At Crossroads Communications, LLC (the “official” name of my business, although you probably found me by searching my name; it’s just the way the Google search bounces) we essentially are a message company. We discover the stories of our clients and share them, whether through PR, marketing, advertising, social media, content-creation on blogs, videos, etc. The tools are less important than the focus on the messages. Before we can find and authentically help brands, businesses, and places tell their story, we have to really, and I mean really, get to know them. You can’t effectively market what you don’t understand.

I use a set of questions to help get that process started. They’ve evolved over the past several years, but not as much as some might think… because they are focused on the business goals and objectives rather than the tactics. I hear often that just going through the process of defining the business and its profit centers, challenges, goals and marketplace in the way that we do is valuable to business owners. I also hear that answering the questions we ask is hard work. Until we have a solid idea of where your business IS, why that’s true, and WHERE you want to go… how will we all agree we’ve reached “there?”

While I won’t share the whole set of questions here (I do have to feed my family, after all), I am going to share a few of them with you, and then share some additional thoughts in upcoming blog posts. I hope they’ll be valuable conversation starters for you and your business supporters, partners, or even that little voice in your head who pushes back whenever you want to go try something new.

Defining the Business

Current Challenges

1. What is the biggest obstacle, in your opinion, to purchasing one of your top profit-generating services for most of your potential customers? When you hear “No…” what is the “why?”
2. How much time must you typically invest face to face and behind the scenes to close a sale? Please list face to face separately from behind the scenes. How much of this time is spent explaining what you do, the benefits of using you or of having the service, and generally in educating your prospects?

Looking forward

1. Thinking about the future, what would you like to be different about your business in one year? In three years? What kinds of clients do you want to be serving? What services do you want to sell them?
2. Considering your profit-generating activities of today, what do you see changing, growing, fading over the next 1 to 3 years in those activities? Do you see an increasing demand for what currently drives your profit or a declining demand? Why?
3. If the demand for today’s profit-driving activities may decline or remain flat, what other activities or products are within or adjacent to your current expertise and offerings which might be increasing in demand over the next 3 years?

Did anything above make you stop and think for a minute about your business? How do you keep your business “on-track”?

Twitter became meaningful for me two years ago today. Happy Anniversary, sweetheart

Today is the anniversary of the day I figured out the power of Twitter. I’d joined a few months before, in November of 2008. I’d tweeted some, and found and followed about two dozen people I respected in my industry… names I knew from MarketingProfs.com or from reading blog posts or articles. But mostly it was just for fun and a way for me to collect links and articles more quickly. I’d yet to really utilize a news/blog reader very well, so Twitter was serving that purpose. I’d first become intrigued after spending the previous year on Facebook, joining FriendFeed, and then hearing/seeing/reading about Twitter in industry articles. No one seemed really clear on what to do WITH it, just clear that everyone should be DOING it. I began to read… a lot. I didn’t follow anyone else and decided to start tweeting the good content I found, and commenting on it. I knew nothing of hashtags, really, other than that they existed. I’d never participated in a chat. I was determined to see if sharing good content was a strategy that actually worked, though…. so away I went.

After a couple of months, my following had grown to several hundred, based on luck and retweets of the content I’d created or shared. I still wasn’t actively following anyone, but I’d begun to talk to the followers I did have and with those I’d initially followed. Cool… but still not earth-shattering or profoundly game-changing. Then came Superbowl 43. I sat down to watch with my family, with my laptop… and started tweeting about the commercials (Hey, the Dolphins weren’t in it, and growing businesses is my profession). Suddenly, as the hashtag for the ads connected me to a slew of people across the globe all seeing and reacting to the same thing I was, at the same time, through a single medium, the power of Twitter (indeed, of all social media) became crystal clear to me. The conversations and engagement were infectious and addicting. I debated, agreed, challenged, tweeted and retweeted though the entire game, and have been actively engaged ever since. Because life is always happening, everywhere, all the time, and people are talking about it. Online, offline, all the time. The power of Twitter is not that I can talk to you, or you to me… it’s that WE can talk to EVERYONE else out there, anytime we want, one conversation at a time. Even if all we have in common is a love of Superbowl commercials, for today, it’s enough. Let’s connect.

What was your moment like? When did social media hook you?

Brand DNA isn't a static thing

I found an article by Inc. magazine on rebranding a company and when it makes sense to do so that I tweeted and amplify’d. I liked the article enough to post the amplify.com note to my blog, too. If you’re a regular reader, you know I almost never “reblog” anything. Bottom line, I thought it had merit. It garnered more retweets on Twitter than anything I’ve posted in recent days, too, so it seems others saw the merit, too. And that made me wonder WHY it struck a chord with so many, right now.

Here’s what I think: It’s a new year. It’s an evolving economy seeking a new normal. As business owners, we are all striving to make the best start, seeking to leave behind the angst and difficulty of the recession and looking for authoritative answers to our questions on just how to make it happen. In some of the discussions that happened about the article (Twitter, Amplify and here) several people commented that new packaging won’t fix a bad company. Very true… so the question becomes, “How do I know if we’re a company with a branding problem, or with a deeper problem?” Before you scoff and tell me that is an easy one and list off all the things obviously unhealthy companies get wrong, let me tell you why this question is harder to answer than it seems for most businesses, and what I mean by “branding problem.”

Brand does NOT equal the logo, name, colors, style of letterhead, signage (physical expressions of a company’s visual identity). Brand DOES equal the perceived attributes, ideas, relationship, expectations and direction of a company, as expressed by external viewers. Not just customers, either. Apple’s brand is shaped by both customers’ and non-customers’ opinions and expectations. This is why people can say they “love” or “hate” a brand. They are in relationship with all the things they associate with that company. Therefore, rebranding doesn’t mean changing your logo (although that may indeed be part of the tactical steps taken). It means examining dispassionately the perceptions of your company in the marketplace. It means looking at market potential with existing perceptions in place (current brand) versus market potential with changed perceptions in place (successfully rebranding) and any number of potential new sets of perceptions or brands. It means looking at your business as an organism that must make conscious choices and that can foresee, with some degree of accuracy, the outcomes of those choices. It means doing the hard work to understand the marketplace, consumer behavior and drivers, trends, costs and long term financial impacts.

So, that’s what I mean by branding.

If you’re a small business (one or a few employees), the company’s identity is often so closely associated with your own that changing the brand can feel like a betrayal of self. Having or acquiring the market knowledge to accurately reflect and then predict your company’s trajectory based on brand A, B or C can be difficult at best. Being able to set aside the hopes and dreams you had when you launched to look carefully at the future, especially if you’re doing fine right now, is often the hardest part of all. The upside is that the vision is usually strongly shared and employees (if there are any) are committed to it and tend to start from a cohesive point. Changing a brand is impossible if the company only concentrates on external packaging, advertising, marketing, PR etc. Changing how the business operates, what it produces, how it produces or delivers, how it interacts with the marketplace… those things are often easier in a smaller company once the commitment to changing is set.

If you own or work for a larger business, the difficulty often arises from that lack of shared internal vision and perception in the first place. Many larger businesses have the resources to model their marketplace and make some educated assessments regarding what might happen if… what’s ofeten missing is the internal commitment to real change, since the starting place for the many employees is so varied. If, for instance, a large consumer goods company wants to change how they interact with the marketplace so they are perceived as more community-minded, more involved in social issues, more caring… but their employees feel neglected, unimportant, like expendable resources… I submit that the rebranding will ultimately fail. Advertising can say whatever it wants, but products and service delivered by employees who feel like the company doesn’t care are not going to deliver on the advertised promise of caring.

How do you know if your business would benefit from a rebranding effort? You don’t – without doing the hard work of figuring it out. The best thing about the process may be how it forces us to look at our businesses from a clinical perspective… examine the DNA and look for mutations that may signal a problem or may herald our next big thing.

Look, Mom... Sharks!

You see, when you sleep with the fishes at the aquarium, you sleep right beside the tanks and exhibits. On the concrete floor. My comforter-doubled-over-for-padding did not cut it in the comfort department. But I digress. Several things happened during our adventure that I thought were great lessons in PR, specifically in event planning. So here, without further ado (and because I’m still working the kinks out of my shoulder and back), are event planning lessons learned:

Prior Planning Makes For Perfect Events > You could tell, rather immediately, which troops and girls had prepared appropriately for the evening and which ones had not. Planning well is the difference between event panic and event accolades. Our troop leader rocks, by the way, and we were armed with flashlights, toothbrushes, vending machine change, and other necessities for the night. And in her defense, she’d recommended foam padding for underneath the sleeping bags. I (ouch) should have listened.

Do, Indeed, Sweat the Small Stuff > Someone, somewhere, decided “Alice in Wonderland” (the new, Tim Burton version) would be a great movie to screen in the big hall before lights out. Some of the girls in attendance were 5 or 6. All the girls had gone on a red-filtered flashlight tour of the aquarium exhibits to observe the animals in their nighttime modes just before the movie. So you watch a giant moray eel by flashlight and then see giant scary things on the movie screen and then you go sleep someplace unfamiliar in the dark? uhhh… not a win for the younger girls. Me, my daughter and her three other young troop members all bailed on the movie about 30 min in and went to settle down on the concrete instead. Be sure to think through all the choices… go visit the site for your event, for instance, at the time of day you’re having it. Are there traffic issues? Parking problems? What are the best sight lines for TV cameras? Do you have a need for or access to electricity? A microphone? Podium? Are there outlets so reporters can plug in anything they might need to? Refreshments? And if you’re serving food with napkins or containers, do you have a trash can handy?

Some Of Us Are Best Out Of The Spotlight > The flashlight tour was an amazing thing… so many of the animals that were, well, boring during the regular hours of operation were quite interesting at night. The story my daughter has told over and over? How she got to see the inside of a clam (really a mussel) and how when someone’s non-red-filtered light shone into the tank by mistake the “clam” snapped shut again. The “clams” are definitely at their best out of the spotlight. So are eels and some of the jellyfish. If you’re planning an event for a client, know the strengths of the people you’re working with and for. If the COO is not comfortable in large groups of people, gently talk the CEO out of making him speak at the event. Yes, it’s wonderful that Bill wants to share the spotlight with Ted, but in order for it to remain a big adventure and not become a big disaster, Ted needs to play a role he’s better suited for… perhaps welcoming guests one on one at the entrance, or simply hovering in the background, available for a one-on-one later on.

So there you have it… Plan, Prepare, Pick Your Performers. And take the foam padding next time you go sleep with the fishes. Trust me.

Event hiccups, disasters, funny moments you want to share? Please go ahead! It makes us all feel better to know we’re not alone in the moments we remember that we’d really rather forget.

– (Originally posted on the Journal Record’s Blog Hub, August 7, 2010)

Or, my first video blog post. Enjoy!

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

If you have billboard experiences, wisdom, insight or horror stories to share, please... the comments are (as always) yours! And if you think video is a good idea here, let me know, OK? I've been a little (OK, a lot) hesitant to post in this format. If you like it and find it useful or helpful, I'll do it more frequently.

Thank you

Missing the Mark

I don’t normally rant on this blog… not really my style. But I feel compelled to cry out against the marketing sins of Jim Norton Ford in Tulsa.

Ford is the only American motor vehicle company that posted growth last month. Ford did not take bail-out money and is taking its corporate marketing in a more social, relevant (in my opinion) direction.

(GM results) (Chrysler results) (Ford results)

But one of our local Tulsa Ford dealers… who is running a radio spot featuring a guy with a (bad) British accent. Huh? As the spot closes, the “Brit” says, “And remember, folks; we ain’t Norton (play on “nothin’ “) without you!”

Bloody hell… no self-respecting Brit would ever utter that phrase. EVER.

Sometimes I feel like we (marketers who blog) spend too much time preaching the basics, and then something like this bit of “marketing” comes along and I realize, anew, that the basics just aren’t that basic.

What happened to knowing your market? Knowing what motivates them? Knowing why they buy, and more specifically, why they might buy from you? How did “let’s just use some guy with a British accent!” become the answer to why people in Tulsa, Oklahoma would choose a Ford?

I do not know if an agency was paid to produce this, but I hope not. And please, don’t tell me how it worked because I remember it… I remember and write about really good and really bad marketing because it’s what I do for a living, not because being bad is a strategy worth emulating.

So what do you think? What are your favorite examples of marketing that misses the mark?

(Photo credit: malavoda on Flikr)