On Internet Marketing

Recently I have had several people who have asked me for advice and council on how to do Internet Marketing. It looks like my day job is considering taking the plunge as well. As a blogger, I know an opportunity to kill two birds with one blog post when I see one. So here are my thoughts on Internet Marketing in the age of social media.

Some context

First, a little history. It used to be that Internet Marketing was all about communicating effectively with a web site and email communications.

For a website, the general advice was that you wanted it to be important in Google’s eyes, essentially the process of SEO. You wanted to make sure that your domain name was easy to type, and easy to spell. You wanted to make sure that your users could find what they wanted on your web site. A website needs great analytics tools so that you can track how your web site is being used.

For email communications you had to decide if you wanted to have only an outgoing email campaign (broadcast only), or a mailing list (communication between everyone). If you wanted and email campaign you wanted to make sure that you had beautiful html emails that degraded gracefully into text emails. You needed to be sure that your html emails worked in the most common mail clients (harder than it sounds). For a mailing list you wanted to make sure that no one was added by mistake, and that no one was spamming people through your list.

Anyone who knows about these types of marketing systems can tell that I am barely scratching the surface on these issues. Moreover, it is also clear that while so-called “Social Media” has become really important, these older modes of communication are not less important, they are just… older.

So that is the backdrop, in brief, for the Social Media revolution. What is the big deal about Social Media? Way out of scope for this post, but I will inline probably the best video proving the point that I have seen. If you have not seen it, then watch it. If you have, then you probably already know why Social Media is a big deal.

The question posed at the beginning of this video is “Is it a fad or is it a revolution?” As is often the case to questions like that, the answer is “Yes”. Social media has lots and lots of people connecting meaningfully with lots and lots of people, but that does not mean that you will be able to get your message across using Social Media. All it means is that there are people there. Its a lot like Lubbock, Texas. For whatever reason, there are hundreds of thousands of people living in what appears to be a desert. Why would you want to live there? Because there are hundreds of thousands of people there. There is probably a reason why the original people made that city, but no one moves there now because of scenery, they move there because there are already people living there. This is much different than something like Las Vegas. Its a city in the desert that was built specifically so gambling could be legal. That is why people moved there. (I also do not understand Phoenix…)

So the next question is “What is your message?”

Your Message

Social Media people often “sell” Social Media as “the new business requirement”. They say things like “You have to be on Facebook” or “You need to have a Twitter account”. But that is really not the first question. The first question is “What is your message?”. Unless you can define your message, clearly, in a sentence or two then nothing else I am going to say is going to make sense. For fun, and because we are going to talk about Twitter soon, see if you can put your message into 140 characters. That is basically two short sentences or one really long one. Its OK if you need to go over a little, but if you need to have four or five 140 character blocks then that should be insight that you have more than one message. That is OK, but you need to recognize that you might need to follow significantly different strategies for each of your different messages.

So do you have your message(s) in your head? OK then.

Impact

To make an impact you have to learn to use the Internet Marketing tools well and then you have to apply them in  meaningful way. This is a lot like a carpenter’s toolbelt or a musician’s set of instruments. First you have to master the tool and understand the deep implications that subtle details of each  given tool. Just because a tool is a type of hammer does not mean you can use it do mount photos (imagine using a sledgehammer to tap a nail into drywall). Just because it is an instrument does not mean that you will fit in with a given band (imagine bringing a tuba into a rock band). The first level of tool mastery is understanding how to use the right tool for the right job. the second stage of mastery is knowing when to ignore what you learned in the first phase (for instance, Ska is a movement, within rock music, to embrace brass instruments).

Note that true mastery of a tool is being able to use the tool to do something else amazing. When Michelangelo was painting the ceiling… there were thousands of painters who knew how to use a paintbrush as carefully as he did. But they were probably painting signs, or the sides of barns. The ability to use the paintbrush is only the first step towards being Michelangelo.

This should sound obvious. But here is how I think this basic tool mastery is playing out in Internet marketing.

OK, so what does these phases mean? First I should admit that I was inspired to make this chart by two different sources, one is Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync? By Seth Godin. The other is a blog post entitled: The multiple phases of social media integration which is where I borrowed my three phases ( of course as a computer scientist, I must count from zero).

• 0 level is nothing.. If you read this article and go “What is Facebook?” or “What is Twitter?” then this level is where you are. No problem, I will try and help you out with lots of good links.
• 1 Level is using the Internet as a megaphone. This is when you treat your web site, Facebook page, Twitter account or whatever as a mass media device. You use it the same way people use radio, TV or newspapers: to send messages out to lots of people all at once.
• 2 Level is to use the Internet as a camp fire. When you sit around a campfire and talk, it shifts between you speaking to the group (like a megaphone) and the group speaking to you, one at a time. The group also speaks about you, in front of you. It enables public conversation in lots of different directions. In real life campfires are a great time and place to do this, because the typical night-time acoustics allow for a large group (10 to 30 people even) to participate in a single conversation. But this does not scale. The whole point of Social Medial is that you can have a campfire chat with hundreds, thousand or even millions of people all at once.
• The third level represents full tool mastery. But this does not automatically mean that you get to paint the Sistine chapel. It just means you know how to use the tool.
• 3a is named after Blendtech, a company who has successfully used Social Media to create a Sistine chapel (more in a moment).
• 3b is someone who is using the tools well, to do OK things, but is not doing anything truly meaningful. This would be like the painters who during 1512 were painting portraits or landscapes and are today forgotten. But they made a good living and their customers were happy.
• 3c is like someone who was drawing graffitti on the walls in 1512. No matter how pretty an picture, painted at night on barn might be, in the morning it will be whitewashed. The skill is irrelevant, it is a matter of message and medium match up.

Obviously, what everyone wants is to make an impact with their marketing. To leave people with a message burned into their minds, and happy that it happened. Once people see the Sistine chapel (on my bucket list) they will never never think about it the same way, and they will never forget the experience.

Is this possible with Internet Marketing? Yes. I will give you two examples.

First, if you have bought a book recently online and you immediately typed in Amazon.com then you have experienced this effect. The word “Amazon” has nothing to do with books. Yet when you want to buy a book on the Internet you probably go there automatically. Why? Because you have had a Sistine Chapel- style experience there and you will always remember it. Note that this is a great example of a company that was able to achieve this with just a website and without any kind of Social Media. Ebay and Google are other good examples.

Rather than just talk about the second example I will show you. Blendtech is a company that makes really good blenders. That is their message. That is what they want burned into your brain. After you watch the following videos, you will always remember that Blendtech is a company that makes really good blenders. You will be unable to remember the name of any other blender manufacturer, but you will never again think about where you would get a really good blender…   if you needed a really good blender.  Please watch the following two episodes of “Will it Blend”.

What is a Meatball Sundae?

Its two things that are great by themselves but still do not go together. Meatballs and Whipped Cream/Chocolate. This is the worst case scenario for Internet Marketing efforts. This is what happens when you fail to recognize that Internet Marketing and/or Social Media (two terms for the same things nowadays) really does change things deeply in in your industry, but you are unwilling to make the fundamental changes needed to make the leap.

This is actually a fundamental mistake that happens often in Health IT, which is what I like to call “Technology as Paint”. The basic notion is that technology can be liberally applied to make any existing thing better. This is the way you use paint. My wife and I recently bought a desk for $35. It was banged up and looked awful. We painted it. Now it looks like it cost $350. Paint is awesome like that!

But technology is not paint. You cannot take something that works without technology, merely make it “online” or “computerized” and assume that it will be better than the original system. the cardinal example of that in health IT is the we- are- going- to- computerize- the- dumb- doctors. Here is how the plan unfolds:

Doctor: “Hey business man, I want you to computerize me.”

Business Man: “That’s great! I have my favorite coder here with me, and we can help.”

Coder: “I can easily computerize you! I just did it for a Gas Station last week! No more paper forms at the Gas Station!! All I need to do is see all of your paper forms, and then I will computerize you by making computer versions of those forms.”

Doctor: “OK, here are the ten forms I regularly use.”

Coder: “OK I will be back in a week with your computer system built!!”

Five years pass…

Coder: “The system is almost ready, I have just finally got the ontology mapping tool together, you can go live next week!!”

Doctor: “You are fired. You have been charging me for five years to code and you have nothing to show for it. I still have to use paper because your system does not even to 10% of what the paper system does. Now I have five years worth of data in both paper and electronic records, and I can no longer afford to maintain the electronic system. I am sooo screwed, but at least I am going to stop paying you!”

This happens again and again and again in Health IT because so many technologist view technology as paint: Standard technology, liberally applied, solves all problems.

Seth Godin’s book is really required reading. It details, very explicitly how Social Media is not technology paint for marketing purposes. Any good summary of his points will show that you have to figure out if, and when your message is right for the Internet Medium in question. So when you hire someone to help you with Social Media, and they fail to show you how a given Social Media platform is good for your message, then they have failed. A pretty good idea of when you are getting bad advice here is that they are recommending that you go with the usual suspects. If they say: “you should be on Youtube, Twitter and Facebook” without discussing how your message will play in those environments, then you need to take a step back.

It would be much better for you to do what Blendtech did, which is to find the one medium that allows you to create a super-compelling version of your message, and make that medium into the “Sun” in your marketing “Solar System”. Sure Blendtech uses Twitter, and Facebook, but they do that to funnel people to their awesome videos, which in turn funnel people into buying an awesome blender.

Message and Medium as a Solar System

What follows is a little more conjecture. I am pretty darn sure about the notions I have explained above. But without dealing with a specific message, it is difficult to know what the right center-of-gravity medium might be. But still here are some guidelines that make sense to me:

• If your idea is best communicated in pictures, try Flickr or Picasa. They have really advanced tools that allow you to view a series of constantly updated photos as a steadm on another site. A big hint when using pictures is that pictures with people in them are almost always more interesting then pictures without people. You can make both Twitter and Facebook, and plain old web-page follow those photo streams. You might want to use Flickr/Picasa as the centre of gravity if before and after photos are more compelling than a video, for instance. Lots of people have made this approach work.
• If your points make sense as really short catch-phrases or have a very important real-time component, then Twitter or Identi.ca might be for you (Identi.ca is a more freedom/less popular version of Twitter). Shit My Dad Says, which is now a television show and a book (pretty good planets!!) is a good example of the catch-phrase style Twitter feed. In Portland there are some food carts that you can only find by following them on twitter. Note that you easily add Facebook and Google Buzz as planets merely by propagating your status updates to those platforms.
• If you want a deeper social engagement that includes videos, text, pictures or perhaps an application that you are writing yourself, perhaps Facebook is for you. A good question to ask about Facebook is “Am I anything like Farmville?” Again you can easily make Facebook updates propagate across the other platforms.
• If you are trying to make a series of arguments that require carefully constructed arguments, then you need a blog. This gives you the ability to tie in all kinds of other content (like I did with Youtube videos here) to make very specific and complex points. But if you make enough of these points, then perhaps you are really slowly writing a book, and you should consider self-publishing it on CreateSpace or Lulu.
• If you have already written a book, perhaps you need to split apart into a blog.
• Videos can be tremendously engaging and personal. If you have a story to tell, a parable of some kind, then this is the right medium. Even just a camera, pointed at you can be very very compelling if your story is good enough. You should be looking into Youtube, which is the king of the space, but also perhaps screencast.com if you want to show films of computer programs, or some other site if you have other specific video hosting requirements. Again, you can turn your video feed into facebook, twitter, identi.ca, and Google Buzz integration.
• If for some reason your content would work really really well next to gmail, you might look at Google Buzz.
• If you want to create complex person to person engagement between lots of people around a particular topic that they have a high level of interest in, then I would consider either email mailing lists, or online forums, or something like Google Groups, which is a pretty good fusion of both. Getting the “full message” in your email Inbox is pretty valuable.
• If you want to have things showing up in email Inboxes, but do not want to enable communication between the recipients then you probably want an email broadcasting service like MailChimp.
• If you want to engage with professionals of one kind of another Linked in is where you should start.
• If you want to generate written content, you need a Wiki.
• Face to face Events can now be deeply connected into the Internet. I like using eventbrite to schedule things like conferences, I like meetup.com for regular meetings, and when a meeting is really important, it should be live streamed with something like livestream.com.
• Sometimes, what you need is a simulated three dimensional space. Frankly I have trouble understanding when this is a good thing… but if you see it is valuable you want to use Second Life.
• If you want a Facebook style social network that you control you want Ning.
• If you want full control, including source code for your social network, then you want one of these.
• If you have a health IT application that needs to interface with Doctors socially, then you want to work with Sermo.com

I hope this is helpful to people that I am trying to counsel on Social Media. Its not just about using it, its about finding a way to use it in a compelling way!

-FT