Video Interviews | Small Business Marketing & Business Acceleration

Think Narrow and Harness the Power of UnPopular

Posted on 04. Apr, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Book Reviews, branding, humanization, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Video Interviews

Excerpt of my interview with Erika Napoletano. Transcription services from our friends at Speechpad. For full conversation, watch the video!

Jay: Hey everybody it’s Jay Baer from Convince & Convert, joined today by a very special guest, Erika Napoletano, author of The Power of Unpopular: A Guide to Building Your Brand for the Audience Who Will Love You (and why no one else matters). Erika, how are you? Thanks for being here.

Erika: Any better and I would be twins.

Jay: Wow, I don’t even know what that means. It’s freaking me out a little bit actually.

Erika: If the world could handle two of me, there would be two of me right now.

Jay: There you go. How’s the book doing? I loved it. It was such a refreshing read. I really, really enjoyed it. I tore through it. It was great.

Erika: The book is doing great. The publisher is absolutely stoked about digital sales. You know from when your book came out last year, Amazon releases the Kindle edition when they like.

Jay: No kidding. Surprise!

Erika: Somebody’s like, “Hey, I just ordered your book,” and I’m like, “You, you, you did?”

Jay: No email, no notification. It’s just appears. It’s the craziest thing.

Erika: So, it’s boom. Kindle edition just manifests, but the feedback from the Kindle edition has been great. Hardcover sales are going fantastically. The initial feedback, even unsolicited feedback on Amazon from people who didn’t get advance review copies, I’m just grateful. People are sharing feedback and we’re looking at really kicking off the forum for the book this next week, so. It’s exciting. Thank you, guys.

Jay: It is exciting. One of the things that you actually say in the book is that the book itself didn’t turn out how you had planned it necessarily. What did you mean by that?

Erika: Well, anybody who follows my online persona, which is RedheadWriting, is probably opening the book. Even the early feedback I’ve gotten, they were expecting me to smack people around. Because that’s what RedheadWriting does and people who are fans of that brand enjoy that style. But this book is by Erika Napoletano, and when I went through the book and even through the editing process, I got to the end and I looked at it and I was like, I learned something in this process.

It’s really cool to get to the end of your project and go that’s not where I thought it was going to go, but I’m really happy with where it’s at. It’s a lot like owning a business because when we start a business, and you have started multiple businesses yourself, some successful exits.

When you start a business we have these, I’ll call them daydreams, about where we think things are going to go and how they’re going to be on a day-to-day basis and the reality is much different. So when you can get to a place where you’ve got your own project and you go, not what I planned on, but it’s in a really awesome place. That’s a great place to wake up to every morning. It was a great place for me to end the book and that’s what the epilogue of the book talks about. Not what I planned, but a really cool place to be.

Jay: Fantastic. I love the examples in the book, too. Tons of great companies that you used as examples of how to brand and how to be unpopular on purpose, and a lot of companies that are not household names intentionally and I think that’s really interesting. How did you come up with those? I saw at one point you sort of reached out to HARO and asked people if they knew of a company who kind of did this sort of thing. Talk about that a little bit.

Erika: I don’t know about you, and I’m a huge fan of Zappos and I fly Southwest Airlines all the time, but if I read one more case study about them, I’m probably going to explode all over my screen. And I thought that maybe my readers were going to be exactly the same way because the target audience for this book, even though it applies to brands of any size and scale and whether they’re new or established, most of us wake up every morning and we just want to run a business that makes us happy, that gives us the time to do the things that we love doing and allows us to own a business instead of have our business owning us.

So what I did is I went out and found businesses that were privately owned, and in a lot of cases family owned, and asked for examples of, especially with HARO, which is Help a Reporter Out. It’s a place where anybody who’s writing or researching anything can ask for resources and I asked for companies that thought that they fit the mold. Two of the companies in there actually came from research for my column for Entrepreneur Magazine, which was Narragansett Beer and Marination Nation.

Jay: And when you talk about branding and brand personality, I think it’s oftentimes easier for smaller businesses to do that well anyway because you’re closer to the customer. You get into big corporations and it’s like layer, layer, layer, layer, layer, layer and the founder or the sort of C-Suite is so far away from the front lines that it’s hard to get that kind of cultural alignment. So it’s usually easier to sort of turn that battleship when you’ve got a little smaller company anyway.

Erika: And what businesses can take away after reading the book is how do I build a brand that has an audience robust enough to support it through any economic cycle? And that’s where I came up with the five principles for the unpopular brand. A lot of people think that being unpopular means being unlikable, In fact, it’s the exact opposite. The blog that I just put up on the website for the book today, with is unpopularbook.com today, talks about a recent ad campaign by Reebok which was actually just pulled because it advocated infidelity and it alienated 50% of that brand’s audience base.

So to me, that’s an unlikable decision because it degrades and insults your audience. When you make an unpopular business decision, it’s about honoring your audience. It’s about saying, I appreciate the fact that you’re here. You are the reason that I get to be in business today, tomorrow and the next day. This decision I’m making, while it may not resonate with everyone, it’s going to ensure that we’re here to do business for you and with you long into the future. That’s what being an unpopular brand is about.

Jay: Yes, there is a big difference between being unpopular and unlikable. So much of what I was reading in the book and the theory of being unpopular is you say stop focusing on pleasing people who are never going to like you. It’s this notion of really segmentation and focus. A lot of things that we do are with agencies, and that is very typical agency problem, where it’s like, well, we’ll be the agency for anybody who will hire us. And that is a sort of road to ruin, right? You’ll be great at one thing instead of being okay at a million things, and I think that’s the key.

You’ve got a little chart methodology in the book where you actually have an exercise where you say, “Let’s figure out who is never, ever going to hire you.” Right? So you do it opposite. It’s really hard for people to say here’s who this business if for. That sounds easy, but it’s a hard exercise to do. It’s easier to say here’s who this business is definitely not for. And by a process of elimination you get to your core audience. I love that mechanism. Do you do that with your clients?

Erika: I do. We come across businesses all the time that are in the middle of a life cycle. They’re not just starting off, they’ve been around for a while and they’re wondering why they’re not growing. How can I get traction on the next level? I’ll go all the way back to, why are you here? You know the Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why,” hugely powerful concept, and from that why we figure out whom are you talking to. A lot of times they go, well, everybody needs what we have to offer. That’s when you put the brakes on. It’s an ah-ha moment because once you figure out that that’s the problem.

Jay: I think there’s this pervasive belief that niche means lesser, and all it really means is focused. Right?

Erika: Right.

Jay: In addition to the sort of focus on a particular audience, which is sort of a theme of the book, there’s a lot in there which was really resonate for me because it’s similar to the things we talked about in The NOW Revolutionabout culture. You wrote that businesses and brands begin with the people behind them. That there really is no such thing as a brand. That a brand is a who. It’s never a what, which I think is artfully put. Talk about that a little bit and how important sort of the personality side of it is.

Erika: For me, personality is job one for a brand. Ford thinks its quality, I think its personality. But think about, you know if we want to use Ford as an example, why would they come out and say that quality is job one? Because they want you to understand that their products are reliable, they’re there. They’re concerned about your experience as a customer and that quality is something that you’re never going to have to worry about throughout your ownership and your experience with their brands.

Think about the friends that you sit down to dinner with every now and then. You have the friend who, without fail, every time you call him, he’s there to take you to the airport. It doesn’t matter what time of the day. You have a friend who will go off the grid for a week, if he even catches wind that you’re moving. You have the person who will always add extra money to the tip when you’re eating as a group, and you have the person in your group who just has the best jokes, hilarious. Your world is a collection of those personalities, but those people aren’t just the joke teller. They’re not just the reliable ride to the airport. There’s people behind them, but those leading qualities are what makes you go for everything you are, and more importantly, for everything you’re not, I’m glad you’re in my world.

If business owners think about their brands the same way as they think about the people in their lives, then you can begin to understand how people keep brands in their lives as friends. When you have that friendship established, there’s a whole other world of dialogue that opens up to you, and it’s having a brutally honest customer base.

Jay: It’s a challenging concept for a lot of companies though because they assume, because they’ve been taught to believe this, that business is about transactions and that it’s about talking about yourself and marketing the business. What you talk about is that we need to sort of transcend the transactional and that 80% of the things you talk about should not be about your company.

Erika: Without a doubt. I’ll go back to the people that you sit and have dinner with. You don’t invite the person who is a me, me, me, me, me, me and you do this, you leave. It’s the same when you’re at a business function and somebody walks up and interrupts your conversation and derails it. You want to be surrounded by people who don’t just, they empower you to talk about yourself when it’s appropriate because they’re genuinely interested in what’s going on, but you’re way more interested in what’s going on with them because as a business owner, that’s data. That’s the most powerful information you can have to shape your future business decisions because if you audience is saying, responding to things and going, “God, you know, money’s tight,” or “God, you know what? I love this product,” or “I wish it came in orange,” or “I love it. I would pay twice as much for it.”

Jay: The book was awesome. I really, really enjoyed reading it. It is a breath of fresh air, as are you. It was really, really useful. Very well written, too. No surprise given your background. But I’m super proud of it and I know you are, too. Everybody should pick up a copy of it.

Erika: Thank you so much. It’s been a labor of love and I’ll tell you this – not all of you who decide to buy the book you’re going to love it, and that’s okay. But, hopefully, you take some great things for your business out of it and the one thing that I’ll close out by saying is remember how I said there’s no case studies by those behemoth brands that we’re tired of? There also aren’t any of those crappy end of the chapter workbooks, which some of us have publishers that say we have to put those in and I was like, “No! I’m not going to do it!” So what I did is I built a fully interactive forum.

So if you have ideas to share about the book, head on over to unpopularbook.com and click the tab “Get Into It.” Also, at the end of the book there’s also an appendix that tells you how to use the forum. We want to hear from you.

I thought it would be great to just have the conversation start when somebody closes the back cover and to carry on those ideas and have it be a continually growing kind of wiki knowledge base for other entrepreneurs, even if they’ve never read the book, to go to the forum and go, “Hey, I have that question, too.”

Jay: Look at Erika, eating her own dog food. How about that! Nicely done. I will be on the forum. I’ll be in there. I’ll mix it up.

Erika: Please, go start stirring some stuff up.

The Value of Small Business Blogging: 3 Key Questions & Answers

Posted on 15. Mar, 2012 by Lee Odden in Blog, business blogging, interview, lee odden, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Video Interviews

Earlier this week Frank J. Kenny did a Skype interview with me about small business blogging and why or why not it makes sense. Frank’s audience is the network of Chambers of Commerce across the U.S.. I think it’s a timely question considering the ongoing “blogging is dead“, “no it’s not“ debate that’s been going on for the past 5 years or so.

As a small business owner myself, I’ve been blogging here at Online Marketing Blog for over 8 years and can testify as to the pros and cons like few others can. In our case, we’ve had great success with our blog as a way to achieve industry awareness and credibility, attract new business, employees, media coverage, speaking opportunities and many other benefits.

In the interview with Frank, he asked 3 key questions about blogging and social media that I wanted to share here since it’s had such a huge impact for both our clients large and small, as well as on our own small business.

Why should small businesses blog?

Blogging is a method of creating and publishing conversational content. Blogs are an easy to use content management system. The value is in the content and ability for companies to leverage the inherent promotion and engagement capabilities of the blog publishing platform. Blogging offers a few key advantages:

Easy to use platform to create sharable, linkable content that addresses specific prospect and customer interests
Serves as a hub to a hub and spoke model of content marketing and promotion
Creates a promotable SEO and Social Media asset – every post is a potential destination for a link and an entry point through search engines.

Through multiple channels of discovery, blog content can reach:

Prospects
Existing customers
Potential employees
Marketing partners, investors
The media: journalists, bloggers

What is the impact of Google+ on search and how does it affect business blog marketing?

Google+ personalization and it’s impact on search is the hot topic and any company that wants an advantage in Google search results needs to consider Google+ and other social media participation. The behaviors of content creation, sharing and engagement are incredibly rich signals that search engines can use to improve search results quality and search user experience.

The more people that have included your Google+ profile or page in their circles, the more likely content that you’ve created, shared and engaged with will appear in their Google search results while they’re logged in. Google+ optimization should be an essential part of any business blog effort.

At the same time, social media content, whether it’s text, images or video is content that can be crawled and ranked in search results. Social media optimization can improve search visibility of that social content for people that are actively looking for solutions.

When we make optimization recommendations, we go beyond search keywords and have our clients consider social topics as well. Understanding what keywords consumers are searching on as well as the topics they’re discussing on blogs, twitter, and other social networks can inform an editorial plan that does a much better job of attracting new customers because it’s focused on their language and the things they care about. Incidentally, I go deep, deep into this within Optimize.

How much emphasis should small business bloggers place on SEO vs social media?

The consumer journey through the sales funnel is increasingly weaving through a social and search experience. Our model of optimization focuses on how consumers Discover, Consume and Share content so the notion that people will come across a small business solution because of a social connection to a friend that then leads to a search on Google or Bing to get more information is entirely likely and common.

When people use specific words in a search they are segmenting or qualifying themselves to a certain degree because the words they use indicate intent to a particular purpose or outcome. Creating, optimizing and socializing blog content according to those purposes or pain points can be very powerful for any sized business that wants to be found or talked about where relevant customers are looking.

There’s so much more I can say about this (and I will – see my upcoming speaking schedule)

Here’s the video version of the interview:

Despite the success we’ve had with our own business blogging efforts at TopRank Online Marketing, we’re probably only realizing a fraction of the potential benefits from business blogging. If that’s the case, why do so many other companies with significantly greater resources fail at blogging for their business? They quit, lack vision, underestimate resources and timeframe, and fail to understand where blogging can be integrated with achieving multiple business goals.

Hopefully you’ll find the advice above useful to help your business blogging effort. If you have specific biz blogging questions, please ask them in the comments.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. |
The Value of Small Business Blogging: 3 Key Questions & Answers | http://www.toprankblog.com

The Value of Small Business Blogging: 3 Key Questions & Answers

Posted on 15. Mar, 2012 by Lee Odden in Blog, business blogging, interview, lee odden, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Video Interviews

Earlier this week Frank J. Kenny did a Skype interview with me about small business blogging and why or why not it makes sense. Frank’s audience is the network of Chambers of Commerce across the U.S.. I think it’s a timely question considering the ongoing “blogging is dead“, “no it’s not“ debate that’s been going on for the past 5 years or so.

As a small business owner myself, I’ve been blogging here at Online Marketing Blog for over 8 years and can testify as to the pros and cons like few others can. In our case, we’ve had great success with our blog as a way to achieve industry awareness and credibility, attract new business, employees, media coverage, speaking opportunities and many other benefits.

In the interview with Frank, he asked 3 key questions about blogging and social media that I wanted to share here since it’s had such a huge impact for both our clients large and small, as well as on our own small business.

Why should small businesses blog?

Blogging is a method of creating and publishing conversational content. Blogs are an easy to use content management system. The value is in the content and ability for companies to leverage the inherent promotion and engagement capabilities of the blog publishing platform. Blogging offers a few key advantages:

Easy to use platform to create sharable, linkable content that addresses specific prospect and customer interests
Serves as a hub to a hub and spoke model of content marketing and promotion
Creates a promotable SEO and Social Media asset – every post is a potential destination for a link and an entry point through search engines.

Through multiple channels of discovery, blog content can reach:

Prospects
Existing customers
Potential employees
Marketing partners, investors
The media: journalists, bloggers

What is the impact of Google+ on search and how does it affect business blog marketing?

Google+ personalization and it’s impact on search is the hot topic and any company that wants an advantage in Google search results needs to consider Google+ and other social media participation. The behaviors of content creation, sharing and engagement are incredibly rich signals that search engines can use to improve search results quality and search user experience.

The more people that have included your Google+ profile or page in their circles, the more likely content that you’ve created, shared and engaged with will appear in their Google search results while they’re logged in. Google+ optimization should be an essential part of any business blog effort.

At the same time, social media content, whether it’s text, images or video is content that can be crawled and ranked in search results. Social media optimization can improve search visibility of that social content for people that are actively looking for solutions.

When we make optimization recommendations, we go beyond search keywords and have our clients consider social topics as well. Understanding what keywords consumers are searching on as well as the topics they’re discussing on blogs, twitter, and other social networks can inform an editorial plan that does a much better job of attracting new customers because it’s focused on their language and the things they care about. Incidentally, I go deep, deep into this within Optimize.

How much emphasis should small business bloggers place on SEO vs social media?

The consumer journey through the sales funnel is increasingly weaving through a social and search experience. Our model of optimization focuses on how consumers Discover, Consume and Share content so the notion that people will come across a small business solution because of a social connection to a friend that then leads to a search on Google or Bing to get more information is entirely likely and common.

When people use specific words in a search they are segmenting or qualifying themselves to a certain degree because the words they use indicate intent to a particular purpose or outcome. Creating, optimizing and socializing blog content according to those purposes or pain points can be very powerful for any sized business that wants to be found or talked about where relevant customers are looking.

There’s so much more I can say about this (and I will – see my upcoming speaking schedule)

Here’s the video version of the interview:

Despite the success we’ve had with our own business blogging efforts at TopRank Online Marketing, we’re probably only realizing a fraction of the potential benefits from business blogging. If that’s the case, why do so many other companies with significantly greater resources fail at blogging for their business? They quit, lack vision, underestimate resources and timeframe, and fail to understand where blogging can be integrated with achieving multiple business goals.

Hopefully you’ll find the advice above useful to help your business blogging effort. If you have specific biz blogging questions, please ask them in the comments.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. |
The Value of Small Business Blogging: 3 Key Questions & Answers | http://www.toprankblog.com

Video Interview: Social Media Marketing at GM – Charlotte Blank, Manager of Social Media

Posted on 15. Feb, 2012 by Lee Odden in Blog, interview, Online Marketing Summit, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media, Video Interviews

At the recent Online Marketing Summit in San Diego I caught up with Charlotte Blank, Manager of Social Media at General Motors to talk about digital marketing. In this short interview I asked Charlotte a few fundamental questions about digital and social media marketing related to customers:

1. How does GM segment digital marketing activities between customer acquisition and retention?

Follow up: Does GM follow a social media editorial calendar according to customer buying cycles and personas?

2. With all the shiny objects of social media in the world, how does she go about deciding what to test and what to implement?

Take a look at the video and I think you’ll be interested in the customer-centric approach GM takes with social media and how time is allocated towards new customers, activating current customers as evangelists and their approach to filtering shiny social objects.

How is your company focusing digital and social media marketing efforts towards winning new customers and engaging those you have? How do you evaluate new social technologies for marketing and communications? Do you allocate time for testing, experimentation or go with the crowd?

Transcript:

LO: This is Lee Odden from MarketingBlog.com at Online Marketing Summit in San Diego. With me is Charlotte Blank, Manager of Social Media at General Motors. Welcome.

CB: Hi Lee, Thank you.

LO: So thanks for spending a couple of minutes with me to answer some key questions I think for digital marketers, big brands, small brands. One of the first questions I had for you is, in terms of your digital approach, how much of it is split between customer acquisition vs customer engagement and retention?

CB: We definitely approach the consumer from a 360 degree angle. We try to keep the consumer at the center at all times in thinking about their journey from when they’re just kind of living their life 98% of the time to maybe thinking about making a car purchase a few months down the road to actually actively researching the car.

I think social media in particular, plays a role in all of those areas of the funnel. Our own channels, like our Facebook pages and Twitter handles for example, we typically think of as an upper funnel play. There are really an opportunity to engage our consumers with their lifestyle passions. For example, music is a big pillar for Chevrolet and we offered early access to Spotify when that came out. That was a good integration with the millenials that we were targeting for the Sonic launch. That encouraged more engagement with our Facebook page. That would be an example of a lifestyle play that we use our own social media channels for.

I also see social media playing a big role in the ownership and CRM space and that’s where I think I’ll be focusing a lot of my efforts this year. I think that there’s a big opportunity with turning our owners into advocates and giving them tools to light up their social graphs and really share with their friends how they love their GM vehicles.

In that kind of middle area, more on the conversion question, we do have an entire group that has all kinds of sophisticated ways of knowing when someone is in market. Because we really want to be cognizant that we’re not flooding the market with our messages about “buy now, buy now” when really only 2% of people are in market at any given time. So we like to be very sophisticated in the way that we target those people with relevant messaging when they’re ready for it. There are still great opportunities for social to play a role there, especially in the influencer space. The ratings and recommendations – we work a lot with 3rd party sites like KBB and Edumunds – those are increasingly socializing.

LO: Is there integration much from an editorial planning standpoint? Are you running social content calendars for example, that tie into buying cycle or customer segments?

CB: We absolutely do use content calendars, mostly from a lifestyle engagement space. We do constantly measure and optimize the way that we’re resonating with consumers. We’re starting to find some real nuances depending on the name plate. So some of our more performance oriented vehicles, Camero fans, Corvette fans, Cadillac, they really like that awesome car content – great performance engine type of content that they just can’t get enough of. Whereas we’ll use some of our bigger brands, Cheverolet overall to connect more with young consumers based on a lifestyle play, a mom blogger relationship or ways to be more a part of every day life.

LO: In the social media world, by the way I love that you used the word optimize, OptimizeBook.com is where you’ll see this video and information about a book called Optimize. In terms of this fast changing world we’re in, there are so many apps and channels for us to deal with, it’s almost information overload not only for consumers but for marketers deciding where it is that those consumers are spending their time. How do you decide when it comes to new digital marketing technology, to invest, where to experiement?

CB: That’s a great question, that’s one of the things I talk most about in my job. It’s one of the most important things that we can do. It’s all about consumer insights and putting yourself in the shoes of the consumer you’re trying to reach. This varies by campaign, by name plate, by the tone that we want to have with our consumers. We need to define up front what are we trying to achieve and who are we trying to connect with? Put ourselves in their shoes using thorough research, data and insights. What is that these people like to do? Do they use the Pinterests of the world, are they big Tweeters, do they even click on online advertising? It depends on who we’re trying to reach. If you constantly put yourself in the consumers shoes, it can help avoid the “chasing shiny object syndrome”.

LO: Right, some empathy towards what’s important and what they care about. If you’d like to share a Twitter handle, a blog or any other social destination for folks to find out about you and the work you’re doing?

CN: You can follow me @charlotteblank and please like all our Facebook pages. We have 8 Chevrolet pages and one each for Cadillac, Buick and GMC.

LO: Thanks Charlotte!

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. |
Video Interview: Social Media Marketing at GM – Charlotte Blank, Manager of Social Media | http://www.toprankblog.com

Video Interview: Social Media Marketing at GM – Charlotte Blank, Manager of Social Media

Posted on 15. Feb, 2012 by Lee Odden in Blog, interview, Online Marketing Summit, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media, Video Interviews

At the recent Online Marketing Summit in San Diego I caught up with Charlotte Blank, Manager of Social Media at General Motors to talk about digital marketing. In this short interview I asked Charlotte a few fundamental questions about digital and social media marketing related to customers:

1. How does GM segment digital marketing activities between customer acquisition and retention?

Follow up: Does GM follow a social media editorial calendar according to customer buying cycles and personas?

2. With all the shiny objects of social media in the world, how do you go about deciding what to test and what to implement?

Take a look at the video and I think you’ll be interested in the customer-centric approach GM takes with social media and how time is allocated towards new customers, activating current customers as evangelists and their approach to filtering shiny social objects.

How is your company focusing digital and social media marketing efforts towards winning new customers and engaging those you have? How do you evaluate new social technologies for marketing and communications? Do you allocate time for testing, experimentation or go with the crowd?

Interview Transcript: