In an age of instant-gurus, it’s reassuring to turn to a reliable source with a little age in the marketing world: AdAge. Their Power150 system objectively measures and assess blogs to create a reliable, public ranking for marketing bloggers.
The top five AdAge Top 5 marketing blogs combine unique perspectives and experiences into solid counsel for business leaders. Here are five lessons from these blogs, along with action steps for putting the lessons into practice to grow your business.
Top Marketing Blog #1: Chris Brogan
Chances are you’ve already been to Brogan’s website. You may have even read his book, seen him speak and met him in person. (We’re speaking together at the Like Minds Conference in Devon, England in February, 2010, so I’ll meet him for the first time there.) He’s one of those overnight success stories that took years to create. From what I can tell, his success flows from an intensity for heartfelt relationships. You’ll notice this when you read How Heartfelt Marketing Delivers. The post recounts how Griffin Technologies restored an old VW van and traveled from Nashville to Las Vegas for CES.
Along the way, they engaged with real people in person and online and documented the journey with multimedia, even old-school Polaroids. They connected with VW fans (we tend to be a crazy about our VWs as Apple fanatics are about everything Apple) and became a part of other peoples’ stories.
Brogan says the Griffin exhibit at CES was a hit: crowds gathered and just had fun hanging out with the Griffin folks. It was a hit because it told a heartfelt story that matched the heart and soul of Griffin Technologies.
Lesson: Have fun on your journey and go with the flow: the flow of others already on the journey and the flow of those who would like to go on the journey. Wherever you’re going, there are other people who were already going there before you—humbly go with them; and there are others who would like to go with you—embrace them, shine the spotlight on them, let them have your fun with you.
Marketing is a journey. Be yourself on the journey, have fun, include others, share. Get crowds of smiling, happy people all around in return.
Action: Ask yourself, “Where am I going and why do I want to get there? Who else is already on their way there and how can I share the journey with them? Who else wants to go on that journey and how can I help them get going?” Then, connect with one group on their way there and just watch and listen for a while.
Top Marketing Blog #2: Seth Godin
Seth is remarkable, in every since of the word, including his own definition in Purple Cow. Visit his blog any given day and you’ll find an abundant handful of actionable ideas. Most of his posts are short. One long one is especially relevant: Why Write a Book? Many marketing counselors will tell you to write a book (Dan Kennedy, Dan Poynter, Zig Ziglar, Bob Bly, to name a few). Books help establish credibility. For professional speakers, books are the new business card. Books are fabulous self-promotional tools.
Self-promotion is NOT what Seth had in mind when he wrote the post. His point is deeper than that. It gets at the heart of marketing: “to make change happen.” Tweets are nice, but as Seth says, “a 140 character tweet cannot change someone’s life.” A book just might. A good friend of mine, Daniel Waldschmidt, is determined to change the world. He thinks he can. He’s not delusional. He thinks everyone has the potential to change the world. Writing a book is a great way for you to start on your quest to change the world.
Lesson: If you want to make a difference, to change the world, sometimes you’ll need something more than a tweet, brochure or YouTube video. Looking inside and connecting with the passion that got you into the business in the first place will fuel your efforts to create something with enough “leverage” to change your world.
Action: Grab a copy of Dan Poynter’s book Is There a Book Inside You? and Steve Zousmer’s You Don’t Have to Be Famous: How to Write Your Life Story. Assume there IS a book inside you. What would the title be? Who would read it? How would they change as a result? If you got what you want from your journey, would that be something others would want too? Write it down.
Top Marketing Blog #3: Ads of the World
Want to see advertising that’s working all around the world? That’s what you’ll find at Ads of the World. The “of the world” part is particularly valuable: too often our “hometown” equals “the world.” We extend our assumptions, commitments, preferences, sensibilities universally. If we think it, feel it, believe it, want it, so must everyone else. Spend some time on adsoftheworld.com and you might be surprised to discover that’s most certainly not the case.
In GoViral Game Changer Results they focus on the top campaigns of the first decade of this century. The post is worth studying with your creative team AND your customer service team, too. The game changer of the decade was the Mentos/Coca-Cola experiment. The experiment included two quite well-known brands; the video achieved the coveted “viral” status. The shocker is, it was well on its way to viral long before either brand knew about it. When the big brands became aware of the experiment, they didn’t engage the corporate legal department to shut the video down. Instead, they embraced what was already going on in the marketplace.
Lesson: You are not in control of your brand. Efforts to exert force to control your brand or your message will probably not only fail, they’ll become the fodder for great hilarity in well-circulated blog posts. Embrace what’s already going on with your brand and see what you can do to help them do it more.
Action: Sign up for Google Alerts and TweetBeeps on your key brand name, product, etc. and find someone who’s doing something with you stuff online. Watch them for a while and then reach out to them to see what else you can give them.
Top Marketing Blog #4: Search Engine Land
I’m not an SEO expert. Still, the Search Engine Land blog has fascinated me for some time. We’re living in an amazing time where we can actually measure and test the impact of the specific words we use. By test, I mean assess the actually behavior human beings engage in as a result of our content—not some focus group guess at future behavior, but actual behavior. Search Engine Land is packed full of thorough search engine insight and tips.
A recent post focused on the Fort Hood, Texas rampage. In The Algorithm Chasers, Kim Krause Berg detailed how news reporters turned to Twitter and other social media sites for word preference clues. Should their headlines use “hurt” or “injured,” “Fort Hood” or “Ft. Hood”? As the story unfolded in real life, those reporting it crunched data from social media and Google to help them unfold the news story online. The stories they wrote were often given to designers who would actually present the story. Berg says,
Designers use boldface, italics, larger fonts, color choices, borders and much more to attract attention to words, but user motivation is focused on the meaning, relevancy and emotion behind those words.
Lesson: Content creators are focusing more and more on content consumers in real time. Content presentation motivation is sometimes at odds with user consumption motivation.
Action: Find as much user-generated content about you as you can. Make a list of the words they’re using to talk about you. Find the common words they’re using. How do those words fit with your own perception of you? If you can’t find much content about you, search for user-generated content about the problem you solve. Make a list of the words your marketplace is using to talk about their experience of the problem you solve. Without spinning the truth, rework your own wording about what you do to incorporate their words.
If you’re still stuck, identify your best competitors and see what folks are saying about them. Make user word list, etc.
Top Marketing Blog #5: Brian Solis
Brian is an online friend and public relations expert. His posts are often thorough, researched, and well-linked to supporting artifacts. A recent post caught my eye (probably because it reinforces what I keep saying in my presentations; funny how that works: we tend to find those things that support our commitments and viewpoints, don’t we?). In Who is the ME in Social Media, Brian documents how private is becoming public, even giving rise to what he notes are “the web equivalent of nudists.”
The article is lengthy. If you want data for who (specifically) is doing what on social media and how they feel about it, it’s a good article to study. It probably won’t take you long to realize, people are doing a lot of what they do online because they like the attention they get. That’s where the article solidly supports the thesis I keep advocating—everyone wants to be heard, everyone wants to be understood, everyone wants to know his or her life matters.
Lesson: People are moving more and more towards the media, places and people who acknowledge them.
Action: Go through your sales records and find three avid supporters of your business. Invite them over for an interview. Find out what’s important to them. Use whatever media you have to help make them a star while helping them achieve what’s important to them. If you have a blog, make the blog post all about them. If you have a newsletter, make them the star of the next issue. Repeat.
Bottom line: marketing is an expression of the heart and soul of who you are and what you want to accomplish in the world. Psychologist Bob Hartley (Bob Newhart Show) would encourage you to “get in touch with your feelings.” As you use social media, express your heart and soul. It will attract others to you who share your heart. As that happens, use your media to demonstrate you’re listening, seeking to understand, and doing everything you can do to facilitate their quest for significance and meaning. You’ll both win. Bigtime.
