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“We make brands imperative.”

July 20, 2010 by Mike Troiano · View Comments 

Work on our new Web site about to begin in earnest, centered on bringing the approach that’s come into focus over the last few months to the Web.

Starts with a clear statement of what we do, thought I’d bounce a draft off you folks and get some feedback. Here’s what we have so far:

Holland-Mark is a marketing services firm focused on making brands “imperative.”

We believe that consumer and business-to-business buying habits have changed permanently in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Where people once bought what was “interesting,” today they buy only what is “imperative;” what they truly feel they need or expect a return on investment from.

While advertising can make products “interesting,” marketing communications alone cannot make a brand “imperative.” Imperative brands have four attributes in common:

  • Relevance of Offering – A product aligned with the evolving true needs of its target audience.
  • Clarity of Message – A truthful, relevant, motivating and distinct statement of its core value proposition.
  • Consistency of Communication – Reinforcement of the above at every point of contact with the brand.
  • Driving of Engagement – An ongoing, mutually beneficial relationship between the brand and its primary external constituencies.

These requirements correspond with Holland-Mark’s four core offerings:

Sync™ – A management consulting offering which shapes a product or service experience to align more closely with the right market opportunity

One Simple Thing (OST)™ – A brand strategy offering which distills messaging down to a singular thought which is true, relevant, motivating and distinct

Every Point of Content (EPOC)™ – An audit of the 360° experience of a brand to ensure consistent alignment with OST™

Content Hub – A social marketing program which enables client organizations to engage effectively across social media channels.

So what do you think? Do you get that? Would you pay for it?

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It’s Time to Tackle the Unlearning Challenge

June 18, 2010 by Mike Troiano · View Comments 

Had a nice chat with my pal Edward Boches earlier today, talking about MITX’s FutureM, and why its timing couldn’t be better.

These are challenging times among marketing folk. I’m convinced most are still hoping this social stuff is going to just blow over at some point, but even those who “get it” often seem not quite sure what to do with it.

There are a set of ideas accepted as metaphysical certainties among the social branding blogerati, almost all of which are anathema to people who’ve successfully built brands through broadcast media. Among them:

  • The user is in control now
  • Great marketing is distributed, not centralized
  • Target engagement trumps message control
  • The future belongs to free content
  • Advertising is dead.

There’s truth in each of these ideas, and nonsense as well.

The struggle to get beyond the black-and-white view, highlight the nuances, and act on them in ways that make sense for a particular brand at a particular point in time are daunting, to say the least. In doing so progressive brand managers need to overcome both the inertia of entrenched old-media diehards, and the relentless castigation of social marketing jihadis. It’s a real challenge, to say the least, and a recurring theme in the day-to-day lives of camp-straddlers like Edward and myself.

Perhaps the first step toward a productive middle way is the try-and-frame-the-problem-in-a-more-nuanced-way. Reflecting on our conversation, I’ve come up with this:

Social/Content/Inbound/New Marketing is hard because adopting it requires cognitive change on 3 levels.

First we must learn what we don’t know. We have gurus for this, fortunately… Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott, Louis Gray, and others. These people are the front line of the revolution, and although the risks are great out there, it’s a lot of fun on the days you don’t get shot.

But learning what is new is not enough. The second level is a bunch of stuff we need to re-learn… the fundamental truths of branding, communications, and media, which evolve within the speed limits of behavioral rather than digital change. There are a handful of real bloggers with the depth of experience required to advance this position. For me Tom Cunniff is in this camp, along with people like Joe Jaffe and Steve Rubell.

But even that is not enough. There’s a third leg of the New Marketing adoption stool: that which must be un-learned in order to succeed. The unlearning domain includes a whole bunch of established, structural stuff that needs to be turned on its head: organizational structures, business processes, financial incentives, competitive dynamics, and operational metrics. These may be among the most challenging things to change, and they are almost certainly among the last to be tackled by the subset of people who are serious about business results.

I hope to spend some time tackling these issues in one of the FutureM sessions, and hope you’ll join us for it. In the meantime… does this framework shed any light on things for you?

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The Hub in Education

June 14, 2010 by Rob Waldeck · View Comments 

The New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) has published the New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE) for more than 25 years – and we have had the pleasure of being their design and production partner for over a decade and a half. For reasons both strategic and economic, it was time for NEBHE to elevate their online offering and bring the robust content of their well-regarded Journal to the digital space. For the past few months we’ve worked closely with them on this endeavor and we’re delighted to celebrate the launching of their new site, NEBHE.org.

We are particularly proud of this effort because NEBHE hasn’t just redesigned their website ­– they’ve created a Content Hub. They’ve embraced the notion that it is not enough to simply create content on their website for others to find; they’ve made the strategic decision to elevate the new NEBHE site as a center for the distribution and discussion of the most relevant and compelling commentary, analysis, news, data, and conversation about higher education in New England.

In the past we’ve posted lots on how to build a Content Hub, including “Ten Steps to Build a Basic Content Hub” and “The Plumbing of Social Marketing.” But beyond the technical, what does a Content Hub mean for NEBHE?

The good news is that NEBHE is a content-creating machine. After all, they’ve produced dozens of pages of content each quarter for more than 25 years. But creating a Content Hub isn’t as simple as posting the Journal content to the site. Here are the biggest of the challenges we faced:

1) Articulating a content strategy. The magazine delivered a certain kind of content each quarter that was appropriate for that medium and frequency. In the new medium we needed to determine what of that we would keep, what needed to go away, and what new could be added. Ultimately we needed to identify what NEBHE’s target audience wants to read about, what content NEBHE is qualified to deliver, and what content best serves NEBHE’s mission.

2) Elevating the content. NEBHE is an active non-profit with a number of substantial initiatives and hundreds of existing web pages. Bringing the Journal to the web led to two questions: one, how best to integrate the Journal content and weight it with/against the existing site content, and two, how to logically structure and present the various content types within the Journal.

3) Enabling participation. Producing a quarterly print publication requires one set of processes. Redirecting those efforts to continue to produce long-form content, while adding responsibility for curating the most relevant content of others, offering daily perspective on breaking news and events, and reaching out to contribute to the conversation in the online space requires substantial realignment, new processes, and a little training.

We worked through these challenges and a few others too. And we are proud of what NEBHE has accomplished. So visit the NEBHE site. Or grab their feed. Or follow them on twitter.  We hope you’ll take a look and let us know what you think.

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Talk at Today’s MassTLC Conference

June 3, 2010 by Mike Troiano · View Comments 

Well covered by Computerworld…

(photo courtesy Doug Haslam)
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The Tweetwashing Agency Dilemma

May 26, 2010 by Mike Troiano · View Comments 

“Greenwashing” is how cynics try to capitalize on the public’s growing predisposition to conservation and renewable energy. It’s a bit of flim-flam to make a product seem environmentally responsible, when it really isn’t.

It’s a lose, lose, lose proposition. First, some people are inevitably duped into believing that BP loves animals / trash bags can be biodegradable / coal can be “clean” – all to the benefit of charlatans and scoundrels. Second, the environment suffers despite the best efforts of downstream buyers to express their will in supporting it. Third, opportunity costs build up on two fronts: Buyers become cynical and indifferent, and sellers fail to invest in technology that would render their products more sustainable versus the competition.

The same thing is starting to happen in social marketing. Prospective clients are asking about whether they can “outsource Twitter and Facebook” to us, meaning will we put some underpaid 22-year-old on TweetDeck and ask her to “@” anyone with the poor judgment to tweet that his girlfriend dumped him while coolly sipping a cold can of BrandX.

Why do they want this? Certainly not because it’s effective in building relationships, in driving incremental sales. They want it because access to such a resource would enable them to plaster Twitter and Facebook chicklets all over their web site (which almost never allows comments because “the legal folks won’t let us”).

Call it “Tweetwashing.” A shallow and gimmicky handle for a shallow and gimmicky practice.

Is that the promise of social media? Will it become just another channel for back-slapping bullshit?

For me, the dilemma is this: I don’t believe social media can be an effective branding or promotional medium if it’s not embraced – authentically – by real people from inside brands that want to engage with the truth. I just don’t believe it can be applied as some kind of glossy outer coating by an agency partner, or any third party, and be truly effective over the long haul.

But that seems to be what clients want. They aren’t focused on the opportunities presented by social media. They seem to want to make the social media problem go away, as cost effectively as possible.

So what should we do? What do you do?

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How To Get Started On Twitter

May 14, 2010 by Mike Troiano · View Comments 

Had lunch with a marketing exec today. Senior guy, lots of questions about Twitter, but hadn’t had a chance to get into it yet. I put together a “Ten Step” type note for him, and thought I’d share it in hopes of helping other senior marketing folks get started.

Anyhoo…

  1. Get into the right frame of mind. Read this. I wrote it a while ago, but it was (and is) my best attempt to explain to people why Twitter is worth the effort. I’d also recommend you take a look at this, and this, from the people who taught me about Twitter. Ready? Good.
  2. Create An Account. Go here. Enter your real info, and pick a username people can both remember and spell easily. You can skip the “suggestions,” but definitely look for your “friends.” If you use Outlook I’d strongly suggest exporting your contacts to a GMail account so you can check for them in the system, but if that freaks you out just skip it. If there are specific people you’d like to add you can do so in the “anyone” screen, but you can always do that later as well.
  3. Confirm your account. Check your e-mail for a note from Twitter, and click the link to confirm your e-mail.
  4. Personalize your account. You wouldn’t go to a cocktail party with a bag on your head, would you? For God’s sake… Click “settings” in the upper right, then “profile.” Upload a picture of yourself. Nothing too formal, but a head shot you can live with. Add your location, your site or blog, and a 2- or 3-line bio. If you’d like to spruce your page up a bit, click here, then click the “login to twitter” button, and “Allow” when the Auth confirmation screen appears next.
  5. Follow some smart people and news sources. I created a Twitter List of good accounts to start with. Just go here, and follow it.
  6. Find and follow some other stuff you’re interested in. You a Patriot fan? Have a favorite celebrity chef? NASCAR driver? Politician? Celebrity? Go here, and find some folks to follow. Odds are they’re already here, and getting a little closer to them can be cool.
  7. Get Tweetdeck. Twitter on the web is for dorks. Seriously, dude. Download and install Tweetdeck. It’s awesome. It will help you use Twitter as a tool, you can even feed your LinkedIn and Facebook feeds into it if you have accounts there.
  8. Add a few search columns in Tweetdeck, to track whatever you’re interested in. Follow the people you like, unfollow the people you don’t.
  9. Reply to a few people, or just retweet them. Figure out how to reply to a tweet you like (just roll over an icon in Tweetdeck, and click the back arrow. That will create a tweet with that person’s name preceded by an “@” sign. That tweet will appear in their replies list, and they’re likely to see it.) Huzzah. Retweeting is similar… just use the forward arrow. This sends the tweet through your account, a way of amplifying stuff you like, so it’s easy for more people to find. It’s a good thing for the community, kind of a service we do for each other. Welcome.
  10. Start tweeting yourself. Now you’re ready. What do you have to say? What’s the most interesting thing you came across today? What were you thinking about in the car just now? Just react to the world around you. Be sincere, be genuine. Contribute.

That’s it. Give it a whirl. Let me know how it goes.

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