Chaotic Flow

Streamlined angles on turbulent technologies

If there are two areas of cross-disciplinary study I would recommend for every Web PR and Marketing professional it would be linguistics and postmodernism.   The reason is that Internet marketing (and branding/marketing in general) is driven by forces described by these disciplines…and the ideas have been around for 50 years, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel by figuring it out for yourself.  I’ve seen a number of blog posts triumphantly delcaring that The Medium is the Message, and while true, I personally didn’t learn much from them that I didn’t already know from postmodern theory.

I’d like to try and clarify an idea that I think is creating great turmoil for most PR firms and media outlets in general, from blogs to wikipedia to cnet.  The difference in Web 2.0 is not that the medium has suddenly become the message, the medium and the message have and always will be fundamentally inseparable, the difference now is that a) anybody can create a message and b) anybody can modify the media.  This change is blurring the lines between PR and marketing, and IMHO to be successful in PR 2.0 and Marketing 2.0 you have to get these two fundamental shifts.

Old school PR adhered to a certain set of ethical rules designed around a certain media structure.  News was FILTERED by experts in the form of reporters and editors who controlled access to FIXED media channels, e.g., a magazine, a newspaper, a TV show, etc.  This was the world of broadcast media.  The ethical PR person followed this model by making sure the message being offered was newsworthy and by pitching this newsworthy story to these ordained few.  While this paradigm still exists, it is being rapidly eroded by user generated content and the Web’s inherent fugibility.   Now there is a spectrum of credibility caused by variable filtering that extends from MySpace to Wikipedia to the New York Times.  And, the medium itself changes every nanosecond with each new link that is created.

Depending on your product or service, your news credibility requirements take on different flavors.  For B2C, sufficient credibility may simply be what everyone else is doing…a trend.  For B2B, it is more likely to come from the more traditional experts or perhaps some of the newer ones like popular blogs.  The pressure on PR firms and marketers alike to adapt and take advantage of this new paradigm is strong.  Many will not survive the transition.  The two most important ideas that must be relearned are that a) your communication channels are radically expanded by social media and user generated content…you must have a solid understanding of your potential online media outlets and the right message for each and b) it no longer stops there, you must learn to modify the medium to your advantage.  More concretely, don’t just go to the NY Times and pitch your case study, consider what your presence should be on social networks, blogs, etc that are relevant to your customers…ask yourself:  Where do my prospects congregate on line?  Can I create my own community around my brand?  Then, create your own content and adapt the message to both the audience and the medium: don’t just make a viral video, because they are hot…you might be as well served simply by posting insightful comments to the right blogs.  And finally, focus on the medium itself to accelerate distribution and build a trail that leads back to your own website.  Link, link, link. Syndicate, syndicate, syndicate. Everywhere, all the time.  A news story in the print version of the NY Times lasts a day and then goes into library archives.  A blog post or a gadget can be redistributed across the Web, and a link from your story back to your website on a page rank 9 site has a much longer lifetime in cyberspace than the print equivalent in physical space.

Viral and loyalty are two words you don’t often see right next to each other as a single unified marketing concept.  Viral marketing is almost exclusively associated with acquisition and loyalty as closely tied to retention, so they are natural opposites…right?  Wrong!  If you read my previous post on the syndication revolution being driven by the natural response of Web businesses to users spreading their time and attention all over the Web with the help of search, the inherent value of the web syndication model begins to emerge.  What if you could virally attract users to your content and then hold them there?  This IS syndication, whether it is RSS, podcasts, gadgets, toolbars, etc.  Syndication at its heart is two simple concepts:  distribution and subscription.  It allows you to follow your audience to the farthest reaches of the Web by virally distributing your content, and then it allows your potential audience to sign up for ongoing, deeper engagement through subscription.  How cool is that!

What works?  Here are my top three…

1. Search (SEO and SEM)
2. Public relations
3. Easy, online trial

IMHO, these three are the proven blocking and tackling marketing activities to get an on demand business off the ground.  These three are fundamental and should be done first, because they all have marketing leverage beyond the individual activity.  SEO/SEM works because your customers are already looking for you–online.  You are just facilitating the buying process.

PR works, because it is fundamentally viral and cheap.  And, I don’t mean just doing press releases or press relations, because the traditional online media world has blurred to such a degree with bloggers, social networks, etc.  I define PR as simply having a strong story to tell, and finding viral free ways to tell it.  Also, credibility is critical.  In the end, most marketers don’t really do most of the marketing of their products.  Ecstatic customers do it for them.  And, opinion leaders reinforce your trend to put you over the top.

Finally, there is trial.   Even if you don’t a have complete self-service on-demand offering up and running, trial will allow you to apply resources at the highest value stage of the purchase process—right before close.  If you get them to trial, don’t let them get away.  Then, use your experiences to learn what you need to do to automate the trial to close to deployment process.

In my next post on the topic, I’ll give my top three that don’t work.

I am seeing this phrase, syndication revolution, more and more lately–largely related to the growth of Blogs and RSS.  However, I believe that this event will wash over the Web in a way that is much bigger than what have seen so far.  In a recent meeting with Michael Eisenberg of Benchmark Capital last week, he expressed an idea he had been encountering/formulating with other Benchmark portfolio companies that I thought was so powerful it was worth trying to encapsulate.

Simply put, the so-called syndication revolution can be viewed as a natural response of web-based businesses to the rise of search.  While the historical web monetization model has been to try and capture users within the confines of your website, search (Google in particular) makes its money by spraying users all over the Web.  Dave Winer’s earliest (pre-Google) posts on syndication characterize search engines as concentrators,  but in hindsight, the effect has been the exact opposite.  It is now easy to find zillions of small, low-traffic websites (like this blog) simply by typing in the right keywords.  Taken in this light, the coming syndication revolution (and it IS coming, it is just beginning) is really just about following your audience by pushing your content out to the rest of the Web and engaging them offsite, because despite how compelling your service might be, that is where they are going to be spending the bulk of their time online.

I recently did an interview on vator.tv for ivybrain.com that focused on marketing tips for entrepreneurs in on-demand software (soon to be posted). This is the first in a series of posts that summarize the ideas covered….enjoy!

1. Create and deliver a focused, high value product. Don’t try to solve every problem; keep the value proposition simple.
2. Choose a big market, so you can choose your customers. Don’t chase customers that need features you don’t have or would naturally sign up later in the adoption cycle. Ultimately, your value proposition has to draw customers to you…and the integrated product has to allow them to sign up and get going on their own.
3. Strive for 100% self service acquisition/deployment/maintenance and work rigorously to eliminate obstacles that require and hand-holding. Put people in place initially to do the hand-holding, e.g., education, sales, service, support…but recognize that while their tactical function may be to close a sale, the more important strategic function is learning. These folks are a direct line to your prospects that provide critical feedback to get the product just right and understand the details of what is stalling growth. Then, make it your company’s habit to use this knowledge to eliminate these obstacles through automation.
4. Develop online marketing prowess and creative PR. SEO, SEM, email marketing, and affiliate marketing are commodity skills; you must be a master at these (or outsource to a master) just to be competitive, and then you should be good and creative at more cutting edge marketing vehicles like blogging, social media, viral media and syndication. Plus, don’t underestimate that one incredibly great marketing or PR idea while mastering the basics…often that one creative blockbuster, viral marketing or PR idea can generate 10X demand. But, you can’t count on that long shot…so mastering the basics is a given.
5. Flexibility. You won’t get it right out the gate…so all of the above should be designed to create a flexible, rapid response to quickly zero in on your sweet spot, accelerate adoption, and grow rapidly. Expect failure. Learn from it. Move on.