Category Archives: Buzz Management

Buzz Management

Operational Marketing

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Lying on the floor while talking to my insurance company shows why marketing must be involved with operations. In the past week I did business with a bedding retailer, which indirectly led to filing an insurance claim on my car. The bedding company’s operations were a disaster – they got precisely 0% of our order correct, causing my wife and I to camp on surplus mattresses placed on the bedroom floor, checking The Sleep Guide’s mattress protectors tips. Their late-arriving truck hogged the street, causing a passing vehicle to clip my side-view mirror. Unlike the bedding retailer, the insurance company (Geico) executed perfectly, from a well-designed web claims form to nearly instant claims analysis, body shop appointments rental car reservations and more. The contrast is stark. The bedding company experience after the sale (and to a lesser degree, during the sale) was a study in manufacturing customer frustration. The salesmen … Continue reading →

Old School Social

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My dentist does social marketing. This should surprise nobody because social marketing has existed since the first two cavemen competed by selling left-over mastodon meat (“My mastodon steaks come with 30% fewer fatal microbes!”). Businesses have always used the power of social networking, long before social media became a reality. Social media changes nothing and thinking about primitive social marketing helps to clarify your social outreach. Social marketing is, in essence, assuring that people talk about you in positive terms. As an example, when you move to a new city, odds are you ask everyone about their recommendation for a good dentist. Some will warn you about bad jaw crackers, and others will wax poetic about how gentle and through is their dental doc. This is social promotions in its most basic form. The product (dental services) is referenced by customers based on the positioning criteria they most vale (money, … Continue reading →

Faking Authenticity

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It is odd to encounter plain spoken and seemingly honest politicians. Being a professional cynic, I doubt nearly everything. Having been a political animal my entire adult life, I’m doubly cynical about anyone who campaigns to achieve power. To be disappointed in broken political promises is a sign of naivety. To believe any political brand shows trust where there should be none. So to witness a handful of governors and other candidates speaking bluntly, without equivocation, and taking positions normally considered poisonous … and then watch their poll numbers rise … is both a lesson in marketing and possibly a sign of the Apocalypse. Authenticity matters in all matters. If you could not take your spouse’s word, then your marriage would be destined for the dumpster (which always makes me wonder about Bill and Hillary). When corporations promote products that do not deliver, the acquired lack of authenticity becomes fatal. … Continue reading →

Social Referral

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Social media is an ad hoc referral system gone horribly right. Referrals are primarily a means to building business, brands and bucks. Ask my dentist (to whom I would gladly refer anybody). He is maniacal about soliciting his patients to make referrals, and he gets them.  He knows that patients move away or die (hopefully from old age and not botched dental surgery), so he is constantly refilling his demand chain for crowns, fillings and laser whitening. Referrals occur in every business, from your neighborhood dry cleaner to multinational technology companies. The larger the organization, the more it drifts from the quaint and personal sounding “referral” into the more Machiavellian sounding “buzz generation.”  Yet it is essentially the same thing. At either extreme we are asking, coaxing, bribing or begging people to talk to other people about our products, preferably in a positive manner. Which brings us to social media, … Continue reading →

Disreputable Tech

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Dilbert’s distrust of marketing exists for a reason. Back when I had a regular job — during the Taft administration — my co-workers loved to drop Dilbert cartoons on my desk whenever marketing was the strip’s topic.  In one installment a customer asked Dilbert if he was lying about a product, to which Dilbert replied “No, that’s marketing’s job.”  This naturally reinforces the very stereotype that Seth Godin outlined in his masterwork All Marketers Are Liars. The reputation of marketing people has been rightfully sullied because many marketing “professionals” destroy reputations — of their companies and themselves.  They fail to grasp both the mechanics of reputation as well as its essence.  Much has been written about the former since reputation in social media is a hot topic, yet the latter has been incompletely analyzed for high technology.  Reputation for a company and its technology products are intertwined, and failed market … Continue reading →

Netscape Necrology

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Alas, poor Netscape. I knew them heretofore. It is indeed sad to see the reaper claim Netscape Navigator. And sadly enough, the very thing that brought them fame may well have killed them — namely buzz. When the net was first being popularized, and HTML was still a quirky technology at best, we had limited choices for web surfing. People with graphical terminals (you lucky *#&**#^!) had Mosaic. Primitive as it was, it at least allowed for direct and intuitive access to the few thousand web pages in existence at that time. It was a durn site better than the text-based browsers (lynx) to which I was restricted. Then along came Netscape. They picked-up where Mosaic left-off, adding polish and professionalism. Andreessen, Clark and the rest of the Netscape team knew the net better than most anyone at the time, and leveraged that knowledge in one of the earliest instances … Continue reading →