Marketers:
Corporations Get Low Grades in the Art of Conversation

How to Stop Issuing Press Releases and Join the Conversation

By Scott Gerschwer, OutputLinks

By now, we have all read about the Supreme Court ruling that granted corporations First Amendment Rights as if they were individuals. The socio-political implications can be discussed elsewhere. My first thought was, “Corporations speak like individuals? I just don’t think so.”

Corporations get low grades in the art of conversation. They speak a language of their own, filled with insider business terms and industry jargon that is baffling and sometimes even intimidating to consumers. But thanks to multi-user domains, aided by social media technology, customers can now discuss products and services with one another—with or without the participation of corporations—and bypass those carefully crafted messages and pronouncements, liberating themselves from the tangled labyrinth of corporate speak, creating a brave new world of customer-focused communication.

The conversation has already started, so some of you will have to play catch up. With that in mind, here are some tips to help you communicate more like individuals:

• You don’t need press releases unless you are a public company regulated by the SEC. Think of press releases as worms dangling on a hook. The journalist is the fish. Back in the day, the journalist used to absorb your message, parse it for half-truths or lies, compare it to the messages of other companies Like Yours, and come up with a story that could possibly mean a lot to your top line sales.

It’s not like that anymore. You can communicate directly to your audience. Write the story yourself or better yet hire someone with the skills to do so. Put it out there and prepare to engage in the debate. Be honest and you won’t have to apologize, backtrack, hem, haw or explicate. The key is to participate in the discussion. There is an old New Yorker cartoon wherein a CEO-type hands the PR guy a document. “Here’s the unvarnished truth,” he says. “Now varnish it.” PR departments need to adjust to a new role. You need new communication skills. Something more direct and focused. Without varnish.

OutputLinks is a channel to your best customers and prospects. It is a great social media site that allows you to give your feedback and take part in the conversation. For example, I’ve long been a fan of the columns written by Guy Broadhurst, The Broadhurst Report. He has a great point of view, he knows the industry well, and he writes with great clarity. Here is an article from November 2007 that still resonates today.  

Or try out this article on QR Codes by Joe Barber. Few people can articulate a complex message as easily as Joe does here. Even a card-carrying Luddite like me can understand it.

In addition, the OutputLinks LinkedIn discussion group lets you directly engage in the debate, discussion, conversation, etc. Here, the words “legacy print streams” touched off an excellent 24-part debate.

            To join the OutputLinks LinkedIn group just click on the link below.

Discussions | LinkedIn

• Marketing departments are not about value propositions, speeds/feeds, “features and benefits” anymore. They are about Useful Content. Your website should be informational, not sales-y. The role of Marketing is to create a consistent, if not constant, stream of idea-based content that keeps buyers interested and engaged. Provide information that has value, be all-too-human, develop a following and you will be pleasantly surprised by the results.

Look at the GMC Software News Lounge. You can spend hours on this site, getting information, watching experts like my friend Roger Gimbel talk about the transformation of print. You don’t have to buy anything. No one is shoving solutions down your throat. As one reader commented about a blog posting, it’s great breakfast reading.

GMC Software gets it.

Marketing is now about building relationships and focusing on buyer problems. Your buyers want to discuss this in their own words. At each stage of the sales process, well-written concise content will help your buyers understand how you, specifically, can help them.

If you have a tough time explaining how your products solve customer issues, it’s probably because you don’t understand how your products solve customer problems. Go back and learn more. Talk to buyers more about their problems, too. Don’t just cover yourself by explaining the myriad nuances of the product and pepper your blather with industry jargon that sounds vaguely impressive.

If you dedicate yourself to communicating effectively, to answering questions, being useful, forging partnerships and becoming trustworthy, you discover that buyers will emerge from behind their barricades. After all, we all want the same thing: to be successful in what we do. Those that help us in this endeavor are our friends.

I am often asked to help with a social media strategy. And when people in the customer communication field ask me which social sites work best, there is only  one possible answer—you need to look at them all: Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Delicious, Digg, etc…and decide which one(s) best suit your own needs. There is no right site or wrong site.

But above all, don’t forget OutputLinks. This site is emerging as a great social media tool. Used correctly, it can get you face time with decision-making C-level executives on a weekly basis. It can connect you to some of the best minds in the industry and allow you to express your own excellent ideas. What more could you ask?

Content development is where it all begins. This is the main role of marketing going forward. 

·         Metrics that Matter

I recently talked to a marketer who feels that his organization has a killer sales force and that all he needs to do is generate leads and funnel them to his team. If they get a face-to-face meeting, they will close.

I talked to another marketer who wanted to get prospects to his Web site. The information there would help his organization convert prospects into sales every time. All he had to do was get them there.

Yet another organization is betting the farm on Search Engine Optimization. Their position is that they have the best tech but have gotten lost in the shuffle. Their push for 2010 is to establish a brand without spending a ton on advertising.

Clearly, these marketers require different sets of metrics to measure their effectiveness. So are you measuring what you need to measure? Are your objectives and measurement tools aligned?

More often than you think, the answer is no. Much of the blame goes to the disconnect between IT and marketing. The era of the data dump is over. There are too many things to measure. You have to pick the right ones for you.

The nice thing about social media is that it’s easy to see when you’ve hit a nerve. Elizabeth Gooding, an output industry consultant, recently posted a topic on LinkedIn. Within hours, it got great comments and a discussion grew out of it. That’s a social media success story. Figure out how to bottle it and you are on your way.    

Communicating well is not something corporations do easily. There is a tendency to be too guarded, too fearful about not maintaining message discipline. But all you have to do is establish goals, create messaging in plain, transparently understandable language, give a pep talk to your employees and let them represent you.

The conversation has already begun.

Individuals are not press releases; corporations should not be either.

We are all in a call center now. Talk.

We invite you to dialogue with Scott regarding your corporate communications >>>.