Tuned In: Uncover the extraordinary opportunities that lead to business breakthroughs.

Is your website tuned in?

Many thanks to Douglas Karr of the Marketing Technology Blog for creating the Tuned In Calculator.  Doug took the concept of getting tuned in right into action by measuring how tuned in his website was. His calculator looks at the number of times you reference 'you and your products' vs. 'your customers and their problems' and comes up with a simple 1 to 10 scale to rate how tuned in you are.  Doug scored a 9 out of 10 which is 'awesome' (I can attest to this as I've been a fan and follower of his blog). We rated our three sites and only 1 of them came up this high so we've got some work to do. Doug also warns us to beware of the Narcissists (those with a score of 0).  They're the guys at your party who always seem to respond with ... "that's very interesting; now let me tell you about me."

We think this kind of measurement is a perfect place to start for your initial assessment of where you (or your business) are currently in terms of being tuned in. In our work, we measure lots of underlying factors like how good a company is at market sensing, how well they know their buyers and their own distinctive competence, what kind of solution experiences they develop and monitor and what kind of market positioning tactics they use. Taken together, these form a foundation for how likely it is that your business will create a resonator. 

But, this is all inside the company and largely invisible to the marketplace. The two things that are visible are your product and the central communication you have with the outside world ... your website.  By starting here as Doug has, you'll get a very up-front view of what kind of image you are projecting, how authentic it is and how likely it is to be received by buyers as thought leading and valuable.  Check it out and see how you rate. We'll have more coming in our world at www.gettunedin.com down the road.

Why do CEO's hate marketing?

If there was a univeral truth in the research we did with business leaders it was their extreme distaste and frustration with marketing.

It seemed that the initial first reaction to the question about 'what role marketing played in the success or failure of their business' was almost always a shake of the head, a look up to the sky and then some statement of how the organization was pouring money down a rathole ... usually followed by a specific example of something that happened recently that had a horrible result.

The thing that surprised us was that no other part of the organization was really hit as hard with the disdain that leaders felt towards marketing. So, we of course wondered why and investigated a bit deeper down the food chain, interviewing teams of marketers and others that aligned with the organization. What we found was a full litany of challenges:

• Marketing teams working tactically to 'dream up' campaigns to support sales of lagging products.
• Confusion of when to apply the new rules vs. the old rules.
• Pockets of teams embracing all aspects of social media and viral marketing working in isolation from the rest of the organization. 
• Teams focused on brand and awareness programs separated from the rest of the business. 
• Product marketers working on persona profiles for new groups of buyers that were different than who they were calling on today. 
• Web marketing teams working tactically to update sites that noone visited and not spending any time on identifying which keyword searches their buyers valued. 
• Customer and solution marketing teams coming up with new presentations and programs that sold thought leading concepts that only they understood and the company couldn't really support with either a product or sales execution. 

In short, a mess. Sometimes all of these problems existed in the same business. And when they did, or even a healthy percentage of them existed, the company's marketing was full of one-off communications with their buyers that served only to confuse the marketplace and the business at the same time.  Time consuming, expensive and ultimately fruitless in execution. 

The funny thing was that in a majority of the cases, the company culture was really the culprit. Too many marketing organizations were chartered with the mission of either serving sales, building a breakthrough brand or pushing product into the marketplace (and sometimes doing it with these new rules techniques that someone heard about at a conference). The roadmap to failure was baked in from the start!

There's an old statement from David Packard that's often repeated that 'marketing is too important to leave it to just the marketing department'.  People laugh at because it seems to put the rest of us on a higher pedestal to ensure that the role of marketing is managed by the experts in the business, not marketing. Well, then step up and smell the roses on your marketing problem because the place to start more often than not is with 'how tuned in is your business'. 

• Are you building products that you could, not should?
• Do your buyers like them and talk about them?
• Do people know why they should do business with you vs. your competitors?
• Are you solving a problem that people care about deeply?
• Is your leadership team active in thought leading communities that are relevant strategically?

Marketing teams have their faults to be sure. Trying to be too clever and hit home runs all the time vs. listening closely to their markets is probably at the top of our list. But, when companies, departments, leadership teams or even CEO's start down the path of blame on their marketing departments, we now feel compelled to stop the conversation and ask:

We'll get to that but let me ask you a deeper question ... how tuned in is your business?   

Are you a sales guy?

I've noticed that over my twenty years in the business world, titles for sales guys have become ever more grand and difficult to understand.

My first business card said "Sales Representative" and my friends in sales at other companies had the same thing or something similarly descriptive on their business card.

Now I see things like "Business Development Director" or "Client Care Specialist" or even "Marketing Manager" on salespeople’s business cards. Many of these titles seem a bit sleazy – a bait and switch sort of thing to hide the fact that the person is in sales. If your company is tuned in, why do you need to hide the fact that you're in sales?

Several weeks ago I keynoted the Home Theater Specialists of America conference in Rancho Mirage, CA. At the event, I met several people from SpeakerCraft including Jeremy Burkhardt, the company president.  Jeremy and his company are tuned in and they are honest.

Jeremy's bio on the company site says, among other things "Perfect Day-wake up at the beach with my son, surf then wake board then sky dive then snow board then jump in the plane fly to mile marker zero at the Grand Canyon and white water raft to camp where we would eat and sleep under the stars." Honest man, that Jeremy. At the conference, he rode a skateboard from building to building at The Westin Mission Hills.

I was amazed when I received Steve Hayes’ business card at the conference. He works at SpeakerCraft too. His title? "Sales Guy."

Please… Eliminate gobbledygook!

Oh jeez, not another flexible, scalable, mission-critical, industry-standard, cutting-edge product from a market-leading, well positioned company! Ugh. I think I'm gonna puke!

Just like with a teenager's use of catch phrases, I notice the same words cropping up again and again - so much so that the gobbledygook grates against my nerves and many other people's, too. Well, duh. Like, companies just totally don’t communicate very well, you know?

Most of the thousands of Web sites I've analyzed over the years and the hundred or so news releases I receive each week are laden with these meaningless gobbledygook phrases.

To create effective marketing, Web content that people want to share, you must eliminate gobbledygook.

Whenever you set out to create something to reach people, you should be developing content specifically for one or more of the buyers that you want to reach.  You should avoid jargon-laden phrases that are over-used in your industry. In the technology business, words like "mission-critical," "industry-standard," and "cutting-edge" are what I call gobbledygook. And the worst gobbledygook offenders seem to be business-to-business technology companies.

For some reason, marketing people at technology companies have a particularly tough time explaining how products solve customer problems. Because these marketers don’t understand how their products solve customer problems, or are too lazy to write for buyers, they cover by explaining myriad nuances of how the product works and pepper this blather with industry jargon that sounds vaguely impressive.

If you want to be successful online, eliminate the gobbledygook and speak like a real person. Use the words and phrases that your buyer personas use.

If you want to learn more, consider reading my (free) Gobbledygook Manifesto published by ChangeThis.

Case studies are not about your ego

Many companies use case studies as a way to show the market how their products and services work.  And the case studies fail big time.

Why?

Because talking about you is exactly the wrong approach because nobody really cares about you or your products. Unfortunately, the vast majority of case studies I see on the web are simply ego stroking by the company using a traditional advertising approach of inserting product messages into a customer example. 
What people care about is solving their problems. If your product or service helps people to solve a problem, then a case example can be great marketing tool.

Here's an example of a video case study by Neighborhood America. The video called Adidas Goes Mobile At NBA All-Star Week 2007 highlights their client and barely talks about the Neighborhood America at all.  And also notice how video is a great way to tell this particular story.

Watch the video

Consider how different this approach to a creating a case study compared to most of examples that are either a) dreadfully boring or b) prattle on about the product or c) are egotistical or d) all of the above.

Tuned in to what bloggers are saying

A hallmark of being tuned in is to know what bloggers are saying about you, your company, and its products and services.

If you haven't already done so, you should set up a Google alert for your company name, product and service names, CEO and other important people’s names, and perhaps your category of product.

Any time there is a mention, you will know in near real time via an email alert.

It is always a good idea to leave an appropriate comment on the blog. This shows the blogger that you care and that you're watching. Don't try to sell your products and services, but instead perhaps thank the blogger or add to the discussions that the blogger has started. You can also clarify anything that the blogger has said if appropriate.

I get between five or ten alerts a day that are either triggered by my name (I use my middle name so that I don't get false hits from other David Scotts) or the title of one of my books.  I always look at the blog posts and usually leave a comment like I've done this morning on Kerri's blog and Michael's blog.

This only takes an hour or so a week, but the effort pays off significantly.

Search Engine Marketing: focus on buyers, not keywords

Whenever I begin a speech, I pose four questions to the audience and ask them to raise their hands if the answer to a question is "yes." How would you answer?

In your personal or professional life in the past two months, when trying to fix a problem or to research or buy a product, have you
(1) responded to a direct mail advertisement?
(2) consulted magazines, newspapers, TV, or radio?
(3) used Google or another search engine?
(4) electronically (email, Skype, Facebook, etc) contacted a friend, colleague, or family member who responded with a Web URL that you then visited?

Over the course of a year, in front of over ten thousand people from many dozens of groups including college students, marketing professionals, and executives at Fortune 500 companies, the answers were surprisingly consistent. Between 5 and 20 percent of people answer each of the first two questions affirmatively. These answers mean that the ways most companies have historically reached people—advertising, direct mail, and pleas to the mainstream media for coverage—are only effective in reaching a small portion of potential customers. However, between 80 and 100 percent of people raise their hands to indicate that they have used a search engine to find a solution to a problem or to research a product or that they have checked out a Web site suggested by a friend, colleague, or family member. Clearly, creating effective Web sites that are indexed by search engines is critical for any business.

Unlike non-targeted, in-your-face, interruption-based advertising, search engine results are content that people actually want to see. How cool is that? Rather than forcing you to convince people to pay attention to your products and services by dreaming up messages and ad campaigns, search engines deliver interested buyers right to your company’s virtual doorstep. This is a marketer's dream-come-true.

However, most marketers don't know how to harness this exciting form of marketing. Their most common mistake is to spend way too much time worrying about the keywords and phrases they want to optimize for and not enough time creating great content on their site–content that search engines will reward with lots of traffic and that visitors will find useful.

And nearly all organizations are terrible at building an effective landing page, the place people end up when they click on a search hit. Too often, buyers arrive at a site only to wonder what they're supposed to do now. It's like the outdoor part of a Hollywood movie set. Sure it's a beautiful facade, but if you actually went through the front door, you'd find nothing there.

OK, so that’s the bad news. The good news is that these common problems are easily solved… If you're Tuned In.

Smart companies create web content that actually meets the needs of your potential customers (instead of search engines). The information that people see when they link to your site is meant to be the beginning of a relationship. Here's the rule: When you write, start with your buyers in mind, not with search engines.

The Authenticity Election

This Tuesday is Super Tuesday in the US Presidential primary races. For anyone in our business almost regardless of your candidate preferences, you can't help but watch the strategies that each campaign takes with some professional interest. This year has been particularly enlightening. 

As we've listened to the pundits over the past couple of months, much of their analysis has pointed to the surprise that this election has become more and more about 'authenticity'. Both of the early front runners in 2007 that had all the advantages of name recognition and financial backing have seen their leads evaporate. One, Rudy Guiliani is already out of the race. Another, John McCain crashed and resurfaced. An unknown senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, has become a serious challenger to the nomination nearly everyone assumed Hillary Clinton owned. 

We see all of these shifts in relation to how tuned in the candidates and their campaigns are.

What has our eye most is the authenticity trend. When we got down to defining the sixth and final step of our Tuned In process, we quite naturally got into a good deal of debate over the right model for marketing an idea, a product or service. What we eventually settled on was 'Establishing Authentic Connections' as it best described the ability to create and communicate leading thoughts that motivate specific buyers to act becasue they are believable.  

The candidates who are moving are establishing authentic connections. We watch with an eye towards how well they speak to real problems, promote their thought leadership, speak directly and leverage the New Rules of Marketing. In this election, each of those techniques is having an impact. Tuned In candidates and campaigns are taking share every day. It hasn't been money that's changed the game, it's the connections through new mediums to new audiences. 

It will be interesting to watch how this plays out on Tuesday and beyond but if current trends continue, we may be watching a major landscape shift in how national elections are won.

Papa John's connects to college crowd

I'm amazed at how my son and daughter communicate with their friends. Between Facebook and texting it's almost as if they have found a way to interact without ever having to make a direct connection. It's definately a new language and for better or worse, a new style of building relationships. 

When I saw last week that Papa John's had introduced a new service to take pizza orders by text, I knew exactly why and marveled at how tuned in they were. There are few audiences for pizza's that are better at any time of the day than college students. Certainly they've never had trouble figuring out how to get one in the past. But, by being able to text for one guess what happens? 

Papa John's has built an authentic connection to a core buyer persona.

People love it when companies act in ways that show they 'understand me'. And today that means communicating through mediums and styles that your target buyers use. By adding a simple distribution option like texting, Papa John's will no doubt resonate more with the college crowd. Imagine the scenarios that will get created.  "Hey, anybody want a pizza?  Watch this!"  The first in class to find this out will proudly whip out their cool new iPhone and text an order in. Congratulations all around when it shows up in 30 minutes. Most importantly, word of mouth is started and Papa John's has an in. We found in our research that a real key to a tuned in company was that they had a high percentage of their business coming through referrals (some as high as 80%). What a great way to start that process. Building authentic connections like this is one of the most powerful things you can do to grow your business faster.   

I wonder when a beer distributor will catch on to this?    

Authenticity vs. "messages"

For decades, tuned out companies have focused on two ways of getting noticed: buy your way in with expensive advertising or beg your way in by courting the media.

These methods rely on one-way interruption with "messages" that consumers increasingly ignore.

How about you? How many 30-second TV commercials spur you to action? Are you one of those people who can't wait to get home and tear through all the wonderful offers in your postbox?

The tuned in company is different. When you understand your buyers and their problems, you communicate to people in an authentic way using the precise language that they use and in the media that they consume. Your buyers want to hear from you.

Have you recently used Google or another search engine to research a product or find an answer to a problem? Most people do.

Your job as a tuned in marketer is to get in front of the people who are searching, right now, for the products and services that you sell.

Your job is not to dream up clever ways to interrupt people.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center - a tuned in hospital

Paul Levy is President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School) and he writes the popular Running a Hospital blog. Recognizing that hospitals have many constituents (patients and their families, doctors and staff, and the communities they serve), Levy uses his blog as an important communications and management tool. Among many other things, Levy posts about clinical data that the hospital sees in virtually real time—things like quality and safety. Running a Hospital has about 10,000 visitors per week.

"As an academic medical center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a high cost part of the medical system," Levy says. "The public has the right to know what they are getting for their money. So what better way to make a case that we're adding value to our public, and to the government agencies that support and regulate us? Why not show what we’re doing as a public institution through the blog? This is an exceptionally useful tool as part of the public debate and to hold our own people accountable."

Levy says the blog makes it easier for doctors and employees at the hospital to work together. For example he posted information gathered at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center about Ventilator Associate Pneumonia that helped to save more than 90 lives. "People in hospitals are caring and they want to eradicate disease. The blog creates better work because we are not afraid to say what we're doing and how we’re helping. We put ourselves under the microscope."

How Stardoll became bigger than Barbie on the Web in just three short years

Barbie, the bestselling fashion doll in the world, was launched in 1959. Mattel, the doll's maker, says that a billion Barbies have been sold and three new Barbies are sold every single second. Barbie has always kept up with the times, her outfits, hobbies, and professions reflecting the society that she lives in and the interests of the elementary and middle school girls who play with her. In recent years, Barbie has even gone digital with a site "to engage, enchant, and empower girls. We inspire girls to be creative and explore their individual interests through a variety of exciting activities, from online art to interactive games." As of October 2007, the Barbie Web site is ranked as number 1,100 in the world based on traffic.

So how is it that Stardoll, a Web-based version of dress-up dolls launched only three years earlier, could have 6 million unique visitors per month and be ranked as the number 386 in the world based on traffic and have more than double the daily pageviews of Barbie.com? How could Stardoll become so much more popular than Barbie on the Web?

Simple, Stardoll is tuned in to "tweens" (girls from 8 to 12 years old). Stardoll members access the site in their choice of 16 languages (including English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Chinese), set up a profile to house their virtual doll and clothing collection and become online friends with others. The people behind the scenes at Stardoll understand their market and the breakthrough experience they created resonates with girls all over the world. Girls love that they can dress up virtual stars such as Ashley Tisdale, Stacy Ferguson, Hilary Duff, the Olsen twins, Rihanna, and Hayden Panettiere. Girls eagerly participate in live chat with idols like Avril Lavigne. And members maintain their very own blogs and photo galleries so they can share with their friends.

Editorial note: Dressing up the celebrity dolls is weirdly addictive. I dare you to try dressing Ashley Olsen.

Stardoll is tuned in mishmash of what girls love, particularly fashion. Every celebrity doll has a wardrobe full of unique clothes and outfits and new ones are released each week. The fashion industry has taken note, with Donna Karan's DKNY label and Sephora, both owned by French luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, offering virtual clothing and makeup to Stardoll members in specially designated online stores that are part of the Stardoll site. Stardoll originally started out as the hobby of the Scandinavian-born "Liisa"and is now backed by venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures.

Impact versus value

Let’s be realistic. Not all potential product ideas are going to come from the outside. As much as we want to be Tuned In, there are times when an idea comes from our founder, the CEO, product development, a customer, or even a competitor. We feel an insurmountable pressure (or mandate) to proceed with the idea against all common sense telling us otherwise.

The Tuned In solution to this is called an acid test. When we are being pressured to build a product from the inside-out, we should first put the idea to a market test and let the market decide. Acid testing doesn’t take long and need not be expensive.

First you need a prototype that you can show. It doesn’t need to be a complete product or service. You could simply prepare a presentation, much like a salesperson would give, and show what you plan to offer. Call the prospective user and ask for 30 minutes and stick to your schedule. If you can’t define your product and solicit input in 30 minutes, you aren’t ready to test it. Reassure your contact that you are not selling anything because you haven't even started to build this product.

When you present the product or service, stick to the facts. Don’t tell them the benefits, just show them what it does and ask them what problems does it solve and what impact would it have on them, their family, or their company.

I like to use the term “impact to the customer” instead of the word “value". Value is one of those terms that means different things to different people, much like “quality” or “marketing.” Asking for the impact clearly asks “How is life going to get better for you by owning or using this product?”

There are lots of things that I own that have “value”, but there is a distinct subset of those items that truly had a positive impact on me, my job, my company or my relationships. Those are the tuned in products that resonate for me. Those are the ones that I would pay dearly to acquire, and yet, some of them were free of charge. It is indicative of marketing people who don’t understand the “impact to me, their customer.”

Tuned In: Grateful Dead bootleg recording

Unlike virtually all bands of the era, the Grateful Dead, a popular jam band that toured for thirty years starting in the 1960s, allowed concertgoers to record their live shows. The band even sold "taper section" tickets for where the acoustics were best.

Instead of cracking down like most bands, tapers at Dead shows were free to make copies of the live recordings to give away and swap with others (but were not allowed to sell their tapes).

As a result, the music of the Grateful Dead was shared far and wide, leading to more and more fans who wanted to see the live shows, creating one of the most profitable touring acts in rock history.

Top two reasons why new products and services fail

Why do most new products fail?

1. Organizations base new products on what their current customers request rather than an understanding of the unresolved problems that people will pay money to solve.

2. Organizations try to create a need in the market through expensive advertising or relying on an army of salespeople instead of building products that the market wants to buy. 

The most successful organizations tune in to their markets.

In this blog and in our upcoming book, we’ll introduce you to dozens of tuned in organizations that develop products and services that resonate with buyers and help them to achieve success.

People who run tuned in companies largely ignore the competition. Instead they focus their energies on the problems that buyers are willing to spend money to solve. By first understanding market problems, then building the products people want to buy, and communicating to buyers that we solve their problems, everything else falls into place.

Sounds easy.

Actually, it is...

…if you’re tuned in.

Tuned In communications: The U.S. Navy Blue Angels

Last year, I went to the Nantucket Air Show, featuring the U.S. Navy Blue Angels flight demonstration team. The Blue Angels (and the Air Force Thunderbirds) are truly impressive, not only as an awesome display of precision flying, but also as a terrific marketing tool.

Young people see the six Boeing F/A-18 Hornets zooming in tight formation and many say: "I want to do that too." The Navy is tuned in to what gets people interested in possibly joining.

We've always said that marketing is much better when the approach is "show, don't tell." In this example, don't tell me that it is cool to be in the military, show me.

A Blue Angels flight demonstration exhibits choreographed refinements of skills possessed by all naval aviators. It includes the graceful aerobatic maneuvers of the four-plane Diamond Formation, in concert with the fast-paced, high-performance maneuvers of its two Solo Pilots. The Blue Angels are scheduled flew nearly 70 air shows at 35 locations in the United States during the 2006 season, bringing out more than 17 million spectators.

At the Nantucket show that I attended, recruiters were at the event to answer questions and encourage people to join the Navy.

Of course, we all don't have hundreds of millions of dollars of air power to demonstrate our capabilities. But every organization has something that can be demonstrated, given away, or showcased in some way. And the best way to do this is to be tuned in to what your market values most.

What about your organization? How can you tune in? How can you show people that you're the right choice to do business with? How can you encourage people to join your group, vote for your candidate, buy your product, or donate money to your cause?

CARE: Tuned In to fighting global poverty

We're absolutely convinced that being tuned in is important for every kind of organization. But for a nonprofit charity, being tuned in takes on particular importance. Unlike a company that sells a product in exchange for money, the charitable contribution to a nonprofit is an intangible transaction. This subtle difference requires a need for the nonprofit to completely understand what problems it is solving for the buyer and this process takes significant effort to get right.

The buyer (in our definition, the person who is donating money) receives nothing tangible in exchange for money. For many buyers of charity services (people who donate money) motivations to donate (we call them market problems) may be very personal, requiring the marketer at the nonprofit to dig deep to understand what problems the buyer is solving through the charity donation. The tuned in process is tough because the true benefits to the buyer may be much more difficult to articulate.

Consider CARE, a leading humanitarian organization fighting global poverty. Hundreds of thousands of individuals and dozens of U.S. corporations, foundations and other organizations support CARE USA's program expenses, which totaled more than $589 million in 2006. Poor women around the world are at the heart of CARE's community-based efforts to improve basic education, prevent the spread of HIV, increase access to clean water and sanitation, expand economic opportunity and protect natural resources. CARE also delivers emergency aid to survivors of war and natural disasters, and helps people rebuild their lives.

CARE attracts donors who are astute about international affairs. Their buyers are a group of highly educated people and they want to make a difference in the lives of people less fortunate than themselves. Marketers at CARE understand that individual donors have interests in certain areas that CARE serves, such as geographical regions of the world (such as Africa) or particular issues (providing help in the case of natural disasters perhaps).

Because CARE is tuned in to buyer problems (essentially the motivations of people to donate money), the company's Web site focuses on education of site visitors into the causes of global poverty. The site surfaces information based on people’s interests in learning about issues, geographies, volunteer opportunities, legislative action, and campaigns. People can subscribe to content that interests them.

Because CARE knows that their buyers are passionate about helping and many want to spread the word, the organization offers a virtual volunteer program with CARE Corps Online. People create their own personal space on the Web to let others know about CARE's lifesaving work and in the process generate interest and support for CARE from friends, family and others in their virtual network.

By being tuned in to their market, the organization garners tremendous financial support, providing the resources to further the CARE mission is to change the world by eliminating global poverty.