April 2011

Apr 2011

20

Taking risks in the trade show exhibit halls

by Allen Voivod

A close friend of ours, who’s a product manager for a corporation with offices on five continents, got us thinking about trade shows again.

This friend is on the road for about one show every month, in places you might expect – Las Vegas, Florida, Chicago, and so on – manning the same booth, next to the same competitors, scanning similar badges into similar databases, and passing on those leads to similar sales teams with sound-alike messaging.

This is absolutely not a knock on our friend’s company, or any of their competitors. Not exactly. It’s more about the opportunities that companies like these often miss out on, because of the way risk has been removed from the process of business in general, and from trade shows in this specific example.

Let’s face it, we’re human. We get into routines, into habits, into ruts. In the corporate world, routine often gets rewarded and institutionalized. It’s comfortable, knowing what to expect, and good performance often relies on routines, aka “processes,” from how products move through assembly lines and supply chains, to how financial transactions are securely handled.

Routine has a dark side, too. Blind obedience to the “status quo” is the enemy of innovation, opens business up to competitive attacks, and deadens the employee soul. Heck, Wall Street peeps get unhappy when a public company’s performance doesn’t meet “expectations” – even if the performance is better than expected, stock prices can dip because it’s seen as “uncertainty.”

When you’re stuck in a routine, the opportunities to take risks, to realize bigger rewards (and yes, to fail sometimes, too) tend to disappear.

Trade shows are particularly vulnerable to routine. The cost of the physical booth is high. The cost of exhibiting is high. The cost of sponsorships is high. It’s no wonder a company’s gut reaction is to routine-ize its trade show presence as much as possible.

I read a great post by King Content yesterday, defining and contrasting owned, paid, and earned media, and though it’s written about online content, this quote applies equally to trade shows, and the organizers trying to think of new way to get conference attendees to wander through exhibit halls:

Paid media is no longer simply about buying media space or ad campaigns, it’s about paying for the most creative campaign you can think of and using that to turn from paid [media] to earned [media].

If anything qualifies as “paid media,” it’s a trade show booth. So, if you have anything to do with trade show planning for your organization, be it at the Bellagio in Vegas or banquet space rented out by your local Chamber of Commerce, ask yourself what your business can do to get people talking.

Do it within the confines of your existing booth plan if you must. But for the next show, the next month, or the next year, take it farther. Use other shows in other industries to help you break out of your own industry’s mold.

So, we’d love to know – what’s one risky thing you’d love to try? What would get great results, if only the powers that be could be open to it?

Apr 2011

18

Got limits? Add more of them.

by Allen Voivod

20110417-094843.jpgTime, money, resources. All finite, all limited. All constraining what we do, AND what we think we can do.

As humans, we have a habit of accepting the limitations on life and business as presented to us – by the world, by the media, by your to-do list, by the people standing in line next to you at the store, by your mother.

To get a feeling of some semblance of control, sometimes we put even tighter limits on ourselves than we need to. If we tell ourselves what our limits are, as long as they’re within the borders of what the rest of world thinks are “acceptable” limits, then we avoid drama and conflict. We’re not pushing anyone’s boundaries, least of all our own.

So, rather than fight (too hard) against your own nature – if, indeed, it’s your nature to abide by limits – why not roll with it?

Think you don’t have time for getting a Facebook page started, a press release written, a new workshop designed? What DO you have time for? Create the Page, but don’t publish it today. Get the boilerplate for the end of your press releases updated. Brainstorm a list of potential workshop topic areas.

Can’t do it all? You’re not alone. So instead, just take the first couple steps. Stay within your limits, as long as you’re doing something inside those walls!

And don’t be surprised if you start getting some momentum, and you keep going. That’s how barriers get broken.

Apr 2011

8

Free Webinar: The Power of Social Influence – How to Find It, Use It and Build Your Own

by Allen Voivod

(Here are the high points about the free webinar we’re doing in partnership with Meltwater Group later this month, and here’s the link to reserve your seat!)

Everything’s fragmented these days. Millions of websites. Thousands of media channels. Hundreds of social networking platforms. So many people talking, so much noise, and so many eager people searching for the information they need from people they trust.

In the face of an increasingly complex online space, how do you know who really matters to you and your brand, business, or organization? In this free webinar, you’ll discover:

–How the art and practice of influence has changed over the years

–The basic steps of influencer identification

–Automated tools that help you identify influencers

–Keys to becoming an influencer in your own industry or niche space

–Action steps to implementing influencer strategy and interaction in your own business or organization

Join Allen Voivod, co-owner of Epiphanies, Inc. and Margaret Donnelly, Director of Marketing for Meltwater Buzz (formerly JitterJam) for this free webinar. If you can’t make it live, be sure to register so you receive access to the recording.

Apr 2011

6

Canned responses plus deleted apologies equal bad customer service

by Allen Voivod

As I’ve been reading the emails that keep piling up about the email database breach at Epsilon, I couldn’t help but notice that they all followed a very distinct pattern.

Here’s an example from TiVo, and one from Brookstone. They all hit the same bullets:

  1. Informing you that the breach occurred.
  2. Emphasizing that only your name and email address were compromised (no financial data).
  3. Expressing how seriously they take your privacy.
  4. Warning you that spam, malware, and phishing may result.
  5. Regretting the incident and any inconvenience.

When you start to read more and more of them, you start to realize that it looks very much like all the affected companies were given a template, vetted by the legal and PR teams at Epsilon, and told to tweak as needed to suit their audiences.

Really, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. We should all be jaded enough by now to expect this kind of command-and-control response, even in the increasingly customer-centric Web 2.o world.

But I can’t help it – it’s kind of shocking that what we as consumers are getting out of this Epsilon email database breach are 50+ canned email responses that look almost exactly the same.

What kind of message does that really send, about how much these companies actually care about what happens?

One notable exception is Best Buy, which is the only one I’ve seen so far to include an aggressive statement like this:

A rigorous assessment by Epsilon determined that no other information is at risk. We are actively investigating to confirm this.

Best Buy almost went to the top of my trust list with that one. “Almost,” I say, because Best Buy also deleted the word “apologize” from its mostly canned email.

And they’re not the only ones. Here’s what must be the full “regret” statement, via TiVo:

We regret this has taken place and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Meanwhile, here’s Best Buy’s “regret” statement:

We regret this has taken place and for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Wow. Just, wow! Brookstone and Robert Half International also chose to delete the one word “apologize” from the same canned sentence. Hilton didn’t include the above sentence, in any form at all. Since when did being in business mean never having to say your sorry?

Apology is one of the most human things anyone could do. Chris Brogan puts the overall idea of human business perfectly: “A human business is one that puts relationships and people first. Human business cares about the lifespan of the business relationship and not simply transactions.”

By deleting the word “apologize,” these companies are sending the message that they don’t see us as human, and aren’t willing to interact with us humanely.

And canned, inhuman responses will equal people voting with their feet, more now than ever before.

Apr 2011

5

Epsilon email database breach: More proof that email is a dead man walking

by Allen Voivod

The question isn’t whether you received an email in the last few days from a Fortune 500 company telling you about an email security breach. The question is, how many did you get?

We’re at six and counting – Best Buy, Brookstone, Hilton Hotels, Disney, TiVo, and Robert Half International. Actually, I’m surprised we haven’t received more yet, consider the expanding list of compromised companies.

The email marketing firm Epsilon claims in their official press release that “the affected clients are approximately two percent of total clients.” Sounds minimal when you put it that way, right?

Well, to paraphrase Mark Twain paraphrasing Benjamin Disraeli, there are three kinds of lies: (1) Lies, (2) damn lies, and (3) statistics. So let’s get to the inflammatory number: “Tens of millions” of email addresses were exposed in the breach of Epsilon’s systems.

Email, R.I.P. The end is nigh. Why would anyone want to bother with email anymore, especially in light of the following warning, variations of which were included in all the emails we received:

As a result of this incident, it is possible that you may receive spam email messages, emails that contain links containing computer viruses or other types of computer malware, or emails that seek to deceive you into providing personal or credit card information.

Really, email? Just what I need – a communications tool that makes it super simple for every con artist in creation to put data directly onto my computer. So what if I have junk filters, right? I’m still receiving them. They’re still going into Outlook, regardless. Good grief.

This is exactly why, in our own company, we set up email addresses specifically for our opt-ins to email lists. It’s because when nonsense like this happens – as it often and ever increasingly does – we can drop the email addresses at will and solve our spam and phishing problems quickly.

Most people in corporate America can’t do that. And most people with web-based email addresses from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. will find it to be too much trouble to get a new email address.

So, if you think 80% of all US email traffic being spam is bad, just you wait.

Or, take action. Set up a disposable email account for your subscriptions, or just get off email altogether and use Facebook and an RSS reader to get your updates from the companies with which you want to stay connected. That way, the messages you receive will be the ones you wanted to get in the first place.

You know it’s not going to get better with email. It’s only going to get worse.

Apr 2011

1

Play.

by Allen Voivod

On most days of the year, Google is as boring as all get out. Sure, they swap out their logo from time to time, and that’s nice. Otherwise, they’re the equivalent of HAL9000 – cold, unblinking, and so simplified as to be nearly maddening.

Then April Fool’s Day comes around.

Founded in September 1998, the company started creating April Fool’s hoaxes in 2000, which have only become more prolific and elaborate over the years. 2011′s main prank is a doozy – claiming to use your webcam and spatial recognition technology to create Gmail Motion – email you control with your body.

The dry/serious/hint-of-coolness with which all Google instructional copy is written, when applied to jokes like this, or the swap with Topeka, or the Moon base, or the search-optimizing beverage, makes the gag even funnier.

That’s not the point of this post, however.

The point is, Google would be just a commodity to me if it weren’t for the fact that the company, and its people, make PLAY part of what they do.

If they didn’t play, then I’d just use them to search, and do keyword research, and if something better came along, I’d drop ‘em without thinking twice.

Because they play, even if something better comes along, I’m still going to give them the chance to do better before I take my business somewhere else.

It’s so, so, SOOOO incredibly easy for us as consumers these days to swap service providers, change allegiances, switch loyalties. And that’s good! We’re empowered. We have the control. We can spread the word, good and bad, farther and wider than ever.

From the business side, it’s a new challenge. When customers and clients can vote with their feet this quickly and easily, loyalty becomes one of the most powerful customer retention and recruitment ideas at your disposal.

How do you encourage loyalty? Make human connections. Make people feel. As Donald O’Connor sang (and danced in an elaborate physical comedy master class), “Make ‘Em Laugh.”

It works for giants like Google. It works for us, too. A company recently contacted us to talk partnership potential, inspired partly because of a series of videos we helped create for a client, wherein I wore a long red-headed wig with my beard and got the smackdown laid on me for doing environmentally-unfriendly things:

When people ask us what our target market is, we don’t say things like, “Such and such job title,” “this or that industry,” “how much or how little in annual revenues.” We say, “Our target market is people who understand the value of play.”

That doesn’t mean we’re in the business of creating comedy routines, and you don’t have to be, either. It just means that you have to be willing to make this whole business-ball-of-wax fun. Not just for us. For you. For your clients and customers. Your partners and vendors. Create the ties that bind through good humor, lightening up, and heck, even adding a dose of honest-to-goodness joy into the world.

Get it?