Derek Sivers has a great story on his blog about a musician who booked an ad in a magazine in the hopes of converting 1% of the magazine’s readership into sales. In this case, 1% would have translated into 10,000 CDs sold. The result? 4 CDs sold.
He ends with this line: “He forgot there was a number lower than one percent.”
This story reminded me of when I owned my own retail shop. We would place a full-page ad in the newspaper (with a coupon), hoping sales would just poor in. The newspaper’s circulation was 20,000, so a 1% conversion would have meant 200 new customers. But sure enough, only a handful of new people would walk through the door.
Circulation means nothing without engagement. This is one of the reasons the newspaper industry is in such trouble; for years businesses would throw money at advertising and hope it would make a difference. The problem is that, often, it didn’t.
This isn’t to say that print doesn’t have a place; there are many factors to consider, including the size of one’s target market, ad design, etc… But it does affirm something I believe strongly: that little guys have to develop their own audience relationally, one person at a time.
Have you ever received an email that didn’t quite look right?
When Microsoft released Outlook 2007, they changed the way that it displayed HTML. Instead of using Internet Explorer as it’s “rendering” engine, they started using Word. The idea was that if you sent an email from Outlook 2007 to someone else using Outlook 2007, it would display exactly the way it was created.
The problem with this approach is that if an Outlook 2007 user received an HTML email from someone using different software, it wouldn’t display correctly. This is because most email software is based on current web standards, where Word is not.
Many of us in communications had hoped that with the release of Outlook 2010, these problems would be resolved. Unfortunately, the Microsoft Office development team decided to not include web standard HTML rendering, and will continue with the existing Word rendering engine.
This means that Outlook 2010 will continue to display HTML emails incorrectly. Here’s what the same email would look like in Outlook 2000 and 2010.
There is currently an online campaign using Twitter to encouraging Microsoft to fix Outlook 2010. If you would like to add your voice, post on Twitter or reply to the Microsoft blog.
1. Someone has posted your link on Facebook or Twitter: there’s nothing like getting a personal recommendation. Plus, there’s something about seeing a link in my “stream” that makes me want to click it. I can’t help myself.
2. Your site design is clean and uncluttered: I don’t care how good your content is, if I click on a link and it takes me to a site that’s busy, packed with ads, and generally unreadable, I’ll usually leave. It takes effort to read something; don’t make it harder for me to concentrate.
3. I can view your content nicely on the iPhone: I do a lot of reading on the bus. Everyday, i have two hours to kill on my commute, and I use that time to visit recommended links. The iPhone has a pretty nice browsing experience; but I’ve noticed some sites with inflexible layouts that keep fonts small, and columns wider than my small screen will allow (without side scrolling). The best option is if you can create mobile specific CSS. Oh, and if you have annoying pop-up ads take those off.
4. There’s some good non-clipart images included with the article: paragraph after paragraph of text with no eye candy looks boring. Spice things up with an image or two, especially if your article is long. Surprise me: put an image in your content that makes me go “Huh? What?” and then drives me to read the text so I can have the image explained to me.
5. It’s not too long: long articles are overwhelming. We live in an age of information overload – say what you need to say, and say it succinctly.
Just finished uploading our new podcast. Unfortunately, I lost the old feed, so you will need to update iTunes with this one.
Click here to listen.
I can’t believe that this video was not an ad for Southwest Airlines.
If it was, I think it’s brilliant (especially the last line: “you can not get that on United, lemme tell you that!”)
If it wasn’t, it’s a lucky bit of exposure.
Today, for those who don’t know it, is Good People Day. It was created last year by Gary Vaynerchuk as a way of giving some love to someone in your life who is kind of an “unsung hero.”
Today, I want to give a huge “good person” shout out for my sister, Sarah Jackson. Sarah is an incredibly gifted communicator: she is an amazing graphic designer, artist and storyteller. When we were kids, we would always compete in art class to see who could get the most “votes” at the end (from our classmates). I was a salesperson, so I could “sell” my art; but, when the teacher took away my ability to sell, she would always win based purely on artistic skill.
She has illustrated, written, and published a really cool line of children’s books called “A Jam Story” that have become favorite reading material for my kids (and many others).
She’s also a tenacious runner; in college she would take me out for runs. Again, being competitive I thought I would leave her in my dust. Nope. She killed me. She’s recently been running in half-marathons and doing very well.
Sarah’s character shines in her drawings, her stories, and her life. Get to know her by going to her site:www.ajamstory.com.
I think that JibJab and Juicy Fruit should definitely team up: http://bit.ly/A8fuE
If you haven’t visited the JibJab site, you should definitely go have a look. A brilliant concept, well executed, with great revenue potential.
This is what smart marketing should look like. When Office Max teamed up with JibJab for the highly viral Christmas campaign “Go Elf Yourself” it received over 100 million unique visits over the holidays.
I’m not a real estate agent. I am, however, one of those “closet real estate addicts” – I pour over
MLS listings in my spare time, watch
HGTV, and get emailed pricing reports for the major Canadian markets. I am also one of the few Canadians who sold and bought a house within the past month.
I’ve had a few friends who have recently gone into the business, and being in communications thought this would be a good time to share some of my insights into this unique industry, and some new ways of thinking about marketing. There’s a lot of ground to cover, so I think I’ll turn this into a series (a Complete Communications Guide for Real Estate Agents). First up, why blogging is important.
Why do people choose a particular agent?
I imagine that when real estate agents do any type of marketing, their goal is to have people choose them as an agent. That’s how you (as an agent) get paid. So a good question to ask is why anyone would want to choose you. What is your competitive advantage? I’ve got to be completely honest with you: when I’m looking at a bus bench ad, or at the sea of faces in the newspaper, “competitive advantage” isn’t something that is immediately visible. If my decision was based on who has the nicest smile, maybe, but otherwise these ads are pretty useless in terms of communicating value to a potential client. Now, if you’re that guy who has a full 4-page spread of listings all to yourself I can imagine that would generate some interest. But according to “that guy’s” ad, he’s in the top 0.5% of all agents, so we need a strategy for the 95.5%.
Let’s be honest about something else: you have a lot to prove. Like most households, my wife and I were hesitant to hand over $12,000 of our home equity to someone else (especially in this market). The public doesn’t understand everything you have to do; and they also don’t want to hear a sob story about how hard it is in-between commissions. What they do want to hear is why you’re worth that money. You need to prove to your clients one thing: that they can trust you to work your butt off to sell their home (or purchase a new one). You need to know your stuff, you need to be creative, and you need to build trust.
How to build trust
Trust is key. I know I just said that in the previous paragraph, but it’s the most important thing you will read today. Trust is key: when people trust you, they will call you up and ask you to sell their home. So how do you build it?
Teach them something
This is an idea that comes from the guys at
37signals: people trust those that teach them. The best way to do this is
to start a blog, and post
at least every week. Here are the rules:
- Be genuine: You know what I would love to hear, just once? A real estate agent telling me that now is not the right time to sell! If you do that, you will gain my trust, and I will talk about you with everyone I know.
- Take a stand: This goes with #1, but the other thing you need to do is take a stand about the things you believe in, and be willing to lose a part of your “potential market” for it. I, personally, think that buying a home in a trailer park is a bad deal. In my market you could pay $80,000 for a poorly built structure, have to pay hundreds in monthly fees, and still not own the land it sits on! If I was an agent I would be honest with people that are looking for their first home: don’t buy a mobile home. It would be way better for them to wait, save, and by a condo or a smaller starter home. I’m willing to bet that people would respect me more for taking a stand on something that’s important to me.
- Say something that matters: this is where your social skills come in. You need to listen to people around you. What’s the current “nerve” that you need to hit? Right now, in my hometown there are a lot of people that bought 2nd and 3rd homes in the “boom” hoping to flip them and make them a quick buck. Now they’re freaking out because the market has crashed, and they are left holding the keys (and three mortgage payments). I just asked my agent if he, or anyone in his office, bought 2nd properties during the boom. He said: “Nope, none of us. We’ve always felt like it’s almost always too risky.” That’s good advice; I hope that he said that during the boom, when the trend was for every homeowner to use their home equity and pick up additional properties. That’s advice that matters.
- You have to write it yourself: Given everything I’ve just said, you can’t delegate this off on somebody else. You can’t go and buy some pre-written content. You can’t have your assistant do it. It has to come from you, or it will just look like all the other generic crap out there
Once you’ve got a blog, and you’re updating it regularly, you’re going to have a pool of great content. This is content you can use in other places: your
email newsletter, articles you write for the paper, or that next talk you give at the Chamber meeting.
Equally beneficial, people are going to start visiting your web site regularly. Your organic search results (on Google) are going to improve. And your visitors are going to come back. Eventually, it’s very likely that they’ll ask you to serve them.
What if I’m not a good writer? You don’t necessarily have to post
writing on your blog. You could post video, images, or a weekly cartoon strip (illustrated by you).
Gary Vaynerchuk, owner of
winelibrarytv.com, realized early on that he couldn’t write; but he was great on-screen. For the past 3 years he has produced a new episode of his show every single day and amassed a following of thousands.
Who is doing this well?
At one point, my wife and I were thinking about moving to Prince George. We started our search on the web. We were looking for more than just home listings, we wanted to get a feel for the community. The first site we found was
Dean Birks. He maintains a
video blog and a
real estate blog where he passionately explain why “Prince George BC is a fantastic place to live, work and invest.” His posts provided real insight into the community, and were personal and honest. I instantly trusted him.
Just read an interesting post by Ricky Irvine on Advertising, Value, and Meaning. I think he’s spot on, here’s an excerpt:
There’s what we can call the Walmart Way, in which value means less expensive, affordable, cheap, or low quality. The driving force determining what we’re willing to trade real money for is a rarely possible combination of best quality and lowest price. This is shameful.
Go and check out his blog: Dressed in Value.
I’ve had several people ask me: “How on earth do I use this Twitter thing?” or the even more popular: “I signed up for Twitter but I don’t get it, it seems dumb.” As someone who enjoys using Twitter, and finds it useful, I’m willing to guide you through the app. But first you have to promise me that you’re going to it a “good try.” Twitter is one of those apps that gets richer the more you use it and understand it. It’s not going to take a lot of time, but you really need to engage with it in order to “get it.”
Create an account
Before you do anything you’ll need to create an account at twitter.com. This involves choosing a username. Here’s my advice: keep it short; I would say 8 characters or less if you can. The reason will become more apparent later, but generally you need to know that people are going to be including your username in their tweets, and they only have 140 characters total to work with.
You will also want to upload a profile picture and write out a short bio for yourself. Again, your experience will probably be a lot “richer” if you write a bio that succinctly interesting things about you: your work, your interests, etc…
Start following a few people
After this you should start “following” a few other Twitter users. If you don’t know anyone, you can start with me: http://twitter.com/mijustin. Generally, you follow people by visiting their profile (ie. http://twitter.com/username) and clicking the “follow” button. Anyone you follow will now appear on your Twitter’s “stream” or “timeline” (the ongoing list of other people’s tweets that you see on your Twitter home page).
When you click “follow” on someone’s profile they’ll be alerted that you’re now following them, and they’ll have a chance to “follow” you back. Anyone following you will now see your updates, anytime you post a new tweet.
Post your first tweet
Here’s one of the funny quirks about Twitter: the interface prompts you with the question: “What are you doing?” but most users don’t answer that question (at least not all the time). Yes, that’s part of it, but you need to understand that Twitter is like a giant conversation. People use it to share interesting links, ask questions, search for topics, broadcast news, and have two way conversations. The point where you’ll really “get” Twitter is when you start doing those things.
Engage in the conversation
Replies: to reply to someone you can type in the “@” symbol and their username (ie. “@mijustin Thanks for that link; I’ll check it out right now“). You can also click the “reply” link on a particular user’s tweet.
Re-tweet: quoting people on Twitter is encouraged. If you want to take someone else’s tweet, and re-broadcast it to your followers, you simply type in “RT” and then “@” and the username (ie. “RT @mijustin These are interesting economic times; AIG lost nearly $400K a minute“)
Direct messages: if you want to send someone who is following you a private message use the letter “D” at the beginning of the tweet, and just type in their username (without the @ symbol): “D mijustin Did you get a haircut today, because you are looking goooood!“
Posting links: because you only have 140 characters, you’ll want to use a URL shortener when posting a link in your tweet. I’m currently using
http://bit.ly. Here’s an example: “Just read a really interesting article on the Economist web site:
http://bit.ly/Izk8N“
Posting photos: To quickly post photos, you’ll want to use a Twitter photo app (
http://twitpic.com is the most popular). A lot of Twitter clients have this feature built in.
Understand Twitter search
While it’s not listed on the Twitter home page “search.twitter.com” is a really important component to the overall experience. It allows you to search through all the different conversations on Twitter. Let’s say you’re interested in web apps. You could search for “web apps” but you can also search for items that have been “hash tagged,” for example “#webapps”
Using hashtags will also be important to your overall experience. Here are some examples of tweets using hashtags:
- “Back in the 90′s Commander Keen was my #favoldgame” – Your “#favoldgame” tag will now become a hyperlink that will bring you to a search page with all the other posts with the same hashtag.
- “I just got back from the best cafe ever: http://axiscafe.com – #yeg” – When you want to tag your tweet with your location, use the airport code for that location (in this case “#yeg” means Edmonton)
- “I’m starting a new business, and need advice on a #pos system and #financing. I’m also looking for a #rails developer.” – This tweet is meant to bring in responses. People searching for these tags, for example a Rails developer looking for a job, are more likely to find and reply to your tweet.
Use some Twitter apps
The really cool thing about Twitter is that it’s fairly easy to develop apps for the platform. The most important app you’ll get is a good desktop client.
Tweetdeck is my current favorite. It allows you to see your twitter stream (the ongoing tweets of the people you are following), people’s replies to you, direct messages, searches and post tweets all on one screen. It also has Twitpic and the Bit.ly URL shortener built in.
This is important: get Tweetdeck and you will enjoy Twitter more.If you have an iPhone you’ll want to download a good Twitter app for that as well. I was using
Twitterrific for quite awhile, but now I’ve switched to
Twitterfon, and I’m glad I did. This will allow you to keep up with people’s updates on the Twitter stream, post tweets from different locations, and upload photos.
Keep using it
Remember instant messaging? At first it seemed like a ridiculous concept: regular people typing out their conversations, using a strange dialect of emoticons and acronyms. There was a bit of learning curve. But after a couple of years, people started using it. A lot. And not just nerds – even normal people started using IM.
It’s the same thing with Twitter. It’s a great tool; but you’ll need to use it regularly to fully understand it.