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Everyone can type, but not everyone can write…

01 Friday Oct 2021

Posted by Malcolm Auld in B2B Marketing, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Digital, Digital marketing, Direct Marketing, Email marketing, Marketing Automation, Uncategorized

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copywriting, cyber-hustlers, digital marketing, email marketing

As any experienced marketer knows, one of the casualties of the digital marketing industry has been the quality of marketing communication. The majority of digital marketing messages don’t communicate at all, let alone persuade.

The reason is simple – the marketing messages are written by typists, not copywriters.

I’ve written about this problem before. It also afflicts photography – but that’s another story.

Today I was again reminded of this sad reality. This time in an email from Facebook – more frequently known as Facecrook.

The From Line said the email was from ‘Lara F. from Facebook‘. Any person writing to you who doesn’t reveal their surname, instantly creates a red flag. Are they a human or a bot? Is this phishing or sp*m? Can they be trusted?

The first sentence said: “I wanted to reach out because I noticed you haven’t yet had a chance to take advantage of your free consultation with our team of Facebook Marketing Experts.“

Firstly, only creeps and assailants ‘reach out’ – there is a rule for using the term ‘reach out’ in business:

The sentence is moronic in its meaning. I have had a chance to take advantage of the free (best written FREE) consultation – but I just haven’t bothered to take a chance. I don’t want a consultation – let alone from a ‘team’ of alleged Facebook Marketing Experts – all with initial capitals in their job title.

Lara F. then continues: “We’ll be available to connect during business hours, Monday through Friday.” Again, what does “available to connect” mean? Talk on the phone? Have a video conference call? Chat on Messenger? Swap messages using homing pigeons?

Let’s connect…

And thank you for wanting to do business during business hours – very generous. Why would I want to do business with Lara F. after hours?

She continued: “We know you’re new to Facebook Ads, and that’s okay. You don’t need to prepare anything before the call because we’ll start by:”

Wrong! Thanks for playing.

I’ve been doing Facebook ads since Facebook ads were available. Why make such a false claim? And why is it OK that ‘they’ know I am supposedly new to Facebook ads? Poor Lara F. doesn’t even understand the subject of the sentence she wrote.

Here is what followed “…because we’ll start by:”

  • Learning about your business and typical customers.
  • Understanding your goals and how best to help you.
  • Providing resources tailored to help you grow your business.

If you are “reaching out” to me about my business, wouldn’t you do some homework first? Rule 101 of B2B marketing – understand your customer. If Lara F. doesn’t know about my business and typical customers, why the hell does she assume Facebook is a channel worth using?

And why would I share my company goals with a strange team I’ve never met, or a person without a surname?

The email was only three sentences – but had way more than three fundamental errors. The first sentence started with “I”. The second with “We’ll” and the third with “We”. Not one sentence started with the word ‘you’ or ‘your’ or ‘you’re’. In the three sentences there were six uses of “I”, “we” and “our” – completely abusing “The You Rule” of copywriting. (See Below)

The subject of the message was mainly Facebook, not me the recipient of the message, whose business Lara F. is chasing.

There are two major problems with this email:

  1. It was not written by a copywriter, it was written by a typist with a poor grasp of writing
  2. It relies on marketing automation, which suggests minimal human involvement, hence so many errors or ability for me to respond

I did try to reply to Lara F. but the message didn’t really come from her. It came via a marketing automation system with the address donotreply@facebookmail.com – another giveaway of the low trust and quality of the message and sender.

I’m sure if Lara F. needed surgery, she’d want an experienced surgeon with the requisite skills for the job. She wouldn’t want someone who claims they are a surgeon just because they’ve hung around a casualty ward. So why do digital marketers like Facebook’s Marketing Experts use inexperienced typists to do the valuable (and money-making) task of copywriting, just because the typists hang around digital marketing offices?

So I am pleading with digital marketers. Please use copywriters and save us from wasting our time digesting your word vomit – or leave the industry now. Both outcomes will make the industry healthier. Go on, do it for the good of the industry.

You might find this worth reading too:

The You Rule

The most powerful word in business writing is ‘You’. Far too much business writing is about the writer, the writer’s organisation and the product, service or point of view the writer is trying to sell. Far too little is about the reader, out of whose pocket flows the money that keeps us all employed. Or not, as the case may be.

Make your business writing about the reader. This is especially true if the reader is already a customer. When this is the case, the first two words out of your computer – in almost any form of business writing – should be “Thank you”.

This does two things, both beneficial to your cause:

1. It grants the power in the relationship to the reader. The reader is the patron; you are the supplicant or servant.

2. It reminds the reader that he has a relationship with you or your organisation. It identifies you as someone with whom he has done business in the past, and therefore with whom he may want to do business again.

Here’s a summary of the You Rule:

  1. Write about the reader, not the firm or its products.
  2. When you use the word ‘YOU’, always make it singular.
  3. If you’re writing to customers, open with ‘Thank You’.

And always use you, your, yours, you’ll, you’re way more often than I, we, we’ve, we’ll, us, our, ours, my or mine, throughout your message.

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It’s time to truthfully rename BIG DATA to what it is: “just lots more data – mostly useless”…

24 Monday May 2021

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

BIG data, customer service, marketing, marketing automation

Or maybe; “I know 90% of the data I capture is useless, I just don’t know which 90%”

On January 28, this year, Tim Cook, CEO, Apple delivered a presentation at a Data Privacy Day event.

Here is some of his most insightful words about the use of data:

“Technology does not need vast troves of personal data stitched together across dozens of websites and apps in order to succeed. Advertising existed and thrived for decades without it. And we’re here today because the path of least resistance is rarely the path of wisdom.

“At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement, the longer the better. And all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible.

“If a business is built on misleading users, on data exploitation, on choices that are no choices at all, then it does not deserve our praise. It deserves reform.”

As I’ve been saying for more than a decade, “Most companies aren’t correctly managing their small data, let alone getting BIG DATA right.” And it’s costing them dearly. Small data such as a customer’s name, address, phone number, email address or previous purchase are regularly incorrect, or not even stored. Marketers appear to be focusing on the least valuable data.

For all the investment in BIG DATA this century (and marketing automation software that functions from that data) there has been almost no significant change in marketing results or performance of campaigns. The majority of sales in every category occur without any help from big data.

Ask any senior marketing executive “how has the investment in bigger data helped their sales?” If they’re like those I talk with, they’ll say “I have no idea” or “it hasn’t“. But hey, they do know how many people bounced off page three of their website and who liked a Tweet.


The 90/10 Rule applies to data
90% of the value from using data comes from 10% of the data. Yet most marketers are playing at the margins where the incremental value of lots more data doesn’t cover the cost of investing in gathering it.

I declare my hand here – I am a firm believer in the power of relevant data. I also understand the delusion of productivity created by capturing lots of data for no other reason than it can be done. In 1988 I opened Australia’s first data consultancy and database management service while running Ogilvy & Mather Direct – called Ogilvy DataConsult. Three years later I opened my own data marketing service as part of my agency – MAD. And have worked with data ever since, even publishing a magazine called Database Marketing.

It may come as a surprise to some, but marketing data wasn’t invented yesterday – there is just lots more data now, most of it useless.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should
Just because we can track every digital contact doesn’t mean we should. It’s the equivalent of recording the fact a shopper walks into a grocer, looks at the bananas, walks towards them, maybe even picks up a hand, then puts them down before deciding not to buy – possibly because they remembered they had some in the fruit bowl at home? What is the value in tracking this action? So why do we chase non-qualified consumers around the web with irrelevant messages just because they visited our website?


Stop trying to sell me breast pumps
This happened to a friend of mine who was in her early sixties at the time, as well as me when I tested her experience. After searching for baby gifts online, the insanely stupid marketers started following us around the internet trying to flog us breast pumps. Each time we visited a site, up popped breast pump advertisements.

Even worse are the B2B marketers – particularly those flogging marketing automation software – who follow you around after you’ve visited their site. When browsing a website for personal relaxation, that has nothing to do with business, I get ads asking me to trial their marketing automation software. Or they promote an offer to download a “definitive guide” which at best is nowhere near definitive, rather it’s a sales pitch for the software the marketer is flogging. Here is why most definitive guides aren’t – definitive that is. All this does is damage their credibility.

How ignoring small data resulted in abuse of senior citizens
My 80-year old neighbour shared his story with me last month, he was shaking as he told it. His bank mailed him a letter telling him the email address on his account was incorrect and he needed to fix it. Obviously this was a data-driven message as no human in their right mind would have sent the letter. He logged into his account and checked his email – it was correct. It’s the only email address he has ever owned.

He then received another letter threatening to charge him fees if he didn’t fix the email address. So he rang the bank. They told him he had to go to his branch – which has been closed – so they gave him a new branch to attend. When he arrived he didn’t have the 100 points needed to prove his identity, despite having his bank cards. He had to drive home and then drive back to the bank.

Upon returning, the clerk checked the account and realised the email address was being used in my neighbour’s joint account with his wife. So the clerk demanded to speak to my neighbour’s wife. He told her she was in a dementia hospital. The clerk asked to speak to her there. My neighbour explained it was impossible, as she cannot converse and he was her legal guardian. The clerk then demanded proof.

So my neighbour had to go home and contact his lawyer to get legal documentation to prove his status as legal guardian of his wife who is living in a dementia hospital, because the bank’s data-driven systems believed his email address was incorrect. He ended up driving to the bank branch three times to accommodate their requests.

The clerk finally admitted that the email address was correct and the whole saga was a complete data-driven waste of time. You can imagine how my 80-year old neighbour felt? This bank makes $Billions in profit every year and spends $Millions on BIG DATA capture.

My (even older) father is a lifetime customer of one of the other ‘Big 4 Banks’ in Australia. He used a travel card in 2004 and cancelled it in 2005 after using all the funds. Every year since, he gets a data-driven bank statement telling him he has no funds on his travel card. He has spoken to the bank more than a dozen times and rung them more times than he cares to remember to advise them he no longer has the travel card account. They finally admitted they have no idea where his account is in the database, nor do they have any idea how to stop the statements being issued. This bank also makes $Billions in profit every year and spends $Millions on BIG DATA capture.

My father is also a customer of the largest telco in Australia. He was asked to provide an emergency email address in his account in case of, well, an emergency. With my permission he used my email address. Immediately I started to get his monthly statements emailed to me, while he didn’t get any statements. Over a period of six months he wrote numerous letters and emails to the telco requesting the mistake be corrected, and also rang the offshore customer support a few times. I forwarded the email to some customer service address to try to sort it out, but just got a useless auto-reply. Hours of my father’s and my time were wasted because the telco’s data-driven systems.

And not only that, the statements incorrectly spelt my name. I’ve given up asking the telco to fix it. The data-driven system automatically combines my first and middle names into a single word. Go figure?

Forget BIG DATA

Rather than waste money on gathering terabytes of useless data just because you can, and then relying on computer software to do your customer service, my advice is to invest your marketing funds in human beings who can talk personally to your customers. They’ll have far more success than any automated data-driven programs and ensure the relevant small data is correct. You’ll make more money and have happier customers. You’ll also inject more money into the economy by employing humans.

Only then, once your small data is correct, should you consider an investment in BIG DATA. And then, only if there is proof the marginal returns are worth the financial investment and effort – not to mention improve, not reduce, your customer service and bottom line.

Gotta go now – I have my monthly three-step data verification to complete, so I can get permission to access my own email account. Where is my passport for proof of identity…

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How manufacturers use QR codes to steal sales from retailers who sell their brands…

01 Thursday Apr 2021

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Uncategorized

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In my first book on email marketing published in 1998, titled “They laughed when I sat down at the keyboard, but when I began to email…” I made a couple of predictions.

One was that manufacturers would use their packaging to direct customers to the manufacturer’s website to build a database of customer data. These manufacturers would then use email to take their websites directly to the customers and use embedded e-commerce to sell directly to them. The second prediction was that the manufacturers would redirect their advertising funds from mass media to email marketing and database management.

Unfortunately, the technology we were pioneering – streaming video emails with embedded e-commerce links – became vulnerable as vehicles for introducing viruses, and only lasted a short time before being eliminated forever. But manufacturers have developed databases and now use email to sell directly to consumers. Wisely though, they continue to use mass media to build and maintain brand value.

This leads me to the recent rise in ubiquity of QR Codes that I wrote about in my previous article. It seems my last-century prediction has come true but with a sinister twist – at least in the cosmetics category. I’ve yet to research other categories and welcome any examples you may have dear reader.

Here is how manufacturers are using QR codes to steal customers from a retailer distributing their product, and push the sale to a competitor or to the manufacturer’s own online store.

This case in point is a highly successful Australian retail pharmacy that stocks brands such as Revlon, L’Oreal and nudebynature, yet is having sales stolen directly at Point Of Sale.

The brands have introduced QR codes at the counter to promote virtual mirrors or look-books so retail customers can inspect the products in use, or learn more. But here’s what’s really happening:

Here is Revlon’s QR Code to try the virtual mirror:

Scan the QR code to download the virtual mirror

Here is the landing page:

And here is where you can link to from the landing page – directly to an offer from a competitor:

Her is the L’Oreal QR Code at Point Of Sale:

It links to a tool to trial the lipstick shades. Here is the landing page:

Here is the page after the ‘Tap & Try” link disappears:

And here is where the ‘Buy Online” link takes you – again directly to a competitor:

This is obviously good business if you’re Chemist Warehouse, but not if you’re the incumbent pharmacy paying to stock and promote the cosmetics in your retail store.

Here is the nudebynature QR code:

This opens a look-book:

Click on the logo and you link to the nudebynature website:

Clicking on the “Shop Sale” button links to the e-commerce page where the customer can buy direct at a special sale price:

I have no idea if this is planned surreptitiously, but it certainly smells on the nose. Using QR codes to stealthily switch customers from the retail store in which they are standing, to buy online at a competitor, or directly from the manufacturer, does not pass the pub test.

It feels dishonest and certainly not in the spirit of a good partnership between manufacturer and retailer. If this continues I suspect retailers will simply refuse to allow QR codes at POS, unless the codes link to the website of the retailer in which the customer is physically shopping. This is a shame as QR codes can add value to the shopping experience.

If you have any thoughts or examples please share them. I’m curious to learn if this practice is widespread or just getting started.

I’m off to sort out another service hassle at the Telstra store and consider buying a new phone – I wonder if there are QR codes on their displays???

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I’m not a ballerina, so stop asking me to pivot…

26 Friday Mar 2021

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

This ridiculous email arrived in my inbox this morning from Dropbox – the highly successful digital equivalent of the storage sheds you rent to store your excess junk.

The sender is <no-reply@dropbox.com> – this is a cardinal sin when sending emails for marketing purposes. If you are communicating personally and directly to an individual, then you need to identify yourself and give the recipient an option to reply. It also creates distrust for the sender’s brand.

In email marketing the rule of thumb is simple: The “From Line” gets your email opened, while the “Subject Line” gets your email deleted.

Your recipients ask themselves “do I know the sender?” If they do they look to the Subject Line to see if the message is relevant and worth opening. If the Subject Line is relevant and persuasive, they will open the message. If they don’t know who is sending the message, or if the Subject Line is irrelevant, they delete without a second thought.

The Subject Line from <no-reply@dropbox.com> reads “are you ready to pivot?“. This message is wrong in so many ways.

Firstly, a headline should never ask a question where the answer can be yes/no – because so many of the recipients will answer “no” and delete your message without further thought. If you are going to ask a question, ask a rhetorical question – just as any good salesperson would when selling face-to-face.

Secondly, I’m not a ballerina. Why do I want to pivot? This is one of those buzzwords created by the cyber-hustlers who use a jargoniser to create fake words/meanings to try and position themselves as having some special secret sauce for marketing success.

Here is the Websters Dictionary definition of pivot:

When someone uses the word “pivot” in a business context, what they mean is you should continue to do what businesses have done since the invention of business. Adjust and refine your business according to market conditions. This is not new – it is common sense. Businesses have always created new products/services to grow their businesses, otherwise they don’t stay in business.

There is no need for a jargoniser to create a new word for an existing business practice. Here is an example of an extraordinary business response by a pie purveyor to the current pandemic. He didn’t need a buzzword to act.

But back to the email from <no-reply@dropbox.com>. I opened it to see what to do if I was ready to pivot.

The headline is a glib generalisation about the bleeding obvious: “The best teams know how to work together, does yours?” What business continues in business if its staff don’t cooperate? Why assume my team may not be working together?

Then this gem is offered: “With the right mindset — and the right tools — any team can thrive in this new digital world“

Am not sure how a team has a mindset, but I thought in any world, individuals with the right mindset and right tools would thrive. After all, who would try to thrive with the wrong mindset and wrong tools?

Now I’ve only been working in digital marketing since 1995 (it’s 26 years this year since I ran my first online marketing seminar). At what stage does this “new digital world” stop becoming new?

And why would I believe a digital storage shed could help me? By the way, the response button “Explore Dropbox Plans” is a link to the fees charged by Dropbox to store stuff. There is no “reason why” I should use Dropbox – What’s In It For Me?

Given I am already a customer, there is nothing to explain why I should consider upgrading or changing my contract with Dropbox.

Sadly, these types of emails invade inboxes daily – usually written by a digital or content marketer who has typing skills, not copywriting skills, because hey “everyone can write” right?

In case you’re wondering, there was no signature file in the message, but given the email came from <no-reply@dropbox.com> that’s not really surprising.

Even more frustrating is the fact that email marketing has been around for more than two decades, yet these fundamental errors continue to be made. There really is no excuse for such amateurism, particularly from a successful organisation like Dropbox.

Gotta go now. I have to see my chiropractor after I injured myself practicing my office pivots…

Ouch…

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A phone call with pictures won’t cut it for events/conferences/seminars in 2021…

25 Thursday Mar 2021

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Like many of you in 2020, I attended virtual versions of events originally designed for conference venues. The worst part of this forced process was enduring the events on conference call technology that was not designed for running events online – Zoom, Teams, Skype et al.

I also had to teach university classes using Zoom and Teams – these are definitely not media designed for teaching, let alone learning. Talking to screens with cameras switched off is painfully difficult.

Definitely not the most efficient way to run events…

These stop-gap measures were forced upon us due to the pandemic. Companies scrambled to keep scheduled events going (and not lose revenue) by migrating them to conference call technology – known affectionately as a phone call with pictures. It became immediately obvious the video conference technologies were no substitute for the real thing – a conference centre with staging, speakers, catering, exhibitors and delegates you could mingle with face-to-face over a drink.

But if you’re considering a repeat performance for your annual event in 2020, using a phone call with pictures, you’d better rethink your plans. The forced 2020 solution will not cut it in 2021.

Organisations have no excuse to force delegates to attend an online event using conference call technology. They’ve had 12 months to move on from the emergency option and must now invest in professional event platforms designed for engaging your audience, speakers, exhibitors and sponsors.

I’ve trialed a couple of technologies, there are many and varied suppliers. e:volve by Synergy Effect offers all sorts of options for fully online virtual events or hybrid ones simultaneously combining delegates at a venue and with those attending online.

The immediate benefits will make you reconsider what’s possible with online events:

  • Unlimited options for virtual stages and backgrounds
  • Whatever you can imagine can be created
  • Stream speakers live from anywhere in the world
  • Integrate face-to-face audience with virtual audience
  • Conduct live Q&A between delegates and speakers wherever they are located
  • Checkout the demonstration video below

You can even run a live online Awards Event linking presenters and award winners in real time:

I’ve also attended a webinar using the ON24 platform, which is a much better webinar experience than the standard technologies.

So, if you want to do the right thing by your delegates, guests, speakers, sponsors and other stakeholders, invest in a decent online event service. You might just surprise yourself at the results.

And you’ll be pleased to note I didn’t use the jargoniser and mention “the new normal“.

But I have to go now – I have a Zoom meeting to attend…

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Irrefutable evidence the fake marketers and cyber-hustlers are destroying the joint…

18 Friday Dec 2020

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Uncategorized

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Today, I conducted a small experiment on two social media channels – Facebook and Instagram. I simply scrolled for a couple of minutes on each, capturing screen shots of the advertisements posted in my feed.

I work in and teach marketing, do research on marketing stuff and speak about marketing near my smartphone, so the advertisements in my feed are mostly about marketing services or similar – sad but true. As you know dear reader, both these social channels are owned by the same organisation, so a number of advertisements appeared in both channels.

If ever there was irrefutable evidence of the destruction of marketing industry’s credibility, you need look no further than what appears in my feed. The advertisements are brought to me by those who come from the digital school that preaches “How to get rich online, by telling others how to get rich online“. There were so many, this story could be a three-part series.

Here is but a small sample:

This fake marketer is using a paid advertisement (excuse my tautology) to con suckers that they don’t need to pay for advertising to land clients. I suppose he is also a fisherman, hence the use of ‘land’, instead of ‘acquire’ or “get new”? It seems he’s out of his mind – and it definitely needs changing. Please leave the industry now.

Here’s another one. An advertisement on Instagram claiming you can sell products on Instagram without ads. And not only do you not need ads, you don’t need an audience to sell to or any marketing experience. Making money requires no skills apart from, well, nothing but replying to this ad. Mind you, this ad costs the advertiser money to advertise their message about how to make money without spending money. Bloody hell.

Do they really believe people are completely stupid? Or maybe they are happy with stupid customers, or random monkeys tapping keyboards, given their criteria for customers? Please leave the industry.

Jeff Bezos once famously said “Advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service.” and yet Amazon is now the world’s largest advertiser ($11Billion PA) shunting P&G into second place.

A brand automation tool – amazing stuff. Just press a button and brands are automatically created? Does Coca Cola just hit the Brand Automation Button and go to lunch because the brand is now somehow automated and generating a profitable ROI? What does this headline mean? At least the subheading says “Join the Brand Automation revolution” not “Join the Brand Automation conversation”. But seriously folks – they want marketers to believe their brands can be automated – this defies all logic and demonstrates it was written by a digital typist not a copywriter. Leave the industry now.

Read this headline aloud – “The 2.0 100 viral content templates“. And they trademarked them!

I suppose if you’re selling templates you want those template messages to go viral, as by definition, you’ll sell more. But selling templates is a limited market and as most marketers know, there is very little linkage between “going viral” and sales. Most of what “goes viral” is simply chewing gum for the brain, with very little engagement or commerce involved in the process.

And usually it’s the content within the message that is the reason the message “goes viral” – if the template was the reason for virality, then every social media advertisement would “go viral”. That’s because all social media advertising is produced in a template – including this one. Advertisers are restricted to the same size image space, same character count and same location for the text and images.

This has created the unconscious habit known as banner blocking as the design of the advertisement signals to the viewer “this is an ad” so viewers unconsciously ignore them.

If I believe this “advertisement in a template” all I need to do is put content in one of the templates and it will “go viral” – whatever that means. So just dump a bunch of lorum ipsum into a template and sit back to witness the virality and the money appearing in my bank account?

Personally I’d rather know what type of content to put into a template to make it go viral – and I suspect this “advertisement in a template” has yet to reach pandemic-spread levels. Leave the industry now.

I have no idea why you would post such a distorted image, let alone lead with an irrelevant headline that doesn’t relate to the image. Readers expect headlines and images to relate to each other. The reason is simple – it’s how we’re taught to read.

For example, a picture of a dog, with the word ‘dog’ underneath it. A picture of a cat with the word ‘cat’ underneath it. It’s in our DNA to look at an image and link the caption or headline. But this advertisement does nothing of the sort.

Then the dead giveaways appear confirming this was written by a cyber-hustler. The first giveaway is the Use Of Capitals To Start Every Word In The Headline. The next is the use of the jargoniser to add buzzwords for alleged credibility – in this case it’s the buzzword hack – as if a hack is something special, for no other reason than it’s called a hack.

The other is the zero cost to do do something ‘secret’ that those who make $Billions don’t want you to know. It’s always $0 and only available through this special member of the “priesthood of marketing secrets” who out of sheer generosity wants to share it with you.

But there is a catch – you have to pay for the new $0 marketing hack if you want to use it. Please, please leave the industry now.

Once again, the first giveaway (Use Of Capitals To Start Every Word In The Headline) shows itself immediately. The ‘&’ is also a giveaway. I find this fascinating. How come no legitimate expert in the world of B2B sales and marketing has every written or run a training course on how to do what you are paid to do as a B2B salesperson – get some sales?

The sales training category must be bereft of education materials, so thank goodness for Hubspot – which I believe has one of the largest outbound telemarketing departments in the world of software marketing. Sorry, I meant to say “martech” – forgot to use the jargoniser. The company uses telemarketing to sell software that is supposed to automate the selling process, so you don’t need telemarketing – go figure.

For those who don’t know, Hubspot was made famous in Dan Lyon’s hilarious book Disrupted – Ludicrous misadventures in the tech start-up bubble. Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “the best book about Silicon Valley,” takes readers inside the maddening world of fad-chasing venture capitalists, sales bros, social climbers, and sociopaths at today’s tech startups. It’s a great read by the way.

And the hilarity is real. This advertisement uses the jargoniser to create a TLA for ABM. That’s a Three-Letter Acronym for Account-Based Marketing. Back in the dark ages of mid-last century, the term Account-Based Marketing or Account-Based Selling was invented. It was used to sell mainframe computers and other office and industrial equipment to major organisations and government. The sales teams were divided by market segment, or account type. For example, government or education.

So why use a jargoniser or TLAs to allege special skills are required for a business process that is about 70 years old? If you believe you need to reinvent the name of a process that has hardly ever changed – people selling to companies, assisted in some way by technology – then please leave the industry now.

Analogue tactics rule

The really interesting thing about the cyber-hustlers is how so many of them want you to buy or download a book to discover their secrets. That’s right folks – that old-fashioned analogue thing called a book. You can buy one and have it printed by a publisher and mailed to you, or you can download it and print it yourself.

Curiously, most downloaded books never get read online and even less are printed and read. The sheer act of downloading the book satisfies the respondent they are doing the right thing, then life gets in the way. Because the book isn’t physically sitting in front of them waiting to be read, the downloaded version gets ignored. But some SaaS expert will attribute value to your download and tick-off an achieved task on their KPIs.

The first 20 years of the 21st century are sadly being remembered as the decades that the cyber-hustlers and fake marketers destroyed any semblance of respect for the marketing industry. Even sadder is the glib acceptance of them by the industry. Why are we so intellectually and morally lazy?

After all, if Twitter will put fact-checking messages on Trump’s Tweets and Facecrook will remove fake content, why don’t these platforms protect us from fake marketers?

Have to go now, I’ve been asked by a young digital marketer for advice on how to become a thought leader without any expertise – now there’s an idea for a book…

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The #1 Rule when working from home – trim your nasal hairs…

19 Thursday Mar 2020

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

coronavirus, COVID-19, workingfromhome, workingfromhometips

To say the world has gone mad in the last couple of months is an understatement. People stabbing each other in supermarkets while fighting over toilet paper, food hoarding on a scale that assumes a ten-year apocalypse, and most recently, seemingly sensible intelligent adults struggling with the concept of working from home.

Fisticuffs in aisle 3…

From some of the comments I’ve read, you’d think people have been asked to solve the vaccine for COVID-19 from their kitchen, rather than do what they do on a computer most days, except in their home, not their office.

I declare inside knowledge here. I’ve been working from a home office for most of this century. I said ‘most of this century’ because it sounds even longer than ‘the last two decades’. In fact, I have worked from 5 different home offices in that time. Though to call some of those offices a ‘home office’ is stretching the truth. In a couple of cases, they were just desks in the corner with my computer on them.

My current purpose-built home-office accommodates my bride and myself. We work in two entirely different businesses and are seated at a comfortable 6′ of social distance. We’ve been socially distancing from each other for years, so to speak. We hardly speak to one another during the day and neither of us wears noise-cancelling headphones. We just get on with our business, blithely ignoring one another.

So given my expertise in this matter of working from home, I thought I’d share some tips to the virgin home workers out there who have been caught on the hop by COVID-19.

The first rule is quite simple, and it will help when you start to use video calls more frequently: Trim your nose hair!

You can see evidence of home-based conference-call virgins making this mistake every day on TV. A news presenter crosses to someone talking into their Skype or whatever app they have on their laptop. Inevitably the ‘correspondent’ talks into their computer’s camera looking down into it and close up – just to make sure they can be seen. This results in everyone who is watching the program staring straight up into the dark reaches of the speaker’s nostrils – and it is not a good look at all, ever.

Don’t sit too close to the camera…

Organise your camera so you are talking directly at it or slightly up into it, particularly if you are talking at close range.

Start your day with a routine, as if you are going to work at your office. One executive I know starts his day the same as always. He showers, eats breakfast and dresses for work. He hops in his car, drives down to his local cafe and buys a takeaway coffee, then returns home and walks into his office as if he has arrived at work. Even hangs up his coat.

In my household, I do the drop-off to school or bus stop, while my bride takes the dog for a walk. On return, I grind the beans and make the coffee. We have a quick chat about what’s planned for the day and then go to our desk, or head off to meetings. We both dress smartly, as we have clients come to our home for meetings, as well as couriers delivering parcels.

We eat lunch separately as we have different dining habits. If one of us is heading out we check deadlines so we can manage the afternoon shift of teens arriving home. We shop daily rather than a big weekly shop, as it provides a social opportunity to get out of the house.

The teens are told not to enter the office during business hours as we are working. They generally stick to this rule unless they need to use the printer or have a homework question.

When our teens were toddlers we used a combination of tag-team parenting, day-care and for a short while an au pair. Curiously, the lady who managed my son’s day-care centre left to set-up a doggy day-care centre. She’s now much happier, wealthier and our pup even goes there on rare occasions – I’m obviously in the wrong business, as the doggy day-care has a waiting list.

My pup thinks she’s a big dog when she goes to doggy day-care…

One word of warning. Those friends who don’t work from home can assume that because you work from home, you are not working. They suspect you are free to do any favour they want, as they are working in an office, in a proper job. So you’ll get a call or text to pick up a child, mind a child til they get home, sign for a parcel, pick up some groceries when you go shopping for yourself, let in a tradie (and watch over them), put their garbage bins out and who knows what else?

You need to use all your diplomatic skills when these requests arrive. I call it on-the-job training and professional development in negotiation skills.

Be careful of your backdrop when doing video calls. Let’s assume you’re not sitting in your pyjamas and are dressed appropriately, then position yourself so you have a blank wall or maybe a bookshelf behind you. If you have pets or young children, lock them (safely) in another room while you’re on the call. And be wary of background noises that you may have become accustomed to, but a microphone amplifies when on a call.

As well as looking up my nose you can see my washing basket behind me…

If you don’t have a dedicated office, try to create a separate space you can leave alone, even if it’s a corner desk. You don’t want your work files overtaking the dining table and you need to have a way of shutting off at the end of the work day.

Try to keep your office space separate and tidy…

One bonus of working from home is you can generally find an hour in the day to exercise or go to the gym, or enjoy a lazy-person workout in the sauna or steam. Even better, you can go during the day when the gym is quieter, so you can be more productive with your exercise regime. Though in these current times, you may just go for a brisk walk, a run, or a surf if you live near the beach like I do.

Keep healthy snacks in reach and avoid trips to the fridge – just because it’s there doesn’t mean you need to open it and devour the contents. And yes, it’s Wine-O’clock somewhere in the world, but that doesn’t mean you pop a cork at 4pm each day, just because nobody’s watching.

It’s always Wine O’clock somewhere in the world…

Make sure you have regular external appointments and spend time face-to-face with clients, prospects, suppliers or even a coffee with a friend. Humans are social creatures by nature and like to interact with other humans. But when working from home, you can quickly become comfortable with your own company and isolate yourself from the rest of the world – only communicating via email and social channels with emojis to express yourself.

Set aside time during the day to access social media, news sites and other non-essential online distractions – and stick to the schedule. It’s too easy to ‘check-in’ on these platforms every few minutes. Before you know it you’ve wasted an hour looking at the same news and social channels you looked at an hour earlier. And nothing has changed, except you’ll never get that hour back.

Depending upon your job function, you’ll generally find you can get more done in less time working from home – as long as you minimise the distractions. And every day is ‘bring your pet to work day’ so that’s a good thing too:)

Gotta go now. It’s almost 4 o’clock and well you know, time for a…

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Today’s throwback is a 2004 interview with Bird, Auld & Kotler…

08 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

In 2004 I ran a series of one-day seminars about online marketing with Drayton Bird, in Oz and NZ. Before the NZ leg of the tour, we were interviewed along with that doyen of marketing, Philip Kotler, by NZ Marketing magazine. Phil’s textbook was compulsory reading when I did my first marketing degree.

drayton-malcolm-phil

If only we’d realised then, what we were really doing in the new-age digital world, imagine how successful we could have become?

According to the cyber-hustlers, by being interviewed in a marketing magazine, we were practicing influencer marketing, by delivering thought leadership as part of our content marketing strategy. If only we’d known – we could have become Linkfluencers! The cyber-hustlers have so much to teach us.

Here’s a PDF of the interviews.

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Why don’t big brands like Woolies & Telstra understand customers?

22 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Advertising, BIG DATA, Branding, Content Marketing, Customer Service, Digital, Digital marketing, Marketing, small data, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

BIG data, Coles, content marketing, digital marketing, marketing, Woolies

Further to my last post about Woolies problems, there’s a growing belief in the marketing industry that BIG DATA is distracting marketers from the main game. Just like social media and content marketing have been driven by trend blindness, so too the BIG DATA fashion. Most marketers haven’t a clue about their small data to even contemplate making BIG DATA work for them.

Woolies was so enamored with their BIG DATA, they bought the data analytics company managing it. I have to admit, as an old Seinfeld fan, I cannot get the BIG SALAD out of my mind whenever I hear people use the term BIG DATA.

rakingbigsalad

raking over the BIG DATA in the BIG SALAD…

Given their lack of financial and marketing success, Woolies is obviously yet to reap their BIG DATA benefits. I recently heard an interesting insight from one of their data executives. Apparently they are analysing people’s credit card purchases.

They discovered if you are a male who buys weight loss products for six months, you’re very likely to then purchase “adult services” once you’re looking fit and trim. This brilliant insight will obviously help the adult sex industry. Let’s see, maybe they could advertise their services on low-fat yoghurt labels, or possibly put a neck tag on bunches of kale?

Gotta luv BIG DATA – it’s sooo relevant to the average business.

big-data-cartoon.gif

But let’s not blame the current BIG DATA fashion for the “why don’t they get it?” marketing moments. While speaking at a tourism marketing conference in New Zealand a few years ago, I met Jeanette Kelly. She had spent years working in the hospitality industry. Jeanette presented a wonderful piece of research conducted by the University of Waikato.

What it revealed is a problem all too familiar in the marketing industry – a complete lack of understanding of customers by people responsible for marketing to them.

Scott-Adams-cartoon-21

The accommodation and marketing managers of various hotels, motels, guest houses and the like, were asked what they thought were the most important factors influencing accommodation choices. Here’s what they considered the most important:

  1. Staffing and accommodation service
  2. Room rate
  3. Location
  4. Facilities
  5. Marketing and Sales programmes
  6. Seasonal tourism
  7. Competition from other properties
  8. Supply and demand
  9. Events taking place in the area
  10. The general state of the national economy
  11. The state of the property

The customers were then asked the same question. Guess what the customers listed as the most important factors influencing their accommodation choices?

  1. Cleanliness of the room
  2. Quality of the bath towels and wash cloths
  3. Quality of staff service
  4. Friendliness of staff service
  5. Comfort of mattress and pillow
  6. Quietness of room
  7. Well maintained furnishings
  8. On-premise car parking
  9. Overall facilities
  10. Level of security

As you can see – the marketers hadn’t a clue. In case you’re wondering, ‘room prices’ came 17th on the list of priorities for customers – amazing how small data can help your business.

Telstra is another brand that is out of touch because they ignore their small data. Here’s an earlier example.

More recently though, they have reached new heights – or is that lows? I have an iPhone on a plan, as I was unable to get my Samsung Galaxy to work – here’s why. Twice in the last month I’ve received an email with the subject line: “Malcolm, we have an offer exclusive for you“. I assume they meant to write: “Malcolm, we have an offer exclusively for you” OR “Malcolm, we have an exclusive offer for you“. This grammatical problem typically occurs when you use content marketers instead of copywriters to write your messages.

The offer is for a Samsung Galaxy. Personally I’d like one – as Apple is now the new IBM – do it our way or else. Here’s the email – an ad not a personal message:

telstra 1

Selfies make you feel more in the know – WTF?

telstra 2

I thought I already had a great plan?

telstra 3

Any sane human involved in the mobile phone industry knows the terrible psychological damage caused by trying to switch phone brands, if you use Outlook email on your desktop and want to sync your data. Even worse if you use it via Google Apps. Grown men, champion triathletes, even UFC title holders wither to blubbering wrecks, trying to get a simple transition of their data from Apple to Samsung or vice versa. It can invoke violence on innocent handsets.

resized_anderson_silva_15_0

I lost all my contacts because I couldn’t sync my phone…

And Telstra know this problem – particularly relating to me – because it’s recorded in their small data on my account file. It must be after the Great Samsung/iPhone Disaster mentioned earlier. So I assume given my ‘exclusive’ offer, they have looked at my account.

It is not unusual to see a total chasm between marketers and their customers. The recent Woolies debacle is typical.

perception

Quite often what customers want and what marketers think they want, are two different things. It’s why you see so much irrelevant content in content marketing. And it’s everywhere. Here’s a recent example of a headline from a Data-Driven Marketing association:

Content might still be king but distribution is queen and she is in charge!

Yes it’s true folks. That ridiculous headline was published online – note the complete lack of reference to customers in the statement. But please don’t despair. The marketing pendulum will swing back to common sense soon, you just need to be patient.

pendulum

Very, very, very patient…

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Those two marketers walk into a bar and laugh at sms jokes…

24 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Mobile marketing, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

mobile marketing, sms

LOL – avagoodweegend:)

.Funny-Hilarious-Text-Message

sms joke

Funny+SMS++Text+messages+jokes

Funny-text-messages

tumblr_lx3m60UQdi1r20l7b

index 1

funny-text-message-joke-I-love-you

funny-text-joke

Funny-love-text-message-to-the-wrong-person

Because-its-Fun-to-Troll-Stupid-People

530871_482126571827137_1758438440_n

14b4f50b3e8e7a9292a238939f73b033

image 2

b5c946b412bd3b02be80522cf6a3c94b

funny-text-message-joke

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