I have a confession to make: I may be partly responsible for inciting one of the most obnoxious, in-your-face student-led guerrilla marketing campaigns Concordia University, Nebraska’s campus has seen in years.

But I’m not sorry—mostly because I think it worked.

To summarize, a group of students were hosting an event they called “Fight the Night,” a fundraiser to help eradicate malaria. The big idea was to invite students to sleep outside in the quad overnight after some entertainment. To advertise, they covered every window, every sidewalk, and every table on campus. There was nowhere you could go on campus without seeing “Fight the Night” promos.

And people showed up. With virtually no budget they raised a few thousand dollars from a bunch of poor college students on a night when a number of other events were going on.

They did it by using everything they had at their disposal, things that were far beyond monetary resources. As one of their marketing advisors, this made me extremely proud.

I think there’s a strategy lesson in their approach, so I’ll offer a mini-case study.

Start with two “whys”

One of the biggest challenges that I see with businesses is that the lack good answers to two questions:

1. “why do you exist?”
2. “why should people care?”

Most people can answer the first question—everyone has a mission statement. But chances are if the real reason you exist is to make money, I’m not going to care very much.

Satisfying answers to the second question above relate to deeply human needs and desires. How does your organization serve your customers, your students, your donors?

When I met with the Fight the Night group, I asked them not only to define what made their event (and their cause) unique, but why it mattered to students.

They answered brilliantly. They were having the fundraiser as part of a goal to raise $25,000 in an effort to eradicate malaria deaths in Africa by 2015. Every 60 seconds a child under 5 dies from malaria, even though the disease is preventable and treatable. They believe this is unacceptable, so they are giving up their time and their own resources to make a difference.

They structured their argument for the Fight the Night event well, too. Malaria is spread by mosquitoes that mostly bite at night (hence “Fight the Night”). One easy method of malaria prevention is to sleep under a bed net, so they decided to charge a $10 admission fee to anyone who wanted to come to Fight the Night—the amount it cost to produce and ship one bed net.

They appealed first to their fellow students’ sense of being part of something bigger, of contributing toward the good of humanity by defeating malaria.

And if saving people from needless death wasn’t enough to excite their fellow students, they added some things to appeal to their colleagues’  less than altruistic motivations: they had entertainment (live music, an improv show and a movie), a chance for students to pie their professors, and of course the chance to sleep outside on the quad (which hasn’t been done in decades).

The brilliance of sidewalk chalk and window paint

Sometimes when we look around to see what resources we have available as marketers, instead of coming up with ideas, we come up with excuses.

“I don’t have enough money to buy another TV spot and my competitor is all over the airwaves.”

“I can’t match how much my competitor is spending on AdWords.”

While these statements may be true, they are only helpful inasmuch as they force us to think about our broader marketing strategy. If you’re trying to copy the strategic playbook of a competitor that’s much larger or better positioned, you’re probably going to fail.

The real question is how do your marketing tactics match up with your target audience? Are you producing commercials, buying billboards or sending a multitude of annoying emails because everyone else is?

You might not need TV or billboards or email.

You might not even need the Internet. Fight the Night didn’t.

The Fight the Night group told me they wanted every student on campus to know about the event and to consider attending, but they faced some serious competition—laser tag on campus, an away football game, and multitude of other potential weekend distractions.

So I asked if there was a way they could use the campus environment as their canvas.

They ran with the idea. They got permission from building managers to cover exterior windows in window paint. They chalked up the sidewalks with facts about malaria.

They printed stickers and flyers and covered every flat surface they could find. They set up “pie your professors” bidding stations in the highest trafficked areas of campus. They even draped a bed net over the statue in the center of the quad.

There was literally nowhere a student could go without experiencing Fight the Night marketing. In all of my time at Concordia, both as a student and now as director of marketing & comms, I have never seen an event so heavily promoted.

Sure some students were a little annoyed, but it forced everyone to make the choice to attend not just once when they read it in an email invitation, but every day for a week when they walked to class.

Using who you know

What was the last strategic partnership you leveraged in your marketing?

And I don’t mean when is the last time you bought a service from someone and called it a “partnership.” I mean when was the last time you built something with a partner for mutual gain?

Fight the Night was a complete exercise in mutual gain.

The sound system the group secured for the event was property of the school, and the faculty advisor who helped set it up used it as an opportunity to test it outside and to give some of his students additional experience in setting it up.

The band and improv group they invited to perform were both made up of students who appreciated the exposure.

Concordia’s faculty go to great lengths to show how much they care about their students, so many willingly accepted the request to be pied in the face in front of the student body. Even the university’s president took a pie:

A summary of strategic considerations

After doing some thinking about the success of Fight the Night, here are the big questions I think all marketers should challenge themselves to think about:

1. Does my organization have a compelling answer to why what we do matters? Do we clearly and consistently articulate “why” in all of our marketing?
2. Do our marketing tactics really match our differentiation? Do they serve who we are trying to serve or are we just producing ads because everyone produces ads?
3. Are we actively looking for opportunities to partner with other organizations for mutual gain? Are we losing out on using who we know to advance our business or cause?

One last thing—want to help end malaria?

As you’re mulling over strategy (which can be a little tricky), here’s one simple thing you can do: give $10 to help end malaria deaths in Africa.

You can make your donation securely here. Thanks for considering!

all photos original

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Yesterday HubSpot’s Dan Zarrella announced a new “Value of a Like” Calculator that uses some straightforward math to help you determine how much your Facebook fans are worth in dollars and cents.

Essentially, the calculator takes into account how many Likes you have, your clickthrough rates, conversion rates, and the value of each conversation to spit out a value per Like.

While it’s fun, I’m not sure how determining the value of an individual Like is actually useful.

Let me explain.

Some tacit (and fallacious) assumptions

Zarrella says that the aim of the project is as follows:

Once you understand the true, monetary value of each of your business’ social media connections, you can start to understand exactly how much time and money is worth spending to grow your social media reach, and you’ll know which metrics you need to improve to get the most out of your efforts.

This, I agree with, but it’s the following that troubles me:

Play around with the calculator’s sliders for each question to understand how each variable impacts your overall VOAL [value of a Like]. How much does your VOAL change if you were to increase your posting frequency? What about boosting overall Likes? Should you focus your efforts on growing your social media reach?

Zarrella makes a strong assumption in suggesting that “playing with the sliders” can help you make decisions that will actually provide bottom line results—namely that there is a direct and linear relationship between all variables (e.g. if you get 10 clicks on one post per day, you’ll get 20 clicks from two posts per day).

But from experience, any social marketer (or social science researcher) will tell you that changing one variable can affect the outcomes of other variables in unpredictable ways. For example, increasing your posting frequency might change the average clicks you get per post—maybe people will see you more often, and you’ll get 30 clicks from two posts; or maybe people will get annoyed with you and you’ll only get 12 clicks from two posts.

My point: in the VOAL algorithm there are six variables—if you change one, you can’t expect that the other five will all change in a predictable, linear fashion.

Mo’ Likes ≠ Mo’ Money (all of the time anyway)

More specifically, I’m a little uneasy that the tool purportedly delivers actionable data. Zarrella states the impetus for creating the tool was a discussion aimed at determining “how much we should be willing to invest to gain a new social media follower or Like.”

The troubling assumption this makes is that all new Likes we add will be equally qualified to the Likes we currently have.

Here’s an example: Imagine you own a department store. Armed with your sales history and a calculator, you could easily determine the average value of a visitor to your store on any given day. If you decided to throw a big promotion to get more people into your store, you would reasonably expect that your average value of a visitor on that day might be lower than normal, even if you make more money overall.

Why? Because newcomers who are attracted by your new marketing techniques are not the same as your current customers. It’s reasonable to expect that some people, lured by your stellar promotion, turn up only to find that your merchandise doesn’t appeal to them all that much, and therefore, walk out without purchasing as much as a normal customer on a normal day (or, the promotion could have the opposite effect—people might buy more than normal because items are on sale).

Analogously, the same is true of campaigns to get more Facebook Likes.

The value of a VOAL calculator is that it gives you a snapshot of what’s happening right now with respect to the equity you’ve built in your social network marketing channels. It’s like seeing what your average sales were for one day.

But it doesn’t and shouldn’t be a tool used to predict your future bottom line. Any new marketing effort you undertake will fundamentally change the relationship between the six variables in the calculator’s algorithm.

That’s why its a bad idea to say, “today our value of a Like is $X, so we can spend $Y to gain a new Like tomorrow.”

Valuing Likes is less important than valuing networks

When I use data to make decisions about future marketing investments, I always seek the “smallest big-picture metric.”

The idea of the smallest big-picture metric is to ground marketing evaluation in what you’re really trying to accomplish. For example, when testing Facebook ad performance, I’m more interested in downstream conversions (new leads) than clicksthrough rates alone (because I’m after new leads, not clicks!).

So instead of thinking about VOALs, I suggest we ought to measure effectiveness by social media channel and tactical execution within that channel. The idea is that if your social media efforts make you $15,000 more this month, you aren’t really going to care if your average VOAL increased or decreased.

The smallest big-picture metric, I think, should be the overall value of referring traffic from the network or specific marketing initiative related to that network.

Testing becomes more meaningful in the total revenue context: this month we spent $X increasing Facebook Likes, and as a result made $Y. This month we spent $Z posting new content, and as a result traced it to referrals that lead to $A in revenue.

The upshot here is that you don’t need the average VOAL to determine your social ROI. What you need are smart tests that tie revenue spent to revenue gained.

A few parting words—no ill will

I applaud Zarrella’s effort, and his denunciation of “snake oil hucksters selling platitudes like ‘engage in the conversation,’ or worse, ‘be awesome.’”

I just fear that the VOAL tool may lead some folks into making bad marketing decisions, so I felt compelled to write this response.

And Dan, if you’re ever in Nebraska, look me up and we can hash this out over a beer. I’m buying.

Photo credit: .reid. on Flickr; see original for creative commons copyright info [remixed by yours truly]

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This is not my real moustache. This is my aspiration-stache. I like it better.

This year I participated in Movember for the first time, an experience that’s mixed equal parts of fun, irony and believe it or not, a lesson in branding: relevance isn’t just selected, it’s also created.

In case you’re unfamiliar with Movember

Movember is the month formerly known as November, where men and women across the globe join together to raise awareness and funds for men’s health issues. Men grow and women support a Mo (moustache) for 30 days to become walking, talking billboards, for our men’s health causes – prostate and testicular cancer initiatives.

Mo Bros start clean-shaven Nov. 1, endure the humiliation of wearing a half-stache for most of the month, and raise some money from their friends and family along the way to support cancer research.

But it’s just not that easy.

In this hilarious video, lip sweater king Nick Offerman tells viewers “Growing a mustache isn’t easy. Nothing incredibly awesome is.”

But compared raising money (for any cause), growing a moustache is a cakewalk.

Let me replay most of my recent interactions with friends and colleagues:

1. Friend/colleague sees me and attempts, unsuccessfully, to hide their shock and horror. Usually this includes a furrowed brow and/or blinking. Sometimes there is gasping.
2. While staring at my upper lip, they ask something to cover themselves like, “Oh hey, you look different. Did you cut your hair?”
3. I explain the whole Movember thing to them and ask them to donate.
4. They change the subject by asking, “So when do you get to shave it off?”

From all of the no responses I’ve gotten, I think I can summarize why more haven’t taken the opportunity to participate: they don’t care as much about “changing the face of men’s health” as I do.

And that’s okay.

Because there’s a lesson in building brand relevance buried somewhere in there.

Even incredibly awesome brands need relevance

Great brands are three things: relevant, unique and simple.

As a walking billboard for Movember, it’s easy to sell unique and simple: men’s health issues (unique) supported by mo-growing bros (simple).

But relevance is harder.

One of our team’s early supporters has a husband who was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Movember’s cause was extremely relevant for her, so we didn’t need a sales pitch. We just told her we were doing it and she gave—more than anyone else in fact.

For others who aren’t personally touched by men’s cancers, the job of building relevance rests primarily with the fundraiser. As a Mo Bro, it’s my job to make the cause relevant to my contacts.

This, I think is the brilliance of Movember. Although research for men’s cancers might not seem immediately relevant to many people, the Movember organization created an army of relevance agents in Mo Bros and Mo Sistas.

They also broadened the scope of what we might consider relevant. Instead of making their brand only about fighting men’s cancers, it’s also about supporting a guy you know who is growing his own soup strainer.

If you’re growing a moustache, the relevance for you is about fun, freedom (what’s a better excuse to see what you’d look like with a stache?), and the feeling that you’re making a difference (without actually having to sacrifice much).

Granted, our team hasn’t raised an astonishing amount of money. But that’s not the point. The point is that we raised some, and together with the rest of the world, we’ve raised over $72 million and counting (in 2011 Movember raised $126 million). Consider also that charity: water, lately everyone’s favorite model of fundraising success, has raised just only $27 million last year (source 2011 annual report).

The lesson for brands: Relevance isn’t just selected, it’s also created.

Creating brand relevance is typically associated with the marketing task of segmentation (i.e. answering the question, “who is going to buy this?”).

Too often though, I think we assume we can manufacture relevance first and pick the right demo later.

Marketers in the traditional marketing planning camp spend millions of dollars in research to select the right demographics for their products. While this is a time-tested way of finding an audience, the process mostly ignores consumers as willful agents who have the ability to co-create meaning (relevance) with the brand.

As Movember illustrates, relevance doesn’t always need to be self-evident (contrast the kind of fun Movember has with the relatively serious and straightforward brand of Relay for Life), and it doesn’t need to be imbued meaning from the marketer’s office only—you can encourage your customers can add their own meaning, too. They can create relevance with you.

As time goes on, I believe allowing customers to participate in relevance-making will no longer be an option—it will be a requirement for success. With instant, mass communication tools at their fingertips, our customers have too much power to simply sit passive as we feed them with the meaning we think they want. As the authors of Cluetrain put it:

Marketing isn’t going to go away. Nor should it. But it needs to evolve, rapidly and thoroughly, for markets have become networked and now know more than business, learn faster than business, are more honest than business, and are a hell of a lot more fun than business. The voices are back, and voice brings craft: work by unique individuals motivated by passion.

So, as November draws to a close and I ponder the next chapter in my facial hair saga, I think even more I’m going to ponder the craft of marketing. And more specifically, considering how the voices of the customers I serve can participate and co-create relevance with me.

Here’s one final quote from Cluetrain to close:

Marketing needs to become a craft. Recall that craftworkers listen to the material they’re forming, shaping the pot to the feel of the clay, designing the house to fit with and even reveal the landscape. The stuff of marketing is the market itself. Marketing can’t become a craft until it can hear the new — the old — sound of its markets.

The post The branding lesson in growing a moustache appeared first on Andrew Swenson.

Retro is cool everywhere from music to clothing to Instagram to skeuomorphs in iOS.

But is it holding us back? I’m not sure, but Simon Reynolds, who recently published a book on the topic, shared the quote below with Collectors Weekly.

The post Simon Reynolds in Collectors Weekly appeared first on Andrew Swenson.

See original on Flickr by kevin dooley for creative commons copyright info

You know that making your marketing objectives and goals match your strategies is essential to business success. You even know the difference between marketing strategies and tactics (and if you’re like me, you’re probably sick of the “hey, focus on the strategies, not the tactics” blog posts).

But do your strategies match your view of reality?

Hear me out. Which of the following two options best describes what you believe to be true about the future?

1. The future is a continuation of the past—something that you could reasonably predict with enough data.
2. The future is unknowable because it is co-created by willful agents (people).

Your answer to this question, whether you realize it or not, has a profound effect on the way you do business.

Your philosophy drives your marketing

If your answer was number 1, then you probably fall into that traditional marketing planning (TMP) camp.

The basic premise of TMP—that process that you more than likely learned in college or b-school (see Honig 2004)—is that we can predict the future with enough data (McDonald 1996).

If we can predict the future, it makes sense that we would first research, then draft a plan with clear goals that relate to our prediction of the future, and then go about executing that plan. Since predicting the future takes a lot of work, we’d probably only write such a plan about once per year (annual business planning…sound familiar?)

If your answer was number 2, then you probably fall into the effectual marketing planning (EMP; not this kind of EMP) camp.

The basic premise of EMP is that the future is unknowable  (in a Knightian way), so rather than wasting time trying to predict the future, we should try to create it. Instead of TMP’s logic of prediction, EMP follows a logic of control (Whalen and Holloway).

If we want to create the future, it makes sense that we would skip research and instead turn first to the resources we have at hand (capital, talent, and people with whom we could form partnerships), and conduct a series of small experiments to see what works and what doesn’t. Since our strategy lives and fails on our ability to learn from mistakes quickly, we probably would spend more of our time testing and evaluating our efforts rather than writing a full-fledged strategy document.

Matching what you believe with what you do

So what if what you believe to be true about the future doesn’t match how you plan?

You’re in for lots of frustration, that’s what.

Let me confess that I’m speaking from experience on this one. Like many of you, I’ve always been more concerned with applying business and marketing planning concepts—in writing the obligatory plan for my VP or board, in setting the strategies and determining the tactics—than with examining the underlying assumptions my business plan made about reality.

In day to day practice, I’ve always been much more in the EMP camp, but the organizations for which I’ve worked (and most I served as clients) have a deeply engrained yearly plan and review (very much TMP) process which I naturally followed.

A couple of interesting things happened as a result:

1. Miscommunication with the people I reported to. Even in highly unpredictable situations, I had to think no less than a year out with respect to all our tactics. While taking a long view is useful in some respects, I found that some of our tactics ceased to make sense when we tested them in the market. Naturally, we pivoted our strategy and started doing other things—many of which were not documented in our TMP at all. The problem with this that by all accounts of formal responsibility (to the board for example), we were failing at executing our original plan. This lead to more uncomfortable conversations than I’d like to remember.
2. I wasted a bunch of time writing plans for things that would never see the light of day. Even though I’ve professed a mantra of “Try. Test. Improve. Repeat.” if you read though my past marketing plans, you’d assume I had all the answers before we even tried anything. Because after all, that’s what a good TMP looks like. Evaluation is on an annual schedule. Sure we had MoM or QoQ benchmarks to hit, but they were all in pursuit of a yearly goal. So on top of developing new strategies as I pivoted marketing efforts, every year I took a crazy amount of time trying to predict the future, even though in my heart of hearts I believed that I couldn’t (not just wasn’t able, couldn’t—cf. Knight again).
3. I didn’t look for partnerships enough. One of the chief tenets of EMP is asking not just “what do I know?” and “what resources do I have?”, but “who do I know?” to help shape the plan. TMP is mostly about acquiring the resources you need to execute your plan, which doesn’t leave a bunch of wiggle room for negotiations in strategic marketing partnerships.

So, what to do?

Of course, the example in this post really only illustrates a part of the matching-strategy-to-philosophy-of-reality issue.

This is a hard issue that requires some philosophical research (don’t worry, there’s lots of literature out there) and high level critical thinking and analysis. Which is why most people won’t do it.

But I’ve never been one to shy away from the difficult.

If you’re interested in taking the same path—hit me up, and I’ll send over a few articles to get you started.

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