WordPress vs. Drupal in the Language of Legos

We’ve been debating the pros and cons of CMS platforms lately, particularly Drupal and WordPress. Both can work great for a variety of needs, and I really like WordPress in many situations.  But the metaphor that really struck a chord for me is that Drupal is like working with Legos and WordPress is like working with Duplo. When you break down the content and components of your website into such a granular level, you can do amazing things. Sure, it takes more time, but the result is a flexible, scalable platform that won’t leave you saying “that would be cool, but…”

FTD = How Not to Do Email Marketing

I’m always hesitant to criticize brands as an agency guy. Who knows if it will cost me a pitch someday? (I’ve had a scathing yet thoughtful review of M&T Bank in my draft folder for about six months that may never see the light of day.)

But a big part of me knows that good marketers monitor social media and welcome customer comments that might help them improve. So here goes…

Dear FTD flowers,

Stop emailing me daily and make it easy to opt out.

Just because I bought flowers on Mother’s Day doesn’t mean I want flowers constantly. You can’t possibly provide value to my life every day — you’re not Groupon.

Ironically, I bought from you because of Groupon…or maybe it was Living Social. Not to digress, but Groupon really won that naming contest. Imagine if some paper company launched “Living Snot-free” after Kimberley Clark created Kleenex? To me, Living Social will always be selling Groupons.

Back to FTD…your opt-out process is borderline illegal. Why should I remember yet another username and password just to change my preferences to “leave me alone”? You have my email address. I want it back in one click. You’ll save money and your metrics will look better.

Plus you’ll get fewer people blogging or tweeting something negative to their friends, family and colleagues.

Having said that, thank you for making my mom’s day. The flowers were lovely.

Sincerely,
Eric

I Hope to Get Fired

An old boss of mine said he hoped to get fired at some point in his career so he would be forced to change course and try something new.

I’m not sure I would go that far, but I do recommend living through a merger. People around you will inevitably jump ship. Your product or service offering will change. Systems. Processes. People. It’s all on the table.  Outside of starting from scratch as an entrepreneur, there is perhaps no better inflection point for change in business.  The people who stick it out are the ones you want as a business owner — loyal, optimistic, and open to positive change.  It’s a fantastic window of opportunity that won’t stay open forever.

What did you learn living through a merger?

Aiming to Please and 6 Tips for Tough Situations

In the service business, we aim to please. But sometimes we have unpleasing situations to address. If you’ve been an account person long enough to have your own clients, you’ve surely had to have a few tough conversations:

“The requirements have changed and we need more budget.”

“I sense that you’re unhappy with the work and we need to know why.”

Or better yet…

“We went over budget.  And even though the scope of work was vague (because you wouldn’t pay us to do discovery first) and technically the deliverables haven’t changed, we need to ask for more money.”

“You need to stop art directing and remember why you hired us. If we do what you asked for, it will look like ____.”

Fun stuff like that. While you’ll probably never completely avoid the occasional tough conversation, here are 6 tips that work:

1. Over-explain — from the beginning, pretend you’re teaching Advertising or Web Design for Dummies. (but don’t be condescending)
2. Define — write out the scope in excruciating detail, exhaust all assumptions, and them define the project some more. Review the scope with your client and don’t assume that they understand it or your word choice.
3. Report — clients deserve to know how their money is being spent, and it makes you look on top of things
4. Anticipate — if you think the scope may change, give your client a heads-up. Chances are, they have someone else to ask for the money (or time) and are just as nervous as you. Help them look good…or at least look organized.
5. De-personalize — when in doubt, make it about business and requirements and rounds and other inhuman, emotionless things. Remove the anger. No one is out to get anyone in trouble.
6. Humanize — joke with your client. “Oh billing, the least rewarding part of my job. Let’s talk about your late invoices.”

What works for you?

How Are You Adding Value During Your Project?

Most projects have several phases. Take a website build: you have discovery, strategy, specifications building, information architecture, visual design, technical development and deployment. How much value are you or your agency creating during each phase?

Which phases create work (and pain) for your client?

Where is the value of your expertise, skill or talent most apparent? Does your client agree?

Answer these questions and you’ll understand a) why you got hired, b) why you might not get a referral, and c) where opportunities exist to provide your clients with a fantastic experience from start to finish.

Followership is a Great Indicator of Influence

Read this first. It’s an article on AdAge arguing that:

“popularity on Twitter or Facebook is just that; it’s the ability to drive behavior that matters.”

Matthew Creamer argues that followership does not equate to influence. I agree that it isn’t perfect, but it ain’t bad either.

Let’s look at the history of influence. Avoiding word of mouth — the most influential, yet difficult to measure — let’s focus on media channels. At first it was simple — you had radio, newspaper, and the big 3 broadcast TV stations. They had the potential to influence a big chunk of the world because of reach. They had huge viewership; the first form of followership. Sure, the content had to moving, thought-provoking, or funny. It turned guys like Hal Riney, Lee Clow, and Ray Rubicam into legends. We knew the right message in these mediums worked to influence ideas and sell product, but we just didn’t know how exactly. We couldn’t measure the conversations it sparked afterward. We didn’t know if it inspired the viewer (a.k.a. follower) to tell a friend or Google the product (well, actually, we know that didn’t happen).

Now we have social media. Conversations are happening online. We can engage with anyone. The playing field is leveled, in a sense. And people and organizations are growing followership by using these channels effectively.

The author looks at Justin Bieber as example #1. He asks:

It’s hard to imagine that Justin Bieber, with his 6.4 million followers, is driving much behavior other than getting people to talk about Justin Bieber, frenetically retweet him, and possibly buy a record. Is that influence?

I ask, isn’t that the point? As a celebrity singer, isn’t that his business goal? I’d say he is driving exactly the kind of behavior he means to.

He also discusses the interesting case of Apple’s Scott Forstall:

Klout gives Mr. Forstall a score of 59 and credits him with “high percentage of amplified content.” Thirty-six thousand people follow him, while he follows just one, Conan O’Brien. Guess how many tweets the appropriately-named Mr. Forstall has posted.

Not a single one.

How’s that for influence?

I would argue, what if he did tweet something important, like an appeal to donate to pay the medical bills of an injured soldier? His influence would be amplified by those 36,000 dormant followers. I guarantee he’d generate more donations than me with my 192 followers. He has influence. Maybe he’s just picking his spots.

He also discusses people who don’t really use Twitter and Facebook, yet are still influential, like Seth Godin. To that point, I would say that Seth uses them as promotional channels because his goal is to drive people to his blog — his social media tool of choice. He needs more than 140 characters because frankly he has too much good stuff to say. It is a good reminder that, although widely popular, Facebook and Twitter are simply tools. You can accomplish many of the same tasks in other ways, like picking up the phone, mailing a letter, or using MySpace (gasp!).

So what creates followership? To me, influence is one thing. If you’ve been influential in some other way, such as a book or a moving speech or a heroic action, you can probably gain followership. Athletic success, good looks, comedy, and interestingness (to borrow a term from Flickr) also leads to followership. If you have followership, odds are you have, or can have, significant influence. That’s why celebrities as spokespeople are as old as the advertisement.

The bottom line is this: marketers are always searching for understanding. Understanding behavior and people is hard because everyone is different. As marketers, we must be OK with this.  We can look at actual, individual experiences (i.e. use cases) and learn a lot about influences on behavior. But we have to take everything else as a trend or indication. Services ranging from Klout to Nielsen can only provide trends and indicators of influence. As marketers, we are right to scrutinize their methods. To say that followership doesn’t equate to influence is true to a degree, but also false to a higher degree. If we trust that followership is a strong indicator of influence, chances are we’ll be right.

Advertising Works: Anatomy of a Christmas Present

It worked. Advertising did what it is meant to do: create dissatisfaction that leads to purchases.

First, it was a TV spot from Nescafe that reminded me of the coffee machine we got for our wedding that crapped-out after a few years and maybe a dozen uses.  (This might have been the spot, although I can’t say for sure.)  I thought, “hey, I bet my wife would like a cappuccino on Christmas.”  I also figured, Nescafe makes cheap stuff, so if it craps-out, I won’t be out too much money. So then I went online, picked a model, and SOLD. TV advertising can still work. But can they attribute the online sale to the TV spot? Doubtful.

Next, it was a reflective vest from New Balance. Although I can’t find the article now, I’m pretty sure I read one about reflective running gear in Fast Company or something. My wife is training for a 10-miler this spring, so why not equip her with a warm, safe, reflective running vest.  newbalance.com.  Boom.  SOLD. Chalk that up to good PR. But, since they didn’t ask me how I found out about it, some brand manager will have to play “Guess the ROI” next month.

Finally, a gift for myself: a quirky Michigan t-shirt. Who knows who is behind “Down with Detroit”? It could be some guy in a basement. But smart targeting on Facebook Ads makes me ask “who cares”? On Facebook, I’m a fan of all things Michigan. Lions, Pistons, Tigers, Red Wings, Spartans, Up North, Ann Arbor, and more. So the great people at Down with Detroit harnessed the power of Facebook’s platform to target me with an ad for a stocking-stuffer t-shirt on the same day I was trading gift wish lists with my family. SOLD. CTRL+C the link to sis and her shopping just got easier.

How were your gifts influenced by advertising this year?

Write-offs Are Good. Don’t Tell Accounting.

Between us, I love write-offs. Not hard costs, but time. Write-offs are the only tangible, monetary proof that we’ve over-delivered for our clients. I can usually tell that we’ve over-delivered by the ideas we generated, favors we gave, extra design work we’ve done, or bonus features we’ve developed, but I can never assign a value until we do billing and I have to write off a dollar amount.

Let’s face it; if you’re not over-delivering, you’ll be out of business soon. There are very few companies or skills that can’t easily be replicated. Some may argue that write-offs will put you out of business faster, but I disagree because they result in client happiness…when put to good use.

Sure, we all value our time.  Some are sticklers who believe that every word they utter is valuable.  There are many good arguments and tips for getting paid for your time.  I’m not one of those people. I’ve written about the time sheet business model before, and I don’t like it.  Time sheets are accurate within maybe 25%, plus or minus. And within that, most people multi-task, get interrupted, take a bathroom break, or let their focus stray.  To me, a billable hour is one in which the phone is set to ‘do-not-disturb’, I’ve logged off AIM and G-chat, minimized Outlook, closed my virtual cube door, and I’m focused squarely on creating ideas and strategies to help my client win. Better yet, that billable hour is spent talking face-to-face with a client or their customers.

I also believe in favors.  Favors are a very good thing.  They show that you care and you’re invested in your client’s goals.  They are a genuine thing that humans do for other humans they care about.  If you’re not doing favors for your client, ask yourself how much you truly care about them.

Having written all that, moderation is good for just about anything.  You can’t lose talented people to profit-sucking projects or too many non-billable flings.  For the sake of the business and the people who depend on the income it provides, people must apply their trade to paying clients.  The faster you hit milestones, the faster invoices go out the door.  I’m not saying you should compromise the viability of the business, but writing off some time should be smiled-upon when it leads to loyal, happy clients.  I’ve seen the opposite and it never works.

What’s your baby’s name?

Do you know the names of your clients’ children?

Do you have your clients’ birthdays in your calendar?

When is the last time you mailed a hand-written note?

Sometimes we account managers must be reminded that little gestures like this go a long way.  Nothing matters to business more than relationships.  And yes, your professional and personal lives are one and the same.  If you say you love your clients, do you send them candy on Valentine’s Day?  A get-well-soon card when they’re out sick?  Alas, these things matter.

Personality vs. Professionalism

Somewhere on the continuum between professional and unprofessional is personality.

At the far end of unprofessional you have lawsuits and jail time. At the far end of professional you have robotic boringness and unaddressed problems wearing a tie and white collar. In the middle you have real people sliding along within their comfort range depending on the situation and people involved. It is a fine line, but as one approaches unprofessional, one’s amount of personality grows…until one goes too far. We’ve all worked with “that guy” (or gal) who was just a little too open, honest or off-color. Like my ex-boss who thought it was OK to pump breast milk under her desk during a conference call.  Borderline illegal, but I was OK with it because we were tight.

People like people with personality. We like working with them — most of them — and we like buying things from them. As we get more experienced, I think our personal comfort range grows, and we find that it works.

With clients and co-workers, I believe you have to show some personality and slide towards unprofessional sometimes to build a great relationship.  The best relationships are collaborative and result in great work. Sometimes we need brutal honesty.  Sometimes we need conflict or a good argument. Sometimes it should just be fun.  (After all, we spend half our lives working so why not enjoy it?) Great relationships require a level of personal closeness, like an inside joke, common experience, shared hobby, or even, dare I say, a flirtatious tension? (the last one may be too close to unprofessional…and thus jail time)

My point is that laying the foundation for great relationships requires sliding up to that area where you drop your guard, open up, show your personality, and maybe say or do some things that would make the professional dark suit robots cringe. Honesty is good. Conflict is OK. Errors are forgivable. Weakness equals opportunity. Open up.