On "glorified testimonials" and getting in the way of customer stories

austinkleon:

From an interview with Kate Kiefer, content curator for Mailchimp, who make terrific “Customer Stories” videos like this one for A Book Apart.

campcopy:

The glorified-testimonial approach to case studies didn’t feel like us anymore. Was I really going to visit this amazing factory where they make signed and numbered blue jeans by hand, and simply ask them how MailChimp’s autoresponders are working out for them? We felt like the part about MailChimp was getting in the way of [the] stories. So many of our customers are smart, creative and passionate about what they do. MailChimp supports them by making their jobs easier and their marketing more effective…we don’t have to insert ourselves into their story.

So smart. As Kathy Sierra has said, “Just make people better at something they want to be better at. When your goals and your user’s goals are truly aligned, you don’t need pixie dust.”

the hughtrain mkii

THE HUGHTRAIN MkII

1. The market for something to believe in is infinite. We are here to find meaning. We are here to help other people do the same. Everything else is secondary. We humans want to believe in our own species. And we want people, companies and products in our lives that make it easier to do so. That is human nature.

2. The most important word in marketing is “complicity”. It’s not enough for the customer to love your product. They have to love your process as well.

3. Your customers are becoming smarter about your market a lot faster than you are. Thanks to the internet, your customers are able to talk to each other. They are able to find better information about your product than you are able of willing to give them, much quicker than you are capable of giving them. The conversation will happen with or without you, you’re better off joining in.

4. The primary job of an advertiser is not to communicate benefit, but to communicate conviction. It’s not about what you have; it’s about why it matters.

5. A company’s primary role is to function as an “idea amplifier”. A company’s primary role is not to make or do stuff. Making and doing are mere subsets.

6. The future of advertising is internal. The hardest part of a CEO’s job is sharing his enthusiasm with his colleagues, especially when a lot of them are making one-fiftieth of what he is. Selling the company to the general public is a piece of cake compared to selling it to the actual people who work for it.

7. Your job is no longer about selling. Your job is about firing off as many synapses in your customer’s brain as possible. The more synapses that are fired off, the more dopamines are released. Dopamines are seriously addictive. The more dopamines you release, the more the customer will come back for more. Your customer thinks he is coming back to you for sane, rational, value-driven reasons. He is wrong. He is coming back to feed.

8. Good-bye, Messages. Hello, Social Gesture. A well-executed marketing campaign is an act of love.

9. Control the conversation by improving the conversation. Choosing to have a “smarter conversation” with the market is not a marketing decision; it’s a moral decision.

10. The more porous the membrane that separates your business from your market, the easier it is for both parties to be in alignment. And the more porous the membrane, the easier it is to fix non-alignment.

[Originally published November, 2006]

via http://gapingvoid.com

How to be successful on YouTube [what I learned after 2 million views]

Quelle: Loic Lemeur

I have always been a big fan of video as a communication tool and YouTube is an amazing platform if you use it right.

-it’s human

-it’s you, your voice, your gesture, your feelings, much more than text

-it helps you scale: if you do a talk thousands can watch it even though they’re not here or if they missed it

-live is great, your community can feel the moment without being here, we use ustream at any of our launch events and LeWeb got 250,000 unique people watch the free stream last year, with peaks at nearly 10,000 simultaneous people watching, that is 4 times the size of the physical event.   image

My YouTube channel loic.tv passed 2 million views and I’m getting about 3,000 views a day. Okay it’s nothing compared to the astounding 150 million views of iJustine, the 50 million views Renetto got, or the 90 million views Chris Pirillo got, but it’s a good start! Scoble also recently started to finally put everything on YouTube and is very successful with his channel.

Chris Brogan is also a great source of inspiration. They all have many success factors in common. I am still learning a lot, here are a few tricks:

-don’t think just shoot Most people don’t do video because they lack confidence, they are afraid of their image. Don’t think. Shoot, record. You look ridiculous? No problem, who cares. Most often if you think too much, it gets worse! Watch iJustine teach you here.

-Interview others That’s easy these days, just carry an iPhone4, a Kodak Zi8 or a Flip camera and when you have interesting meetings grab a few minutes with the people you meet, or make thousands of them like scoble does.

-make sure you have good quality sound, it’s as important as the video itself here is what I generally use to record my YouTube videos

-build a YouTube following. Did not think much about it until now, I started adding a “subscribe to this channel” button at the beginning of all the videos, it takes 20 seconds to do with YouTube annotations. In one month, my channel went from 3,000 to 4,000+ subscribers. It builds loyalty and creates a community, subscribers get the videos by email generated by YouTube. You also get more views

-transcribe the videos to get more visible in search and increase audience We have been adding text transcript to every single video of my series “Build Your Own Brand”, it makes the video accessible to the hearing impaired but it also helps Google understand what’s in them, every single word you say gets referenced, you appear in more searches and therefore get more views.

-use annotations to make it easy to follow a series I added a simple “Watch the next video” button at the end of each video of Build Your Own Brand linking into the next in the series. Simple, but helpful and gets more views to the videos. I also added a “Subscribe to this channel” button at the beginning of each video.

-translate them in as many languages as possible This is a tough one. Being French I know many people don’t understand english (or even don’t understand “my” english) and therefore having a French, Spanish or German translation is really helpful. It’s not easy, I have posted a few tweets and many of you offered their help to translate them, Ricardo Sousa helped coordinate. Thanks all for your help but the truth is you end up with many files partially translated and it takes a huge amount of time. I am investigating other ways to translate.

-create a video series Grouping videos on a topic like “build your brand” then publish them as a series released every day helps loyalty and excitement around the channel, instead of publishing them all at once

-create a dedicated site for a video series Youtube itself is a great platform, but if you use their custom player, you can make it a player with the entire series and just register a domain et voila, you have a dedicated site you can point people to

-add a url at the beginning of the description of each video I always forget this one, but starting a YouTube video description with a link to whatever you want to promote is a good way to get traffic from YouTube into your site, since YouTube standard annotations don’t let you do that, you need to buy advertising if you want to link from a YouTube video to a url which isn’t a YouTube content. This is a good way around it. When we launched Seesmic for iPhone we added a direct link to download the app in the AppStore in the description and the video got about 40,000 views, many of those viewers for sure also downloaded the app from that link.

-respond to comments The more I am active in YouTube, the more comments I am getting. As in any social network (yes, most people don’t think of YouTube as a social network but it is one) interacting with your community is very important, that’s one more source of comments you need to monitor and the YouTube plugin Tequila Rapido created for Seesmic Desktop2 really helps.

-do shorter videos The Twitter and Facebook era got us all used to short snippets of information, I am starting to do the same in video in my BYOB series, more like 1 to 3 minutes. They are edited, though, which takes a huge amount of efforts that Whit Scott is doing for me . When I create the videos myself without editing I try to have one or two points no more and keep them short.

-post often it’s like blogging, you really create a community around the videos if you post regularly, every day if possible

-create one or many YouTube channels depending on content and quality? That one I still have to figure out, I noticed iJustine now has several YouTube channels, one for her iPhone videos for example, which tend to be casual and lower quality than the other, often edited, ones. I am just starting to play uploading from my iPhone4, wondering if I should make it a separate channel.

-create an interactive channel banner I think you need what YouTube calls a “partner” account to do this but you can deep link your banner to your other social networks or your own site or blog, try it on mine.

-do a podcast, too It’s a shame that from just uploading on YouTube there isn’t a feed making it available as an iTunes podcast option, so I am also uploading some of them to blip.tv so they’re available on my iTunes video Podcast unfortunately I forget most of the time, we’re trying to make it happen for the BYOB series.

-oh and of course needless to say when you post a video share it on all your social networks and blog it as much as you can any other good tricks you think about? update: Chris Pirillo posted how he got 50,000 subscribers on YouTube

Raise your Prices!

Thanks to Leslie Burns for highlighting this article in the MIT Sloan Management Review about pricing.

All of the issues it raises about pricing strategies and pricing mistakes are relevant to the creative industries, whether you are selling products or services, even though the examples are from big manufacturing firms.

The article underlines and expands on various advice published in the book ‘T-Shirts and Suits: A Guide to the Business of Creativity’, connects with some posts on this blog, and links in with discussions on the T-Shirts and Suits Creative Enterprise Network.

I think some of the most important points are:

1. Look at your offerings from the customers’ point of view and understand how they see value in your products and services. This new perspective may allow you to increase prices.
(See also: ‘What are you selling, really?’)

2. Set prices according to what the customer gets out of it, not what you put into it.
(See also: ‘Art is not what you see…’.)

3. Instead of competing on price with lots of competitors who do much the same as you, focus on what you can do that they can’t. In other words, focus on the areas of the marketplace where you have a competitive advantage. This will lead you to particular types of customers who need and value the things that you excel at in relation to competitors. These customers are more likely to pay higher prices because they recognise you are the best in your field.

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Discuss this with creative entrepreneurs world-wide on the Creative Enterprise Network.

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via feedproxy.google.com

Dies ist der Hintergrund meiner Preisstrategie!

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Simon Sinek spricht über “Start With Why”.


Buchbesprechung von Dipl.Psych. Roland Kopp-Wichmann:

Hilfreich fand ich in dem Buch die Kriterien eine Marke, die Kunden zur Loyalität einlädt:

  1. Eine starke Marke ist einfach zu verstehen.
  2. Sie ist klar positioniert und unverwechselbar.
  3. Sie bietet einen rationalen Nutzen.
  4. Sie hat einen hohen emotionalen Mehrwert.
  5. Sie erbringt die angebotenen Leistungen in Top-Qualität.
  6. Sie ist glaubwürdig und hält ihre Versprechungen ein.
  7. Sie ist eine sympathische Persönlichkeit mit Charisma.
  8. Sie inszeniert faszinierende Geschichten.
  9. Sie ist kontinuierlich und lautstark präsent.
  10. Sie aktualisiert sich und überrascht immer wieder.
  11. Sie hat eine Markengemeinschaft (Brand Community)

Diese Aufzählung kann man gut als Checkliste für den eigenen Auftritt am Markt nutzen.

Mehr dazu:

Was müssen Sie tun, damit Ihr Kunde, Mitarbeiter oder Ehepartner nicht flüchtet?

How to Get an Influencer’s Attention » Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg

Telling a story on the label

Jazz um 11, immer sonntags in der Austernbar, Berlin Hauptbahnhof. Ein Reklamefilm produziert von ‘ichfilmeSie.de’.


Share the Smarts!

We live in a world where consumers actively resist marketing. So it’s imperative to stop marketing at people. The idea is to create an environment where consumers will market to each other. (from Seth Godin’s Super Ideavirus Vook. http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=Ui0o3kJi6AY)

Theoretical theme by SMPL Design