thinks

Jeremiah Owyang is a friend of mine, in the “we’ve never met but we like each other’s work,” kind of way that happens in the world of social media and very few other places. He just announced a new role leading corporate media strategy at Podtech. Congratulations, Jeremiah! Glad to see good things coming you’re way. And keep up the great work at Web Strategist!

Cingular Wireless started a new integtated marketing campaign not long ago talking about how they offer the fewest dropped calls of any company. They do a decent job with execution, displaying the claim on their website, in mass media, and in online media. The company touts their investment over the past year and cites “the leading independent research company” to back it up. However, they don’t actually talk about what percentage of calls the company drops. So, really, their only claim isn’t that they’ve got great coverage. It’s just that they’re not as bad as “the other guy.”

If you think about it, that’s what most politicians do. In their marketing, they also often claim nothing more than “I’m not as bad as ‘the other guy’.” So, Cingular is just basing their marketing on a proven technique, right? What harm can it do? Since Election Day in the U.S. is tomorrow, it’s useful to note what’s happened in terms of voter turnout over the last bunch of years. Voters (the consumers in this equation), have stopped showing up at the polls. The continual messages emphasizing, really, how bad the entire product category is has succeeded only in driving consumers away.

Imagine doing that to your brand. Sound marketing practice? I think not. Instead, why not focus your message on your positives? Effective marketing practice, particularly when dealing with the kinds of fragmented audiences we’re all facing today, should be to have your name associated with all the positives possible. Seth Godin provided an interesting point of view on trademarks the other day, noting how much better it is to have your name out there than not. While he discussed the dangers of “genericide,” he didn’t go anywhere near what consumers think of both your brand and the generic category. The implicit message is this: when in doubt, you want consumers to have a positive point of view at least of the category as well as your product.

The one place where you might think this kind of marketing works, particularly in politics, is when you’re the incumbent. No reason to have too many customers when you’re more concerned about folks buying from “the other guy,” right? Wrong. Unless you’re a politician, you’ve got to have consumers think positively about your category, else you’re simply creating opportunities for a category killer to come along and sideline the whole lot of you. For now, a better message is “we don’t suck and neither does our competition.” Then you’ve given yourself the opportunity to message why you’re the right choice.

Towards the end of Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg’s terrific Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? the authors note, “…these principles aren’t new; they’ve been around, in one form or another, for as long as people have been trying to figure out how the most effective ways to exchange this for that. Technology may rearrange the furniture, but the same people still live there.” And they’re right. Most marketers will have come across each of the disparate elements in the Eisenbergs’ book in some form or other somewhere along their way. However, if the same people still live there, it’s amazing how many companies have never bothered to visit the neighborhood judging by typical retail website conversion rates. To help marketers improve conversion rates, the Eisenbergs (and their company Future Now, Inc.) describe where today’s consumers live and how to help arrange the furniture in ways that benefit customers and businesses alike. It’s a great read and makes me wish I had been adopted by the Eisenberg family when I was young (sorry, Mom). It’s a worthy follow-up to their earlier book, Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results. Buy a copy of each for your CEO and make sure she reads them. If you’re in marketing today and don’t listen to what Bryan and Jeff have to say, very soon the only furniture you’ll be rearranging are the deck chairs on your own personal Titanic.

OK, so this is a couple weeks old, but it’s definitely still worth mentioning. Steve Rubel recently wrote about the coolest thing I’ve seen in the last year. A few folks from the University of Maryland Baltimore County put together Feeds That Matter, a site that interprets Bloglines user data to create a tag cloud showing the top blogs Bloglines’ users read. On one day I visited baseball showed up in the Top 500 tag cloud, while football did not. Neither did NFL, basketball, NBA, NHL, etc. Travel showed up, but not air, hotel, or cruise. Marketing was bigger than Media or Advertising. Google, bigger than Yahoo, but MySpace didn’t appear. TV, but no TiVo. Xbox, but not Playstation. Politics, but not government. And so on. Clearly these represent the interests of the folks that did the writing, but remember that these folks are well positioned to influence a fair bit of thought around how customers interact with your products. Companies report that a single mention by Walt Mossberg can influence a product’s success dramatically. If you believe Seth Godin (and I believe I do), influencing the influencers has enormous impact on your product’s success in the marketplace. So, what are you doing to get people talking (and blogging) about you?