MarCom Professional

Let's be honest, OK?

Nobody cares about your products and services except you and the others in your organization.

What your buyers do care about are themselves. And they care a great deal about solving their problems (and are always on the lookout for a company that can help them do so). The good news for smart marketers is that this knowledge has the potential to make you many times more successful. It may quite literally transform your business (that’s not just my opinion; many people write me to tell me so).

Buy truly understanding the market problems that your products and services solve for your buyer personas, you transform your marketing from mere product-specific, ego-centric gobbledygook that only you understand and care about into valuable information people are eager to consume and that they use to make the choice to do business with your organization. More...

I am a huge fan of interactive tools as a way to generate a World Wide Rave (when people are talking about you and your company). The best interactive tools tend to be free, are easy to use, and provide meaningful data. And when they do all those things, people talk about them and share them.

For example, HubSpot has two great tools, Website Grader and Press Release Grader. The simple and free tools have been used to grade hundreds of thousands of sites and press releases. And tons of bloggers have talked about the tools, generating thousands of inbound links.

Last week, Douglas Karr released on his Marketing Technology Blog a Tuned In Calculator. More...

I was fortunate to have taken a bunch of fiction writing classes and spent a lot of time writing fiction prior to starting this blog and writing books about marketing.

Something you learn very early in creative writing classes are the various elements of the craft like plot, dialog, characters, setting, and the like. But what I always recall as being a particularly important element in fiction is conflict.

According to Wikipedia, conflict is "a state of discord caused by the actual or perceived opposition of needs, values and interests. A conflict can be internal (within oneself) or external (between two or more individuals). More...

For an interesting use of video check out those produced by Max Deale, author of the self-published book Sold Out, So What! The Secrets that High-Priced Ticket Brokers and Scalpers DON'T want you to Know!

This excellent little book (you can read it in an hour) is for fans of concerts and sporting events and teaches the art of scoring tickets to sold out events and always sitting in the best seats in the house. I've been going to concerts since I was 15 and had accidentally discovered and used some of Deale's techniques. However, this funny and well-written little book gave me some new ways to score tickets. More...

There's been some debate recently about totally free content vs. gate content. On one side are people like me who say put your stuff out for free (my ebook The New Rules of Viral Marketing that has been downloaded around a quarter of a million times in 2008). On the other side are people like Bob Bly who believe that gated content (such as white papers that require an email address to download) is the way to go. Many people suggest a combination.

Last week I was in New York spending time with my publisher at Wiley. After work, we went to see Canadian indie band Wolf Parade. But in order to get into the proper mood for the show, we first hightailed it up to Rudy's Bar & Grill in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City. More...

I had a rare and exciting opportunity to participate as a guest on the Marketing Over Coffee podcast, with Christopher Penn and John Wall, produced in front of a live studio audience at PodCamp Boston 3.

This was really fun, not only because John and Chris are such great hosts, but because of the audience. I've been a guest on perhaps 100 telephone call-in podcasts, but this was my first time to do it in front of an audience. The live audience makes a huge difference.

It was also fun because Chris and John taught me about podcasting when I met them two years ago at PodCamp Boston 1. Both are also featured in my book The New Rules of Marketing & PR in the podcasting sections. More...

I'm often asked to critique a site, blog, YouTube video and the like. Hell, that's easy! I just say what I think. A typical top-of-mind reaction I offer might be, "Your site looks cool, but I think you're being egotistical. Write for your buyers instead by eliminating gobbledygook and jargon." (I've said this over a hundred times. Look at your site, perhaps it applies to you too.) Or I might say, "Your video is too long. Shorten it to less than two minutes." I'll admit that it's freakin' easy to act smart when its not you who is doing the work!

So here's an opportunity to test not only my thoughts and ideas but also those of social media gurus Chris Brogan and Paul Gillin. More...

Have you noticed there are a bunch of polls and research reports that ask people questions such as "Do you read blogs?" or "Do you use social media?" or "Do you go to video sharing sites?" Often the resulting data show rather small use compared to those who, say, use search engines or email.

From the perspective of the value of social media in an organization's overall marketing and PR efforts, this data is misleading and dangerous. Why? Because the data is used by social-media-resistant executives to justify sticking exclusively to the methods that worked decades ago like image advertising, direct mail, and the yellow pages. More...

If you've read my book The New Rules of Marketing & PR or spent time on my blog, you may recall that I stress the importance of "buyer personas." In fact, I believe they're one of the most fundamental aspects of great marketing. A buyer persona is distinct group potential customers, an archetypal person whom you want your marketing to reach.

Basing your work on buyer personas prevents you from sitting on your butt in your comfortable office just making stuff up, which is the cause of most ineffective marketing. Incidentally, my use of the word "buyer" applies to any organization's target customers. More...

Readers of this blog know that I am a huge fan of ebooks as a way to show the world that you're smart and worthy of doing business with. Ebooks have potential to spread your ideas far and wide. For free. My own most recent ebook, The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free, released in early 2008, has been downloaded a remarkable 250,000 times.

E-books have become a very significant medium, partly because people can instantly see the value of a product that looks like for-purchase content but can actually be downloaded for free. In my opinion, e-books should be material people want to read, compared to the dense and usually boring white paper, which our buyers feel they should read but often don't. More...