The Brains of the Outfit

It’s election time in lots of locales, and that has made for some interesting social media bedfellows, if you will.

I’ve heard more about local and state elections and referenda than I could imagine possible – or that I really care to know, to be honest. Some of the state issues are interesting, since they have bearing on the overall national agenda, but the local stuff isn’t quite so fascinating.

A case in point: I recently spoke to the Roswell, Georgia Kiwanis club on Using Social Media to Build your Business, a presentation I thought went very well, and it garnered me a few local Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and LinkedIn connections. Well, many of those folks work for the municipality, are running for public office, or are campaigning for someone who is running for public office.

I’ve heard more tweets about voting for various city council candidates in the last week than I can shake a stick at. I can’t vote for these folks. I don’t know their platforms. In many cases, I don’t know what party they represent.

I’m hoping that I’m the exception in these Tweeters follower group – but I doubt it.

One particular gentleman running for State House truly has missed the point of community-building, both off- and on-line. I met him in person at the Suwanee Business Alliance. (Great local business alliance, by the way). He came on really strong – classic politico – shaking hands, introducing himself, immediately launching into his pitch, starting with his party affiliation. I politely excused myself, letting him know that I’m not a voter in his district. I didn’t tell him that I was in general disagreement with his party’s politics. Maybe that was my mistake.

He somehow got hold of one of my business cards. I hand them out like water, so it’s not surprising. The next thing I knew I was getting his direct e-mail campaigns, he was following me on Twitter, I got a friend request from him on Facebook, he invited me to become a fan of his campaign on Facebook, and he asked to connect with me on LinkedIn. This from a guy who I politely blew off at a networking event!

Know your audience, folks. Targeting is the key, whether it’s on social media or anywhere else. You can very quickly make an enemy of someone who at worst was indifferent. I’d rather have someone not care at all about what I’m doing than actively discourage people from voting for me or buying my product.

Tweet This Post

I was sitting in a branding interview yesterday, and had a bit of surprise. The gentleman I was interviewing was one of the principals of the company, and the evangelist for the company’s services.

The thing that surprised me was this – he knew his company’s place in the industry. He actually knew and could explain their value proposition. If I had handed him a blank Bowman strategy clock, he could easily have placed his company on it. I’d be willing to bet he could have easily explained to me his positioning relative to Porter’s Five Forces.

This type of thing shouldn’t be unusual, but it is. I interview more people within more companies who know themselves well, but are lost as to their industry and position within it, especially within service industries. For example, the employee assistance program who doesn’t know their market is commoditized and how to deal with that.

Therein lies a problem. If you don’t know your industry environment, you can’t create marketing strategies to deal with that environment, and it’s easy to fall for whatever some slick ad salesman throws your way. I even catch some of my clients in that act – they’ll get a spam promising them the world, and consider it as an option, in spite of the fact we have a solid, planned, measurable marketing strategy for them that is getting results. Luckily, my clients are all smart enough to forward it to me first and ask if it’s a good idea to pursue.

Tweet This Post

We at Realize position ourselves as a value provider – bang for the buck, if you will. Of course, that means different things to different people. In product strategy, it’s generally defined as a provider who uses efficiencies to sell a high-quality product at a better price than his competitor. Services are similar – using efficiences, experience, and knowledge to provide a high-quality service at a competitive rate.

There are some pitfalls to this positioning. Using the product example, your customers may start to mistake you for a discount provider, who uses both efficiencies and lower-quality products to create rock-bottom prices on their available goods, and making up the margin differences with high volume. Strangely, the client perception that comes with this in a service industry is that you’ll provide the same level of service that you provide to others for a rock-bottom price – obviously a quick method to go out of business.

The client who tends to make this error in perception tends to be uneducated about the cost of services and production. Unfortunately, the only successful method I’ve seen for them to figure it out is experience in purchasing services.

Print production is a great example. Explaining the complexities of the different types of print production, the vagaries of color matching, and types of paper stock seems relatively fruitless in many cases. The only thing the client sees is that they can get it online at (insert your favorite online press here) for about a third of what I am willing to quote them for good quality production with one of my print vendors.

Buying consulting services is no different. I say I can do it for price X, and a competitor says they can do it for half of X. But invariably, they’re not getting a comparable service, and the value created is far less than had they made the initial investment in a value provider.

Tweet This Post