“The nut” arrived in the mail, as is, without a box, for a deep visual impact. The postal carrier was so impressed, she had to stop in and hand it to me personally. Why? Because “the nut” is a coconut!—a three-dimensional fruit sent to gain my attention. And that it did.

Hand-written quotes from numerous famous and influential people cover “the nut”. Karl Schweitzer, president and founder of MobiRez, a client, colleague, and friend, sent me “the nut” to honor our relationship and to make an impression. For him, it was the perfect marketing device.

Consider, for a moment, the effectiveness of your marketing if you sent your version of “the nut” to tightly targeted prospects. It most definitely would be remembered; people would stop to admire and inspect it. It could even become the buzz of the office. On thing is for sure—it would make an impact.

Imagine sending these three-dimensional mailings to your current clients, to thank them. Karl wanted to further solidify what was an already sound relationship. That he accomplished.

Three-dimensional marketing. At a marketing conference a few years ago, one pundit told us of the value of three-dimensional marketing. “We’re partial to sending blocks of wood,” he said. I asked my Art Director what she thought of that idea. She said simply, “out of context”. She continued. “A block of wood has nothing to do with what we do, there is no connection, no context. What would be more effective is a 3-D mailer with a direct connection to who we are and what our prospects gain from collaborating with us.”

And so this is the beauty of Karl sending “the nut”. His office is in Honolulu, on the island of O‘ahu, in Hawai‘i. Karl’s mailing succeeds on a number of fronts. First, the islands are teeming with coconuts, so there is a direct connection to Hawai‘i. Second, Karl is in the business of attracting tourists to visit Hawai‘i, again and again—“the nut” gives recipients tangible evidence of the islands. Third, Karl’s very existence exemplifies the motivational and inspirations messages of such pithy quotes. With “the nut” being covered with some of these quotes, it not only provides a connection to him, but more importantly, gives something of value and something to consider to the recipient. There is a personal connection; and it is common knowledge that such a connection powerfully motivates action.

More evidence of success. Earlier this year, I judged an international marketing and design competition. One entry that quickly caught the judges’ attention: a three-dimensional mailer from a computer peripheral manufacturer touting the benefits of their newest device. The entry was pyramid-shaped, its top cut off, on a square foundation.

Unfolding the sides one by one revealed a simple key—a powerful image, metaphorically and physically. The key tied directly into the marketing message and to the printer’s name. The key enabled prospects to receive a free demonstration, on their own networks, to try first-hand the benefits of this new enterprise-wide printer.

I’m all for innovative design. In marketing, however, an innovative design that fails to market is worthless. The marketers who submitted the piece stated their response was over three times higher than any previous marketing effort. Three times! Certainly well worth the extra cost in design, construction, and mailing.

In today’s world of multiple messages from multiple streams, getting through to a prospect is indeed a daunting task. And while the world continues to focus on electronic communication—and rightly so—perhaps some consideration can be given to a stand-out marketing device, one that actually puts something tangible into the hands of your prospect. What a welcome change that can be.

The quotes on “the nut”.

“The important thing is not to stop questioning.” –Albert Einstein

“The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret to success.” –Henry Ward Beecher

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” –Albert Einstein

“The way to succeed is to double your error rate.” –Thomas Watson

“If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it.” –William Arthur Ward

“I owe my success to the fact that I did not allow my schooling to interfere with my education.” –Mark Twain

“The most important key to success is to know how to get along with others.” –Theodore Roosevelt

“In the end it is not the years in your life that count. It is the life in your years.” –Abraham Lincoln

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest your reap, but by the seeds you plant.” –Robert Louis Stevenson

“If you realize how powerful your thoughts are, you would never think a negative thought.” –Peace Pilgrim

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.” –Buddha

[Note: This post first appeared as one of my position papers: The Nut as a Marketing Tool]

—Rich Maggiani

Poor communication costs business millions of dollars every single day. Most executives and managers understand this, yet they don’t realize how big a part they play in this miscommunication.

Financial statements do not carry a line item for poor communication, although they should since, with a little effort, it can quickly be quantified.

Communication is vital to the success of your organization. To be most effective, communication must circulate and reach all levels, not just the core.

Different forms of poor communication. Here are but a few:

• Long, unproductive, numbing meetings without a clear purpose or agenda, often reaching no conclusions, result in lost productivity as well as the collective time of everyone attending.
• Poor documentation neglects to mention the purpose of the software or hardware and only explains how it works. Users, however, don’t care how it works; they want to know how to use it!
• Uninspired selling skills and anemic sales presentations showing no interest or understanding of a prospect’s needs, result in missed opportunities and lost sales.

• Rambling, cryptic, and incoherent emails that are misunderstood or ignored, result in wasted time. Often (up to 50% of the time) an email’s tenor is incorrectly perceived, simply because body language cannot be analyzed and tone of voice not perceived; this results in hurt feelings, ill will, and inaction.
• Distracted managers who simply do not or cannot truly listen alienate staff and lower morale. Staff members who realize they are not being listened to and simply patronized, themselves stop communicating.
• Staff members from different generations or gender lack a basic understanding of each other, their communication styles, and preferences. Incomprehensible and inappropriate statements are commonplace. Baby boomers (thinking it’s still the ’70s) and today’s generation (who were not even alive then) simply do not share the same communication foundation.

Poor communication squanders time, wastes effort, erodes loyalty, and loses business.

Squandering time. Poor communication simply takes longer to process and understand, if understanding can be attained. Unnecessary questions are asked, discussions are needlessly lengthy, the communication is recreated, only to be foisted again on a wary audience.

Here’s an example of an email received by a colleague: “The company may need the more accurate methodology since it’s the standard approach employed of the more approximate method that may result in an estimate that underestimates and not on-target estimates.” After a lengthy conversation with the sender, my colleague’s client rewrote the email. Final squandered time for one email: six hours.

Wasting effort. My bank’s CEO recently sent every customer a letter explaining the bank’s checking account overdraft policy: five dense paragraphs. The policy was more onerous than the current overdraft protection plan. Many customers didn’t appreciate the change and called to protest, inundating the bank. The customer service representatives explained why the letter was misleading and inaccurate. As a result, the CEO planned to rewrite and resend the letter. The CEO’s effort fell prey to the 30% of business letters that initially fail.

Eroding loyalty. According to an Accenture study, American consumers returned $13.8 billion in electronics in 2007; Europeans returned $11.5. That’s over $25 billion. Between 60%–85% had nothing wrong; that’s between $15.2 and $21.5 billion in perfectly functional equipment returned. Why? Confusing interfaces, features difficult to access, no customer education, weak documentation were overriding factors—all issues that superb communication could solve. $25 billion! That’s a lot of lost loyalty.

Losing business. The presentation was wonderful, beautiful slides, expertly delivered—all about the expertise of the company who was leading the proposal. Unfortunately, the state agency wanted to know how the company would solve the agency’s problem and support their budget. Instead, the agency got egotistical fluff. The agency, rightly, awarded the contract to another firm; the company came in “second”.

How big a cost? Poor communication cost Merck $253 million after losing their Vioxx trial. Why? The jury was befuddled by Merck’s scientific explanations.

Positive results. Thoughtful, effective communication delivers unparalleled benefits to both you and your audience. Effective communication reaps positive results: increased market valuation and stockholder value; greater employee commitment, involvement, retention, and morale; and stronger customer loyalty. All of which saves you—and makes you—money.

How much is poor communication costing you?

–Rich Maggiani

The Buyers Guide section lists companies that provide a specific product or service; it’s organized into several helpful sections. The Consultant Directory lists over 600 professional technical communicators, all of whom are just an email or a phone call away; many are just a Web site click away. (We are listed on page 53.)

Research has demonstrated that clear technical communication created by professionals who understand the needs of their audiences — your customers among them — return solid benefits: greater customer satisfaction, less technical support calls, increased sales, and fewer returns.

Do you want to know how a technical communicator differs from a technical writer? Go to page 7. Then go to page 9 to learn about the value that technical communication can bring your company. The return-on-investment (ROI) is clear.

The best part of all: the Directory is free! Just go to http://www.stc.org/ and click the link on STC’s home page.

–Rich Maggiani

An increasing percentage of the tweets you receive are spam. Twitter is especially vulnerable, given its inherent automation. Anyone can easily follow tens of thousands of people, and then gain a large percentage of followers in return. An easy, ready market for spam from lurid “marketers”.

What does Twitter spam look like? Twitter spam can take many forms. Legitimate companies spam when they endlessly promote their products through dummy Twitter accounts. These accounts often bear no resemblance to the products they pitch. Con artists attempt to shift your money and to gain your identity through a series of shady financial transactions. You are probably wary of these: “Help me access my dead uncle’s $20 million from a backward third-world country and receive a 15% fee.” Still, a small percent click through.

Many times, spam tweets are sent by members with few followers yet following as many as possible. This should be your first tip-off when someone starts to follow you. These people send tweets with blind tiny URLs linked to those click-here-if-you-are-18-years-or-older sites — except that requirement is frequently omitted. These can easily be identified by the busty, cleavage-popping, young lady’s photo on the account.

Then there are the “See how I got 3,000 followers in one afternoon” spammers. Another come-on: “I can show you how to make $1,000,000 by tomorrow afternoon by following this simple method. No, really I can!” Hair removal treatment for women garners a good share of spam tweets. You get the idea.

The quality of tweets. Pear Analytics, a products and services firm based in San Antonio, Texas, conducted a study of tweets. Over a two week period last month, they sampled the Twitter stream every 30 minutes from 11 AM to 5 PM for 10 days. They then organized this sampling of 2,000 tweets into six categories:

“Pointless babble”, 40.55%. Described in the study as the “I am eating a sandwich” tweets. These are the kind of tweets that blindly follow Twitter’s original query, “What are you doing now?” Let’s be honest though: who cares?

“Conversational”, 37.55%. That immediate dialogue, questions, answers, replies, and back and forth better suited for instant messaging. Again, who cares other than the two conversing, and even then…?

“Pass along value”, 8.7%. Retweets passed along from other Twitter members that actually might have some value.

“Self promotion”, 5.85%. Tweets that market the member, generally about products, services, demos, or the companies themselves. Actually, not that large a percentage.

“Spam”, 3.75%. The unwanted tweets you hoped never to receive.

“News”, 3.60%. Generally, these are re-tweets from mainstream or alternative media sources. As one wag stated, “It’s sad that news tweets are more rare than spam.”

What to make of all this? Here’s one thought: the vast majority of tweets — 81.85%, the total of “pointless babble”, “conversational”, and “spam” — are virtually worthless. Adding “self promotion” to that total gets 87.7%, although this category could also contain valuable information depending on your point of view. That means that a mere 12.3% of tweets, between “pass along value” and “news”, contain worthwhile information. Thus, for the sake of argument, one could conclude that approximately seven out of eight tweets are spam or spam-like. That represents a lot of time sifting through your personal twitter stream to garner some real usefulness and value.

What you can do. First, Twitter has been especially proactive in identifying spam accounts. In late July, Twitter simply deleted accounts that automatically follow people. They called it “Correcting follower and following counts”. As a result, counts dropped on many accounts, some precipitously. You can add to this protection by reducing the number of accounts you follow. First, don’t automatically click to follow everyone who follows you. Take the time to check out followers before following them. Block them if you want. If you think they are spammers, don’t send them a direct message or retweet them. Instead, follow the official Twitter spam account: type “spam” into Find People (the account from Twitter HQ uses a Spam can as its photo); click the account’s Follow button. Report suspected spammers to this @spam account. Go to the account’s home page for more tips on thwarting spammers.

As a final resort, consider ticking the ‘Protect my tweets’ check box under Settings/Account. You must then approve anyone who attempts to follow you.

Appreciate the point of Twitter: rapid, immediate communication that enhances your social media experience and educates, entertains, and informs. Anything less than that is unacceptable.

–Rich Maggiani

With your social media goals set, measure your progress to ensure you are on the correct path. To continue with our travel analogy, after being on your journey for awhile, check your map, gauge your progress, consider a different route, a better route, or perhaps even test an intriguing path that appeals to you.

What most matters are the people you meet along the way — you must engage them and influence them to believe in you, to travel with you, to support you. In other words, you want to influence this audience to embrace your brand, embrace your products and services, and ultimately become your customers.

Traditional corporate communication is dead. You cannot do this with traditional corporate speak, the whitewashed prose and polished text that you have traditionally been written for your web site, marketing materials, press releases, and other corporate communiqué. You must engage your audience, entertain them, invite them in, and ask them to participate. It’s then, and only then, that you gain a community that supports and promotes your brand, with its resulting positive effect on sales, profitability, market share, and valuation.

You no longer control your brand. You must fully realize that you are no longer in charge of your brand.

Where once you controlled the message, now you can only influence the message. Think about that for a moment. You do not control your brand. Anybody, and every body, has the ability, literally at their fingertips through the myriad of social media — Twitter, blogs, YouTube, email, texting, forums — to publish their thoughts and opinions of your brand. And there is nothing — absolutely nothing — you can do to stop it.

You must engage and influence. The only thing you can do, and this is the crux of your social media efforts, is to influence the behavior and opinions of your community (and by extension, their communities) to be positive about your brand. Your social media efforts must be personable, real, truthful, appealing, entertaining, but more importantly — human (which is the main reason why our blog is entitled Toward Humanity).

This kind of engagement represents a complete shift in your communication strategy. This is persuasion of a different yet similar sort: to influence your audience to speak for you. It is a core component of your brand. It builds your community who in turn, build a positive and stellar impression of your brand.

That is why you set social media goals, so that you can test your efforts against these goals, evaluate how the journey is progressing, determine whether to stay the course or change routes, even alter your ultimate destination if that is necessary: essentially, to adjust, be agile, and be flexible. In this way, you come full circle in your social media journey.

One of the truest tests of how well you are influencing the greater community is by seeing what they are saying about you, either proactively or reactively. And then, how you are responding to it. Let’s look at two examples.

How not to respond: Domino’s. You’ve probably seen it by now — after all, millions have in the course of a couple of days — the YouTube video (now removed) of two Domino’s employees demonstrating how they “creatively” and unsanitarily assemble a simple submarine sandwich. After watching their video, you wouldn’t want to eat their creation.

Yet while the acts of these two employees were clearly disgusting, their video was engaging: they talked to the camera and connected with their audience as only eye-to-eye contact can. As a result, Domino’s suffered a hugs backlash of angry and disengaged customers. Their sales precipitously dropped.

After deservedly firing the two employees, Domino’s posted a YouTube video from President Patrick Doyle. He blathered corporate speak for two minutes, looking off-screen while reading from a prompter, never once looking at the camera. His voice fluctuated and was emphatic at points, yet this response was bland, flat, and clearly not engaging. His response would have been more effective if only he looked directly into the camera, spoke from memory, curbed the corporate speak, and talked to us as humans.

The better response: Motrin. In an advertisement (print and video) aimed at increasing sales, Motrin directly intimated how physically painful it is for new moms to carry their newborn in a sling. Mothers everywhere were outraged with Motrin for making this connection, incensed that this joyful union between mother and baby was reduced to simple pain. Over the next two days, moms responded with thousands of tweets (using the #MotrinMoms hashtag) and numerous YouTube videos, including one clever parody, calling for a boycott on Motrin products.

Motrin’s response: They stopped running the video ads, wrote an immediate apology, followed in four days with another apology. They owned up to their mistake, said they were sorry for offending moms, and stated they learned their lesson and that they were listening. A human, engaging response. The furor ended three days after it began.

–Rich Maggiani

Engaging social media to promote your company is similar to taking a long trip in your car. You must take these four steps:

1. The vehicle you are taking: one you know how to drive.

2. Where you are going: your destination or goal.

3. How you are going to get to your destination; what are the means or objectives, for attaining your goals: the roads to take.

4. Checkpoints along the way: to assess your trip and possibly to make adjustments.

One thing is certain: a long trip does not happen overnight. It simply takes time.

All of these factors about taking a long trip are true about engaging social media, except there are multiple vehicles, goals, objectives, and checkpoints. Let’s look at them individually.

1. Vehicles. When taking a long trip, it’s best to choose a reliable vehicle. In social media, there are many reliable vehicles. Chief among these are blogs (posted from your web site), microblogs (through Twitter), social networks (Facebook being the most popular), and professional networks (LinkedIn by far the largest). There are others, of course, but these vehicles represent a firm foundation for your social media efforts.

Once you choose your vehicles, learn how to drive them. You can easily create a blog on your web site, join Twitter to make an account for your company, sign up for Facebook to create a fan page, and enroll in LinkedIn for a company page and for pages on your key executives, managers, and staff. In fact, you probably already own many of these vehicles. But are you driving them to your greatest advantage? For that, you need to know your destinations or goals.

2. Destinations or goals. These are broad, intangible, even abstract statements of your long-term intentions. Your destinations or goals describe your future expectations, provide direction for your actions (your means or objectives), and focus on end results. Some of your goals might include any or all of the following:

• Build awareness of your brand and enhance your reputation by shaping their perception in the marketplace.
• Generate leads and convert these prospects into loyal customers.
• Interact with your customer community, and influence their behavior.
• Manage customer relations with your prospects and customers.
• Promote your products and services.
• Increase employee morale and empower their collaboration with social media.

You can adapt these goals, add others, or create a list to meet your specific needs. What’s important is that these goals be the ones most important to you, the ones that help you attain your overall company goals.

3. Means or objectives. From your social media goals, enumerate the means for attaining them through the vehicles you are driving. It all works together. The means must be tangible, realistic, and above all, measurable statements of action. They generally fall into three categories: information (what to post); engagement (who is engaging your community); and management (how much time and resources to invest). Make these decisions up front, and all becomes clear.

To be more specific, your means describe the kinds of information — text, images, audio, video, ideas, concepts — to post in your social media vehicles, who is creating them and how, where are they being posted and how often, who is responding to comments, who is interacting with your community, and what are your guidelines for involvement. The means you choose must directly support your goals.

4. Checkpoints. Once on your social media journey, check at regular intervals to make sure you are still on the right road. This is why your actions must be measurable. Many methods are available. Success, however, depends less on the methods you use and more on what you measure and how well you do it.

Show some return: make money. When all is said and done — your vehicles chosen, your destinations set, your means being implemented — you must be able to answer this question affirmatively: Are we making money? Doing that makes for profitable journeys.

–Rich Maggiani

• Build awareness of your brand.
• Enhance your reputation.
• Convert prospects into customers and clients.
• Create loyalty in your customers.
• Increase the morale of your employees.

So that’s what you get, the benefits. How do you get it?

• Through a Facebook fan page for a celebrity, band, or business.
• Through a Twitter account for your business.
• Through LinkedIn pages for key employees (executives, managers, employees, whoever best represents your company).
• Through a blog with one or more authors (or multiple blogs) on your web site.

Those are the tools. But they are only tools; you must know how to use them to enjoy the five benefits.

So you must have a plan, well thought out; with goals, strategies, and tactics. You must know where you are going and how you are going to get there; otherwise, how will you know you are on the right road? How will you even know when you get there, whatever your destination (your goal) might be? So a plan is a necessity. As is the skill to use these social media tools.

It doesn’t hurt to write guidelines for participation. Actually, guidelines are a necessity, for companies of any size, even for one-person companies. Why? Guidelines allow you to consider the rules for playing. They set a clear path of engagement.

All of this takes some thoughtful consideration, some time to gestate ideas, some time to adjust as you go. And a commitment for the long term.

See. That’s all it takes! Nothing to it, right?

–Rich Maggiani

Trust has shifted. Target markets shun official messages and the corporate leaders who make them, replacing these messages with conversations among peers. Marketing materials, advertisements, and press releases increasingly find fallow audiences. Target markets, instead, covet dialogues and multi-dimensional conversations among their chosen communities.

Revising your communication strategy becomes vital — one that contributes to the conversation; one that collaborates and connects with a community you create and cultivate. One of the best methods for engaging your community is through blogging and microblogging.

Blogging (the macro kind). If you don’t already, write a blog. Post an entry at least once a week, aiming for the same day and time so that your readers get used to the expectation. Why? Two-thirds of people on the Internet have positive thoughts about companies with blogs. They trust what they read in blogs, even about your product and service because, surprisingly, they perceive blog writers as peers (not as the top-down corporate speak they’ve already turned off).

What to blog about. Start writing about what you sell, your product and service. Integrate customer resource management into your blog posts. For instance, blog about a particular aspect of what you offer and review the results you reap.

Remember though that a blog is not a marketing and sales platform — it is about sharing useful information with your readers. Write stories that resonate with them. Your posts should make your readers smarter and help them succeed.

Write your blog posts employing your personal voice, a moderated conversational tone, some humanity (which is why our blog is entitled Toward Humanity). You are writing for your readers, not yourself or your company. Engender multi-dimensional communication — a conversation where readers can reply and comment. Respond to these comments and, above all, listen to them!

Many companies remain wary of blogs because they are concerned about receiving negative comments being added to their posts. With the ease of communication through the myriad of social media, these negative comments are going to find an audience somewhere; they are not going to be easily quelled. Negative comments on your blog, however, at least give you the opportunity to respond, deal with the issue, and set the record straight. Besides, readers feel better about the real voice of your company dealing directly with problems. As a result, your reputation — and your brand — is enhanced.

Promoting your blog and gaining readers. While it might feel great to write a blog, what is more important is for people to read it. Once you have a number of posts, promote your blog and its web address aggressively to gain community. Promote it in your printed materials and stationery, especially your business cards; on your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages; submit it to StumbleUpon, refer to it when you interact on FriendFeed and when you submit to Flicker and YouTube; add it to your email signature; and (of course) talk about it when you meet people in professional settings (think conferences). Submit each blog post’s unique address to social bookmarking sites (such as Digg, Delicious, and Propeller) using socialmarket.com, submitting to 160 sites through one interface.

Microblogging with Twitter… at 140 characters or less (cutely called a “tweet’). Followers are the foundation of Twitter; these people are your community. You send a tweet and your followers receive it. They can then “retweet” it to their followers, thus quickly gaining exponential exposure.

Twitter has grown about 1500% over the last year and a half (mainly in the 35–50 age group), quickly becoming a standard of communication over the Internet, cell phones, and mobile devices.

Send regular tweets to your community of followers, using the same strategy as your blog posts: information that is useful, helpful, and makes them smarter. What do you tweet about? First and foremost, don’t tweet about what you are doing right now; trust me, no one cares! Instead, use Twitter to tweet about your blog posts, to engage in customer service, to converse with your customers, to promote your brand, to inform about promotions (such as couponing or discounts), to inform about breaking news or informative articles (and blog posts) of interest to your followers.

Gaining followers. You gain followers first by following. Follow your Facebook buddies, your LinkedIn connections, the people you email and those in your contacts list. Use wefollow.com to find people; try Twitter’s suggestion page for ideas; use keywords on twollow.com; and search for people you meet.

Succeeding at blogging. Increase your readership and your followers — your community of customers, prospects, and advocates — by writing engaging, interesting, and worthwhile tweets and posts. It’s that straightforward.

[Review the accompanying slides, download a pdf of the slides by clicking the top link, or download the related position paper by clicking the top link.]

–Rich Maggiani