It’s an idea, that many believe isn’t true now that there is the ability to track visitors and where they came from… on the Internet. What is still not sure of is exactly what caused the person to seek the services a company offers. It might be the reason that hot new ad campaign is working so well is because a movie had a similar item used by the star, usually the person reaching out to a business doesn’t really know. They may think they do which will cause a new ad campaign with a similar message to go out. New movie goers will jump on board or something else might trigger them, but very doubtful the ad did all the work.

Now, lets jump back to the company when it was just starting out. What was important was getting the message of the business out to would be ‘investors’ and ‘buyers’ of the service. Most often, the message had to be delivered very quickly… standing in line at the store, between meetings… or on the elevator. If your new to starting a business, there are two versions of your quick message needed. One that is 10 seconds long that you can deliver to the question “what are you up to these days?” or “crazy weather we are having”. If there person is at all interested, meaning they didn’t turn and run, you need to be able to roll into a 30 second message. If it is good, the person won’t get off the elevator on their floor to hear what you have to say. If you can’t get a person’s interest in 30 seconds, you have a bad message or you are talking to the wrong person.

Back to the ‘what marketing works’. You can’t be everywhere, all of the time. So, empower your employees to say the message. If they believe in the business, they will have no problem saying the 10 second bit with enough energy to make it an effective marketing moment. If someone asks them what they are doing these days, they shouldn’t have to think about it and say “Oh, the same thing as before, selling kitchen stuff”. The ‘better’ answer would be “Changing the world one dinner at a time… I’m working for XYZ helping people see that a really great spoon makes meals more enjoyable”.

If you have a business with sales or tech support, every person should know the 10 second elevator pitch for something you offer. They should practice and see the success of a simple mention that represents excitement rather than a pitch they are reading off of a card. This is not a suggestive sale, you don’t want everyone to say “do you want fries with that?”, you NEED them to put a different view on what a person may have seen a million times before but missed.

The sale might not happen at that moment, don’t let the employee feel they need to close the sale. You may not even get the future sale when you run your next ads, but later your customer won’t be able to put their finger on it but they will seek you out. Usually we don’t remember the elevator ride but we feel good about the energy around that spoon company’s product when at the store… “must be because of that magazine ad they ran”… they don’t know why and you won’t be able to pin your success to one employee chatting in the grocery store line, but everyone will win in the end.

————-

Years ago, I saw a magazine article where a person with the company I was working with had mentioned they had very successful workouts on the way to their job with XYZ. When I mentioned it to the c0worker, he let me know that the company’s lawyers let him know that in the future he needs to get permission to mention the company’s name. In the positive light of the article, they would have been better suited giving the employee tips on how to talk about the company and if they can help him get into other related articles.

Today’s software, especially that designed for the mobile user, have many ways it can be used. Apple attempted to limit down their mobile environment with set screen sizes and only a few hardware button/features different across devices. Android has many more variables with so many screen sizes, hardware arrangements and skins used by device providers.

With hundreds of thousands of software options for the mobile devices, it is very hard to know when a piece of ‘someone else’s’ software might cause an issue with yours. A popular steaming music app currently makes it so the Apple Updates doesn’t work unless you stop the stream and remove it from the Multi Task Bar of the iPhone/iPad. Yes, that software was certified and available through the app store.

A current application can be used by literally millions of people. That application may have taken just months to design and program by several developers. There is no way those two developers could have tested all the possible ways a user might torture the app. Programmers have to expect a perfect world will be their application’s working area and hope any issue/conflicts can be resolved without causing too much pain to their users.

Those users are not the corporate users either. Yesteryear, if a software issue was found, a request for a fix was put in. There was budgeting, discussions, timed roll-outs and finally a fix. Always mindful that it was cheaper to bundle multiple issues into a single ‘release’. Today, users are folks walking down the street or sitting in a coffee shop. When they find a issue with their mobile app, they can yell quickly and spread the word to many users since they have a social media audience.

What is surprising is that since the channel to yell is available, it is being used more often than not. Rather than discussing an issue, or even a possible issue with the application provider, people go straight to expressing their distaste for a problem they are seeing. Since the developer was not reached out to first, there is little research done up front to see if the problem lies with software or something else. ‘Have you restarted? Have you tried emptying your cache?”

With the larger corporate software, the first thing we looked at where human errors. There was little controls over incorrect information being entered so bad data was most often the problem. Development teams had to research first the issue, the data associated with the issue, and if that was a human miss-entering or the software miss-understanding. Today’s smaller apps are more often having a conflict than data so researching issues is now more about outside program influences than internal data entry.

The quick creation of modern software, and the likelihood of conflicts from many apps living on a single mobile device, means that users will see ‘unusual’ issues.

Last night, I was reminded of the Sherlock Holmes quote: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

I have mentioned here before that I love post my iPhone snapshots up on Instagram. I follow only enough people to be able to follow what they are posting and have a lot of family and worldwide friends as followers. Last night, I had an alert that someone was saying I used one of their images. I quickly responded and they repeated their concern. To try and comfort them, I posted an original of an image, prior to cropping and filters, so they could see I had taken the image.

Their response was that their issue wasn’t with a photo I posted, rather that I was using one of their photos as my profile picture. This struck me as really strange, and I wondered why it didn’t strike them as weird too. Why would a guy who has family followers and isn’t looking to have huge quantities of following numbers use someone else’s picture for my profile? Especially a lady’s image!

I reached out to several people from other areas to see if they can see a different profile image than I installed when I started the account. They only saw my original. No one seemed to be able to reproduce the image she was talking about. Sadly, what appears to be a software issue, was thought to be a human issue. Why do people today question something completely uncharacteristic of a human rather than look at software. Again, with the jump to action rather than stepping back and remembering Sherlock Holmes’ words.

It gets sadder though… she has actually stopped using Instagram due to what she saw. I don’t know her directly other than being referred by another person who I enjoy the images posted by, but still it is really disappointing she left.

Being in software, I knew to reach out to Instagram immediately. I offered my assistance and suggested they talk to their concerned user about her device/software set up. I also encouraged Instagram to verify to her that my profile picture has never been changed. While this would represent a issue with the software, it would make the software users more comfortable that there is nothing evil going on with their social system. It’s part of today’s software development needs… the ability to assure customers that there can be issues with the software but it can be fixed. The level of expected perfection in today’s software is beyond what any small, fast moving team can possibly deliver on. Even in today’s corporate world, with cost cuts, teams are expected to deliver at incredible rates. Users need to remember that and work with the folks that are trying to make their world a better place.

As I have mentioned here before, I use social networks to keep up on things around the world. I only follow or friend or circle a quantity of people which that particular system will allow me to actually see what is being posted by others. When Twitter was new, I had few friends on the system so I was in the public feed a lot… it’s impossible to get much more than a disconnected snippet about anything unless it’s a global issue that everyone is talking about. I prefer groups in the 300 range that has few enough to actually make it through the last few hours of posts but enough that there is always something new. Too few and you go through blanks in time.

With that self imposed limitation, it means that I use each social network to fill a different personal need. For Facebook, it’s all about co-worker friends from my years at Thomson Reuters and friends from the 80′s that have re-connected. The 80′s friends only have a few things to say where local happenings are the bulk of those posts. The co-worker ‘friends’ are a great group to throw ideas at, share fun finds, joke with and chuckle at a common evil. It will be ‘interesting’ when Timeline goes public so we can see if we can make any sense of the string of posts from the last 5 or 6 years.

Twitter is all about the Business side of Gary. Very few personal posts, since the group I follow are more towards the entrepreneurial mind set. I post up links to articles I found that others of like similar motivations might enjoy as well links to the many posts I have made across assorted blogs. The idea is to have a finger on the creative Business folks around the world to put together posts from several people and make decisions from trends and mind set. You don’t have to be a government spy office these days to put together comments from a variety of key individuals on Twitter to see changes coming.

Instagram, the photo sharing social network, has amongst the smallest group of people I follow. The photos are from people in different areas, it amazes me the wonders of areas I had no idea existed. I also follow people that have like and polar opposite photo styles as mine. I see the photos sweep by and it opens my eyes to new possibilities for photo opportunities all around me. I stay away from the ‘major’ players and the politically motivated image posts. Major players these days are posting from their collection so nothing is from today or yesterday and they post non-stop. I would rather see a grainy image of a man on a bike in China from this morning commute than a perfectly balanced image of a famous church reflecting off a fountain’s lower water. I do have an appreciation for the effort to make that beautiful image, that doesn’t happen to be why I’m on Instagram. I share out images that I have taken with my iPhone and tinkered with to bring out the message while staying true to it being a snapshot in time.

There are a few less popular social offerings that I joined and posted to. They are not key industry players like the chosen few I work with daily, but still get my attention. For example PicPlz… another photo sharing network. ‘Another’ as in one of many options outside of the Instagram giant. Not quite sure why I still post there, the images being posted by others are dropping in quality of subject and heading more towards individuals presenting a half dozen snaps of their faces and then nothing more. It doesn’t help having the folks that created it say they don’t know what to do with the service going forward… do you risk committing your time to a service that has a near potential of just being turned off as has been the case with many other social attempts.

Now comes Google+, what to do there? Such an overwhelming force, tied into so many other Google ‘tools’ I use on an occasion, it is nearly impossible to ignore. My first toe in the water was to join up with photographers. The idea being that the images would be more robust than the snapshot world of my other photo sharing options. But, the feeds very quickly filled up with professionals posting up multiple images an hour from their portfolio. Are they just bragging or looking for people to hire them for their photography abilities? Then, I shifted a bit towards adding circles of people I enjoy on Twitters. They were great on Twitter for bits of information, on Google+ their posts go long enough to come across as a sales pitch.

Friends from Facebook on Google+ never post anything as the system has more of a ‘public’ feeling. There are a few speakers and authors that are proving to be interesting. Their posts are generally about an event they are at and their personal feelings on what was being presented. On the surface, thus far, no agenda has jumped out of their posts. With that in mind, I went back to my photographer circle and cut it down to people that are doing things like ‘city photo walks’ as well more ‘people on the street’.

The question I have for myself has been what do I post on Google+? Looking at what I enjoy on the service and the provided features, I’m leaning towards one to two paragraph ‘mini’ blog posts. Not really ‘blog’ posts, I’m using that term to say they are opinions posts that go on longer than a flash sentence but don’t drag on like this bit did. The challenge will be to stay true to what I have to say. The words on the page can be viewed by the masses, including future employers and customers. How will they react to Gary Being Gary, in a paragraph. Will I soften my apple box standing bark if I’m faced with the text appearing years from now from a potential client search on me? I’ll give it a try… it isn’t like Google will keep my typed words forever…

First, listen to my problem, make sure I understand you care. Ask questions to make sure you have all the facts.

Do not state I did something wrong. If you feel I am in error, help me understand that without making me feel embarrassed. If you feel your company may be at fault, do not open with an apology. Tell me how you will solve my problem.

If you do not have an answer right now, tell me what your next actions will be. Explain when you will be calling me back… you, your the one that answered the phone. Let me know that if we don’t connect, you will leave a voice mail but encourage me to call you back if we don’t connect. Let me know the number to call and the reference information.

Then, do what you promised.

Do not offer me a discount, do not offer to do something for free. Just help me get my problem solved without any more effort on my side. If you discount, your telling me that I overpaid when I first paid for your service. You don’t believe in the value of your products. If I ask you for a discount, find out who in your company is offering the discount. Due to their actions, there may be the word out in the world that people can get your product for free just by complaining.

Use the above as the starting point.

To repeat – make every attempt to solve my problem instead of turning to discounting. You answered the phone or read my email about my issue, your now a sales person. You represent the business I called and control if I will come back and buy again. In the age of online social media, a miss step spreads around quickly. How do I feel if I read how someone got your products for free, yet I paid $50? Next time; I will go somewhere else to buy a ‘better’ product, wait for a coupon to buy at a discount or complain online to get you to give me your product for free. Well, me and everyone I know, everyone else that pays full price are not smart with their money. If you create this world for your company, you can expect to get some time off when the business starts cutting positions as they try to understand why sales are down.

This has been true since the original threaded chats on the Internet started. People will change who they are in the physical world to explore a different life path on the Internet. There are some folks doing it to do harm to others, some are hiding from family/friends and others can do it quite by accident. The accidental misrepresentation is just someone who is posting without realizing how others are viewing their comments, reaching a different conclusion around who they are dealing with than reality.

The new social solutions available to share for fun or profit include a lot more possibilities than just text. People share their words, images, videos, links to other people’s words and so on… new options come out all the time. Someone has to make a pretty strong effort, or not post anything but text, to ‘be someone else’ online. On most the big name sharing systems, it is easy enough to check out tagging on an image to see if it really taken by the author or at least where they claim it to be. While not many socialites will take the time to do this extra step, the information is there to see if the image was true to the provider or one grabbed from somewhere else.

For the sharing crowd that is just having fun, the options bring many people from all corners of the world to exchange thoughts and experiences.

A common thread across all of the well known social sites is they allow people to follow or track your posts. There is a variety of ‘allowing’, ‘blocking’, and ‘limiting’ made available to provide some level of controls over who a person’s friends are online. If the step to hide this information isn’t turned on, other Internet users are able to see how many people are following or being followed by each member of the system.

These numbers can be very small and well managed to just what a user is able to view and respond to. All the way up to huge qualities of people who follow everyone. A post submitted into a crowd of those big number groups have a very low chance of being seen/read. It also results in people sharing the same link over and over again since it is impossible to watch all of the activity across thousands or even millions of viewers. The desire to have the following/viewing quantity being very high drives a different face users have on social sites. The normal is becoming the desire to post things that everyone will like.

Other than a couple specialized social networks, the quantity over quality game is played on all of the major services. I call it a ‘game’ since following more than a person can possibly view posts from is a way to get more followers in return. Some do it for their marketing ideas, others think of the followers as ‘friends’. Everyone would love to have friends everywhere around the world, but can any of those friends actually quote anything you said?

Many people feel that anything over a couple hundred of Social friends are too many to follow. A couple exceptions to this is following a lot of people that only post once a week… not very social are they? Then, there are folks like my niece that has over 500 friends, because she follows all the folks in her High School graduating class. You have to believe she chooses which posts she pays attention to, changing from day to day depending on what the happening event of the day is.

Enter, my ‘friend’. He has traveled the many places I have which he took pictures of and shared on Instagram. He commented on my pictures and responds when I comment on his. He even has a Laberdoodle with the same name as our Bichon. His name? No clue. As quickly as the friendship started, it ended. He decided he didn’t like the crowds that followed that where following so many other people. The comments that included a request to follow them. I don’t share the path he took or removing his images and account. Maybe he will return and look me up, would like to have my friend back, whoever he may be. Guess our families and dogs may never meet in person… why should I expect differently, it’s a virtual social world.

When it comes to marketing, there are two areas I always push. Think at least three months in the future and be where you shouldn’t me. There will always be marketing of you and your business that you need to do just-in-time, like keeping daily tweets going out. I’m talking more about holiday and seasonal promotions. Almost no print media think beyond the next month unless your buying a year long campaign so they wont come to you until the month before. That little amount of notice wont give you time to ramp up to get a full impact of your dollars spent. A plan is a good thing. Get a calendar, look ahead, then count backward for when things need to happen so everything is in place on the selected promotion day.

Do this even before you open your doors for the first time. Get involved with what is going on around your area, get the word out that your coming. Show up at events and talk with people. Get them connecting you to the business your opening early on. When you open, hopefully you will be too busy to start making friends in the area so get ahead of it.

Shifting from brick locations to online product sales -

When Apple launched the iTunes App Store, predictably, the developers we were working with for Newton and Palm software thought there was no longer a need for marketing.

Developers could just put their app up in the store and people will buy the offerings. When asked, no one could explain how a possible client would find them beyond luck. There are developers gaming the system to get listed better for more eyes, but that is short lived for a quick income rise and fall.

Again, plan ahead. Start pounding the social world prior to your app hitting the store. People love to read about the behind the scenes efforts, they become connected to the people and project. This is very important for ratings too, people have a tendency to do more positive ratings if they feel they have a relationship with the developers and where ‘involved’ in the success of the app. Negatives are more likely to go directly to the developer rather than get posted on the iTunes store. Referrals and mentions will get the app to rise above the competitors.

I’m not saying that a modern software title needs to have a magazine page ad. What an app does need is something people can relate to so they build a need in their own heads. We have seen blog mentions do good things, particularly if it is more than a list of features taken right off of the iTunes store page. This takes having a personality when contacting blogs rather than a mass press release. An app MUST have a Web site/page. It needs a FAQ at a minimum, a online ‘manual’ with images is even better.

Lately, we have been seeing nice results with video. If you going to do a video though, please outline what your going to say and record it a dozen times to get it right. Be a person, have a personality and enjoy doing the video, people will feel connected. Real life usage examples helps people visualize the app in their lives.

In my years of racing, the team always reached out to the locals to find what they knew about the best way around the track. Then, knowing what everyone else was doing, we would take inches off every corner during practice to find bits of a second. It’s the same with selling your products or services.

In both worlds of a physical location or an online product; plan ahead, have a personality and be where you ‘shouldn’t be’.

We have a few issues these days with conference room meetings.

Everyone shows up with their notebooks so they can multi task

Everyone has meetings right before/after which means they are generally late showing up and would rather do the meeting as a dial in from their office.

Speakers are trying to keep meetings fluid and gather ideas brought up

Depending on the office and people’s responsibility, there will be an occasional person in a meeting that is working across projects. Expect them to have an eye on their notebook. Others need to stop thinking about their social media posts and start getting engaged!

Admittedly, there are meetings that have to happen as dial ins for people in other city, states and countries. These guidelines apply for them too, but it will be harder for them to stick to the rules since they don’t have peer pressure in the room.

I have seen people’s ideas of allowance coins or points of importance for being able to call meetings. I have also seen where upper management wants extensive minute-by-minute meeting plans to make sure the meeting was well thought out. I do not agree with wrapping meetings in a blanket of negativity or limits. I do agree that meetings need to be thought through and encouraged. A well run meeting produces more results than a 50 email thread. A meeting needs to be a presentation that requires others to understand or give an opinion.

My ‘meetings’ thoughts here are ideas pulled from a couple different groups I have observed, into a single possible solution.

What is important is getting to the point, on time, and having everyone involved. The person who is calling the meeting should know where they want to get to by the end. Presentations are easier to set a starting/ending while discussions are more open ended to what makes it a success. Discussions need a clear statement up front why people are being asked for their time.

PowerPoints for the discussion should only be sent out in advance if it is expected that people will have to prepare in advance. History shows us that sending presentation materials in advance of a meeting leads to attendees printing or a desire to follow along on their own devices, usually jumping ahead and disrupting the flow.

Meetings need to have good notes taken for everyone’s later reference. It should not be expected that the speaker will keep the meeting moving along if they have to take notes. Attendees should not be expected to take notes, they should feel comfortable they will have a copy of what was discussed right after the meeting. There may be some attendees that insist they be able to electronically annotate their own copy of the documents. The meeting notes can be tweaked over a few meetings to make those attendees more comfortable with the after-meeting deliverable so they won’t have to take their own notes ongoing. As well, some note takers will self correct as they find they are not as engaged in the discussion as the rest of their peers in the room.

Hard to do if people are involved in multiple projects, but where possible, have open time before/after meetings so attendees have time to mentally prep going in and out of meetings. As well, it is easier to arrive in meetings on time if everyone isn’t rushed from room to room. This can cut down on the personal chatter at the beginning of the meetings since they got that out of the way on the trip to the meeting room.

Many people are reading this saying “Yea, don’t we wish”. Until you make an attempt, it will never become a reality. Someone has to step up, why not it be you?! As your meetings become the ones that get things accomplished, others will follow.

I have mentioned a speech many years ago the way we will interface with computers in the future. It appears that that “future” is just around the corner.

A few observations first. When working from home, how many times do you find that you step away from your desk and work in the kitchen standing up? Maybe not the kitchen, I’m really talking about the action of working standing up many offices are starting to offer their employees the ability to raise their desks to work standing. More on this later.

Apple pulled a patent a short while after the introduction of the Touch. It involved on screen actions, like shortcuts, that would replace mechanical buttons. Many have attempted this with a “mouse” arrow like screen icon to mimic the mouse interaction, this is a fail. The OS needs to step beyond how we interact with our computers now.

This week, the “Lion” OS, newest version of OSX, was released from Apple. It presents a different interaction with the computer where there is no scroll bars and actions are representative of the physical world. You do not scroll down a page, instead you move the page up to view what is off the screen below. If you have an iPad, you are used to most of the actions. Except, they took it one step further, finger action shortcuts. If you want to get to a ‘launcher’ of software on your computer, place three fingers and your thumb on the trackpad, open slightly then pinch like your picking something up. With this action on the desktop computer, you have removed the need to use keyboard shortcuts or click on a applications folder. Like anything new, there are negatives for some people, they don’t want to take their hands off the keyboard to do multi finger trackpad actions.

Let’s take a big jump here, but not a leap. What do you need your keyboard for? Typing long documents of course. Why do you need long documents? If you believe the many books and what appears to be Apple direction with their Apple brand software, you can tell a story with little text and a few images. As a challenge to myself, watch here in the near future for a representation of this post with fewer words…

If you were only needing to do a few descriptive words amongst images on a page, do you still need a full hardware keyboard? You could tap out a few words with a on-screen keyboard. You can do flow charts, spreadsheets, short documents and presentations with just the software keyboard. Long documents, legal come to mind, will still need a physical keyboard otherwise too much time is spent fixing mis-typing. With on-screen gestures supported on a tablet, navigation is possible without a mouse too.

So, the office of tomorrow, iPads on sturdy stands. A tall stool is available, and a few keyboards can be checked out for special circumstances. No more cube or flat desks for papers. To make this work, you will need to be using the currently available cloud storage and across device document sharing. The full multi finger navigation isn’t on the iPad with iOS4, but could show up late this year with iOS5.

This is actually being typed on an iPad on a plane. As it approaches the maximum length you would want to produce with this set up, I will part out how the world will work with conference room meetings using this iPad on a stand approach in another post. Yes, people can write more/longer documents on an iPad, I’m only representing that for an full office with this set up you would want to think through how best to keep documents shorter for maximum human creativity and output.

Update: five minutes after posting, I was hit with a few questions. While Minority Report like big screen full arm gestures will happen, the interface isn’t there yet. If doing it will mean a pointer on the screen like a mouse, that is not success. And, voice recognition is getting pretty good these days, but your not going to have 10 people working in an office all talking out loud.

What happens if an impossible idea isn’t thought worth working on, but someone else does? If they are successful, do you have any rights to the finished product? Is there any way knowing what happened to have had two people think of a similar idea?

When the commercials and associated hype came out about The Social Network, I had no interest in seeing it. Since I have had a couple employees attempt to walk with my company intellectual property to release on their own, I didn’t need to see a movie about the same. All the news was talking about how the lead in the movie got away with developing someone else’s idea and is making billions.

By chance, the movie came on and I didn’t reach for the remote fast enough to not get drawn into it. By the end, I was thinking less about people having original ideas and more about people tuning other’s ideas. If a company passes on a idea, is it OK for someone that works for the company to run with the idea? Big Corp American says no, you where being paid at the time of the idea so they own it. But, how can one be certain that the idea came to you and the company at near the same time due to a global event? Two different people seeing the same need might have different thoughts on a solution, usually enough to make one profit and the other fail.

Outside of the cases where a company says ‘no’, is an employee running with an idea on their own the fault of poor management? If a superior encouraged the idea, would the employee felt they needed to see the project through on their own? In today’s society where ideas are creating Billionaires, more people are willing to risk a company coming after them and will try to see an idea through on their own.

In the case of Mark and his Facebook, he was obviously motivated by attention and not the money. He has or at least ‘had’ a pretty good grip on what people wanted. The direction the group he was working with had an idea but it was highly limited, pointed at a single market. Should Mark have given his idea to the team he was working with, one might argue that they would not have seen his vision. Would he have come up with the idea on his own? The school (at least as represented in the movie) thinks that many people at the school can come up with the same idea since they don’t know the ‘aha’ moment that many may have shared in a class or at a campus event.

Running with an idea that a employer may think they own is highly risky. Even if they don’t do anything initially as they don’t see a profit from their legal expenses, it will always be hanging over the creations ‘head’. Of course, everyone thinks their idea will be so big that they can just pay off anyone that comes along with a few hundred million ‘jump change’. It shouldn’t be missed that the project may end up with a partner that will be tired of the creator down the road and run with the idea they passed on before it was a hit.

There may be ‘no new ideas’ under the sun left to be thought of, but an impossible idea passed on yesterday can be a reality tomorrow… in the right hands.

Recently there has been a lot of press around large companies not getting out of social network marketing as they expected. Comparing the ROI to other media options for marketing, there is a feeling that they aren’t getting their money’s return. A coupon or special offer is pushed out and they aren’t showing up in their stores.

There are a few group buying or coupon sharing services that are hitting it big. These are working because people using the services are folks that already have their heads around using the services. What happens when a person not in that spot gets a coupon in an email for 10% off? They don’t know what to do with it… do they print the email? Do they search the email for a key phrase to use in the store? Do they have to click through to a site where they have to give personal information? If there is a coupon code to use, will they face possible embarrassment in the store when they ask for a discount they get wrong or there are particulars… again, should they print the email?

Not a single item above creates a positive experience for a possible customer. It doesn’t work. It isn’t the fault of the system, it’s time to rethink the whole marketing scheme. This doesn’t mean companies should jump on board with the many folks marketing online how they can sell, their job is to sell a system. There isn’t a ‘system’ that works for everyone. Think about who uses the service being used, now about the current customers. Even though the current customers may be moving to using the social service, their frame of mind is in that social frame of mind… not a newspaper coupon clipping.

Along with rethinking marketing, what is a real ROI? Is money being best spent with big promotions instead of ongoing mentions across the social landscape? Some big names have large followings which can be paid to mention a product. That might build hits but doesn’t mean purchases unless the person was already in a position to buy.

There needs to be a reason for a mention in Social Networking circles. Forget the coupons unless it’s a “50% off everything”. Even ‘click here’ to go to our site for a discount will have very low counts of people willing to go since they know they are being ID’d to the site and followed around… causing them to get more junk mail.

A system that worked in the 80′s physical store days is now proving to be valuable in a electronic social world is relationships. Marketing across other company’s promotions. Your email list is very valuable, particular to other companies. Join forces to do mailings of your products, mentioning other company’s tie to yours. You have a golf club company, you can’t say ‘buy these chocolates too’. But, you have a card printing service, you can mention that including chocolates with their customer card to their co-workers is always a hit. There is no discount involved. The win is that the Chocolate company got a reach they didn’t have before… the Greeting Card company doesn’t give up their client email list but they have people reading since there is additional information from a marketing pitch from them.

Customer lists are literally a reason companies are being purchased these days. Take good care of your lists, organize them with keywords to what the person purchased, how they purchased, if they came in via marketing and if they continue to order.

For movies that I am a Producer for, I never push the movie it’s self. Posts across my circle of influence are about who has mentioned they are going to be at a sneak showing, what is going on in the line, what is going on after the movie showing, tie ins to items within the movie. These all build interest as people can relate to their own lives. There is no mention of coupons or hype about what the movie is about.

This will be very hard for most marketing groups to jump on board with since they are generally asked to show ROI on everything they do. New measurements are required to prove what worked. Rather than throwing away anything that is thought as a ‘didn’t work’ do a tweak to it instead. Drive down the overhead of pushing information out via social networks doesn’t mean firing the marketing group but it does mean that marketing have to be very dynamic rather than six months of presentations to get anything kicked off. Don’t be insulting with social network marketing, but don’t be afraid to try new ideas!