Never work for cheap
by Scott McLeod
Traditional book publishers use techniques perfected a hundred years ago to help authors reach unknown readers, using a stable technology (books) and an antique and expensive distribution system.
The thing is--now I know who my readers are. Adding layers or faux scarcity doesn't help me or you.
The internet has dramatically widened the number of available substitutes. You don't have to like it, but it's true. That means you have to work far harder to create work that can't easily be replaced.
Nobody notices normal, nobody buys boring and nobody pays for average. Period. Amen. Q.E.D. As such, your greatest barrier to business success isn’t a bad economy, stupidity, inexperience, or lack of funding – it’s anonymity.
Consider this quote from a high-ranking book publisher who should know better, "We must do everything in our power to uphold the value of our content against the downward pressures exerted by the marketplace and the perception that 'digital' means 'cheap.' ..."
Hello?
You don't have the power. Maybe if every person who has ever published a book or is ever considering publishing a book got together and made a pact, then they'd have enough power to fight the market. But solo? Exhort all you want, it's not going to do anything but make you hoarse.
Movie execs thought they had the power to fight TV. Record execs thought they had the power to fight iTunes. Magazine execs thought they had the power to fight the web. Newspaper execs thought they had the power to fight Craigslist.
Here's a way to think about it, inspired by Merlin Mann: Imagine that next year your company is going to make 10 million dollars instead of a hundred million dollars in profit. What would you do knowing that your profits were going to be far less than they are today? Because that's exactly what the upstart with nothing to lose is going to do. Ten million in profit is a lot to someone starting with zero and trying to gain share. They don't care that you made a hundred million last year from the old model.
Will P-12 public education be immune from these outside forces? I'm guessing no...
It doesn’t matter why you’re not on Twitter (or the other social media platforms). Whether it’s because some high and mighty CMO thinks Twitter (or all of social media) is a fad or if it’s because your internal departments are still trying to decide who get the job, or some other ridiculous reason – if you’re a consumer brand this is where your customers are – now. Not in two weeks or two years.
Speaking of your customers – guest who they’re talking to? That’s right – other customers – potential and current. If you don’t get involved in the conversation or at least listen to what’s going on you will be tried in absentia.
Web Strategy Matrix: The Eight Stages Of Listening
| Stage | Description | Resources Needed | Impacts |
| 1) No objective at all | Organization has a listening program but has no goals, nor uses the information for anything resourceful | Simple alerting tools, like Google Alerts and feedreaders will suffice. | At the basic level, simple self-awareness. Yet without any action from the data, this is useless. |
| 2) Tracking of brand mentions | Like traditional “clip reports” of media relations, companies now track mentions in the social space. Despite tracking there is no guidance on what to do next. | Listening platform with report capability based on brand or product keywords. Radian 6, Visible Technologies, Techrigy/Alterian, Buzzmetrics and Cymfony, Dow Jones are providers. | Improved self-awareness to track volume of information, yet unable to track depth, and tonality of conversations. As a result, not a full understanding of opportunities. |
| 3) Identifying market risks and opportunities | This proactive process involves seeking out discussions online that may result in identifying flare-ups, or possible prospect opportunities. | In addition to a listening platform staff must actively seek out discussions and signal to internal teams. Alerting tools, and listening platforms are required. | Organization can reduce risk of flare ups before they become mainstream, identify prospects and poach unhappy competitors customers. |
| 4) Improving campaign efficiency | Rather than just measure a marketing effort after it’s occurred, using tools to gauge during in-flight behavior yields real-time marketing efficiency. | Dedicated resource to manage reactions, activity, and sentiment to a marketing effort, and the resources to make course corrections nearly real-time. Traditional web analytics tools like Omniture, Webtrends and Google Analytics are common. | Campaigns can be more effective, as hot spots are bolstered, and dead spots are diminished. |
| 5) Measuring customer satisfaction | In addition to customer satisfaction scores,organizations can measure real-time sentiment as customers interact. Sysomos and Backtype have focus areas into this space. | Customer experience professionals will have to extend their scope to the social web, using a listening platform and sentiment analysis. Insight platforms like Communispace and Passenger offer online focus groups solutions. | Brands can now measure impacts of real time satisfaction or frustration during the actual phases of customer interaction. Then identify areas of improvement during customer lifecycle |
| 6) Responding to customer inquiry | This proactive response finds customers where they are (fish where fish are) in order to answer questions. Example: Comcastcares account on Twitter asks customers if they need help –then may respond. | An active customer advocacy team that’s empowered, training, and ready to make real-time responses nearly around the clock. | Customers will fill a greater sense of satisfaction, yet this teaches customers to ‘yell in public’ to get a response. |
| 7) Better understand customers | Evolving the classic market research function, brands can improve their customer profiles and personas by adding social information to them. | Social CRM systems are quickly emerging that tie together a customer record and their online behavior, locations, and preferences. Salesforce, SAP, both have partnerships with Twitter to synch data | The opportunity to not only serve customers in their natural mediums, but to offer them a richer experience regardless of their customer touchpoints. |
| 8. Being proactive and anticipating customers | Minority Report: This most sophisticated form actually anticipates what customers will say or do before they’ve done it. By looking at previous patterns of historical data, companies can put in place the right resources to guide prospects and customers. | An advanced customer database, with a predictive application put in place, as well as a proactive team to reach out to customers before an incident has happened. Haven’t seen any such application yet. | Identifying prospects and engaging them before competitors can yield a larger marketing funnel, or reducing customer frustration as problems are fixed before they happen. |
Found this via Christopher Sessums' Delicious links, http://delicious.com/csessums
The Washington Post recently laid off a columnist because his blog posts didn't get enough web traffic.Of course, in the old days, the newspaper had no real way to tell which columns got read and which ones didn't. So journalists were lulled into the sense that it didn't really matter. The Times quotes Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU, “It’s an unusual public rationale for serious newspaper people, that’s for sure.”
Wrong tense. It's not going to be unusual for long.
Wouldn't it be interesting if this concept was applied to academia?
Does it really matter if you're right?
Given the choice between acknowledging that your customer is upset or proving to her that she is wrong, which will you choose?
You can be right or you can have empathy.
You can't do both.
