My forced break, and the start of a revolution in branding
I had to take a forced break from writing this blog last year due to health reasons. I was struck down twice in 2009 by painful, humbling illnesses. A certain kind of clarity occurs when you’re in that much pain. It’s a clarity that can only come from an extreme life experience. It’s the stuff that changes you, pushes you to learn and grow.
I finally emerged, triumphant, a little angry, with a broader perspective, more compassion, and ultimately a different person. The anger eventually subsided.
When I started writing this blog I wanted to share experiences about virtually all of the services I regularly perform for clients. Then I wrote some reviews and observations, and wrote more about general business, until finally the focus on branding and marketing was all but gone.
When I finally regained my full health, I began writing again, but with a whole new level of focus. At some point late last year, it occurred to me that I didn’t need to write about every business experience. I no longer had a desire to write critiques of lectures and other people’s work. There’s plenty of that out there already. I wanted to write something profoundly positive that would help people learn and grow.
Yesterday, I launched a new blog aimed at inspiring people to think differently about their brands. It’s called Branding Revolution.
I’ll be writing about small business branding, personal branding, brand development, how to find meaning in your brand, how your brand fits into your marketing, and a whole lot more. Every post will be focused squarely on brands and the process of branding. Current posts include a series on how to find a great graphic designer, personal branding, and more.
Branding can be the most boring of topics if you think of it only in terms of business branding. For instance, a house-mom (or dad) would have little interest in branding. But personal branding is a whole different beast. Personal branding is, well, personal. It opens the doors to the experiences that shape us as people. When you start opening those doors and seeing what is behind them, it’s pretty fascinating stuff. It can be profound and life-changing.
If you can’t tell, I’m super excited about Branding Revolution. I hope you will come over to the new blog to learn and share your experiences.
Just as a brand is a constantly developing and evolving entity, so too is Branding Revolution. I will be chronicling the development of my own personal brand as an example. If you would like to be featured in a similar capacity, shoot me an email and tell me a bit about your story.
I’ll still be posting articles here on KellyHobkirk.com too, yet this site is going to undergo a major redesign soon. The focus will narrow for sure. Keep your eyes peeled.
Thanks for reading.
Ask, then act – not the other way around
In the last seven days, I have received email marketing newsletters from five people I know, and one request for permission to be added to a list. Just two out of them all asked permission to add me to their list. One of the emails was from a hair and beauty salon. Do I look like I’d be interested in a hair cut or a beauty treatment? (Don’t answer that.)
Which do you think got approval? Care to guess which ones received an immediate Unsubscribe? Hint: there were just two approvals.
Clients always ask what is the quickest way to build an email list? Well, first you start with a better question: What is the most effective way to build a quality email marketing list? There are two answers, and they are both simple:
1. One person at a time.
2. Always ask permission.
After you get permission, instead of focusing on quick, focus on quality, as in your quality. Make the content actually worth reading, and people will anticipate your emails instead of clicking the unsubscribe link.
The world is flat: An evening with Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
I attended a Biznik event Tuesday night with Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, stalwart authors of a new best-selling book called ‘Trust Agents.‘ It was a fun evening for all. The two of them sat side-by-side in the excellent Columbia City Theatre venue, playing off each other’s comments in an unscripted, casual, conversational format. They sipped beers during the hour and fielded questions, while offering anecdotal commentary.
Audience members seemed as if they were at times bursting at the seams to take the floor and answer each other’s questions, but our fearless leaders maintained order with a set of equally encouraging voices.
At the end of the event, a woman next to me asked a friend beside me what he learned. He thoughtfully replied, “Well, I didn’t learn anything new to be honest, but I enjoyed the event.”
When Julien Smith asked me the same question, my answer was unfortunately the same. I’ve never been one to blow smoke up, so I answered honestly. He laughed and said, “Well, just tell us you did!” And that’s kind of the underlying message I got out of the evening. Don’t keep it real – Keep it happy!
Use your friends
Now, I’m looking forward to reading the book – I just got it, so these observations are based solely on the discussion event. Much of their advice is sound common sense, good manners type of stuff, all of it applied to social media. It’s the type of stuff your parents probably (hopefully) tried to instill at a young age.
Their perspective on how social media dialog should occur was interesting, but it’s largely at odds with how I approach life and business.
Their overwhelming message during the talk was that we should be using our friends as a way to gain influence and make a lot of money.
I tend to think of my friends as people with whom I can enjoy life, rely on for help and advice, and share the good times and occasionally the bad, and I hope I can do the same for them. I do not think of my friends as my next meal ticket, or as people I should ‘use’ for anything. If I did, I would expect them to drop me like a rock because good friends are not commodities to be squeezed for every last drop of social influence.
But that’s me. Chris Brogan and Julien Smith see it differently (and you might too. The times they are a changin’).
Never utter negativity
Their other big message was that we should always keep a completely positive dialog, never disagreeing online with anyone. I see that as dangerous.
Positive dialog is a good thing. Keeping positive in your marketing communications is always smart. That said, honesty, peppered with a healthy dose of tact, is always the best policy.
If everyone always agreed, no one would ever learn anything. We would all become, well, dumb. We wouldn’t have intelligent conversations. We might even still believe in our heart of hearts that the world is flat. There is a great benefit for everyone in disagreeing and sometimes risking being seen as having a negative viewpoint. It’s generally during point/counterpoint discussions that people learn the most. Without the counterpoints, there would rarely be discussions of importance that advanced the social dialog.
I agree with the idea of always keeping the dialog positive, however, sometimes in the course of reaching the most positive outcomes, it is necessary to examine and experience the negative parts. When we learn in these types of discussions, we tend to be pretty darn happy.
Go see Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
You have to like these guys. They’re personable, natural speakers, and they will make you laugh. In fact, that was one of their messages – If you can make people laugh, that’s often more important than having any useful skills to bring to the table, and will often win you the business. I can’t really argue with that. I’ve often been hired more for rapport than skills, but the fact that I bring mad skills, 25 years of experience, and an impressive portfolio to the table is what gets me in the door in the first place, probably about 98.76% of the time.
All in all, I found myself unable to relate to the primary concepts presented at the event, while I sat in a room full of people who largely nodded along agreeably. In some ways, the event was a disturbing experience, with messages reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984 and George Lucas’ THX 1138, yet with the thought-provoking nature of the event, I couldn’t help but enjoy myself.
An attorney sitting in the back expressed the frustration I hear from so many people trying to get involved with social media. He’s a successful attorney who undoubtedly expresses himself quite well in court, but at this event he was utterly flummoxed. He enthusiastically described his frustration at not knowing how to utilize social media for an undefined greater purpose in life. Social media, it seems, ought to be something we can easily grasp, become an expert in, and use to become a superstar in other ways. And that’s what many people don’t get about social media. It’s not a pot of gold, unless you’re ready to jettison your moral code. But that’s another post. What happened at the event for this gentleman? Someone in the audience knew how to help him. People meeting face-to-face, making real, meaningful connections. That’s real power.
If you’re really lost in the social media game, our hosts suggested that you create fake profiles and experiment. Learn the ropes without damaging your reputation.
How should Andy Rooney change?
You may have heard of the well-respected television personality named Andy Rooney, a regular on CBS’ venerable news program, 60-Minutes. He is a journalist who made a name for himself by calling out individuals, companies and organizations who are doing things patently wrong, particularly in cases where their errors are not in the best interests of the greater population. Sometimes his musings are small things that just don’t seem to make any sense. People love the guy because he tells it like it is. He is authentic and real. I have always admired him. His viewpoints, which in today’s dialog are seen as negative in nature, bring about enormously positive change. It’s powerful stuff.
I asked Chris Brogan and Julien Smith how they would recommend that Andy Rooney change his dialog to be compatible with Twitter and Facebook (where anything that could be viewed as negativity is frowned upon at best). They couldn’t or wouldn’t answer the question – I’m unsure which. I asked twice. They deflected both times. I think perhaps the answer is that some people are not compatible with social media, much in the same vein as some people are incompatible with Tupperware or Amway. Some people can benefit from social media, while for others, it’s just not a fit.
No, really, go!
These guys wholeheartedly believe what they are preaching. If you go to their event, you may well walk away believing as well. It may help you get over some of your long-held beliefs about the nature of relationships, and that will make you more compatible with social media tools.
If Chris Brogan and Julien Smith visit your town, I highly recommend their event. It was thought-provoking, just as I imagine their book will be. You can’t ask for more than that, especially in today’s never say negative online dialog.
Bad marketing habits die hard
Bad habits are hard to break. If you are routinely investing time in low-yield marketing methods, you have yourself a bad habit. If you need proof, just take a look at some of your daily non-business habits. Here are a couple of bad habits I’ve observed in my daily routines:
Hot and cold water
It’s 95 degrees out. Hot food and drink are the last thing on my list of desirable sustenance. I’m pouring ice cold chocolate hemp milk into my coffee solely to bring the temperature down so that it does not heat up my body. And yet, every time I turn on the water at the sink, I turn on the hot water. It’s a bad habit. I keep correcting myself, but not before I feel hotness on hands. It costs money to heat water. Granted, it’s not much, but when you wash your hands as often as do I (yeah, I’m sort of a germ freak), it adds up. I’m teaching myself to turn on the cold water first, but years of badness are hard to undo.
This one isn’t bad, but it illustrates the point well
I eat a lot of soy yogurt. Heaps. I usually buy the 4-serving tubs, but sometimes they are sold out, so I get the 1-serving minis. The tubs come with a re-closeable lid, the minis with a foil peel-away lid. Every single time I get the minis, upon finishing the yogurt, I search the kitchen in vain for the plastic lid so I can recycle it. But there isn’t one, I realize eventually. My mind believes there is a lid because so often there is indeed a lid. I know that I must recycle that lid. Each time the product availability changes, I must change. If I do not change, I waste my effort.
Bad marketing is habit forming
Every week, it seems, I talk with agents and sales professionals who are trying to find easier ways to connect; ways to put less effort into their marketing, and ways to procrastinate from implementing tried and true marketing methods that work.
Procrastinating is habit forming. Bad marketing is habit forming. The more you invest in bad marketing habits, the more your business will flounder, and the more you will ask yourself when will it all turn around? Blaming slow business on the economy is a form of procrastination. Stop blaming and start marketing. When will it turn around?
It will turn around when you turn around.
Turn it around now!
Here’s a simple yet extremely effective exercise. Take a look at your marketing methods. List them out on a sheet of paper (or in Excel if you just can’t bring yourself to use paper and a pen). List out everything you do during your day that could possibly be categorized as marketing, and add it to your list. Now, write the time you are spending on each item on a weekly basis. Next, write the positive outcome in a third column, and finally, write the negative outcomes in a fourth column. It will be very easy to see what is an effective use of your marketing time. This exercise will take you all of about one hour.
I’m going to be totally honest with you here. This exercise might make you feel bad about yourself. It might make you wonder why you’ve been wasting so much time on facebook or twitter. It might show you that your blog posts are ineffective. Or, it may show that all of these are wildly effective. (I hate to say it, but in most cases, they’re not.)
There are some side benefits of this exercise. In addition to giving you a bird’s eye view of your bad marketing habits, you will get a good sense of how much consistent effort you have actually put into each method, and ultimately, how much you are willing to invest in your success. It will tell you if you can effectively manage your own marketing, or if you really need a marketing manager to keep you focused and on task. Finally, it will help you discover your strengths and weaknesses, which can be applied to your personal brand development.
Things can change, but first and foremost you must stab those bad habits in the heart with the sharp end of a highly motivated goal. You can do it. You just have to do a little hard work. Meanwhile, I’ll be hunting around for a nonexistent yogurt top.
Look for the shorter processes that are most effective
I interviewed a friend of a long-time client as a favor the other day. She called for directions from the road. She had no idea where she was, but she had a GPS in her car. I gave her the address, which she had forgotten to bring, and although she was about fifteen minutes away, she got here in about forty minutes.
The interview went fine, and she seemed nice. I could tell she was firmly planted as a contemporary of the current generation, and it served as a perfect analogy for what I see in marketing nowadays: People lost in a sea of unknown choices, trying to make technology do for them what they could easily do themselves in less time and with greater effectiveness.
When she left, I asked if she needed directions. “Sure,” she said. Nice of her to accept them I guess.
I proceeded to tell her: “Go up the street to the stop sign, take a right, take a left at the signal, then another left at the next signal, and that will take you straight to I-5.” I could have drawn her a map in about ten seconds. They were pretty easy directions, but I could see she didn’t know what to do with them. I asked, “You’re going to use your GPS instead?”
She nodded her head yes, smiling, and walked out the door thanking me for the time. I poured some juice, and looked out the window about five minutes later. She was still sitting in the driveway messing with the GPS with a furrowed brow. She fumbled with getting the GPS to stay on the windshield for a couple minutes, before driving away.
People complain they haven’t enough time today. Today’s new processes take infinitely longer, even for the generation brought up on them, and they are less effective. Let’s take a look at a couple of simple examples of this.
Example #1
Old way of making contact:
1. Look up phone number,
2. Call,
3. Talk.
Conclusion: Pretty darn effective and quick to boot!
New way of making contact:
1. Turn on computer or PDA,
2. Log in to facebook,
3. Login failed,
4. Look up password,
5. Log in to facebook,
6. See if your friend is available for chat,
7. See that your friend is not available for chat,
8. Go to friend’s profile,
9. Mindlessly read their ‘wall’, and learn about Enquirer-like headlines
10. Send message to friend,
11. Wait for reply,
12. Still waiting for reply three hours later,
13. Take a facebook test. And so on.
Conclusion: Oh my. What do we have here? Why it’s a total waste of time and no connection!
Example #2:
Look at facebook ‘fan pages’ if you need another example. If you’re over the age of 30, facebook is not your primary communication tool, and you don’t ‘get it’. If you’ve started up a fan page for your business, you are not marketing. You’re playing. And that’s fine, as long as you’re not expecting a gratifyingly high return on the effort, and you have plenty of spare time in your business schedule for connecting with your friends, because that’s what facebook was designed for. Oh, and you already have enough business too.
What the hell does your business need a fan page for? Businesses don’t need fans. They need customers, plain and simple. Anything else is just playing around. Fan pages are akin to high school popularity contests, complete with cliques (approve your friend as your facebook friend), gossip (read your approved friends’ walls), and scratch fights. Well, maybe not the scratch fights.
I know, I know, updates can go out to your entire fan base with the click of a button. So? How big is your fan base? Is it 100 people? 250? 2000? Unless your fans number about 250,000, you are playing, not working. You can effectively reach infinitely more people with a plethora of other media in a fraction of the time. And remember that time equals money. Your time is valuable. Add it up.
Stop playing if you want your business to succeed. Look for the shorter processes that work instead of the longer ones that just waste time.
Now excuse me while I go try to find my GPS so I can wonder where my cell phone is so I can get that address so I can look it up on the GPS that just fell off the windshield and drive with one device in each hand while steering with my teeth.
Go out and fail today!
It seems that mistakes are no longer acknowledged. One of the most important childhood lessons I learned was how to accept being wrong. It taught me to be humble and to know that everything I do is not perfect.
Lately, it seems that every phone call I make to a customer service department at nearly any company, from those known for their stellar customer service, to those not so known for it, is answered by someone whose number one priority it is to assert just how right they are.
It doesn’t matter what I have called about because 99% of the time, they aren’t listening. All they seem to want to do upon answering the call is let me know that they are right. Their opinion is the only one that matters. Have a question? We don’t care. We’re not here to answer your questions. We’re here to be right. Is our product defective? Don’t care about that either as long as we’re right.
If everyone was perfect, it would be a pretty boring world. We learn from our mistakes. A mistake is a small form of failure. Failure rocks because it teaches us how to succeed. “Why do we fall down? So we can learn how to pick ourselves back up.” (- Batman Begins, 2005)
All of this rightness begs the question: If every company is always right, who does that leave to be wrong?
It leaves only the customer to be wrong. How do you think that makes customers feel?
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes
Think about it for a second. You’ve just given your hard-earned money to a company. You’ve got a question or a problem, so you call customer service, and the first thing they tell you is that you’re wrong or your question is irrelevant. How does that make you feel?
This kind of rightness can only lead to resentment and a damaged brand. The good news is that always being right presents opportunities for competitive companies to steal away business. People do business with people they relate to. People make mistakes. Companies make mistakes. When they can admit it, they go well together. When companies claim to be perfect, humans can no longer relate to them, and they move on to someone else.
When companies claim to always be right as a flawed tactic for eliminating liability or due to an over-inflated ego, they are really losing customer loyalty by alienating people and creating a disconnect that damages their brand reputation.
Whether you are building a personal brand or protecting a corporate brand, you must learn to relate to your customers, admit your shortcomings, and embrace your failures. Only after doing these can you realize your greatest possible success.
My call to businesses great and small: Go out and fail today!
Congratulations, Starbucks, on your chest-thumping ad campaign
An open letter to Starbucks’ marketing department:
Your latest ad headline reads, “Thanks to everyone who helped make us the country’s #1 best coffee, which includes our great baristas.” Could you possibly have worded that any worse? What exactly does that headline mean? What is a “#1 best coffee”? Why would someone in New York care if someone in Wyoming favors Starbucks coffee? I mean, really?
I should admit, I am opposed to chest-beating, ‘We’re #1 statements.’ They have no meaning, and they’re simply in poor taste, harkening back to apes proclaiming their dominance after battle.
I see Zagat did the rating. (They’re the #1 best business ratings company.) Funny, they never contacted me. Did anyone you know get a call from the folks at Zagat wondering about your favorite coffee? My informal survey revealed that fully no one I know got the ring up from the Zagat survery folks. Yet, Starbucks is the country’s #1 best coffee. Oh, I see the survey included just 6,000 respondents. That seems like a small minority to represent 305 million Americans.
It seems as if Starbucks is really saying thanks to all the folks at Zagat for designating you “the country’s #1 best coffee.” And the #1 best coffee includes the baristas. Or are the baristas in the coffee? Did I get that right? Will anyone else? Or are you saying thanks to your employees for being the country’s #1 best baristas? Does the whole country think that too? Does it sell Starbucks coffee?
Not on Zagat’s own site, it doesn’t. A search for ‘coffee’ on the Zagat home page will net you eight coffee shop results, none of which are Starbucks. So, Zagat awarded you with the ranking as the country’s #1 best coffee, but that doesn’t get you a listing in their top eight places for coffee.
Oh, wait! Zagat must be talking about rural America! The country! I love the country. It’s the #1 best place.
Really, what it does is get you a whole bunch of free news clippings that no one cares about. There are much more compelling ways to start a visible conversation about Starbucks.
Why spend valuable marketing dollars putting a poorly-worded, completely meaningless message out to the masses?
Your tag line is much stronger: “It’s not just coffee. It’s Starbucks.” Exactly! There’s thought-provoking power in that. People go to Starbucks for the ‘Starbucks experience.’
Since the ad headline has no real meaning, it creates confusion, which greatly reduces the likelihood that ad viewers will scroll down to see the much stronger tag line.
When you ask folks in Starbucks’ hometown of Seattle, many people say Starbucks coffee tastes burned, but the shops here are always packed anyway. That speaks to the quality of the experience, not the #1 best coffee.
What I’ve come to know about Starbucks is that I can stop into nearly any one of them, sit comfortably and work while a stream of interesting people pass through the door. I can get a decent beverage and some reasonably healthy food to boot. Starbucks ubiquity means that I can set up meetings in far-away towns with a setting that is familiar to both me and the client. These things are all about value and experience, not some arbitrary “country’s #1 best coffee” rating.
Don’t get me wrong here – I’m not beating up Starbucks, just their advertising, which could easily be a whole lot better.
Twitter ‘keeping it real’ serum
This is a quick screen shot from my Twitter home. Good for a small chuckle. 15 minutes always seems to take about 19 minutes in real time. Livestrong.
People love advertising
People like to complain about advertising. They see it on the internet, on the tele, on billboards, in magazines, and in the mail, and it annoys them. People would prefer to have their entertainment cakes and just stare at them with syrupy eyes, never having to engage their minds in the inner “manipulative” advertisements.
Thing is, advertising is not manipulative in the least. In fact, people actually value advertising as part of their daily lives, more so now than ever before.
All advertising mediums are completely optional. Without the branding and adverts that people love to complain about, none of the mediums would exist. Advertising pays for the entertainment we treasure and learn from. Advertising is a win-win for everyone. You get your entertainment, the advertiser gets a great response (when they do it right), and the medium – be it a tv program, magazine, website, or whateva’ – continues. Win-win-win, in fact.
Do you watch movie previews? They’re adverts. Do you ever see a movie preview that entices you to go see another movie? That’s an advert that worked the moment you paid for the next ticket. If the movie previews annoy you, you are free to look away or come in just in time for the feature. I usually see a packed theater during the previews.
The same choice to look away or simply not engage applies to every other advertising medium that exists. Try thinking about advertising like this: Advertising pays for the entertainment you love. Which forms of entertainment do you love? What types of advertising are bringing that value to you?
Branding touches high school students
I had the opportunity to speak about branding at a local Seattle high school a couple weeks ago. It came as no surprise to me that some of the students feel manipulated by the branding efforts of large corporations.
What did surprise me, however, is that fully half of the students felt that they are not manipulated at all. Instead they felt while businesses can effectively market themselves in very visible ways, each person has choices about what to buy and which mediums to view. My point exactly!
The students liked the idea of defining their personal brands. The teacher liked it so much in fact that she suggested making it into a class project.
It was a nice way to spend an hour and great to connect with some smart, passionate young adults.