t read a book about effective blogging techniques, buy some books on Wordpress, HTML and CSS. Have a great idea on how to filter Tweets to more easily respond to customer inquiries? Don’t worry about how to engage people on Twitter, worry about how to work with the Twitter API in order to get it done. The best way for you to insure your role in the future of marketing is to not only coming up with the great ideas, but also helping to implement the ideas and watch them pay off for your business or organization.

Learning these skills can often seem like learning a foreign language. Wait, scratch that, it IS like learning a new language. Did I ever think that I would write this way as a marketer?

span tal:repeat="subject python:here.Subject()"
                a tal:attributes="href python:here.blog.tags.absolute_url()
                                                                    + '/' + subject"
                                                   span tal:replace="subject"

No, of course not, but in order to manager our website and implement some functionality we wanted it was important for me to purchase “Learning Python“. Have I read the whole book? No. I read what I needed to read to do what I needed to do and when I reached my very low brick wall of learning I asked people for help. The point is that working in marketing means working with technology as much as anything else.

Today, rather than just Tweeting, learn what makes Twitter work.

Thanks Michelle for moving me again on this topic, I’ve been meaning to dive a bit more into CSS and just put “CSS: The Definitive Guide” into my back back for the long weekend.