How bad reviews bite harder

A friend sent me an article this morning which he thought might interest me, detailing a poor review of a technology conference. The article itself (published yesterday morning) was amusingly written and highlighted everything that is commonly wrong with a lot of poorly executed conferences, it made me smile.

Then I looked at the Twitter and Facebook share buttons on the side and winced a little on behalf of the organisers, upon reading it, 55 of The Telegraph's techie readers had decided to share it with all their friends and followers...who turned out to be 80,000 odd people.

The lesson here is clear not just for event organisers but all product and service providers, it is even more important than ever not to upset your influencers - they just got hold of the world's biggest megaphone and when they shout, your customers listen!

Marketing has got to be remarkable

Now that in and of itself isn't news. However, I was struck by just how entrenched this idea has become when I read a recent interview about web phenomenon Groupon's rejection of the Google billions.

Groupon works by getting local businesses to offer remarkable deals for a very limited time span; when enough people sign up, the seller and Groupon split the cash. For enough people to sign up, the offer has to be jaw droppingly exciting and Groupon uses this principle to select which offers it promotes (it is approached by an average of 8 sellers for every 1 promotional spot).

The contrast between this model and the conventional advertising set up could not be more extreme. For Groupon to make money, they have to be sure your product and offer make your proposition virtually impossible to refuse for your target market.

They have structured their whole business model around this principle and have refused a mammoth $6 billion from Google, confident that they can take what is currently the fastest growing company in history (they are 2 years old) and make Google's offer look like small change.

The message for marketers? Being remarkable, not just in your content but in your value proposition, your service and your offers is no longer just a way to get ahead, it is essential for your survival. The world has rebuilt itself around new rules, evolve or die.

3 ways to decide if a good idea isn't good enough

I came across a great post on HBR the other day focusing on killing off good ideas in order to concentrate your resources on a few that then come to fruition. I really liked this as an approach, perhaps because marketers are so often in a position of being idea rich and time poor, often inadvertently positioning themselves as ineffective as a result. (You've all worked with people like that - super creative types who never complete a project because they've got all wrapped up and excited by their next big idea).

So how do we decide which ideas to keep and throw our weight behind and those to let fall by the wayside?

Before I throw in my 2 pence worth, I want to make it clear that I know there are hundreds of possible ways of doing this and these are just my own, another opinion on the pile!

1) Does the idea align with your strategic objectives? Ideally all major projects should support the pillars of your annual strategy and move those lofty strategic aims forward towards a reality.
2) Can we put a dollar value on the benefit of executing the idea? I'm not saying that if we can't we shouldn't pursue it but I'd rather we could, as no idea that fits into this mould can really be a nice to have if the bottom line impact is significant.
3) Who would your team be? Again, you don't always want to avoid pursuing ideas that involve working with people who are likely to let you down and make your life more difficult. Sometimes it is unavoidable; yet I'd allow it to rule things out if confronted with a list of things with similar possible levels of benefit to the business.

The death of an idea

It is an accepted thing to refer to someone as an "ideas person". I was pondering this concept the other day, trying to establish whether it is actually a compliment or not. I reached the conclusion that it is only really a positive asset if people mean that you come up with and execute great ideas, execution being the key bit as an idea is only really truly great if it results in a successful outcome.

Why do ideas fail to become reality?

1) Lack of support from those whose help is needed to execute
2) Lack of commitment from the idea originator and/or team
3) The obstacles are allowed to become bigger than the idea
4) They weren't truly great in the first place - not enough point to motivate people to execute
5) Lack of understanding of either the objective or the route towards it

I'm sure there are many more but these are the ones that annoy me most...

3 Tips For Better Content Creation

We all know that creating content and “publishing our way in” is the way forward right? Marketing gurus who espouse the benefits of content marketing are ten a penny, however as with many things (social media being a classic example) the theory and the execution can often fail to match up due to real world pressures and variables.

For what its worth, here’s a few ideas on how to make sure your content does what you want it to do, rather than negatively impacting your business:

• Create a content creation process map – understanding what all the steps are for successful content creation and how long they take will highlight when you’re trying to cut corners on production because you are busy. Make sure if you are using a variety of different types of content or different mediums, you have a map for each.

• Invest in relevance and value for your customer – I’m not necessarily talking about an expensive all singing all dancing market research project but you do need to spend time making sure you understand what your customer would find most useful. Easy starting points? Look at what already exists that is popular in your space, run a short survey across your database, call some of your key accounts and talk to them.

• Test and record – all too often (and I know I am guilty of this) we form opinions based on what we think we know, rather than making judgements with all the data to hand. Content has so many variables; you need to try altering one at a time and recording the test results faithfully so you can create a detailed picture. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking “My last podcast got no attention, neither did the first one I did – my market must hate podcasts”.