The Clean and Green Club

This is my entry for Eban Pagan’s how-to-use social-media contest. Even though I’ve covered social media within the year, I think this nice succinct summary stands well as a Frugal Marketing Tip–and is maybe easier to deal with than the four-part series I ran last spring.

Besides, repurposing content is a great marketing strategy, so you get to see me put that into action too. 🙂

The key to success with social media–and I’ve built my business on it since 1995–is to interact with others the way you’d like to be interacted with. Call it the Golden Rule of Cyberspace–it’s not so different from the Golden Rule of every major religion.

This means…
* Provide lots of helpful and useful information, especially if you expect to ask questions
* Say thank-you when people help you (but DON’T fill your public profiles with endless thank-you notes, especially on Twitter)
* Look for opportunities to connect others who should know each other, even if you don’t directly benefit
* Remember that it’s a conversation, not an e-blast
* Pitch subtly and relevantly (is that a word? It is now)
* It’s about relationships, not about numbers

As for which social media to participate on… Four musts would be Twitter, Facebook, your own blog, and (gasp! how retro!) Yahoogroups. Yeah, Yahoogroups lacks all the interface niceties of Facebook, Plaxo, etc., but it has hundreds of thousands of tightly niched communities, and I’m living proof that it’s quite possible to market there.

For myself, I also have benefited from participating on CollectiveX, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and Ning–mostly by joining groups.

I have been using social media marketing for over a decade, and writing about it all the way back to 1991. Most of my books cover the basic concepts, and I recently completed an e-book specifically covering the Web 2.0 sites–which I throw in as a bonus with either of my Grassroots Marketing books. And relationship marketing can exist outside of social media, or even the Web–I write about that in detail in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

Shel Horowitz, marketing strategist and copywriter
https://www.frugalmarketing.com

Today’s Book Marketing Tip is a guest article form Susan Kendrick, of Book Cover Quick Start, discussing (among other things) the important distinction between readers and buyers, and how that affects your book. And by the way, if you order a copy of my seventh book, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers, directly from me, one of the two free e-books you get is “How to Write and Publish a Marketable Book”-which includes a full chapter on covers.

Take it away, Susan!

-Shel

Does Your Book Cover Have a Hidden Target Market?

One Book–Multiple Target Markets?
Discover the Hidden Buyers for Your Book
(That Can More Than Double Your Sales!)

By Susan Kendrick

By now you must have heard or read at least once that you should narrow
your niche, know your target audience and market exclusively to them on
your book cover. I’m going to tell you to forget all that for a few
minutes, because I want to help you see the hidden sales opportunities you
could be missing.

For the next few minutes, I want you to think about your book in terms of
readers and buyers, two often separate target markets you need to make an
impact on with your book cover.

But aren’t readers and buyers the same person?

Not always. Keep reading. Read the rest of this entry »

This month’s book for review includes considerable mention of companies that have often been criticized for environmental, labor, or social behavior that is the opposite of good citizenship, but have started to change their behavior. It also points out the importance of social responsiblity initiatives that are congruent with the company’s core identity. So it’s only fitting that this month’s Positive Power Spotlight highlights a company that does both those things.

Occasionally in this space, I’ve profiled companies like that. Wal-Mart made the list for its amazing humanitarian response after the U.S. government left the people of New Orleans to drown in the wake of Katrina, and could make it again some time for its enormous initiatives on the environment–despite its abysmal record on labor, supplier relations, community impact, and a bunch of other areas. BP got profiled for the huge shift in environmental consciousness under its former chair (I’m afraid there may have been some backsliding since he stepped down). In other words, I’m a believer in acknowledging and thanking companies when they start to do things right, even if they could still be criticized.

This month, I’m saying thank-you to Tyson Foods. Most of what I know about Tyson is not pretty; the company has often been named as an organizing target by labor groups who have been extremely unhappy with orking conditions at its chicken processing plants.

It’s been several years since I heard that criticism, though, and meanwhile, someone Twittered about a remarkable and extremely positive initiative from Tyson: For every comment made on the blog page about it, the company would donate 100 pounds of food to the Food Bank of Greater Boston, up to two full tractor trailer loads, or 70,000 pounds of food. The original offer was one trailer load, but when it took only a few hours to fill their quota, the company added a second one–which also filled instantly.

Tyson execs actually read every comment. I know this because after I made my comment, I received this little e-mail (the link to my blog was not in the original, of course):

Won’t spam you, but noticed your comment about blogging about it. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions. This is the third of these efforts we’ve done; the others being in Austin and the Bay Area.
Regards,
Ed

Ed Nicholson
Director of Community and Public Relations
Tyson Foods, Inc.
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/eenicholson>https://www.linkedin.com/in/eenicholson
<https://twitter.com/TysonFoods>https://twitter.com/TysonFoods
<https://twitter.com/ederdn>https://twitter.com/ederdn
<https://hungerrelief.tyson.com>https://hungerrelief.tyson.com

He included his direct phone number, which I’ve removed. I have to say, the note was effective. I hadn’t known about the two similar initiatives (I had wondered why they picked Boston since their plants are mostly in the South). I was impressed with the initiative itself, but also that someone pretty high up the ladder was reading the blog comments and very quickly contacted me, and that he’s tapped in to LinkedIn and Twitter.  I do think that when you’re using social media effectively, it pretty much forces you to behave in a more outwardly-focused way. Twitter, in particular, is briliantly designed to be more-or-less spam-proof: if all someone does is blab about how great they are, nobody will follow them and they only spam themseles. People will take one look at their profile and leave without following.

Ed is using this Twitter page solely to promote hunger and social justice initiatives (not just Tyson’s either), and is being very transparent.

I noticed, for instance, this post:

@jowyang This account started as 2) and moved to 3) after perceiving the need for more transparency. We also have 4).

The original post he was responding to was from a very prolific Twitterer, and it’s been buried under hundreds of posts, so I won’t quote it here. But I can guess it was in response to some post about using Twitter appropriately for business.

At the time I’m writing this (12/15, 7 a.m. Eastern), his most recent Tweet is

Great 60 Min. story on Pete Carroll & efforts to reduce gang violence in LA. You gotta give props to someone trying to make a difference.

So, I’ll give my “props” to Ed: Thank you for being a voice of conscience at this company. And to Tyson. Thank you for hiring a community relations director who really gets it, and for giving him the resources to make a diffeence.

Another Recommended Book: Just Good Business: The Strategic Guide to Aligning Corporate Responsibility and Brand, by Kellie A. McElhaney (Berrett-Koehler, 2008)

McElhaney’s key point: It’s not enough to have CSR (corporate social responsibility) initiatives in place; they have to be strategic, thorough, and properly marketed:

Strategic: aligned with–and actually fostering–the company’s overall goals. CSR initiatives need to be consistent with other branding, add to the bottom line (or at least not subtract from it), and demonstrate benefit not only to the community but to the company itself (not hard to do, as I point out in my own book, Principled Profit)

Thorough: able to withstand accusations/investigations of “greenwashing”

Properly marketed: Once you’ve got the initiatives in place, tell the story to all your stakeholders: top brass, line employees, customers, suppliers, neighbors, etc. Even better: get your nonprofit partners to tell your story for you, and give them the support they need to develop and disseminate those marketing messages.

The effects can be astonishing. She shares two stories from a cell phone company called Digicell whose success and not only doing but communicating CSR had a clear positive impact on profitability:
During the 2008 food riots in Haiti, local residents protected their stores through community policing efforts, even as stores on either side were burned and looted
When the CEO, Denis O’Brien, was one of several cell phone providers chosen to make a 10-minute pitch to the Nicaraguan government, President Daniel Ortega interrupted his presentation and told him, “Listen, I know wheat you have done for the people and the communities of Jamaica and Haiti. We would be honored to have your company serve not only our mobile telecommunications needs but also the needs of our communities.” WOW!

She frequently cites Pedigree dog food as a company that understands the power of thoroughly incorporating CSR into its core mission AND its branding. Visit that company’s website and you can’t miss the attention to adopting homeless dogs: a perfect message for a dog food maker, and a strong creator of consumer loyalty.

Interestingly, she spends a lot of energy discussing companies that have not always been perceived as good corporate citizens, including Wal-Mart and Dow Chemical. Perhaps, she seems to imply, those companies cans how their sincerity and turn public opinion to their favor, much as Nike did.

The book winds up with action steps, a comprehensive (if somewhat repetitive) section on measuring the results of CSR on profitability, and a look at the CSR big picture and future trends.

Highly recommended.

1. The blah-blah press release is dead.

2. The story-behind-the-story press release is very much alive.

Example: When hired to write a press release for a new book about electronic privacy, I did *not* write “Electronic Privacy Expert Releases New Book” (snore). Instead, I wrote
“It’s 10 O’Clock–Do You Know where Your Credit History Is?”

3. It is dangerous to blow off non-traditional media (e.g., blogs, podcasts).

4. It is extremely useful to have some presence on at least a few of the social media networks, especially Twitter.

5. The best key to PR (and marketing in general) is relationships.  They enable coverage, testimonials, JVs, and much more–not to mention repeat and referral business.

6. Strong ethics helps build those relationships.

7. If you’re not on the web, in many people’s eyes, you simply don’t exist.

8. A web presence doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated–but it needs to be much more than a converted brochure.

9. Pitch letters answering reporter queries, while more labor-intensive than press releases, will have a much higher batting average (two sources: HARO (no charge, but with its huge circulation, reporters get inundated very quickly) and PRLeads ($99/month).

10. The faster you get your response in, the better your chance of appearing in the story.

There’s a lot more information on this in my books, especially Apex Award winner Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. Remember–if you live in the US, this month you can get free shipping, even if you’re taking advantage of the discount you get when ordering more than one title–just put FREESHIP in the promo code on the order form at https://www.frugalmarketing.com/cart (All three of my current books, PrinProfit as well as Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World and Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers, make fabulous gifts, too–especially if you ask me to autograph them.)

Last week, I signed a contract with John Wiley & Sons to do a book based largely on my 2003 self-published book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

Some people think this is every self-publisher’s dream. Well, having been a big-publisher author (Simon & Schuster, 1993) and being married to one (D. Dina Friedman: Simon & Schuster AND Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, both in 2006), I can tell you that both methods have their advantages.

For me, every book is different, and for each book, there are reasons to do it one way or another. I chose to self-publish Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First because I wanted absolute control; the ideas were pretty revolutionary at the time, and I didn’t want anyone watering it down. I also wanted to seize a moment that I wasn’t sure would still hold in the two years before my work would see the light of day with a big publisher. But I always hoped the day would come when I could resell that book to someone else.

Another book I’m circulating a proposal for needs a big publisher and a large advance. It will take far too much research time to do on my own, and the people I need to interview hide behind a lot of gatekeepers. Those gates swing open a lot more easily if a big publisher has backed the project. If I don’t sell that book, I simply won’t write it.

A project I just managed for a client went to the printer last week. Speed was essential, because the story is very relevant to a major movie being released in January. We only started working together in June, and most of the work took place after September. A big publisher simply wouldn’t do that for anyone other than a superstar celebrity. I found a copy editor, cover and interior designers, and a printer, and the book will be out in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, I wrote a letter that the client used to build a relationship with people at Paramount Pictures, and wonderful things might happen.

Also, that book hadn’t been in shape to be taken seriously by the publishing world. It needed cleanup and rethinking, and most big-house editors these days aren’t willing to put that kind of effort into a book unless they know they’re going to sell many thousands of copies.

Which leads me to the key point: the big houses no longer buy many manuscripts on the basis of their merits, but on the author’s strengths as a marketer. They will take a mediocre or adequate book with a superstar marketing platform any day over a fabulous book with no platform.

The reason I got to sign this contract with Wiley is because out of 32 pages (not counting sample chapters) in the proposal, 27 of them deal specifically with marketing and the market for the book, including changes to make the book more user-friendly and marketable, involvement of a celebrity co-author, a market analysis, recognition the book has already received (awards, endorsements, foreign republications, etc.)—and six entire pages about my platform: my speaking, writing, e-zines, media interviews, social networking communities, and perhaps most important, a credible and substantiated argument that I can reasonably expect to use pre-existing relationships with various newsletter publishers (relationships I’ve carefully cultivated over the years) to reach about five million people with news about its publication, when the time comes.

Is this the only way to get a big-publisher contract? Certainly not. But it did propel a self-published book with relatively modest sales into a book that the New York publishing world is taking seriously.

Given that, here’s a homework assignment: Over the next month, write down every useful connection you’ve established, every credential you’ve earned–and then, if you ever want to pursue a big publisher, you’ll have something to work into a marketable proposal.

Within my parents’ lifetime, six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis for the crime of being Jewish–including some of my mother’s cousins. As a Jew of Eastern European ancestry, I cannot be silent while one set of people is singled out for removal of the privileges of full citizenship–because we’ve already seen where that road leads. I speak out against injustice, and I speak out in favor of full citizenship rights for all classes of people: black, white, brown, or yellow…gay, straight, bi, or transgender…rich, poor, or in between…Christian, Muslim, Jew, or other religion…And I believe fervently that all people’s rights must be vigorously defended, and that our freedoms stop when they transgress the rights of others.

–>If I did not take this stand, I would have no right to claim any authority on ethics.

And I believe that committed life partners should have access to the same rights that many of us take for granted: from coordinating care in a terminal illness to playing an active role as a parent. The back of the bus isn’t good enough. Separate-but-equal is not equal, as the Supreme Court ruled in 1954.

In this context, I salute the Equality Business Advisory Council, a business coalition that sprang up to oppose California’s reprehensible Proposition 8–the ballot initiative that took away the right of same-sex couples to legally marry. Unfortunately, the ballot initiative passed.

I do not understand the anti-gay-marriage movement. As a man married to the same woman for 25 years, I don’t see how the right of two people who love each other to make a legal commitment that allows them to be full partners in any way lessens the marriage I have with my wife. I can’t see taking away that right as anything other than discrimination. And I live in Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage has been legal for several years. I haven’t noticed that the sky has fallen. I can see only positive changes from this law–changes that materially impact only the families involved, but whose impact is huge.

The Equality Business Advisory Council included such well-known companies and organizations as MTV, PG&E, Levi Strauss & Co., and Google. Even the usually conservative Clear Channel joined in.  Apple Computer gave $100,000 toward the effort and issued this strong statement:

Apple was among the first California companies to offer equal rights and benefits to our employees’ same-sex partners, and we strongly believe that a person’s fundamental rights — including the right to marry — should not be affected by their sexual orientation. Apple views this as a civil rights issue, rather than just a political issue, and is therefore speaking out publicly against Proposition 8.

Google’s public statement opposing Proposition 8 was written by none other than co-founder Sergey Brin:

Because our company has a great diversity of people and opinions — Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, all religions and no religion, straight and gay — we do not generally take a position on issues outside of our field, especially not social issues. So when Proposition 8 appeared on the California ballot, it was an unlikely question for Google to take an official company position on.

However, while there are many objections to this proposition — further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text — it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 — we should not eliminate anyone’s fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.

In all, the coalition included well over 500 businesses, community organizations, Chambers of Commerce, and media outlets, including 68 newspapers who wrote editorials opposing passage.

My thanks to fellow ethics blogger Chris MacDonald for telling me about this coalition, and flagging the Apple and Google statements I cited.

Another Recommended Book: The Customer Delight Principle: Exceeding Customers’ Expectations for Bottom-Line Success, by Timothy Keiningham and Terry Varva (McGraw-Hill/American Marketing Association, 2001)

This rather academically-written, MBA-oriented book emphasizes that merely satisfying your customers isn’t enough to build even loyalty, let alone the fervent ardor necessary for customers to recruit more customers on your behalf; you have to delight them. And the bar on delight keeps getting higher, because one of the factors leading to delight is that it’s unexpected.

In other words…when a new, delightful practice is successful, it is adopted by the organization, and then becomes an industry best practice–and then it stops being delightful, because the customer begins to expect it as part of a minimum service standard. So innovation plays a key role.

This I think is a crucial insight, and one that makes perfect sense.

Keiningham and Varva also point out a number of other interesting observations, all based in research (and many accompanied by various charts and graphs):

The ROI on improving delight is non-linear; certain little improvements may make a huge improvement in profitability, while others that cost more may have little effect, and the returns may shrink over time
It’s relatively easy to figure out which initiatives will offer the greatest return; just identify factors in the customer’s experience that the customer sees as of critical importance, but where the current satisfaction rating is low
Profitable delight initiatives often target high-dollar-value, low-cost clients
If your customer survey is self-serving and focuses on your wants rather than the customer’s, you won’t get the data you need to improve
Not everyone is delighted in the same ways, so segment your markets accordingly
Multiple touches, when handled correctly, can make a customer feel appreciated and welcomed and special (the importance of which I discuss in my own book, Principled Profit)

• To delight customers, you need employees who are at least satisfied
• Marketing’s primary role is not to shove products down people’s throats, but “to understand the wants, needs, and expectations of current and potential customers, feeding this information into the  business organization to help it create and distribute products or services that more closely address and answer these inherent needs,” and its secondary role is to form and nurture connections with customers
• Customer delight strategies look at a customer’s lifetime value and not so much at the current transaction
• Delighted customers not only proselytize to friends and colleagues on your behalf, they also spend substantially more

The book ends with three extended case studies of companies that benefited by long-term thinking and a delight-based retention strategy: Roche Diagnostic Systems, Toys “R” Us, and Mercedes-Benz USA. Roche and Toys “R” Us both needed turnaround strategies, but the case of Mercedes is especially interesting to me, because that wasn’t about fixing a broken system so much as incorporating delight into the corporate culture with a true focus on serving the customer–and creating an entire business unit, in its own building, to do so. This wasn’t cheap, in other words.

Among other things, Mercedes integrated eleven different databases, collecting different types of customer data, into a single system that anyone could access before interacting with a client (the company stopped using the word “customer” and stopped referring to its franchises as “dealers”). It also developed a strategic separation between client acquisition and retention functions (something Keiningham and Varva strongly advocate). Delight factors entered in not just providing emergency road service but also pre-trip routing services similar to AAA…a line of branded merchandise for sale…multiple touchpoints including anniversary of vehicle purchase and mileage awards at 100,000, 200,000, and 500,000 miles.

Does it work? After initiating the program, Mercedes was projecting an astonishing 86 percent repurchase rate! Even if their projections turn out to be inflated by 100%, a 43 percent repurchase rate is going to look mighty good for the bottom line.

For more on delighting your customer, see Shel’s award-winning book Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

Today, as I brought in my newspaper, my eye was caught by a bright orange piece of paper. it was a Free Standing Insert (FSI). In the right circumstances, these can be far more powerful and sometimes less costly than traditional in-page advertising.

Here’s when you might use it:

• Your product or service has broad general appeal–like pizza, gasoline, laundry
• You’re promoting a time-sensitive event that cuts across demographics, like a county fair, a sports event, a carnival, a restaurant festival
• It makes sense to use a coupon
• The newspaper you’re planning to use has at least some days when there are no other FSIs
• A high-impact graphic can convey your message quickly: a line drawing, a chart, a cartoon, or a high-contrst simple black-and-white photo
• You want to target a certain neighborhood (FSIs are much easier to segment than space advertising)

Use a bright color, either letter-size or half-letter-size (5-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches, in the U.S.). Investigate whether you should have the newspaper do the printing, or whether you should print elsewhere. And set up everything in plenty of time to work out glitches.

For more on cost-effective high-return advertising, have a look at my fifth book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World (Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Finalist). Right now, if you’re in the U.S., you can get free shipping on any (or all) of my marketing books, which make great gifts. Just visit https://www.frugalmarketing.com/cart and enter FREESHIP as the promotional code.

For years, the house-party concept has been used to sell products, especially in the network marketing industry. Think about Amway/Quixstar, Avon, and other household names. and think about Tupperware, which probably did the most to popularize the model–so much so that the phrase “Tupperware party” came into the language.

In a recent newsletter, Steve Harrison of Radio TV Interview Report/Free Publicity offered a few examples of authors who have done very well with house parties. One of them, Kelly Corrigan, a big-publisher author (Hyperion), actually did a traveling house-party book tour covering over 30 events up and down the Northeast, using her wide network of personal connections to get people in a living room to hear her read and buy books.

The result? #15 on the New York Times Best Seller List. Is that cool, or what?

Personally, I’ve done a house party as a book launch (and got over 50 people to my friend’s loft in Brooklyn for the New York launch event), but never tried to do a house-party tour. Maybe when book #8 comes out, I’ll try it, in addition to bookstore events.

Book parties can provide a big advantage for lesser-known authors who may not easily attract a crowd in public venue such as a bookstore or library. By getting your friends to invite their friends, and providing them with the chance to meet a real author at close range, you can have a very successful event.

Anybody out there try this? Tell us what happened.