Ideuhs

Tips On Connecting With Your Audience

Michael Gass’ Fuel Lines is another one of my current favorite blogs. Michael Gass is an advertising agency new business consultant who specializes in advising small- to medium-sized agencies, and he uses his blog to evangelize for social media as a powerful tool for growing agency business. As director of business development for Catapult, a medium-sized Silicon Valley agency focused on digital, direct, and content marketing, I find Fuel Lines incredibly stimulating.

The heart of all agency social media activities, according to Gass, is the agency blog. He recommends that the agency blog be kept separate from the official agency website. The blog is not the place to plug your business – that’s the role of the agency website – but rather a place to engage your audience in discussions of broader marketing subjects that matter most to them. If people are attracted to your point of view as an agency principal, some will naturally gravitate towards your agency when the time is right.

Gass is a prolific blogger – and his intelligent strategy of consistently redistributing older posts via Twitter rather than letting them disappear in the archives of his blog makes him seem even more prolific. Nevertheless, even Gass occasionally has to deal with writer’s block. In Overcoming Social Media Writer’s Block, Gass offers some practical tips on keeping your blog posts coming. “Most importantly,” he notes, “It is not [what] I want to write about. I have to write about what my audience wants to read.”

Focus on your audience is the key to all successful communications, whether we are talking about advertising, blogging, or presentations. If you read Garr Reynold’s blog or book, Presentation Zen, you will certainly pick up on his exhortations to focus on the “particular situation and audience.”  Advertising agencies constantly struggle with clients who are overly focused on what they want to communicate rather than what is relevant (about their product or service) to the audience. It’s always a delicate balancing act. We don’t go out to make advertising, presentations, or even blogs without wanting to say something. But communication is about connecting, and one-sided monologues don’t connect.

Simple Life, Simple Blog: Frugal Mama

One of the challenges of writing a blog is keeping it focused. Committing to a subject and gaining mastery over it are challenging enough. Maintaining a consistent pace while keeping the content fresh and providing value to your audience require yet more discipline. So I am always impressed by blogs that have been able to achieve focus, relevance, and novelty.

A few months ago, Amy Suardi, a former colleague whom I hadn’t heard from in over ten years launched her blog Frugal Mama. She skillfully seeded interest on Facebook, creating a Facebook page, and reconnecting with everyone she knew, including old friends like me.  (Hey, wait a minute, why haven’t I done those things yet? Doh! Social Media 101!)

Frugal Mama is about how to save money and still live better. What I love about Frugal Mama is that it’s extremely practical, with excellent tips that are both effective and relatively easy to act on with a few changes in lifestyle. One of my favorite posts (and one of the most popular) is Never Ask Again: Where Does All The Money Go?, where you can download a printable chart for keeping track of daily expenses. Now I know this is nothing new and my grandparents probably did it, but until reading Amy’s blog I never had. Amy’s take on this is that financial record-keeping seems overly complex, but a simple low-tech chart you can keep in the kitchen really makes it simple and easy. So I printed one out and redid it in Excel, making some tweaks that made more sense for my family, such as adding a line-item for beer. And guess what: it worked!

Keeping track of things like how much you’re spending on gas, lunch, and that money- and adrenalin-sucker coffee – or how consistently those $600 home-repair issues keep popping up – really does give you great insight into your cash-flow, and with that insight comes control, and a certain calm. For example, I’ve been telling myself for years that I should pack my lunch every day instead of blowing money on burritos and deli sandwiches. But having to actually write down how much I was spending on lunch suddenly made it easy to change my habits.

Frugal Mama exemplifies several things that make up good communications: simplicity, relevance, consistency, and freshness. What’s more, it’s animated by a strong Reason Why: saving money on little things can add up to qualitatively bigger improvements.

Fun with ObjectiveMarketer

A couple of weeks ago I watched an interesting webinar by Guy Kawasaki on using Twitter. It inspired me to get my own blog back into shape and try to make it actually relevant to people. Guy demonstrated how he manages his Twitter campaigns through ObjectiveMarketer, a social media marketing and analytics platform. ObjectiveMarketer lets you send out messages via various channels, including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and track the response. It also lets you schedule your posts and set them for auto-repeat.

If you’ve seen several of my posts repeated throughout a day on Twitter and Facebook, that’s the auto-repeat working. What that allows you to do is establish frequency. Frequency allows you to expose your message to more people over time as well as maintain presence with those who may have seen but not clicked on your post the first few times. It’s the same principle that has long been at work in advertising, in which advertisers broadcast TV commercials or insert print ads in a flight pattern. Typically an advertiser needs viewers to see their advertising several times before it sinks in or triggers action. The action I’m seeking is for people to click through to my blog. Hopefully, I’m providing something of value in return.

At the end of the webinar Guy provides information on how to obtain a 90-day trial on ObjectiveMarketer, so I signed up. ObjectiveMarketer is a little rough around the edges and needs some improvement in terms of intuitive usability. At first I wasn’t sure if I had successfully linked my Facebook account. However, after emailing my questions I was pleasantly surprised to receive a quick response from ObjectiveMarketer’s founder (on a Saturday) who kindly helped me through my learning curve.

While I have managed social media campaigns for clients, I’ve only recently begun to do so for myself. What was interesting to me was the amount of visibility the tool gave me on responses to things I put out on Twitter and Facebook. Most of us are Facebook users, but aside from the comments and likes our posts may receive, it’s never clear how many people are actually paying attention to the things we say. To some, it may not really matter. Others, however, may have some interest in actually driving traffic to something and would like to see the results. ObjetiveMarketer gives you that insight.

In the seven days since I started this experiment, I’ve had 432 click-throughs on my posts. Not mind-blowing but nevertheless gratifying (thank you). I’ve also had several follow my blog. Alas, I’ve enjoyed only one retweet, and as Guy mentioned, the key to expanding your audience is saying something interesting enough for people to retweet. So follow me on Twitter @maxterry3. And try out ObjectiveMarketer.

Bento and the Art of Presentation

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I have been spending a lot of time on Garr Reynold’s blog Presentation Zen. As a matter of fact, after reading a few inspiring posts I went all the way back to the first posts of January 2005 and just started going through the whole series chronologically.

If you have the time and inclination, it’s always interesting and instructive to read a favorite blog from beginning to end. The practice provides valuable insight into the ways blogs evolve and develop character over time. The hardest thing about writing a blog is maintaining the discipline and self-confidence to keep it going, so it’s useful to see how others have maintained their pace. And since you will usually find that blogs improve over time, it’s encouraging in the early stages as you develop your own pace. Like exercise, it’s important to maintain discipline, even doing just a little at a time and making gradual progress.

I thought Garr’s third post – PowerPoint abuse in Japan: we can learn a lot from the Japanese bento – was particularly compelling. It tells the story of the insight he had on a train enjoying a simple Japanese box lunch, then looking across the aisle at a salaryman reading through a bad PowerPoint presentation crammed with text. The experience became the impetus for his book, where he notes: “The Japanese bento contains appropriate content arranged in the most efficient, graceful manner. The bento is presented in a simple, beautiful, and balanced way. Nothing lacking. Nothing superfluous. Not decorated, but wonderfully designed. … When was the last time you could say the same for a presentation?”

I’ve been a big bento fan since first visiting Japan in 1989, and living in Tokyo for six years during the 90s. The idea that even at a 7-11, you can get a simple, tasty, nicely arranged, and nutritious meal for $3, always struck me as one of the things that set Japan apart. When I worked at the Japanese ad agency Dentsu, enjoying a box lunch was one of those “moments of Zen” that created an oasis of calm amidst the chaos and clutter of my office environment.

Garr goes into more depth in his book about the way bento are constructed and how the various elements create nutritional as well as aesthetic balance, and makes some observations of how the principles of “presentation” in a good bento can carry over into slide presentations. One of the things I admire about Garr is that he demonstrates a genuine appreciation and knowledge of Zen aesthetics and presents them in an instructive and unpretentious manner. So, I hope he doesn’t mind my frequent links to his blog as my own way of processing and sharing his insights.

Start with Why

In keeping with the subject of Garr Reynolds and presentation, one of my sales colleagues sent me this inspiring TED presentation by Simon Sinek, “How great leaders inspire action.” This is interesting on two levels: the presentation itself and the subject matter.

On the presentation front, Simon’s talk is a great example of simply doing away with slides altogether. Simon simply illustrates his talk with the use of a large notepad, using a total of two sheets of paper.

The point of Simon’s talk is that great leaders inspire through belief, and start with “Why.” His Golden Circle demonstrates that people don’t buy What you do, or How you do it, but Why you do it. It’s a persuasive argument, and makes you pause to think – Why do you do what you do?

Putting the Zen in Presentation

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself returning again and again to Garr Reynold’s blog Presentation Zen. A friend at Duarte Design recommended I read his book, also titled Presentation Zen. If you have to make and give presentations, and most of us do, Garr Reynolds is an amazing source of wisdom and practical advice.

Being in advertising, presentation is part of daily life for me. I’ve sat through my share of mind-numbing presentations consisting of slide after slide crammed with too much data and too many bullet points. And while I’ve always struggled to keep my slides simple, it’s always been, well, a struggle. Experiencing Garr’s extremely minimalist approach really made the scales fall from my eyes.  

Garr’s signature presentation style makes use of quality images displayed full-bleed or elegantly layered against a dark background, with very few words employed to make the most fundamental point. The basic idea is: one slide, one point. At first I thought his approach was more appropriate for lecture-style presentations, in which the presenter is performing in front of a larger audience, and that it wouldn’t work in real-world client meetings.

However, after a few months of progressively peeling away the layers of information in my slides, I had an opportunity to create a presentation on content marketing and social media, and decided to go for broke. I was pleasantly surprised by the results and the positive energy in the room.

Most of us go into a presentation in a defensive mode, expecting that our audience wants to see rock-solid proof of every point we plan to make, or an irrefutable chain of logic. And the result is … slide after slide crammed with too much data and too many bullet points. I think the value that Garr brings is in demonstrating that if we can let go of our fears, stop hiding behind our slides and step out in front of them, using them to illustrate and emphasize what we want to communicate, we will all be more effective presenters.

It takes discipline to capture one simple idea on each slide and to rely on our own mastery of a subject to furnish the fuel for our talk. It means we have to know what we’re talking about and have the confidence not to read off the screen. So, for anyone who labors over the order of their bullet points, I recommend losing the bullet points and reading Garr’s book and blog.