Mike Maney

Tag: marketing

  • On “getting press” and metrics

    Getting “press,” as this job ad I saw on HackerNews claims to want, is more than measurement. It’s about relationships, news, an eye for tying a company’s story into wider trends, and having an experienced gut feel for when a story is worthy of press and when it’s better suited for some other type of marketing channel. It’s a long game made up of moves that often go unseen because they aren’t on a plan or directly and tactically measurable.

    So, please startups, if you are hiring for PR or searching for an agency to help with your marketing efforts, dig deep to understand what exactly you want them to do..and why. Not doing so wastes your time, wastes theirs and, worse, wastes the media’s.

    By all means, measure what you can. But recognize the value of the unseen that makes the measurable possible.

  • On “getting press” and metrics

    Getting “press,” as this job ad I saw on HackerNews claims to want, is more than measurement. It’s about relationships, news, an eye for tying a company’s story into wider trends, and having an experienced gut feel for when a story is worthy of press and when it’s better suited for some other type of marketing channel. It’s a long game made up of moves that often go unseen because they aren’t on a plan or directly and tactically measurable.

    So, please startups, if you are hiring for PR or searching for an agency to help with your marketing efforts, dig deep to understand what exactly you want them to do..and why. Not doing so wastes your time, wastes theirs and, worse, wastes the media’s.

    By all means, measure what you can. But recognize the value of the unseen that makes the measurable possible.

  • The Do’s and Don’ts of Evangelism

    A good friend of mine who runs enterprise marketing for a top tech company recently asked me for advice to help counsel one of his executives on the differences between marketing and evangelism. The list below includes some of the top-of-mind tips I provided based on my experience:

    DO

    • Be human. Nobody wants to engage with a marketing droid. Be yourself. Don’t worry if a few warts show.
    • Educate and inform. Be a good source for people who may eventually buy or recommend your product to turn to.
    • Have a point of view. Make people pay attention and engage with you.
    • Know your stuff. Your community will smell fluff from a mile away.
    • Pick up the tab if you can. You’ll be surprised how far $200 at the bar or picking up pizzas for a hackathon or meetup goes.

     

    DON’T

    • Sell. Selling is the job of your sales team. Your job is to be an engaging human.
    • Overly worry about being loyal to your brand. Great evangelists help their community first, even if it means saying a nice thing or two about your competition.
    • Engage only when you need something. Influence is a two-way street.
    • Attend conferences only if you’re invited to speak. It’s not only conceited, but you’ll also miss out on great content and relationship building.
    • Expect anything of your community. Earn it.

    This is by no stretch of the imagination a comprehensive list. What do’s and don’ts would you include? Add them to the comments.

    (For more, check out my Influencing the Influencers deck on Slideshare.)

     

  • LEGO Does It Right

    One of the things I advise companies is that sometimes the best marketing is not marketing at all…it’s simply a matter of doing what is right. LEGO is now my poster child for that advice.

    And a spot-on post by B.L. Ochman -> “Lego: a company that doesn’t have to force customers to Like them on Facebook“

  • Damn You Nate Silver

    Slides from my closing keynote at The Social Business Future Conference yesterday.

  • Recap: Monktoberfest 2012

    Redmonk founder Stephen O’Grady posted a great recap of Monktoberfest 2012 (complete with the list of amazing, impossible-to-find beers they served). I’m slightly partial to this paragraph:

    Mike Maney, a longtime Friend of RedMonk, arranged and shot the video for the conference on his own. He and his colleague Matt Helmke turned their travel to the Monktoberfest into an epic 7 state roadtrip, featuring stops at craft breweries all the way from Delaware to Maine. From Riverhorse to Olde Burnside to Harpoon, they went from brewery to brewery, collecting stories and – thanks to some very gracious donations – beer.

    Crazy un-marketing ideas like this — the kind where you do what is right for the communities you do business in — aren’t possible without the support of forward-thinking executives like Laura Merling and the sure-what-the-hell-why-not participation of great pros like Matt Helmke and Justin Tormey.

  • Marketing != Manipulation

    “The more authentic you are, the more authentic you can be with others. It has to come from an intention not to manipulate.” – National Geographic photographer Lynn Johnson.

    Great advice for modern marketers. The best marketing is not marketing.

  • Stop Selling

    Last week, I had the pleasure of being the opening keynote speaker at the second annual Social Media Business Life Conference produced by Chuck Hall. I’m usually the guy writing speeches for others, so it was an interesting role reversal to be the guy in front of the audience for a change.

    Chuck does a great job organizing this conference and putting together a full-slate of content that is, refreshingly, vendor-free. Too often, those of us who have been involved in social media for years forget that many people are still ramping up. There were nearly 250 people drawn to learning about how they could use social media to improve their organizations. In a suburb of Philadelphia. As my friend, John Patrick, often said when the web was first molten hot: “We’re only 10% of the way there.”

    My talk focused on the need to look beyond the tools of social media and see the humans behind those tools. I also challenged the audience to stop using social media to sell…which I think forced Chuck and several members of the audience to wonder if I’d started the conference-ending happy hour a bit early.

    (My keynote starts at ~9:30 into the video.)

    Because Face Time is as Important as Facebook

    View more presentations from Mike Maney

  • If I Ran Google+…

     

    I’ve been pretty vocal about my views on how Google is blowing a huge, industry-shifting opportunity with Google+. Most of those views are centered around the company’s inability to know when to let professional marketers take the handoff from the engineers (and accept that it’s ok).

    This morning, my friend and fellow corporate misfit, Greg Lowe, posted his views on why he’s abandoning the Google+ party until it figures out how to make its various systems work together. Greg’s not alone. And that’s when it hit me: What would I do if I was running Google+’s marketing today?

    Would I allocate gobs of cash from my search business to promote this new product that — according to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt — has the potential to replace search as the backbone of the company? I could. It’s not like Google doesn’t have the money to make Google+ a household name like Facebook or Twitter.

    Would I pay a bunch of celebrities and brands bucketloads of moolah to make my new product look cool to people not immediately related to Robert Scoble? I could. Twitter has shown that tactic works pretty well.

    Would I initiate basic political and competitive campaign tactics to reshape how press, analysts and other influencers define the market? I could and would.

    No, what I’d do is much simpler.

    The biggest problem with Google+ right now isn’t that it’s UI is ugly or that people like Greg can’t log in from their different Google accounts. Google+’s biggest problem is that it’s marketing team isn’t harnessing the power of its most passionate customer base: those who take the time to complain about the product’s current shortcomings (early adopters who are core to the growth of the product).

    My fix? Have a strike team scour Google+, Twitter and the web for any and all complaints about the product. Capture them. Catalog them. Categorize them. Communicate them. And then turn the engineers lose fixing them. As each issue is addressed, check it off. Keep the list public. There’s a built-in, passionate product marketing department already built into Google: its customers.

    People want Google to be successful with Google+. The meteoric sign-ups show many are looking for something that builds on the early foundations laid by Facebook and Twitter. But unless Google gets some basic marketing religion — and gets it fast — their constant drumbeat of “It had potential…” flops will increasingly erode confidence in the company’s core geek foundation.

  • What’s Old is New Again (Or is It?)

    I just read a great post by Ustrategy’s Ravit Lichtenberg on ReadWriteWeb highlighting the 10 Ways Social Media Will Change In 2010. It’s a great read and worthy of being carried under the ReadWriteWeb banner (I have no shame in being an unabashed fanboy of good tech reporting).

    However (isn’t there always a “however”?), here’s where I disagree with Ravit. He posits that “Many ‘Old’ Skills Will Be Needed Again.”

    An economic downturn coupled with the surge of social media eliminated many traditional marketing and PR roles. But this year, we’ll see the return of professionals to the field. Enterprises will turn back to marketers who specialize in understanding customer psychology and who are experienced in addressing these both offline and online. Research and development divisions will turn to customer experience professionals to draw on user needs and ideation as part of their product improvement and innovation process, and sales and support will continue to deliver services online. Expect to see job postings for social media managers, social media psychologists and social media executive administrators to help manage the infinite tasks involved with communities and social media campaigns.”

    The reality is that the good shops, the smart companies, never lost sight of the core functions; they didn’t get blinded by the bright shiny lights. No, they saw the lights and worked them into larger, less tactical strategies.

    As marketers, the new tools we have at our disposal couldn’t be greater. But they mean nothing/nada/zip/zero if they aren’t tied into a larger/boring/old school/smart/proven strategy.