The thing about marketing, especially if you’re good at it, is that it looks easy.  Tell some stuff to some people.  Write something.  Build a presentation.  Buy some ad space.  Send an e-mail. Pick some colors.  Shoot video.  These things all look easy.  And, hey, some of them are.  Not only that, some of them are down right fun.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise when someone outside the marketing realm offers their opinion on the way things should be.  That press release should have focused more on this product.  The image you chose for an ad had nothing to do with our company.  Our web site is hard to navigate.  All things I’ve heard from non-marketers.  And all annoyed me at the time.

It’s a lot easier to look at these comments in retrospect, and cut people some slack.  The way I deal with it is to think about it this way:  All of these know-it-alls care about making the marketing effort better.  Now, they may have no idea what the implications or budget requirements are for their request, but at least they care. 

I look at the Everyone’s in Marketing Phenomenon (EMP) as an opportunity to listen to what’s on people’s minds, but then I let it go.  Because I know that marketing is not always easy.  I know that marketing is not always fun.  And I know that not everyone can do marketing well.  That’s how I deal with it anyway. 

How do you deal with it?

"How do you do it?"

Her answer was the same to each question – "Did you read the memo?"

Maybe the employees did and maybe they didn’t.  But, no memo ever answered everyone’s questions.  On top of that, after the meeting there were many pairwise conversations between employees and IT that would have been of interest to the entire company.  Internal communications can be better.

This is a great place to have a corporate conversation with an internal blog: one that summarizes new IT features, procedures and problems, allows employees to comment with questions and concerns and provides IT with a tool to respond to everyone at once. Think of any area in a company – sales, product/service, HR, finance – and there are bound to be items of broad interest that can be shared and discussed in a single place – an internal blog.

While it takes some up front work, departmental commitment and effort to make it part of the business, in the long run, internal blogs can be an effective (and cost effective) internal communications tool.

Any success (or horror) stories out there on internal blogs?

Most marketers are no longer swinging for the fences with marketing communications – they are thinking through their marketing goals and mapping out phased communications strategies that get them there over time.  They are walking before they run, dating before they marry, and establishing a dialogue  before they sell.  Here are a few examples of progressive thinking in the area of marketing phases:

Marketing Experiments Blog: Writing Headlines that Don’t Sell — But Get Much Higher Conversions

Startup Hustle: Acquiring, Engaging, Retaining and Monetizing Your Customers

Marketing Interactions: B2B Websites Need to Focus on the Long Term

Drew’s Marketing Minute: Are You Expecting too Much From your Marketing?

I’m a big believer in marketing programs that don’t sell or try to do too much, but instead happen in phases and focus on long-term success.  I’m glad to see that others agree.  What do you think?

With that, Our Ten Most Popular Posts: 

1. Internal Communications: Own It
2. The Blogosphere: You Don’t Have to Blog to Belong
3. Mission Statement: Make it Possible
4. Slogans: Say What You Do
5. Market Segmentation: How to Prioritize Targets
6. High Tech Blogging: Why?
7. Lead Generation: The Bell Curve
8. Communications Part II: To the Right People
9. Age of Conversation 2: The Deadline
10. The SEO Triple Play: Message, Mechanics, Maintenance

Focus content

For emerging companies, sharing blogging duties is a good idea. It helps take the burden off any one blogger, and allows the company to present multiple viewpoints within its area of expertise. However, one of the greatest assets in a blog is a consistent focus and tone. Without a single owner to guide blog content, posts from multiple authors can easily drift off topic or diverge from the company’s voice, baffling readers in the process. By establishing an owner for all blog content, companies large and small can ensure that all posts are in line with their blog’s focus and tone, and that consistency will keep readers coming back.

Stay on schedule

Blog readers, and especially RSS subscribers, expect to see new content on a blog at least once or twice a week. Posting on a regular schedule helps set and reinforce reader expectations for how often and when to check for new posts, so when companies drift from their blogging schedule, readership trails off. A single blog owner can create a blogatorial calendar and manage the posting schedule to ensure that new content is added frequently and rhythmically.

Moderate comments

When a reader comments on a blog, he or she expects to see their words appear shortly after they click "submit". So when a legitimate comment sits in moderation next to all that wonderful blog spam, readers question whether or not anyone is listening (or worse, whether or not they’re being censored). A blog owner is responsible for reviewing and allowing comments as quickly as possible. Furthermore, the blog owner should ensure that every reader comment gets a reply to keep the conversation going.

Join the conversation

Blogging in a vacuum is never a good idea, so it is critical to find and read other blogs that are related to your company’s area of expertise. Other blogs provide great source material for new blog posts and offer a means of driving links and traffic back to your site. Whoever owns your company’s blog should make a habit out of reading other blogs, commenting where appropriate and reporting interesting posts back to key stakeholders in the company. Without a single ambassador to the blogosphere, different people can send mixed messages on other blogs or, even worse, valuable external content can go unread.

We don’t all have the resources to employ a chief blogger. But by establishing a blog owner, we can avoid sending mixed messages, duplicating efforts or missing opportunities. Most importantly, assigning a blog owner provides a path to consistency, and a stable of happy readers.

What are your thoughts on the chief blogger and blog ownership? Please share – I promise to post and respond to your comment quickly.

While Rapid7 was ultimately exonerated for the breach, the resulting Network World coverage hinted that by removing its link with Hannaford from the  web site and contradicting itself on its rationale, Rapid7 created the impression of guilt. The Rapid7 incident highlights a valuable lesson in media relations, and all marketing communications activities for that matter. Consistency is critical.

In a crisis such as the Hannaford security breach, it is crucial that all company spokespeople deliver the same message. There are numerous other best practices for responsible crisis communications, but we’ll save those for another post. Here, I’d like to highlight the importance of consistency in marketing communications, and suggest a quick fix.

Imagine sitting through a sales presentation for a new software product that appears finely tuned to your needs, only to check the company’s web site later and discover benefits that bear little resemblance to those in the pitch. This scenario can play out in any combination of ways – with a data sheet that flies in the face of a white paper or an advertisement that contradicts a trade show demonstration. When messages are inconsistent from one vehicle to another, a recipe for confusion is born and lost opportunity is sure to follow.

Inconsistency happens when different people create different pieces of collateral, when different items are created at different times and when priorities and messages are constantly in flux. In order to bring stability to marketing communications, it is critical to agree on, document and maintain a basic foundation for messaging, and use it as the starting point for content development. This foundation can be as simple as a one-page outline of high level messaging, and a lexicon of your most important key words and definitions. There’s no need to include every detail in the outline, since proof points constantly evolve. What is important is providing high level messages in context, so the important details intuitively fall beneath.

Once the foundation is in place, the key to building consistency in marketing communications is ensuring that the people on the front line of content development build this tool into their process. This means involving them in the development of the foundation, making it simple and useful, and keeping it up-to-date.

Did you ever wonder why Tom Cruise’s missions were impossible? Maybe the IMF’s vision was too grandiose or Mr. Phelps’ goals were too ill defined to take meaningful actions. As it turned out, at least in the first three movies, our hero defied the odds and accomplished his impossible missions. But, that’s Hollywood. In the real world of high tech, visions must be insightful and relevant, goals must be specific and measurable, and both must be tied together with missions possible.

A corporate mission statement is developed for one main purpose: to drive a company’s actions. Since a company lives and dies by its actions, it is crucial to get the mission right and make sure that every employee is aligned on it. Getting the mission right seems easy enough, but entrepreneurs often fall into some common pitfalls when developing a mission.

Mission is confused with vision – More often than not a mission is crafted to sound like a vision (and vice versa). Remember that a vision is about thinking and mission is about doing. Both are needed, but without an action orientated mission, an organization has no fundamental direction.

• Vision: In five years, every cell phone will be sold with an ultra-long life battery
• Mission: To bring ultra-long life cell phone batteries to 60% of consumers in five years

Mission is too broad or unfocused – Entrepreneurs are known to be aggressive and zealous. These are fundamentally valuable traits, but they may need to be reigned in when it comes to formulating a mission statement. If a mission statement is too broad, it may not be achievable in a meaningful time frame, or it may be open for various interpretations and, possibly, conflicting actions.

• Too broad: To be the world’s leading software vendor
• Focused: To be the number one enterprise security software vendor in the United States

Mission does not align with corporate goals – Perhaps the worst faux pas is a mission that does not align with corporate goals. For example, consider a corporate goal of selling $50M in wireless networking infrastructure in the North American residential market.

• Does not support goal: To be the worldwide wireless networking vendor of choice to residences and businesses
• Supports goal: To be the North American wireless networking vendor of choice to the residential market

Getting the mission right is essential to getting your company moving in the same direction – toward success. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to craft a mission statement that is actionable, focused and aligned with corporate goals, and to ensure that employees are aware of, understand and are executing on the mission.

While poor internal communications won’t necessarily lead to employee payback, it can lower morale, hinder decision making and lead to general inefficiencies, particularly in the dynamic environment of high tech. To ensure that the company is operating as efficiently as possible and the employees have the information they need to make the right decisions, a formalized internal communications strategy is a must in high tech.  That means deciding on an owner, setting goals and checking accountability.

No matter who ends up owning it, there are three main goals in developing an internal communications program.

• Keep the employee based informed
• Provide the information and tools employees need to do their jobs
• Cultivate the exchange of ideas and best practices

Addressing each of these goals in an internal communications program requires an understanding of the information requirements, usage guidelines and tools needed to be sure that the right employees can access the right information at the right time.

Keep the employee based informed
Employees need to feel connected and understand where a company is going. This is best accomplished with immediate and steady communications of major accomplishments, personnel changes and general employee relations information regarding policies and benefits. Informational communications must be both timely and credible. Therefore, it is important that this information comes from a reliable source, such as a member of the leadership team, and is delivered in regular intervals and immediately following important events. In evaluating the right tool for the job, consider options that allow information to be pushed to employees, and don’t underestimate the simple but effective approach of a regular company meeting.

Provide the information and tools employees need to do their jobs
A company operates much more efficiently when employees have easy access to the tools they need. Functional information; including sales tools, software, process information and forms; must be easy to find, up to date, version controlled and secure. However, before investing thousands of dollars in a fancy new software package, consider the information and tool requirements across your company, document a process and owner for the creation and management of materials, and identify the employees that will need access to each item. The best of tools can be easily undermined by a poor process.

Cultivate and capture the exchange of ideas and best practices
Often the most powerful ideas – from new features and market opportunities to resolving bugs – come from within the corporate walls. For inter- and intra-departmental exchanges, which can add tremendous value to a company, employees must be compelled to both learn and share, information must be topical and easy to find and collaboration must be captured and accessible to others. Some tools, especially blogs and wikis, can provide compelling platforms for the exchange and preservation of ideas. But for employees to truly leave the water cooler behind, any new tool must be easy, compelling and even fun to use.

One of the primary goals of marketing is to develop a framework of messaging — the core ideas, and proof points behind them, that promote a company’s place in the market. A messaging framework serves as an underpinning for all external and internal "touch points", those vehicles through which a company and its key audiences connect — sales presentations, news releases, web content, brochures, and even company update e-mails from the CEO.

Because today’s marketplace is extremely noisy and highly competitive, it is extremely important that all parts of the company — executive team, sales and service, A-, I-, M- and PR, board of directors and every employee — consistently say the right things. Not developing, aligning on and documenting a messaging framework is where companies usually go wrong in consistently saying the right things. The legal teams PR departments and company representatives all sing from different hymn sheets simply because there aren’t any. The result of a good messaging framework is verbal brand that helps establish and reinforce a company’s unique place in the market.

Continued in Communications Part Two:…To the Right People