Managing the Gray - Marketing for the New Media Professional

Christopher Penn: Combating new media fragmentation with brand, next on Managing the Gray.

Intro:  Welcome to the brand new world of digital marketing consumer-generated media and no control PR.  The rules of engagement are no longer black and white.  You need to change, to evolve, to manage the gray, and how do you do that?  You let C.C. Chapman help you.

Christopher Penn: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening.  My name is Christopher Penn.  I am the host of the Financial Aid Podcast doing a Christmas gift cast exchange with C.C. Chapman here on Managing the Gray.  Today’s episode of Managing the Gray will be a little different, but in C.C’s words, it is all good.  So, here is today’s challenge, something to think about.  New media, new marketing is what we are all about here on Managing the Gray.  The challenge facing us as new marketing professionals, that I think is going to come to a real head in 2007, is channel fragmentation.

What is channel fragmentation?  Put simply, it is just a whole lot of channels.  Consider this.  In the last six months, FeedBurner has tracked the total number of podcast just under its care and the have doubled to nearly 90,000.  Imagine a radio dial with 90,000 stations on it.  Your car dashboard would literally be half a mile long.  We already have jokes now about the golf channel, the paint channel, the grass channel, and cable, and with the growing popularity of video on the net and internet TV, we will soon have channels dedicated not only to grass, but to specifically partial shade green or blue fescue grass.  So, the problem with channel fragmentation is both obvious and difficult to solve.  Where are marketers do we spend our advertising dollars particularly if we are in a volume business where large audience is needed to drive profits?  With 90,000 channels on the dial, which ones do we invest in?  How do we reach audiences in more than just the channel directly related to our industry?  The answer, unsurprisingly, is brand.  Brand is the essential quality, the story, the myth that helps us to transcend channels and reach audiences that are outside of our direct domain.  Why is brand the key to crossing channels?  Because ultimately, brand is a story and we social creatures, we enjoy telling stories and sharing stories.  If the story was a good one, we will share it.  If the story is a bad one, we will share it, but where we as marketers must absolutely steer clear of is the mediocre story, the story that is not memorable and certainly not worth sharing.

So, that is the theory part of the show.  One of the things that I love about Managing the Gray is that it contains, in the words of motivational speaker Tony Robbins, profound knowledge, knowledge that once you understand it, it is instantly usable.  So, let us get to the applicable knowledge part of the show.  I will leave it to you to judge whether it is profound or not.

First things first, you need to establish what your story is.  Before you go buying a domain name or buying a SIM in Second Life or firing up GarageBand in the microphone, you need to establish your story.  Every story has a plot and ideally you can sum up that plot in two sentences.  Look at the stories and the plots behind some of the most popular brands in America.  Now, granted a lot of these are old media brands, but they have compelling stories that you know by heart.  Apple Computers, the story of garage innovators who challenged the status quo and brought computing to the masses.  Of course, there is going to be some exaggeration, some hagiography to make the story more compelling.  Seven herbs and spices held in secret make Kentucky Fried Chicken better.  PodCamp breaks the mold of traditional conferences and lets everyone participate regardless of background.  Take these thoughts and extend them.  Fill in the back story.  Imagine what your story would look like if it were a feature film.  Here is a good question to ask yourself:  Would you pay money to see the story if it was not your own?  Work on that until the answer is yes.  Have you got your story?  Have you got something that you could tell around the campfire and a couple of beers and people would be interested in hearing more?  You know when you got a good story because you are passionate, you are eager to tell other people about it.

So, next let us develop the mechanisms around the story.  The story needs to be compelling and also instantly understandable in just a few words.  Seven herbs and spices.  Reach out and touch someone.  Good to the last drop.  Do not be evil.  The ultimate drive machine.  Condense your story down to a tagline, the kind of thing that you would see in the preview of the movie about your brand.  What are the criteria for a brand and new media, a brand that can cross channel easily?

First and foremost, we have established that the story has to be worth telling.  No marketing tricks, old or new, can change a story.  That is essentially lipstick on a paper.  Once you have got the story and the tagline, it is time to start establishing your new media presence with a sharable brand.  Your brand has to be one that hits on all the learning channels.  By this, I am talking about the ways in which human beings learn because fundamentally, when you are sharing a story, you are teaching it to someone else.  You are helping them learn so that they can share it with someone else.  Your brand has to be translated into three primary channels of information gathering, visual, auditory and kinesthetic.  This comes from a discipline called neural linguistic programming.  For example, a strong visual identity is used for people who learn visually.  They see that distinctive symbol and instantly understand that it is your brand, maybe even instantly understand what it is you are all about.  It should be recognizable and easy to transmit by written word.  How many people, for example, have misspelled a web 2.0 service that is missing one or more of its vowels?  Flickr could get away with it by being an early adapter, but I challenge you to remember the many other photo sharing services with dropped letters in their names.  Your brand has to be auditorily sharable.  For a lot of people, podcasting is audio.  Not everybody uses iTunes and certainly not everybody has a video iPod.  If I say to you go find like my show, for example, the Financial Aid Podcast.  Chances are you can type that out successfully and find my site.  If I say go find Accident Hash or Managing the Gray, you will be equally successful.  Now, if I say go find Blueberry but leave out the E, it is a little harder to share.  Go to Delicious, but spell it del.icio.us.  Do you see where this is going?  Go to Marvelous, but spell it with 4 M’s and [unintelligible].  You get where I am going.  Unless you are the market creator or one of the earliest adapters who can get away with it because there is nobody else in that space, you absolutely must make your brand easy to share by ear.  If you have to spell it, if you have to explain it, then it is not sharable.  Remember we are talking word of mouth, audio words [unintelligible] 30 introductory seconds are spent explaining how to spell the brand, that is time not telling your brand story.

Your brand needs to be visible too.  What is a kinesthetic brand?  It is a brand that inspires a feeling, an emotion that when you experience it, you feel it in your bones and in your blood.  Think about Kentucky Fried Chicken.  If you like the brand, if you associate with the brand, chances are your mouth just start watering thinking about, you know, hot, crispy chicken, a little salty, spicy, crunchy breading, warm and tender on the inside, delicious mashed potatoes with that gravy.  Are you hungry yet?  That is a kinesthetic response.  Here is another brand that creates an instant response so much so that I only need to say the name and if you are a heterosexual male, you are going to have response.  Victoria’s Secret.  Yes, of course, it is a visually appealing brand, too, but it conveys a physical reaction, doesn’t it?  Here is another brand that you have a physical reaction to.  Osama Bin Laden.  That conjures up a different physical response, didn’t it?

Now, most brands don’t cross well into all three channels, but if you can nail two out of three, that is good enough.  So, how do you explain and apply these ideas in new media and new marketing?  First, establish a brand strongly on your website and your promotional materials.  Get that logo, that graphic that says what you are all about.  Get a domain name that you do not have to spell out.  You say it and people can get there immediately.  When you make business cards, make them look and feel different than the run-on-the-mill business card, but make sure that the call to action is clear.  Have a brand name there, have a website there that you can send people to, to get them engaged.  Think of your business card as like a key to a door, okay?  If it is not even obvious which end of the key to insert, then people are not going to use it, but if you make it real easy, say, “Hi, I’m C.C. Chapman.  I’m a new media specialist,” and right there on the card in big letters it says managingthegray.com, people will understand what to do.

Next, start heading up the major hubs.  Even though channels are fragmenting, there is still and always will be commons, places people go to check in before they head out to their own respective niche areas of content.  Those hubs are places like yesterday, it were Friendster and Tribe, today MySpace, Facebook, Xanga, Bebo, and the million other sites online.  Are they the be-all and end-all of new media?  Of course not.  They are the intersections on the highways that the majority of people pass through on the way to their destinations and if you want to get people’s attention to at least have a shot and showing them your brand, you have to have at least a placeholder at these sites.  Have you got that trailer that tagline that movie plot summer from earlier?  Good.  Load it up on your text editor and begin signing up for as many of the social hub sites as possible within reason.  When it comes to choosing your account name and identity, be sure to reuse your brand name, which ideally should also be your domain name.  For example, if I run financialaidpodcast.com, then you should be able to find me at myspace.com/financialaidpodcast.  If I am on Flickr, you should be able to find my brand by typing in flickr.com/profile/financialaidpodcast.  You get the idea.

So, now that you have got the major hubs taken care of, at least in terms of placeholders, you want to establish a flag on foreign soil and then pick a couple of networks that have the most of your target demographic on them and aggressively market your brand and identity on those networks.  For example, if I ran a new music podcast, gather.com might not be the best place for me to focus my time.  MySpace would be a better choice.  Who has the most of the audience you want to reach?  Once you figure out where you want to have your focus, get the tools, get the knowledge and things that you need to leverage that network.  It is a network that loves you.  Add friends, start adding friends like crazy.  If it is a network that lets you really customize your personal page on there, make sure that it is tricked out so that it reflects the brand and a clear call to action for what you want people to do.  With these sites, you do not want to make the sites themselves the hub of people attention.  You want to make that ideally your website or your podcast or your blog or your Second Life SIM, so make sure that everything that is on these hub sites points back to your primary focus and the call to action is so clear that it is obvious.

The next step by far is the hardest.  Live your story.  If your brand is all about secret herbs and spices, then do not breathe a word of what they are.  If anything, play out their secretiveness.  If your brand is all about fanatical customer service, then whenever anyone messages you on MySpace, be fanatical about getting back to them.  You have an exceptionally short amount of time to reinforce your brand with action that is congruent with your brand, so be fanatical about it.  Live your brand.

Lastly, and most importantly, once you have a following no matter how small, show them lots of love and ask for their help.  Chances are if your story is compelling enough, if your brand is compelling enough, they will share it anyway.  Make sure you reward those people who are most loyal to you.  If you have something to sell, make sure your loyalists are the front of the line for freebies.  If you have a service offered, make sure the loyalists know about it before anyone else.  For example, on my show, I release an eBook with updates from time to time and loyalists who listen to my show get advance notice well before anyone else.  If you know you are running into tough times, share that story with your loyalists first because they know more about your brand than you do.  Listen to your loyalists.  Accept input from them no matter how painful it is and reward them liberally for sticking with you especially the old-timers who have been there for you since the beginning.  They know your story and they will share it unhesitatingly and making sure that you listen to what they have to say.

Okay, so to recap.  New media is fragmenting.  The way to combat that is with brand and brand is a [unintelligible] for story.  A compelling story is easily shared so make yours compelling.  Make it a movie worth paying to enjoy.  Develop your tagline and your trailer for your movie then aggressively establish your new media properties with easily remembered and easily recalled and easily shared addresses.  Live your story.  Reinforce your story.  Tell it every opportunity and reward the early adapters and the loyalists who make your story their own.  Ultimately, it is the sharing of the story that will make your business products and services cross all the different fragmented channels out there that are multiplying by the day.  When you strip away all the technology, all the buzz words, new media really is nothing more than sitting on the digital campfire sharing stories.  The same thing we as human beings have been doing for 10,000 years.  If yours is a story worth retelling, it will be no matter who is sitting on that fire.

Let me know what you think of this story.  My name is Christopher Penn and you can reach me at financialaidpodcast@gmail.com and at financialaidpodcast.com where the story is going to be cross-posted.  Please also leave your comments at managingthegray.com.

Thanks for having me around at your campfire here at Managing the Gray.  C.C. Chapman will be back next time with more new great marketing and new media tips to help you succeed.  Until then, goodnight and remember to turn the marshmallows.

Closing:  Thanks for listening to Managing the Gray.  Tell your coworkers.  Tell your friends and tell us what you think by leaving a comment at managingthegray.com.

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