Marketing-Gimbal

Twitter Helps Latest LA Food Sensation Gather Its Tribes

 Kogi is the latest phenomenon in LA dining. Chef, at world famous restaurant, decides to forgo glitz and glamour and create a unique fusion of Korean and Mexican food and serves up these delectable concoctions in roving catering vans all over LA.

I’m not making this up folks, and it’s the stuff that Hollywood is made of. I’m sure the food network is already doing a show on it. While I’m a foodie at heart, the real story is one of a relatively unknown (until recently) mobile catering truck that used Twitter and awesome food, to create a following, and help lubricate word of mouth in America’s 2^nd largest city and now the world.

As Kogi is a mobile business, and a small one at that, it needed a way to tap into the following that it had created, and who was already talking about Kogi on Facebook, other social networking sites and blogs. Kogi’s brand director, in a recent Reuters article, stated that they decided to use Twitter as a way to communicate with their “tribe” and facilitate gathering places based on the trucks location. Kogi turned to Twitter. Today you and Kogi’s 23,000 followers can be found on Twitter at twitter.com/kogibbq.

This shows the amazing capability of utilizing a social media tool to facilitate a small business with a large following, and an excellent product. So let’s look at Kogi’s ingredients for success:

1.      Great Product: Kogi obviously has a tremendous product. Social media success and for that matter any business, starts with an amazing product or service.

2.      The Tribe of Kogi: Kogi’s customers wanted to talk about their experience, and in fact had became a tribe. Seth Godin writes that “a tribe is any group of people connected to each other through an idea or experience”. In this case, Kogi’s customers had become a tribe, but we’re missing a leader. When Kogi stepped in, and utilized social tools Kogi become the leader of its own tribe. A place where a brand wants to be at the end of the day.

3.      Honesty: The social community in this case is honest. Kogi delivers an amazing product, people want to talk about, and others want to experience it and Kogi facilitates this. Kogi’s goal is not about selling or hyping, at least not yet, and let’s hopes it stays that way.

4.      Word of Mouth: WOM is the best advertising around. This is as old, as the hills, and still true. Kogi couldn’t buy the brand awareness it has now, and is getting through the facilitation of communication across its tribe. Social Media can help any small business if the intent is to converse with the community of customers and prospects; not sales or advertising.

5.      With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility: Kogi must now realize the importance of its brand experience, and promise that its customers have come to expect. Any degradation in service and experience will travel at the speed of light in Kogi’s social universe.

6.      Innovation: While Kogi’s responsibility to its brand experience is now much greater it has an amazing community of people to listen to, and engage with, and in doing that develop new innovation in its business.

This story shows how small businesses can take advantage of building and tapping into their community. Today, McDonalds and Burger King do not have Twitter accounts and Domino’s only recently started one to help combat the recent wave of bad publicity. Why haven’t the brands, with all the resources in the world, tapped into the tools that help them engage with their customers? Probably because they are still strategizing, and trying to figure out the ROI of a conversation. Nuff said.

Reducing Your Content Friction

  Recently came across a tweet from Chris Brogan referencing a post on Shannon Paul’s Blog on how to take your marketing content from available to sharable to social. I’ve referenced Shannon’s 5 ways here:

Five ways to encourage online sharing of your content:

1.      Allow the URL of the image to be copied and pasted in addition to making smaller sized images available for download, too. Sure, magazine publishers will appreciate the large, high-resolution files available for download, but nobody posting online will appreciate such large files.

2.      Video and audio clips should also be embeddable. Don’t make me go to your website every time I want to watch your video. Let me post your video where I want.

3.      Continue to e-mail text versions of press releases when it makes sense to do so, but have an extension of your website dedicated to sharing content that includes SEO versions of your press releases.

4.      With each item you post in your shared content space, include ShareThis or AddThis buttons to encourage direct posting of your content to social networks like Facebook and Friendfeed, and social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg.

5.      In addition to posting current content, also share company background information, executive bios, logos, video and audio clips, images and external links to relevant information.

The words “available to sharable to social” are very poignant. In a web world you must think about making your content available for people to syndicate and share. It’s not enough to make the content sharable or downloadable but to reduce the friction and make the content embeddable and inherently sharable.

On the blog Web Ink Now David Meerman Scott makes reference to Neighborhood America’s online media room as a great example of making content available. They go a long way to making the content sharable but I would have liked to see them go one step further, and make the content more shareable by making the actual HTML code available for embedding the content in other venues such as blogs.

In any event kudos to a Neighborhood America for a job well done. In our recent ebook launch we actually make available a logo-icon with embeddable html code available to anyone who would like to embed our ebook in their blogs.

In catching up with some former SAP colleagues they informed me of a recent initiative where they make the content sharable via buttons that bring up several logos of various book marking sites like Digg etc. This has increased the # of inbound links tenfold, and improved their SEO rankings thus enabling a more efficient allocation of pay per click spend. So as an old school marketer I look for the selfish self interest and I have found it.

Remember you must reduce the friction surrounding for your publishable content in this day and age. Doing so can not only increase your syndication of message, but also nets a positive return for your marketing efforts in enhanced SEO and reduced pay per click spend. Nuff Said.

Eating My Own Social Media Dog Food-My First Ebook

So I’ve finally taken a page out of David Meerman Scott's playbook and developed an ebook. But we didn’t do an ebook for the sake of doing an ebook. We actually had a few marketing challenges. How does a growing software security company like Lumension Security establish a thought leadership position around its brand and raise the security discussion across the CXO suite. An ebook seemed like a perfect solution for the following reasons:

1.       We could communicate a more strategic message

2.       We could use this vehicle to start a conversation with bloggers, and other communities relevant to our message

3.       We could make it viral and extend our message for little cost

4.       We could leverage our communications investment to drive a PR campaign around our message

5.       We could add in rich media to add new dimension to our message and increase our content relevancy across various communities and search engines

In developing the ebook we put some investment into it. We worked on our message, we hired a professional writer, we interviewed customers and analysts, we utilized secondary research and we had a designer add the finishing touches. We also wanted to add rich media to the ebook. Why not take advantage of the digital platform to have rich media embedded into the ebook. So we did a series of videos related to key ebook topics.

  

There was extensive debate over registration and if we should put the ebook behind a registration all. I took a page out of David Meerman Scott’s playbook and said no to registration. Can you believe it? A marketing guy saying no to inquiry generation, especially an old school marketing guy like me. We did this as we wanted the ebook to be accessed without any barriers or friction. Again to go back to our goals. Our goal was not a demand gen goal, but rather a thought leadership and messaging  goal. So why add barriers to the message getting out.

We did however want to ensure we leveraged as many opportunities as possible to get our message and relevance enhanced. For example we created a YouTube channel and this is where we host our ebook videos. Our ebook videos actually pull from our YouTube channel. As the videos are played our video on content gains more relevance on YouTube and Google. We also embedded the same videos on our website so our web now has rich media and our SEO gains additional relevance. We created a special video with our CEO just on the topics within the book and this already has 156 views in one week on our channel without any launch of the ebook itself. Okay so it’s not 1M, but its more than 1.

We did a prelaunch of our eBook to bloggers first and then did a soft launch within our company newsletter. Our official launch doesn’t start until next week. Again no request for bloggers to post or comment just wanted to share our message and thoughts.

We will be doing a social media release next week, and will include the html code to a special ebook badge should people want to place the ebook on their blog or web page. It’s a great content offer and we want people to share it and use it. In fact we even placed a Creative Commons license on the ebook. We will also tie into a extensive communications campaign through the 3^rd QTR and leverage our CEO to expound on his message. It the tie in of social media and traditional communications is where a little new school meets some old school. But who cares if it’s great content lets leverage all our channels more effectively.

Our metrics are # of downloads, # of blog posts, # of interviews, # of mentions. The metrics tend to be more towards the communication side of the house as this initiative was really about the message getting out and not demand generation.

So there we are. We focused on creating a conversation, we’re reaching out, we’re web centric, we didn’t use registration pages, and we created a powerful message vehicle for not a huge amount of investment. In fact there is no media investment within the ebook. Stay Tuned and Nuff Said.

Netsuite Nightmares

Here’s a lesson to all marketing professionals on the importance of listening to their customers and what happens when they don’t. I’ve excerpted from Dennis Howlett’s Blog on the nightmares that Netsuite is having with its delivery of its on demand software product:

Last September I wrote about how NetSuite has been failing its customers. It isn’t getting any better. Following that post I started to receive emails going into detail about how NetSuite’s sales talk bears no relation to what the company is able to deliver. It seems that most of the problems stem from the CRM product but there are broader issues. Commenter - JP Browne56 captured the mood of many commenters:

NetSuite is a catastrophe: sales people promise the moon but there is little flexibility, no support, and no willingness to help solve problems. My firm is small and we almost went under because of the delays and costs of dealing with NetSuite. We had to junk the entire solution and start over from scratch. Avoid NetSuite at ALL costs!

Earlier today I spoke with Tara Rose, CEO of Nurse Staffing Unlimited a small nursing staff agency. Her story mirrors much of what others say: plenty of promise little delivered. In her case, Tara's company forked over $140,000 for a service that was late, incomplete and incapable of providing the right information for workers compensation and professional liability insurance calculations. Specifically, reports that should not include assignments that went unfilled kept showing up, effectively providing incorrect information for insurance audit purposes.

Now imagine yourself in the shoes of this CMO as he/she pulls away from their latest print advertising copy review to address this viral mushroom cloud. Build your conversational channels, listen to them, and address your customers needs….Nuff Said.