Schubert Solutions

Poor Rango.  He starts off so comfortable in his small terrarium world, with his wind-up goldfish BFF and his headless Barbie girlfriend, but he is still a lonely little chameleon.  His conversations are all one-sided and he can never make a real connection with all of these inanimate objects.

That’s a lot like some businesses, I’d say.  Marketers sit in their tiny grey cubes having one-sided conversations with all of the company’s clients.  Buy our product!  It’s sleek and sexy, inexpensive and it will get you a hotter girlfriend. That grey cube can be a lonely world, too.  But, hark!  There is a better way!  Customers want to interact with your brand—join in conversations and ask questions.  You, as a marketer, want to give customers what they want, right?  Right.

So, go ahead and start the conversation, Rango style.

First, know who you are: Rango’s biggest character flaw is his lack of self-knowledge.  He doesn’t know who he is, so he pretends to be someone he’s not.  In social media, there are plenty of brands that try to be quirky or funny or snarky, but your presence needs to reflect YOUR brand.  You risk sounding inauthentic when you follow trends, so be true to your own voice and you’ll win a lot more fans.

Second, accept that you may need guidance: Rango has Roadkill the armadillo and the Spirit of the West to tell him where to go and encourage him on his journey.  You have the internet.  You have social media experts saturating the Google machine with blogs full of free advice.  All you have to do is open yourself up to finding guidance for your social media marketing efforts, and it will appear.  Also, you might want to actually search for things like “social media marketing” in Google—the blogs won’t magically appear if you don’t search for them.

Third, remember that “no man can walk out on his own story”: Just as Rango’s confidence is flagging and he is giving up on his destiny, the Spirit of the West gives him this inspirational tidbit.  It’s completely normal for energy to wane in the midst of an ongoing marketing campaign, but you can’t walk out on your own story.  It’s your brand that stands to benefit from your marketing efforts, so don’t give up before your campaign has a chance to succeed.

Fourth, hire a super star: You don’t have to hire Johnny Depp to do your social media marketing, but utilizing an expert can improve your campaign exponentially.  If you have the funds to spare, find someone with a deep understanding of the various social media platforms that’s not only willing to set up your accounts, but also interact with your followers and increase the visibility of your brand.

And finally, kill it with a single bullet: The hawk, the mayor, the seven Jenkins brothers (OK, that last one he made up)—Rango is legendary for taking men down with a single bullet.  How efficient!  You, too, can take the efficient, one bullet approach by setting up a website for your brand.  Whether or not you think you need one, a website can act as a hub for all of your social media campaigns.  Clients can easily navigate to your Twitter feed, Facebook fan page, LinkedIn account, or whatever other networks you use and start up a conversation.

This past week was my birthday.  Not the whole week, mind you, my mother would probably never have forgiven me if my actual birth stretched out that long.  I’m talking about July 28th, of course.  Don’t you all have it marked on your calendars?  I’d apply for it to be a national holiday, but I’m super-busy so that’ll have to wait.

Something I realized in the past week, though, was how birthdays can make you feel so special.  I didn’t do anything all that great on July 28th, all those years ago, but somehow I’m still entitled to a whole day of being a Birthday Princess.  My husband chauffeurs me around town, where ever I want to go.  People give me presents.  Everyone on Facebook is suddenly aware of my existence.  It’s wonderful!  No wonder everyone loves their birthday.

From a marketing perspective, this is exactly the feeling you want to achieve with your clients.  You want your clients to feel special and loved because that’s what keeps them loyal to your brand.  All of those retailers that offer birthday coupons?  They’re on the right track, but there’s more to it than that.  Making your clients feel special should not be an annual occurrence.  It should be DAILY!

Treat clients to deals and coupons.  Acknowledge them on Facebook and Twitter.  Hold client appreciation events.  Make sure they know how integral they are to your company’s success.  When you treat your customers like they’re special, they’re far more likely to become repeat visitors.

I’ll leave you with a short anecdote.  Last Friday, my husband and I went out to Jersey Mike’s Subs for dinner after we hit up the Border’s closing sale.  We’d ordered our food and were waiting for my hot sub for maybe five minutes.  We weren’t getting anxious, really, just standing around chatting.  Suddenly, the store manager comes over and apologizes profusely for making us wait.  Then he gives me a free brownie.  Then he gives me some coupons.  When the sub was done, the cook brought it over and also apologized profusely for the (5 minute) wait.  He gave me a coupon, too.

Suffice to say, I felt special.  Like my time was important to them, and they felt awful about wasting it.  Whereas I may not have had feelings either way about Jersey Mike’s Subs before, now I adore them.  The next time we go out to get dinner, it will be to Jersey Mike’s Subs.  That’s how important customer service is to me, and I guarantee it’s that important to your clients as well.

Social media marketing has become an ubiquitous addition to every marketing department, and with just cause.  Companies can engage with customers on a (basically) live platform.   Updates and special offers can be related in real time, without months of preparation for billboards and direct mailers.

But what happens when a brand representative has a foot-in-mouth moment?  That moment is likewise real time.  Immediately captured by the public.  If the offense is especially bad, the post can go viral within a matter of hours.   Twitter users seem especially vulnerable to this phenomenon.

In other words, the lightening quick pace of the internet is not always a good thing.  These folks might agree:

Kenneth Cole:  ”Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo -KC”

Oh no he didn’t.  Marketing gone really, really wrong.  There is good precedent for capitalizing on highly visible hashtags, but hashtags dedicated to political movements and tragedies are not the ones you want.  The backlash will likely cast your business as inconsiderate and money-hungry.  Many responses to the insensitive tweet were followed by a new hashtag:  #boycottKennethCole.

Lesson learned? Try not to cash in on others’ misfortune.  This tends to be a no-brainer, but clearly some folks still haven’t figured it out.

Red Cross:  ”Ryan found two more 4 bottle packs of Dogfish Head’s Midas Touch beer… when we drink we do it right #gettngslizzerd”

A case of mixed accounts.  This tweet was meant to be posted to a personal account, but instead made the Red Cross look like a bunch of drunkards.  Oops.  While a tweet like this could have been an epic fail, Red Cross turned it around and made light of it.  They tweeted afterward, “We’ve deleted the rogue tweet but rest assured the Red Cross is sober and we’ve confiscated the keys.”

Lesson learned? Use care when posting social media updates with a phone app.  Especially when you run multiple accounts.

ChryslerAutos:  ”I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to (expletive) drive.”

This is another mixed account issue where a tweet was meant for a personal account.  These twitter apps are wily!  The contractor responsible for this tweet was unceremoniously fired from his position because of the faux pas–an understandable reaction for a company that is working to revive the Motor City.

Lesson learned? See Red Cross.  Social media apps are dangerous.

MarcJacobsIntl:  “Good luck! I pray for you all. If you get the job! I’m out of here. See ya! Don’t want to be ya! Roberts a tyrant! Seriously! He is tough!”

Unhappy intern + Twitter duty = Live Streaming Mental Meltdown.  An intern at Marc Jacobs, on their penultimate day, unleashed a tirade on Robert Duffy (Marc Jacobs CEO).

Lesson learned? Be careful who you give the Twitter reins over to.  Make sure they have your brand’s best interest at heart.

UnitedAirlines:  “…I hear the blues a-callin’, Tossed salad and scrambled eggs..”

For those who are unfamiliar, the above tweet is an excerpt from the Frasier theme song.  How can that be a bad tweet?  I’ll tell you.  A United passenger, whose flight was delayed, tweeted thrice about unsatisfactory customer service experiences with United and received zero replies.  When she finally boarded her flight, she sarcastically tweeted “Thanks to @unitedairlines I can finally watch that Frasier episode I missed in 1994.”  And that’s the tweet United Airlines responded to.

Lesson learned? Twitter is a wonderful vehicle for customer service, but letting customer complaints go unanswered makes your brand look arrogant and unresponsive.  No company wants that reputation.

With an economy that has evolved from manufacturing jobs to white-collar cubicle jobs, a new epidemic has gripped a panicked nation.  Getting things done has always been hard, but with the avenues for distraction multiplying exponentially, procrastination is at an all time high.

After (not) consulting with health professionals, I’ve come up with three ways that you can beat this epidemic and get back on track to become a productive, efficient member of society.

1. Be like Nike.  Just do it.  Once you overcome the first hurtle, which is starting the task, things will flow more easily.  As you make progress, your happiness receptors start to flare (this may or may not be scientifically accurate, there’s no real way to know for sure) and the resulting euphoria can motivate you to keep on progressing until the task is finished.
2. Break it up.  When a large task looms in front of you, it’s tempting to just stand there, looking up at it and crying.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t accomplish anything and it makes you look kind of like a sissy.  Breaking the task down into small pieces is a good way to trick your mind.  For instance, if you have a massive report to compile, break it down into sections and create it piece by piece.
3. Stop reading blogs about stopping procrastination in place of doing work.  Yes, even this one.

When I was a spry, young lass I worked at a daycare center.  My charges were all four year olds, as far as the eye could see.  I loved those kids.  In fact, I was thinking about them the other day as I browsed the aisles at Target, and it occurred to me that my former charges would now be 12 years old.  Tweens.  That’s absolute crazy-talk.  I’m not that old, am I?

I am.

And if you’ve been building an online platform for a while, so are some of your articles!  (You wondered how I was going to bring this around, didn’t you?)

Articles have a bad habit of going stale.  They may have been full of great copy, smooth transitions, and an effective call to action, but now they’re old.  New information has deemed them irrelevant, or they no longer make sense in the context of your new business strategy.

How can you stop this from happening to your articles?  Oil of Olay doesn’t make a cream, unfortunately.  When time takes its toll on your prior pieces, there are only a few things you can do:

• Update the article. If the staleness is simply due to outdated information, you can always edit the article to reflect the current state of things.  It’s cheaper than having a whole new article commissioned and it ensures that outdated information isn’t floating around the internet and misinforming your potential clients.
• Don’t date the article in the first place. News articles are constantly becoming outdated.  For this reason, instead of referring to “today” or “yesterday” in their copy, journalists often prefer to give explicit dates.  This prevents them from having to update articles later, when the event has long passed.  This is especially helpful for press releases, which document a specific happening within the company.
• Use it for parts. For articles that are so outdated that a simple update will not resolve the issue, feel free to chop up the piece and use it for parts.  Maybe the intro paragraph is especially brilliant and would go nicely in your new blog post.  Or perhaps the call to action worked so well that you want to use it again in a new article.  If you own the rights to the writing, you can reuse it in whatever ways you can come up with.
• Delete it. Sometimes an article is correct at the time of publishing, but it has become incorrect as time has passed.  For instance, an article about BP’s wonderful track record would be completely irrelevant any time after the massive gulf spill.  You could make corrections or apologies, but if the piece is online, sometimes it’s best to just delete it.  Deleting is also useful if the former (incorrect) information might get mixed up with the new (correct) information.  However, I feel compelled to say that deleting should be your last resort, as deleting articles and blog posts can often have a negative impact on your SEO.

I’ll confess right now to being a Harry Potter nerd.  I don’t dress up for the midnight showings or write fanfic, but I love the books and I totally have opening weekend marked on my calendar.

And guess what.  It’s this weekend.

In honor of the final Harry Potter cinematic adventure, I’m giving you five spells that you can cast on your clients.  They probably won’t work, but it’s worth a try.

Spell:  Accio
Why You Want It:  Accio Clients! Accio brings clients straight to your doorstep.  Lead-building made easy.
If it Doesn’t Work:  Continue lead-building campaigns as scheduled.  Your best bet is to remain focused on networking events, conferences, and building your social media platform to increase marketplace visibility.

Spell:  Legilimens
Why You Want It:  Chances are your clients have not had a ton of occlumency training, so legilimens will allow you to dig around in their minds unencumbered.  There’s no telling what sorts of useful customer information you might scrounge up in there.
If it Doesn’t Work:  If you want to get inside your clients’ minds sans magic, there are always customer surveys.  Knowing how customers view your brand is critical in building a marketing strategy.  Website analytics are another way to discern how your clients are interacting with your brand.

Spell:  Immobulus
Why You Want It:  Sales pitches are so much easier when the clients can’t walk away.  Immobilize them so they will have to stay and listen.
If It Doesn’t Work:  Forcing clients to hear your pitch is typically ineffective anyway.  Try throwing a party or networking event of your own to reach out to your clients.  Greet each of your guests and use their undivided attention to showcase your brand.

Spell:  Rictusempra
Why You Want It:  Laughter is the best medicine, and Rictusempra, the tickling spell, is guaranteed to make clients giggle.  Now your brand will be associated with happy, lighthearted fun!
If it Doesn’t Work:  Another way to create positive associations for your brand is to go that extra mile to make sure clients feel comfortable and happy.  Baking cookies, restricting hard sales tactics, and learning about your customers’ needs can all go a long way toward encouraging return visits.

Spell:  Imperio
Why You Want It:  You naughty wizard.  Imperio may be one of the three unforgiveable curses, but wouldn’t it be nice if you could completely control your customers?  You tell them to buy your product and they buy it, no questions asked.  Just don’t let the Ministry of Magic catch you performing the curse, or you’ll be in Azkaban before you can even think to disapparate.
If it Doesn’t Work:  Healthy customer relationships aren’t built on mind control.  All you can really do is put your product or business in the best light possible, making sure to diversify your marketing strategy, and the customers will decide from there.

Good luck trying out the spells, and let me know in the comments if you have any success!

On the heels of my prior post, I’ve been noticing a great deal of ‘act fast!’ and ‘limited quantities!’ marketing campaigns.  It’s kind of like when your biological clock starts ticking and suddenly you are surrounded by pregnant women at every turn.  Not that I have had experience with that or anything.

What I’ve been noticing even more of, though, is exclusivity.

Google+, Google’s answer to Facebook, has been rolled out by invitation only.  Gilt.com, a luxury e-commerce site, only allows invited members to access their listings.  Costco has been working the members-only angle for decades.  And now, Mashable has pointed out yet another instance. Spotify, a music streaming service that is hugely popular across the pond, is coming to the US—by invitation only.

My question is, does exclusivity in services and products truly work to drum up business?  I’m not going to give you the answer, mostly because I don’t know it.  I would argue that exclusivity generates hype.  Everyone wants to see what’s going on behind the VIP curtain.  And yes, some people will be desperate to win that invite and strut behind that curtain, but I think this type of marketing can be limited.  Some, myself included, will be wary of a company’s motives.  Is this hype all based on a ‘limited quantities!’ mentality or is the product/service actually an improvement upon what’s currently available?

Google certainly has had success with invite-only products in the past.  Gmail, for instance, was invite-only back in 2004 until the flood gates opened in early 2007.  In fact, many have suggested that exclusivity was a boon to Gmail because it prevented bots from signing up tons of accounts and spamming.  Either way, Gmail’s exclusivity was part of its draw.  But Gmail offered something more than the current free e-mail services.  They offered more storage, better internal search capabilities, and more organizational features.

Will Google+ have the same success as Gmail?  It’s hard to tell.  Especially given that Google’s real-time messaging system, Wave (remember Google Wave?  No?), was similarly exclusive and it tanked.  I think that one of the reasons that Wave may have tanked was that the services were already being provided elsewhere.  Wave was aggregating similar services to Twitter, IM, and e-mail, but customers didn’t want an aggregate source.

In Which I Predict the Future (Accuracy Not Guaranteed)

My guess is that Google+ will meet a similar fate as Wave, unless it can provide a service that somehow builds on what Facebook has already created.  If this is yet another social networking site with the same functionality as Facebook, I would wager that even with the Google branding and the exclusivity, it won’t take off in any meaningful way.  Mind you, I have not been invited (NO I’M NOT BITTER) to Google+ so I haven’t been privy to the differences from Facebook.

Spotify, on the other hand, is offering a service that the US doesn’t have readily available.  Pandora and LastFM offer music streaming capabilities, but you can’t choose what songs or artists you want to listen to unless you purchase the songs or albums.  Putting a song name into Pandora, for instance, may give you that song eventually but more than likely you will have to listen to five or six similar songs before you get to it.  Spotify cashes in on this difference, and with the exclusivity to boot, it seems poised to take America by storm.

Now, if Google+ hits it big and Spotify doesn’t, I didn’t write any of this.  Erase it from your memory.

[EDIT] Just got a Google+ invite from an awesome reader, so now I can give a slightly more knowledgeable opinion.

There aren’t ads on Google+ right now, but that’s guaranteed to change.  So far, it seems that Google+ is just tacking new lingo on the Facebook platform.  +1′s for businesses are just like ‘liking’ business pages on Facebook.  Circles are pretty much just Facebook Groups.  It is convenient that my Picasa pictures were automatically transferred over, but I don’t think that perk alone would be enough for me to rebuild my friends and profile on Google+.

So, my thoughts remain the same.  Unless Google+ is going to give us more than what’s in the beta version, I don’t see it taking off.

That’s right. YOU can write a best-selling ebook.*  Knowing how to write is completely unnecessary.*  Successful information products have ZERO use for proper grammar or mechanics.  Whether you were a high school dropout or you spent every English class secretly playing video games, you can make six figures a year from your ebook.  All you have to do is follow my easy, no-fail system for writing hugely profitable ebooks.

In my ebook, “Making Six Figures in Under Six Hours, No Effort Required,”* you’ll learn to:

• Write an ebook about writing insanely profitable ebooks (results not guaranteed), in absurdly short periods of time.
• Use bold type and red highlighting to make the stakes seem higher for folks that might be considering your ebook.
• Shamelessly market to anyone who doesn’t know any better.
• Create an arbitrary deadline and limited quantities to encourage potential buyers to ACT FAST!

Testimonials:

“This ebook changed my life.” - My grandma

“We’re so proud of you, honey!” – Mom and Dad

“Get away from me.  Stop poking me.  Mom!  She’s poking me again!” – My sister

My ebook typically sells for $700.  BUT, today is my cat’s birthday.  In honor of Socks’ fifth birthday, I’m offering my ebook for only $40.

BUT YOU HAVE TO BUY IT NOW.  There is only ONE COPY LEFT!

This deal won’t last.*

*Disclaimer:  You might not be able to write a best-selling ebook.

*Disclaimer:  You probably do need to know how to write, at least a little bit.

*Disclaimer:  Six figures does not reveal where the decimal might be placed.  $100,000 is six figures, but so is $100.000 and $1.00000.    Also, this ebook does not actually exist.

*Disclaimer:  I don’t actually have anything against ebooks.  I’d like to write one myself at some point.  What I do take issue with is the hard sales pitches with circular thinking that espouse ebook writing tricks for making hordes of cash with little to no effort.  The ebook authors are usually slinging their own ebook writing methods that have earned them more money than they can carry–in an ebook.  Their trick to selling tons of ebooks, it seems, is writing an ebook about how to sell tons of ebooks.

Making decisions is hard.  I mean, really hard.  Everyone has been in that group of people.  You know, that group.  The one where no one wants to decide on a place to eat dinner.  The responsibility is far too great.  They’re all buckling under the pressure.  Burgers?  Too greasy.  Sushi?  Too expensive.  Subs?  Too boring.

If you pick the restaurant and everyone sits down to a pricey menu, ants crawling across the table, or no vegetarian selections—who gets the blame?  You.  That’s right.  And that’s why no one ever wants to make those critical decisions.  Least of all, me.

Don’t even bother e-mailing me about selecting a place for you to eat.  It will take me three hours just to narrow down the field, and eventually my husband will have to drag me along by the arm to a place picked at random from Yelp!.

This is my long-winded, rambling way of saying that I made a decision today, and I am so, so proud of it.  I’m proud of myself for making it, and I’m proud of the decision itself.  My decision was to quit my day job.

Quitting a steady income for freelancing is sort of like a blind leap off of a cliff.  No, I don’t mean stupid.  Well, it might be stupid.  We’ll see.  Anyway, I meant that it’s a leap of faith.  You hope the fall isn’t too far.  You don’t know what’s down there at the bottom.  Could be a short dive into the ocean or a thousand foot drop onto jagged rocks.  You suddenly start praying even though you haven’t been inside a church for over a decade:  God, please let me survive this fall.  I promise, I’ll be totally religious and stuff after this.  I’ll light candles, listen to Creed, and walk around Barnes & Noble spreading the gospel.  Please, please, please let me live through this.

At my job, I was helping to run a small business.  I worked on SEM, SEO, ROI, and a bunch of other three letter business buzz words.  I probably worked on synergy, too, without even realizing it.  I was helping to build a brand, boost conversions, and turn a small start-up business into a success.  In other words, I was doing exactly what I should have been doing for my business.  After I realized that, the decision was simple.

Has anyone else left a steady job to pursue their dreams?  Tell me about it in the comments!