The Monkey and The Marketer

This post is dedicated to my dear colleague Abi Stern, with thanks for the discussion that inspired it...
One of the major battles for many marketers is finding enough time for high value activities amongst the sea of humdrum day to day duties, often in support of other business functions and away from their core focus.

We affectionately term this "monkey work"; its not difficult, just time consuming. This is also an affectionate nod to Ken Blanchard's book The One Minute Manager Meets The Monkey, which is ace if you haven't read it. So how do we ensure our monkey time is managed and we have enough hours left to be marketers?

1) Make sure you know who else could perform the task - sure, as a marketer you're a master at your CRM system but does that mean you're the only one with access? Your automatic adoption of tasks without asking who should really do them and whether the responsibility could be shared will lead to too much monkey business and not enough marketing.



2) Make a habit of saying no or not now occasionally - if you allocate certain blocks of time in which you can complete these tasks and stick to them, you'll naturally push back on people's so called "urgent" requests and you'll be amazed how many turn out not to be urgent or how easily the person finds another way to do whatever it is they wanted you to do.



3) Be sure to understand the purpose of the activity - I've been asked to analyse different things in our business more times than I care to count and often when I ask what the information will be used for I get a pretty lame "oh, I just thought it'd be interesting to know". So ask the question, because prioritising other people's idle curiosity is unlikely to be your smartest move.

 Anyone got any other tips they'd like to share?

Social media to define future company bonuses?

Along with the rest of the planet I received hundreds of news stories about Friday's controversial memo from Google CEO Larry Page, the general gist being 25% of every employee's bonus is reliant on successful performance in the social media space this year.

Doing the job that I do, this prompted me to have a think about whether this was a) savvy and b) fair.

I don't feel comfortable offering firm conclusions as I wasn't privy to the exact wording, backdrop and context of the memo but the following thoughts seemed to resonate as I considered the concept:

• Involving the whole business in social media, whether it is technically their job or not is smart. All too often I hear "oh marketing deal with social media", which is true but the strongest teams have allies, advocates and participants across many business functions
• Putting a solid number on the amount of bonus at stake is sensible enough, but nowhere did it get reported exactly what form "success" was going to take or what it looked like. Likely this is confidential information in this case but worth remembering if you are thinking of following in Google's footsteps
• Making the whole company financially invested in the success of a single project is a great way to get everyone pulling in the same direction and encourage cross functional collaboration
• The whole initiative feels quite broad brushed and making people accountable could be tricky. If Joe Bloggs doesn't pull his weight whilst Jane Doe works hard, is it fair to Jane if they miss out on the bonus or good to reward Joe's lack of input if they are awarded the money?

So is Larry loony or a legend? I don't know - I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Vision - the religion of business leadership?

I just got back from a trip to Vietnam and having returned from a country where religion plays a far greater part in everyday life than it does here, it prompted me to think about what we use instead.

One of the thoughts I had about this in a business context was that leaders in a largely secular environment tend to use vision to serve a lot of the same purposes as religion does in wider society.

1) Both vision and religion unite people in a common view
2) Both encourage people to see the bigger picture
3) Both provide a source of strength and direction in the tough times

I'm sure there are more but just taking those three points provides enough of a reason why you'd want to make sure that you have a clear vision for your team or organisation that everyone is bought into.

At what price?

I don't know if it is the stirring effect of launching new product types or the slightly erratic indicators in the economy, but for the last few weeks our office has been abuzz with talk of pricing (just this morning I was sent this post on pricing digital content that is well worth a read); and it's not just us.

So many of the conversations I have with people nowadays, from closest friends to chance business encounters revolve around it. What will people pay? What would we pay? Are we paying too much? Have our recessionary pricing strategies had a damaging effect?

In the post  link to above, Chris Brogan advises against asking your community what they will pay, because they'll low ball it. A valid point; if you're asking, I'm negotiating because you've signalled that there's room to do so.

So how to solve our pricing dilemmas? This is by no means the only approach but it is the one I'm going to try:

1) Find out how much they are paying (competitor research, surveys, market research)
2) Then comes the painful bit - testing. To my mind, the only way you can be really sure of how much your customers will pay for something is to put together a decent message that accurately conveys the value of your product and see if people will pay the price you ask.

The pain bit comes with the fact that you are probably going to have to get this wrong a lot before you find the ideal level to generate the most profit in the long term. Ah well, no pain, no gain as I'm sure you all said as you hit the gym last month!

Are you exerting your influence?

Like most marketers, I love a good graph and look forward to Marketing Sherpa's B2B marketing chart of the week (yes, I am that cool).

This week's chart highlighted the fact that only a third of respondents are using blogger and influencer relations as a tactic in their social media marketing. Why people, why?

Well, I know why. It isn't easy. It takes effort, tact, decorum and there's no guaranteed ROI on your courting of these rare and beautiful creatures.

However when you talk about your product and service online, you are at best self promoting and most likely boring and interrupting to the conversations happening on the platform of choice.

When your industry guru recommends using your product/service to the masses, you've hit the jackpot because they're going to get listened to. You, as Marketing Manager of Company X are not.

We have to spend more time on this guys, this is the new PR and for those prepared to go the extra mile, the benefits may get you somewhere money can't.