Video Branding Follow-up and Example

Last night I got this email from an ex-client and good friend Flavio Gomes. Flav is co-founder and President of Logisense Corporation. EngageIP, Logisense's IP billing platform is used by customers worldwide. It's a great example of the use of video for both personal and professional branding.

Personal Branding - How Old Are You?

This week I attended a disappointing but eye opening Alumni event on personal branding.

Disappointing because the panel delivered little of value on personal branding.

Eye opening because those attending spanned the full age, experience range - from new grads looking for their first jobs, through recently sidelined senior execs looking for new careers.

Not easy at 55. Or 24. Or 33. The angst in the room was palpable.

Which got me thinking.

First, it's too bad the 55 year-olds were just waking up to their personal brands now. Second, they need to change.

Also, what a great time for the 24 and 33 year olds to be grabbing their personal brands squarely by the 5 P's, and maximizing their efforts to stand out now. Forever.

I felt worst for the 55 year olds. I would have had some simple advice for them: modernize your packaging.

Lose the blue/grey suit, white shirt and boring tie. Not only do you look like every other 55 year old in the room, you look 55. For the ladies - sorry - sleeker is better. Nothing says over the hill like overweight. And colour is good. One thing about boring...it's boring.

For the 24 year-olds 'promotion' and 'product' seem to be the priorities. Desperately unafraid to network in person, checking their on-line presences(?) turns up....nothing other than a maybe it's you/I'm never checking the profile on Facebook. Somewhere in there is a pretty decent opportunity to stake a point of view, show off some great potential and get noticed.

Although this never came up, I wonder about how both groups are grappling with personal brand 'pricing'?

Lots of senior experience got moved out the door over the past 18 months for one key reason: too expensive. Adjusting pricing down, pricing more creatively (eg, take less from more customers), or demonstrating superior value could be important considerations now.

At 24, pricing is pretty straightforward.

Loss leader, baby.

Get me in the door and get me some experience.

It used to be interns were only for law firms and Governments. Now, the free model of employment - experience in exchange for effort - seems to be springing up all over the place.

For those 33 year-olds successfully through the front door - this is brand investment time.
Building experience, expertise, visibility and value. It seems to me all 5 p's are in play. This would be the ideal:

• outstanding 'product' - this is what I do, who I am
• important decisions on 'place' - take the job in NY? don't take the job in NY?
• increasing 'price' - hand in hand with delivering outstanding value
  
• 'promotional' opportunities everywhere - from industry speaking engagements to the personal blog
  
• incredible 'packaging' - ok, the kids are taking a toll and sleep deprivation is tough but working out is working out and Harry's still makes a nice suit

So, different ages - different stages. At 24, I know it's difficult to comprehend 55. And who wants to. But man, what an opportunity at 24 to build a brand for life. And be 55 and in control of a Porsche. Not a Toyota with a faulty accelerator pedal.

The 5 P's of Personal Branding

Last night a client invited me to her alumni association event on personal branding. While interesting, we both agreed later that the session had missed it's mark - career management as viewed by HR experts is not personal branding.

I'm passionate about this: personal branding transcends employment. It's not about getting to the next level - it's about being you to the world, whoever, whenever and where ever you are.

Having said that, there's no question personal branding is important from an employment perspective - for several reasons - 1) how you promote your personal brand should support, not hinder personal employment goals - being a Girls Gone Wild participant may get in the way of becoming the next VP of Supply Chain - and 2) you will get fired or be otherwise unemployed at some point (count on it) - how strong your personal brand is, will (thanks to the internet and other changing factors) be an increasingly important factor in how long you stay unemployed.

So, how to build a personal brand? Well, in traditional marketing there are either four or five key elements of the brand marketing mix depending who's defining it. They're called the 4 (or 5) P's of marketing. Here's how I see them applied to personal branding.

P1 - Product. You. What are you? What do you deliver? What are your values? If I'm going to invest in associating with you, what am I investing in? What value do I get?

P2 - Price. What's the cost of doing business with you? Let's call it dollars plus friction. Are you expensive, inexpensive, a pain in the ass or easy to deal with?

P3 - Place. Where are you located? Where do you hang-out? Where are you accessible? One of the reasons personal branding is becoming so much more important is thanks to the internet. Now, P3 - Place, can be everywhere, from anywhere. Now, we all have the opportunity to be our own world-wide brand like Pepsi or Apple.

P4 - Promotion. Thank you internet. Google yourself. If you don't show up, you either don't have a brand or the scope of your brand is very small. Fixing it is easy. Take 5 minutes to upgrade your LinkedIn profile. No, it won't make you Pepsi but it's a start. Keep going. Write a blog. Claim your name on Twitter. Join a community. There's never been an easier time to get your product in front of customers.

P5 - The 5th P is up for grabs. In many books its PEOPLE. But we are people, so I'm pushing something else - PACKAGING. How do you dress? Accessorize? Look? Are you 50 and look 60? 30 and look 18? Are you over-packaged? Under-packaged? Does your packaging DIFFERENTIATE you in any (positive!) way, from all the other brands out there?

Many people are uncomfortable with personal branding. I get that. 'Putting myself out there' is/feels like a big, unknown risk. However, we probably all need to keep this in mind: whether we participate in personal branding or not WE ALL HAVE a personal brand. We're already being talked about, slotted, respected, dissed or ignored.

I'd prefer to have some input to that discussion.

Product Management Checklist

Scrolling fast through my Google Reader on the 'How to be a Good Product Manager' Blog. Only reading the post titles. Smiling. There's some good advice here.

• Define the problem before solving it
• Decide go / no-go before buy vs. build
• Differentiate to avoid being a “me too”
• Reinforce your product-related communication
• Reconsider your Jack of All Trades strategy
• Consider all details of add-on features
• Lack of complaints does not equal success
• Adapt your product management practice
• Technology is not better if it does not add value
• Choose your strategic alliances carefully
• Take a cautious approach to problem-solving
• Measure the impact of product changes
• Deliver customer value, not product features
• Stop gathering requirements
• Delegate tactical responsibilities
• Be comfortable being uncomfortable
• Plan for the present and likely future
• Work effectively with sales

How many of these could be applied to upgrading your marketing/PM approach?

Viral Advertising Baby Skaters

LOL. Get a diaper load of this video from Evian. One of the top 3 videos on YouTube this week (after the body painted Air New Zealand flight attendants ad - find it yourself :))

SES Toronto Day 1

Took a break from reality yesterday - and today - to attend the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Toronto. Not a subject I've spent a lot of time on lately but it is something I have an interest in through my role at Longtail Publishing - a partnership I'm involved that owns about 150 domain names and websites - everything from torontoplumber.com through applestorelocations.com and museumhours.com - practical, local, directory-based listings.

SES isn't necessarily of greatest benefit to publishers, like Longtail. But it's of great interest to traditional brand marketers and company owners who want/need their brands in front of potential customers.

Get this - 80% of all first interactions with a brand occur on-line now. If you don't show up on-line, you don't show up.

Search engine marketing - getting ranked high enough for customers to find you on the key search engines - is a relatively new art/science that is evolving at the speed of the web. Two years ago, SES was all about getting ranked first page on Google. Everything was text based.

That's changing. Fast. Thanks to 'expert' sites like Flickr (photos), YouTube (videos) and hundreds/thousands of others (press releases, customer reviews, social sites like Facebook), getting your brand noticed and ranking highly on Google and other searches can start anywhere.

Some key, simple learning for me as I advise my clients on basic marketing - make a video, take some screen shots, do some press releases - and load them on the web. Tag them with the appropriate keywords and cover your bases to get noticed.

As a result, the key theme from Day 1 of SES was not 'search engine optimization' but 'digital asset management' - going beyond web-site based approaches and branching out to the other 'filters' on the net that get your brand ranked and noticed. Put another way - getting your content - text, pictures, videos, reviews - out beyond your website.

Other practical learning - how to appropriately 'tag' your content to match what potential customers are looking for - not 'shampoo', but 'shiny hair'; not 'lending', but 'borrowing'; not 'document destruction', but 'shredding'. Speaking simple, customer-centric language, not marketese.

For expert advice on doing this and marketing your company on the web I can highly recommend my partner in Longtail, John Robb. His site and contact info is here.

Overall a good day at SES Toronto. Looking forward to today.

What I Believe

Ever listen to yourself talk?

I do.

This may sound scary but way too often it's how I figure out what I'm actually thinking or worse, what I really believe in. You'd think/hope I might have that sorted before opening my mouth but apparently that's not always the case.

Today I had lunch with a new business prospect. To be honest, I'd heard most of what I said before, but it was a good refresher on some of the stuff I walk around believing in. Like this:

> I believe in measuring outputs, not inputs. This idea frequently comes up around how hard people are working. How hard people work, including how many hours they put in is an input. What they turn out, regardless of how hard they're working is an output. When employee outputs match corporate output expectations, we have success. As I said today - and have said way too often before - if we achieved success with everybody doing their jobs standing on their heads naked at 4 in the morning - how they did their jobs (the input) is irrelevant.

> I don't believe in ego. Famous quotes from me on ego: "Ego kills opportunity". "Ego will outdo intelligence, everyday of the week". "What an asshole".

> I believe in brutal honesty. The term brutal is a little dramatic and not really what I mean but it makes the point - err on the side of telling the truth, not the varnish. The reason I love brutal honesty is it makes things happen. It eliminates politics and confusion. Someone does a great job - tell them. Same person is doing a crappy job - tell them. A client's business is messed up - tell them. The client is messed up - find a new client. My favourite example of brutal honesty - my firing stories - I've only ever fired one person who didn't shake my hand when I fired them (he knew my track record and didn't do it just to mess me up). Why did all the others? Because long before they were fired and leading up to getting fired, they knew where they stood. I told them. We talked about it. How to fix things. How things were going. If/when firing day arrived it was never a surprise. More people need to try brutal honesty. It's treating adults like adults - and they will respond.

> I believe in beer. More people need to drink. It relieves stress and gets people together. I've known a lot of people who's best ideas came after 2 beer.

>I believe in marketing. Not tech - I hired a well known analyst from Gartner marketing. Real marketing. Dog food marketing. Starting with the consumer. Building a product that meets their needs. Selling it so they get the benefits. I've observed, and it scares me, how few companies actually understand marketing. PROMOTIONS AND SWAG ARE NOT MARKETING. There would be more successful companies if more managers understood the power of true marketing.
(Speaking of marketing, I saw a great tag line - on the side of a transport truck - for a promotions company - it said: "Crap to give away. Stuff to wear". Perfect mission statement. I would have loved to facilitate that work session!)

I'm sure I believe in a lot more but it didn't come up today. Saving it for tomorrow.

Marketing for a Better World

Flipping through the Saturday Globe and Mail. It's pretty clear the financial world at least is a mess, verging on disaster. Last time markets were this bad a recession was right around the corner. Maybe the extent of the asset backed paper fiasco is finally getting clearer, but that's not clear either. Merrill Lynch is looking for a cash infusion of a few $billion and writing off something like $15 billion. Corporate default rates are at their lowest point in two years (good news) but are forecast to spark sharply by the end of 2008 as affects of the US downturn take affect.

So...it's reassuring to see the Canada's best brand marketer, the LCBO (Liquour Control Board of Ontario) hard at work with another super glossy 8 page insert. Measuring 11" x 16", this masterpiece flogs everything from Rockstar (vodka-based) Energy Drink (try that at the office!), to Heinekin 5L Draft Kegs (excellent!) to Havana Club Aged 7 years rum (for $30; I got it at the Veradaro airport for something like $7!).

Even better, this beauty's theme is all about a contest called 'Peel 2 Win'. By visiting an LCBO before February 2, depressed market watchers and serious alcoholics have a chance of winning a bunch of decent cash prizes.



This is great marketing. Booze. Cash. Great pictures that make you want to hit the liquor cabinet before 8 in the morning.

Seriously though, this organization knows what it's doing. So much so, they've even laid out their strategy, rationale, programs and results here. Very forward thinking, considering, as they point out - the LCBO is a MONOPOLY. And the numbers show it's working.

"In terms of dividend transfers to the provincial government, in fiscal 2005-2006 we delivered our 11th record dividend –

$1.2 billion. This figure, which does not include taxes, was $57 million more than the previous year and 7.6 per cent higher than the previous year. Our net sales were also a record at $3.6 billion, 4.4 per cent higher than the year before."

The Internet Advantage - Intent vs Content

Thanks to Google, 'search' has fundamentally changed how products and services are marketed and purchase decisions are made.

In his keynote address at WebMasterWorld last week, John Battelle, Chairman of Federated Media articulated simply what many of us have been struggling for years to get across.

What Battelle nailed is that traditional marketing is all about content - putting your product or service in front of your target audience and hoping that their next purchase decision will be influenced by your message. Advertising on Oprah is expensive, but it works to some degree.

What makes search marketing so powerful, and why more corporations need to pay more attention to their internet positioning is that search influences the buyer at the point of intent - when a purchase decision is being made. At this point, conversion rates are high, and thanks to Google especially, the search advertising models are efficient.

For corporations, successful 'intent' marketing means learning how get good rankings in Google and the other search engines and spending a few dollars - nothing close to what 'content' marketing costs - on pay per click and other internet advertising.

As a result, the world of SEO - search engine optimization - is exploding and corporations are being forced to adjust traditional IT vs Marketing organization design. Too many companies have turned execution of their internet strategy over to IT departments - when successful intent marketing requires a new set of highly refined technical skills - SEO - and strong collaboration with Marketing on goals, strategies and site design.

While search and intent marketing clearly drive sales, it's too early to see how they can be used exclusively to build brand. However, there appear to be tremendous opportunities right now for organizations who learn to put the right balance on both.