For anyone who knows my work history, you know that I spent many years in the traditional marketing world. It’s only been since my switch to social media marketing two years ago that I’ve fully realized a dirty little secret about myself: I was an arrogant marketer. As I look back, I know I’m guilty of these five traits of an arrogant marketer: 

1. Arrogant marketers assume consumers are interested in their products or services.
2. Arrogant marketers assume consumers care about whatever they have to say.
3. Arrogant marketers don’t care that they completely interrupt people’s lives.
4. Arrogant marketers tell consumers their product or service is the best even when they know it isn’t.
5. Arrogant marketers are willing to sit back while bad marketing ideas are discussed and ineffective campaigns are created. They know better but remain silent.

I’m guilty of all of these.

Why this post? Why now?
I’ve been chewing on this post for a long time and feel like it’s time to finally write it because I recognized the arrogance in my own marketing approach and I believe other marketers are guilty as well. I don’t hope to convince you if you’re guilty of arrogant marketing. I only hope you’ll realize yourself if you are. My desire is that this post will challenge at least one marketer, PR pro, business owner, or organizational influencer to reconsider why he or she approaches marketing the way they do.

I should probably give a few disclaimers here too. First, this has nothing to do with former employers, clients, or projects I’ve participated in. It has everything to do with me and the kind of marketer I chose to be in several jobs I had and projects I participated in.

Second, this isn’t necessarily about traditional marketing verses social media marketing. It’s about a mindset and approach to marketing. For me, the switch from traditional to social media revealed the arrogance because arrogant marketers can get called out and/or fail more easily in social media. There are traditional marketers who aren’t arrogant and social media marketers who are. It’s not about the tools, techniques, or strategies as much as the fundamental mindset upon which everything else is built.

Apologies
Since I’ve confessed to being guilty of the things listed above, I want to apologize a bit more specifically:

• To book buyers across the country, I apologize for subjecting you to ads that didn’t provide any value at all. I participated in the development of many vague and meaningless ads that I knew you wouldn’t pay attention to.  
• To the millions of people who were on a dirty email list that a client purchased, I apologize for standing by while you received one more spam email in your inbox.
• To the people of Houston, Texas, I apologize for subjecting you to radio, television, direct mail, and billboards that you really didn’t care about. You couldn’t avoid it and that was on purpose. I’m sorry.
• To former clients, coworkers, and bosses, I apologize for being quiet when I disagreed with your campaign or strategy. You were paying me to tell you what I thought and I didn’t do it all the time. It may not have changed anything, but maybe it would have. Now we’ll never know. 
• To several authors I worked with, I apologize for developing or going along with marketing plans that didn’t help your sales or your brand. We could have spent that money many other ways that would have been more effective. 
• To the people in a small New England town, I apologize that you were subjected to years of loud, unhelpful, annoying marketing campaigns and I didn’t do much to fix it. It’s what the client asked for and that’s all that mattered. I’m sorry.

Now what?
Well, I feel better for one. I’m glad this is out there. I’m glad I’m aware of this and have been working on being a less arrogant marketer for the last two years despite the temptation to be drawn back in because it’s all I knew.

I also can’t help but wonder if someone else needs to confess or apologize for being an arrogant marketer. If you do, feel free to put it in the comments. If you happen to be a blogger and do a post about it, please let me know or post the link in the comments. Who knows what a few former arrogant marketers can do to change things around them?

It’s been a little more than two weeks since I posted something other than a video of the week here on the blog. I had planned to take some time off for the holidays, but a semi-serious back injury before New Years delayed everything longer than expected. Thankfully, my back is on the mend and I’m ready to restart blogging again.

If there’s anything I’ve learned about blogging for almost three years now, it’s that these ebbs and flows in posts are nothing to worry about. I used to get nervous if I got way off my blogging schedule and going two weeks without blogging would have been unthinkable. I’m not sure if I was more nervous about losing readers or more nervous that I wouldn’t know how to restart…or maybe it was a little of both. I have a different view on it now. 

If good content is really the key to blogging success (and I believe it is), then any readers to your blog will rediscover you after a break. It may take a while to get your readership back to where it used to be, but that’s all right. You’re probably a little rusty anyway. 

There are three things to remember when you restart your blog. This is where I’m starting today as well.

1. Start with something easy for you. Whatever is really easy for you to talk about (and fits in with your blog content) is the best topic for your restart. Just pick a topic that fits your blog topic(s) but is really easy for you to talk about. You just want to get back in the flow of blogging right now and the biggest barrier to getting restarted can be finding something to talk about again. Start with something you know really well and is easy to write about.

2. Start with a short post. My wife ran a half-marathon a few weeks ago. That’s 13.1 miles. She took a week off and then ran only a few miles her first time back out. That’s how you should restart your blog. Don’t feel like you have to restart with a long post. A short one is just enough to get you going again. In fact, all the posts you’ll do for the first week or two may need to be short just to get you back. If that’t the case for you don’t worry about it. It’s more important that you post something good and short than something long and meaningless because you feel like you need to make up for lost time. 

3. Start with consistency. The worst thing that can happen is that your restart your blog and post a time or two and then take another break. Readers will accept a break. They understand everyone needs a break from time to time. When you’re ready to return, however, be ready to return to your previous blog schedule. If you’re not quite sure you’re ready to restart, it would be better to delay the restart another week or two rather than post once and let it sit again for several weeks. Readers have a sense of a blogger’s post frequency so don’t toy with them. The break isn’t what will hurt you, a bad restart will.

I remember this Tears for Fears song and video, but I like this literal version a lot better. Seems to make more sense this way.

Every year the Chipmunks Christmas song gets stuck in my head for a few days. I’ll hear it on the radio or in a store or something like that, and once it’s in, it’s in for a while. I don’t know what it is about this song but it’s just so darn catchy…so here it is for you too.

If you have read this blog for any length of time or heard me speak about social media marketing, you know that I wholeheartedly believe that content is the best marketing strategy for using social media tools. Once you know that about me you almost always hear me talk about the Old McDonald approach to creating really, really valuable content. If you’re not familiar with Old McDonald and how he helps you with your content here is is:

Old McDonald In A Nutshell
Really valuable content is content that the people you want to reach will find valuable (rather than content you find valuable) so you want to focus on content for them and the Old McDonald approach (E-I-E-I-O) is to use at least one of these five things with your content:

E - Entertain (comedy, drama, mystery, etc.)

I - Inspire (make an emotional connection)

E - Educate (how to do something, what to do, what not to do, etc.)

I - Inform (news, stats, updates, ets.)

O - Outrage (knowing how to use controversy strategically)

Common Question
I’ve gotten some really good feedback about EIEIO over the last year. One question people usually ask has something to do with combining these values. They want to know if it’s preferable to keep content in a single category or if it’s all right to combine them into something like content that’s both entertaining and educational.

I don’t think it matters because so much of good content comes down to simply beginning with a focus on what the people you want to reach will find valuable. If boring, dry, static data would be the kind of information that would be valuable to the people you want to reach, then there may be no need to try to be overly entertaining with it. It has much more to do with the people you want to reach than with what you think will be fun to do. You won’t go wrong when you focus on them. 

Where to Start
If you’re ready to get started creating valuable content but don’t know where to begin, I suggest you start with educational or informative content. Those two can be some of the quickest ways to show value to the people you want to reach, particularly if they don’t know who you are yet. Once you develop a following, you can branch out into something that may be more purely entertaining, inspirational, or controversial.

Information and education are sometimes the quickest ways to show value too. Entertainment and inspiration, for instance, depend more on people’s personalities and tastes, so if you don’t know the people you want to reach really well, you can add the most value to them the quickest by going the informational or educational route first. 

The bottom line is that you want to start adding value as soon as possible. People choose to give their attention to the things they find valuable. If you will shift your marketing strategy to focus on value, you will get more attention from the right people for longer periods of time.

A few days ago I gave a presentation about social media marketing here in Nashville. During the Q&A time, someone asked about using Facebook as a promotional tool. She said Facebook had been working all right for a while, but now it wasn’t going so well. As she explained further, she said her organization had essentially been using Facebook to post news, press releases, and other information the people would find helpful. Now, however, she isn’t sure what to do with it because the group has stopped growing and there’s no interaction among the people.

This is actually a pretty common question to a pretty common problem, so here’s my answer: there are two groups of tools, social media tools and social networking tools, and they are meant to be used differently so use them for their intended purposes:

• Social media tools like podcasts, blogs, online video, etc. are primarily for creating and distributing content.
• Social networking tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace, on the other hand, are primarily for connecting and conversation.

It’s common to mix these up like in the example above. The lady was using Facebook, a social networking tool, to create content rather than to facilitate conversations and interactions with like-minded people. She wasn’t really interested in conversations and connections, so Facebook was the wrong tool for her strategy.

One thing to note here is that in new media marketing, content and conversations are very closly intertwined. So whereas you lead with content if you choose a social media strategy, you don’t abandon conversation. You simply don’t lead with conversation. Good conversation and connections on the heels of good content are a very powerful thing. That’s why it’s important to comment in blogs. It’s the conversation aspect of that particular social media tool.

The bottom line is this: if you choose a social media tool for your marketing strategy, lead with content and then follow up and continue to connect with people in conversations there. If you choose a social networking tool, lead with conversations and connections, and then create good content to keep the good conversations going.

This Christmas when you have a little extra time on your hands, don’t forget you only need to look in your refrigerator to find all the instruments necessary to make a sweet holiday sound.

I was listening to a Q&A session with Seth Godin on the Marketing Over Coffee podcast today and Seth said something really interesting. He said radio was built for marketers. So were televisions, newspapers, and magazines. Without marketers and advertisers, these mediums would be finished. They would go out of business. The Internet, however, wasn’t built for marketers. It was built for communications.

This got me thinking about why good marketers can struggle with how to use the Internet for marketing. It’s not that they don’t know how to do their job. It’s that they don’t know how to do their job with a medium that wasn’t built for their job. I’ve seen really good old media marketers try to apply their expertise online and it fails. It just wouldn’t work.

The Internet is a different animal altogether now more than ever in the social-media-web-2.0-new-media kind of world the Internet has turned into. You must engage differently. You must add value. You must think communications rather than marketing because marketing will happen from the communications rather than communicating only to do marketing.

You can’t think old and do new. You can think old and do old or you can think new and do new, but that’s it. Those are your options.

In my experience, most bloggers don’t think about their post titles very much. They’re so focused on the post itself that the title for the post gets lost along the way, but one of the most important things a blogger can do is to write an concise and informative blog post title.

Blog readers are increasingly scanning blog posts and the title is the headline by which they choose whether or not they’re going to start reading. I recommend bloggers summarize their entire post in the title. If you do, you give yourself the best chance to lure the reader in. With that in mind, I realized tonight that TLC has taken this approach with many of their shows. Here’s a list of several current programs:

• 17 Kids and Counting
• Lottery Changed My Life
• This is Why You’re Single
• Bringing Home Baby
• Crazy Christmas Lights
• I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant
• Girl Who Never Grew
• Life As A Giant

Just look at this list. You may have never seen any of these shows, but almost instantly you have an idea of what the show is going to be about. This what you want your blog post titles to do. If the person knows what they’re going to find on the post, the only remaining barrier is for the person to decide whether the content is relevant to them.

One of my clients is the Threads brand at LifeWay. This week we created a little Christmas video that was a lot of fun. The Threads team is a great group of people who are creating very solid products. They are a pleasure to work with and you’ll see a lot of the team in this video. Enjoy.