Seth Godin Is Writing About You

Best selling author, top blogger, “America’s Greatest Marketer,” and fellow smokin’ hot piece of brain candy (sorry, couldn’t resist) Seth Godin is writing about you.

This paragraph from his recent post “Death of the Personal Blog?” caught my attention:

There’s a difference between a blog about YOU (I call this a cat blog) and a blog about the reader. Guy Kawasaki’s blog, and my blog for that matter, are not about us, about what we ate yesterday or how great we are. They are about you, the reader.

It’s really pretty simple. If you want:

• people to read your blog;
• people to follow you on Twitter;
• prospects to come to your website;
• sales -

you have to make it About You – the reader, the follower, the prospect, the customer.

3 Overlooked Lessons From Obama’s Online Marketing Success

There’s a huge buzz in internet marketing circles and the popular press these days about the role President-elect Barack Obama’s online efforts played in him wining the election.

And rightly so. From Pay Per Click ads to email marketing to social networking, the Obama campaign put together an internet marketing juggernaut the likes of which has never been seen in politics. In fact, it’s not a stretch to say the likes of their effort has never been seen on the internet – period.

However, the coverage in the media and blogosphere focuses on the methods – Facebook, Twitter, email marketing, Google AdWords, website design, etc. – while overlooking what made this all so effective.

Here are the three main things I think have been overlooked and what you can learn from them. . .

1. Strong Message and Content First

Tens of millions of Americans felt a strong emotional and psychological connection to Barack Obama and his message. I’ll leave it for the political commentators to cover the details of the reasons why this is so – I’m not trying to make a political statement here, I’m just stating the facts.

But it was this strong connection and how it moved people that was at the heart of the success of the campaign – both online and off. Armed with a powerful message, it was then up to the campaign’s marketing team to develop content that reflected that message and then figure out the most effective ways to deliver that content online.

LESSON: Online, content is king. You can emulate everything that Obama’s campaign did online and still fall flat on your face if you don’t provide quality content that strongly resonates with your target market.

Your job as a marketer is to find out what your market wants and desires, then develop quality content that satisfies those wants and desires.

This comes FIRST.

Figuring out how to use Facebook, Twitter, blogs, email, etc. to effectively reinforce and deliver that message comes later.

2. He Made it About You

On a number of occasions throughout the campaign, Obama made a point of saying that the campaign is not about him, it’s about you – the people of the United States. (Of course this ‘about you’ talk resonated with me!)

And Obama’s social networking strategy reinforced this message. The campaign built a social networking infrastructure that made people feel more involved and connected to the candidate. They felt like they were being listened to and what they said and did mattered.

LESSON: It’s arguably the biggest mistake marketers make – talking about themselves.

No one cares. They want to know how you, your products and your services are going to make their lives better. How you can help them do or become something they want to be.

The best way to do this is listen to people. Get them involved. Engage them. Make them feel important.

Social media sites – Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube – are a great way to do this. Use these tools to build a community of followers (or Tribe, as Seth Godin calls it) that believes in you and your message. Lead them. And be sure to make it about them and not yourself.

3. Go Where Your Prospects Hang Out

Obama got a lot of support from younger voters. And a lot of these younger voters hang out online on places like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. If Obama’s support came from the nursing home set this strategy would have been ineffective.

LESSON: It’s easier for you to go where your prospects hang out then to get them to come to you. Do your research. Find out where they are and then get there too.

The Bottom Line

I’ve seen some articles crediting Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. with delivering the election to Obama. While there’s no denying the campaign did a masterful job in utilizing these tools to help Obama to victory, there’s more to the story.

I’ve said before that the key to online marketing is offline. And it’s precisely because the Obama online marketing team understood that, they were so successful.

As evidence, I include this excerpt from Newsweek (emphasis mine):

“I don’t care about online energy and enthusiasm just for the sake of online energy and enthusiasm,” said Chris Hughes, head of New Media’s social networking. “It’s about making money, making phone calls, embedding video or having video forwarded to friends.” There was nothing starry-eyed about Hughes, who had been the Harvard roommate and later partner of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and made his first millions before he was 24. His goal was to make old techniques – like call centers and getting polling information to voters more efficient. “When computer applications really take off, they take something people have always done and just make it easier for them to do it,” he said. “And maybe bigger.”

And that’s the big overall lesson (and bonus Lesson #4) here for online marketers. Take timeless marketing fundamentals and strategies that have worked offline for years and then find the tools available online that will help you execute them faster, easier and more effectively than has ever been possible.

Doing that may not win you the presidency, but it may just help you build your own little internet empire to rule over.

Which Candidate is Talking About You?

It’s fascinating to watch.

As the presidential campaign comes down the homestretch, the candidates and their surrogates are making their pitches to the electorate. To watch the messaging and positioning of the candidates on TV, in print, and on the web from a marketing perspective is just fascinating to me.

As some of you probably know, I came up with the idea of adding an About You page to your website. It’s a page that talks about your prospects, not your company.

The most effective marketing messages are the ones that focus on the prospects and show how your product or service can improve their lives. Adding an About You page to a website forces companies to do that (on at least one page of their site) as opposed to the egotistical, company-focused marketing that seems to be the norm.

So as I was listening to Barack Obama’s acceptance speech the other week, you can imagine how this line got my attention:

“But I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring.  What the nay-sayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me.  It’s been about you.“

And while John McCain didn’t utter the exact phrase “about you”, he did say this:

“I don’t work for a party. I don’t work for a special interest. I don’t work for myself. I work for you.”

In thinking about the two speeches, I started to wonder which one focused more on the voters (ie. About You) as opposed the candidates themselves. Luckily, there’s a handy tool to help me do just that.

Internet marketing optimization firm FutureNow also understands the importance of focusing on the prospect. To help companies figure out if their web copy focuses more on the company or the prospect, they put a handy little tool on their website called the “We We Calculator.” To use the calculator, simply enter the URL of a webpage and the calculator will look for certain words on that page to determine whether the copy focuses more on customers or the company.

I decided to use this tool to evaluate the text of both John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s acceptance speeches. I copied the text of each speech onto their own page on my website to strip away any advertising, commentary, comments, etc. that could impact the results. Then I entered the URL for each page into the We We Calculator.

Here are the results:

John McCain’s Customer (ie. Voter) Focus Rate: 12.14%
Barack Obama’s Customer (ie. Voter) Focus Rate: 19.29%

MCain’s Self Focus Rate: 87.86%
Obama’s Self Focus Rate: 80.71%

According to the calculator, McCain had 51 instances of voter-focused words and 369 instances of self-focused words in an acceptance speech that had a total word count of 3912.

Obama had 65 instance of voter-focused words and 272 instances of self-focused words in his acceptance speech which totaled 4610.

By focusing on the voters about twice as much as Senator McCain as well as focusing on himself much less, Senator Obama seems to get the About You concept more than Senator McCain (at least as far as acceptance speeches are concerned).

What does all this mean?

First, it’s probably no surprise that in evaluating the speeches of politicians, both spent the vast majority of the time talking about themselves (I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing in politics, just not surprising).

Second, I’d make no assumptions about the outcome of this presidential campaign based on the voter-focused vs. self-focused language in just one speech from each candidate.

However, I would make the assumption that if you applied this calculator to the pages of your website and got results similar to either candidate’s speech, your marketing needs some help. If your copy focuses on your customers less than 20% of the time and on yourself over 80% of the time, it’s time to get some new copy!

To see how your copy scores on the We We Calculator, put it to the test here.

And one last thing, please keep any comments focused on marketing – not the virtues of the candidate you support or the lack of virtues of the candidate you don’t!

Copyblogger’s Talking About You

There was a short, yet powerful post by James Chartrand on Copyblogger last Friday titled “I Don’t Care About You.”

James writes about “Egotistical Marketing.” It’s a great term that describes a mistake many marketers make – focusing on themselves instead of others.

Bottom line: If you want people to pay attention to your marketing then tell them about their favorite subject – themselves!

After you read James’ post, check out my take on the concept and how to put it to use by creating an About You page on your website.

Do You Have LFAQs on Your Website?

I’ve already made an argument for including an “About You” page on your website. The basic idea is that while everyone has an About Us page that describes you and/or your company, customers don’t care. They care about themselves so you should have a page on your site, the About You page, that describes your ideal customer.

Another page that frequents websites is the FAQ page. Businesses use it to list the Frequently Asked Questions they get asked about their business. The problem with FAQs is that they are asked, well, frequently.

Frequent is common.
Frequent is what prospects are asking your competitors.
Frequent focuses on similarities.

What if you were to focus on LEAST Frequently Asked Questions instead?

The questions that are uncommon.
The questions that you wish your customers would ask you, but usually don’t.
The questions that focus on what sets you apart from the competition, not makes you similar.

What questions do prospects not frequently ask you that you could add to your website? How can you use these questions to uniquely position your company to set you apart from the competition? Please post your thoughts in the comments section below.

Why Entrepreneurs and Parents Need Big Bank Accounts (But Not the Kind You Think)

Think a big balance in the bank will help you run a successful business and raise a family?

There’s no doubt having a lot of money in the bank can help in both cases. But it’s not a requirement. I’d even argue that depending on your definition of success, you can be very successful in business and especially parenthood with not much money at all.

But I’m not talking about money here. There’s another type of bank account that I think is extremely important to being successful as an entrepreneur and a parent.

An Emotional Bank Account.

Let me explain.

A few years ago I attended a lecture by a prominent child psychologist at a local high school. During the talk he explained how he’s come to think of parenting as having a bank account. He said “Early on you need to make as many deposits as you can because come the teenage years, you’re going to be making a lot of withdrawals.”

That got big laughs from the audience. And while funny, there’s a lot of truth to it.

I have not yet experienced sharing a home with a teenager. My daughters still have a way to go (though I know sure that time will arrive much quicker than I’d like!). However, I remember my teenage years. I can say with a high degree of certainty that they were not the most enjoyable years for my parents to have me living under their roof.

But it could have been a lot worse.

While we clashed from time to time, my parents had made a lot of deposits into the emotional bank account when I was younger. As a results, there was a lot of love, respect, and trust between us. And while there were definitely withdrawals made along the way (on both sides), the balance remained high enough to get all of us through those years in very good shape.

When it comes to your business, you need to build an emotional bank account with your customers. Starting with their very first contact as a prospect, it’s critical to start building that balance by nurturing that relationship.

How?

Be reliable.
Be approachable.
Be trustworthy.
Make them feel special.
Underpromise and overdeliver.
Be honest – always!
Make it About You – your customer.

Why is this so important? Because one day, no matter how hard you try to avoid it, something will go wrong.

A server will crash.
A payment will be mishandled.
A miscommunication will occur.
A deadline will be missed.
A campaign will not go as planned.

If you take the time to build up a big emotional bank account with your customers, chances are good they will remain your customers. The emotional account balance you build will not be drained by an occassional withdrawal.

If you fail to grow that balance early and often, then even a little withdrawal can bankrupt your account. And that can have a very real impact on the balance of your actual bank account!

Do you have an example of how building a big emotional bank account has helped you in business or pareting? Please share it below in the comment section.

3 Things Entrepreneurs Can Learn From a Screaming Baby

It’s 2 A.M. You’re sleeping soundly in bed. All of a sudden the peace and quiet of the early morning is shattered by the head-splitting cries of your little pride and joy. You go try to calm her down but two hours later she’s still screaming as loud as ever.

You’re beyond exhausted. You have a headache. You’re near tears. You’re desperately grasping for anything you can think of to get that baby to stop screaming and go back to sleep.

You’ve tried the usual mix of bouncing, swaying, rocking, coddling, dancing, singing, feeding, and changing diapers.

You’ve resorted to more desperate measures like holding her on the dryer while it’s running and taking a drive in the car, hoping the vibrations will do the trick.

Back at home, rattled to your very core, you head to the bathroom to get a drink of water. Your hand misses the light switch and instead turns on the vent. And then . . . silence! The quiet hum of the fan did the trick!

Relieved, but still a bit frazzled by the ordeal, you put the baby back in her crib and go to sleep. Success!

So what can you learn about marketing from this torture that 1000s of parents of infants go through on a nightly basis?

1. Get it wrong . . . quickly! If you’re rocking that baby and she doesn’t stop crying, you’re not going to keep rocking her for very long. You’re going to move on to something else that will hopefully yield better results – and fast!

The same principle applies to your marketing efforts. If you’ve launched a new marketing campaign and are not getting the results you want – don’t go down with the ship. Bail quickly and move onto something new.

Test out new marketing ideas on a small scale. If it works – build on it. If it doesn’t – try something else. The quicker you go through this process, the quicker you will find the marketing ideas that will fuel your company’s success.

2. Make mistakes. In my little story, the usual tricks didn’t work. It was missing the light switch and turning on the fan instead that was the life saver that rescued our desperate parent.

A lot of business owners are afraid of making mistakes. That’s a, well, mistake. Being afraid of making mistakes hampers creativity, makes it difficult to stand out from the competition, and won’t doesn’t lead to any big breakthroughs for your company.

Mistakes have led to some monumental breakthroughs in the course of human history. For more on mistakes, read Scott Ginsberg’s blog post “10 Mistakes That Changed The World.“

Now go make some mistakes of your own!

3. It’s not about you – the business owner, it’s about you – your customer. If you tried some of the things that calm you down (ie. a glass of wine, meditation, deep breaths, spa treatments) on a baby, you wouldn’t be too successful (and depending on which of those you tried, you could end up in jail!).

In business, it doesn’t matter what works for you, what you respond to, what you like. As we talked about the other week, it only matters what your customers want. Give them what they want and they’ll respond by giving you what you want – their business.

Can you think of some other lessons entrepreneurs can learn from a screaming baby? If so, please share them in the comment section below.

And please join me as the “What You Can Learn About Business From a Baby” series continues. Next we’ll explore why in business and parenthood it’s important to have a big bank account. But not the kind you think.

Do You Make This Mistake in Your Marketing?

“Well I never click on those.“

That’s a fairly common reaction I get when describing Google AdWords to people. (Just an aside for those who aren’t familiar with AdWords. AdWords ads are the “sponsored” results located primarily on the right side of the screen when you perform a search in Google. You can learn more about AdWords here.).

It’s the same reaction people have to direct mail and how they put theirs straight into the circular file.

Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who’s admitted to either opening their “junk mail” or clicking on AdWords ads!

But here’s the thing:

A lot of people do open their “junk” mail and buy the stuff being advertised. Billions of dollars a year of it.

A lot of people do click on AdWords ads. And these clicks are making AdWords advertisers a lot of S.W.I.S.S. Money.

The mistake comes when you make marketing decisions for your business based on your behavior and not your target market’s behavior. Just because you don’t open, click, buy, or care doesn’t mean your prospects and customers don’t.

Remember, it’s not about you – the business owner, it’s About You – your customer.

Keep that in mind, and you’re on your way to building a successful marketing campaign whether it’s online or off.

More About You

Do you have an “About You” page on your website yet?

It’s a concept I introduced back in November and I’m thrilled that it seems to be catching on (at least in some circles).

Here are some great examples of people who have added an About You page to their website/blog:

• Ed Vallorani at Avanti Improvement Solutions, LLC.

• Jeremy Nulik, from St. Louis Small Business Monthly, added one to his new blog, Creative Energy Officer.

• And Gill Wagner, put one (called Your Story) on his new website/concept, Idea Transfusion. (If you live in the St. Louis area, check this site out – it’s a really interesting concept. And I’m not just saying that because I’m on the Idea Transfusion team!)

If you add an About You page to your website, be sure to email it to me so I can share it in future blog posts.

Why Most Websites Have It Wrong: It’s Not About Us, It’s About YOU!

Do you have an About Us page on your website? If you’re like most businesses, I’m betting you do.

How about an About You page? I’m betting you don’t.

One of the biggest mistakes most businesses make in marketing is focusing on themselves. The About Us page epitomizes this mistake. Most companies use it as a place to spout off about one of more of the following:

1. How great their company is.
2. How fantastic their employees are (at least the management team).
3. That their widget is the best widget around.
4. Their incredible mission statement that states how great the company is, what fantastic employees they have, and how their widget is the best widget around.

That’s all well and good, but there’s just one problem.

No one cares!

People care about themselves. They want to know what’s in it for them. They want to see how your company, your employees, your widget can improve their lives.

When done right, the About Us page can help a business connect with prospects and turn more of them into customers.

(A little secret about the About Us page is that the most effective ones actually focus on the customer, not the business. They paint a clear picture of the benefits one receives when doing business with that company. )

I’d like to propose taking things a step further. If you’re going to dedicate a web page to “Us” (your company), then dedicate one to “You” (your customers).

Without customers, you don’t have a business. So why not give them their very own page on your website?

What Goes On an About You Page?

Use the About You page to tell prospects and customers about themselves. Detail their problems and frustrations. Describe who they are. Describe who they’re not.

On my website, the About You page has a bulleted list of qualities that describe my ideal prospect.

It tells them who they are – small business owners, entrepreneurs, or the head of a not-for-profit.

It tells them about common problems that my clients have that I can help solve – not having enough customers, being in the dark about internet marketing, or staring at a blank screen that needs to be filled with words for an article or marketing copy.

It tells them who they are not – affiliate marketers or MLMs (multi-level marketers).

What Can an About You Page Do For You?

There are a few main benefits that an About You page can provide.

1. It forces you to focus on the ideal client for your business. Most small businesses make the mistake of trying to be everything to everyone. That generally leads to chasing leads and servicing clients that can suck the life out of your business.Writing down a clear description of your ideal client puts your focus on attracting prospects who are perfectly suited for your business’ core competencies (this is a worthwhile task even if you don’t want to put it on your website).

   Attract these types of clients and you’ll be a lot happier.

2. Clients that aren’t a good fit for your business can quickly disqualify themselves. If you’ve posted the attributes of your ideal client on your website, prospects who don’t fit the bill can see that for themselves and move on to find a better fit. This keeps them and you from wasting valuable time trying to figure it out later.

3. It ensures you have at least one page on your site that puts the focus squarely on your customers’ favorite topic – themselves.

4. There’s a powerful psychological aspect to having an About You page on your website. When a prospect comes to your site and finds a description or checklist that describes them perfectly, it gives them a feeling of finding the mothership. A place where they belong. This can help convince them that becoming a client of yours would be an ideal fit for them.

5. It makes you stand out from the crowd. I did exhaustive research (ie. a Google search) and found almost no websites have an About You page. In a web full of sites with Home, Products, Services, Blog, About Us, Contact Us, etc., the About You page is a great way to stand out and get noticed.
   

So that’s my case for adding an About You page to your company’s website. This is uncharted territory and there are no set guidelines. If you like this idea, run with it! Be creative. Have fun. Email me a link (and if your About You page describes me, you may just get a new customer!)

But most of all, take the idea of focusing on your prospects and customers to every page of your website. Then incorporate it into all of your other sales and marketing activities. Because focusing on your customers will ultimately benefit you.