ChaosScenario

3 Ways to Build a Good Reputation

1. Do something notable.

Today.

If you wait until tomorrow, someone else will have done it, and your doing it won't be as notable.

Who was the second person to walk on the moon? The third?

By any measure, just breaking the earth's atmosphere is quite an accomplishment, but we give extra credit to those who impress us first.

2. Do something good.

Each day. Every day. For a lot of people.

Add value to each person you come in contact with. Don't worry about what they can do for you. Assume nothing. What can you do for them?

3. Fail.

Someday soon, if not earlier.

It's inevitable. You're going to fail. But take heart: A little failure (or even a spectacular one) can be a good thing.

Failure is a great instructor. It builds perseverance. It teaches us different ways to look at things. It necessitates developing alternative solutions.

It also brings us humility, which keeps us from being so confident in our beliefs that we can't see other perspectives. We can empathize with those who disagree because each person may, in Benjamin Franklin's words, "doubt a little of his own infallibility."

But don't give up just because you failed once. Or twice. Or three times.

Or even 6,000 times. Like Thomas Edison's successful invention of a marketable incandescent light bulb, your next try might produce the breakthrough you seek.

- Cam Beck

Insights: Are Your Customers Lost? Because You're Lost Without Them.

Findability is one of the most overlooked tools of marketing. There's just no glitz in making things easy to find. Yet, in nearly every case your customers and potential customers  come to you, they aren't seeking out a "brand experience." They're looking for a solution to a problem or an answer to a question. If they can't find it on your website, often they will simply look elsewhere.

Making sure they can find what they're looking for is the first step in making yourself approachable -- a trusted resource.

In this week's column at the Click Here blog, I wrote about 5 Ways to Ensure Your Online Customers Never Get Lost.

It's not likely to happen by accident. First you have to plan for it. - Cam Beck

Don't Panic. Just Lead.

At MPDailyFix, Beth Harte related a story about how a friend of hers, who is a senior-level marketer, was offered employment with junior-level pay. She goes on to explain some of the reasons this is happening and why she believes it will become more commonplace if marketers don't show their value. She's right. But if I can add my own perspective here, the problem Beth identifies can be understood economically and solved in the same terms.

Unemployment means there are too many people for too few jobs. In other words, there is a surplus of labor.

Surpluses tend to drive down prices.

The price of labor is measured in wages. Thus, when there is a labor surplus in any industry (like marketing), it tends to depress the wages of the people in that industry.

This is especially true when the hiring manager believes it doesn't matter from which part of the labor pool he chooses. One person is just as good as another -- or in Beth's words -- a commodity.

Being good -- being great -- these things don't matter unless we distinguish ourselves from the rest of the pack. It is the perception of our expertise and effectiveness that will enable us to demand higher wages.

Actual expertise can help drive perceived expertise, but it does not guarantee it. Now, more than ever, a marketer must be both good and an excellent self-promoter.

Doing this effectively is about all the things Beth mentioned. Among them:

• Be a leader.
• Measure.
• Document.
• Foster and nurture relationships.
• Continuously improve.

However, this effort shouldn't resemble a campaign -- which is temporary and smacks of insincerity. In order to assure others of our value, we must first strive to be valuable. We must both improve the product and promote the improvement.

Luckily, in our cases, the act of successfully promoting the improvement, in some ways, actually helps to improve the product -- especially when we're willing to make mistakes and learn from them.

Instead of curse the conditions that led to this difficulty, we must embrace it as an opportunity to revolutionize the way we practice marketing. And we can apply to our clients the wisdom we gained from the experience of practicing it on ourselves.

I'm afraid that this won't guarantee a happy ending for everyone -- even a lot of the good ones. However, being a jack of all trades (and more importantly, being the sort of person who can adapt to changing circumstances) all but promises that we'll find someplace to be of use. - Cam Beck

Who are you calling a sell-out?

Awhile back, I wrote about Anthony Bourdain's criticism of Rocco DiSpirito for what some of Bourdain's fans called "selling out." (Anthony Bourdain: Hypocrite ... or Genius?). I asked a Bourdain fan, who (about a year after I wrote the piece) came to criticize DiSpirito and praise Bourdain, exactly how "sell-out" is defined. His answer is revealing.

...but at one point he [DiSpirito] was a serious chef making good food ..then he made the decision of saying i want to become a "star" and ill do anything i can do get there. but i wont do it through my food, ill do it through a marketing machine...

This, he said, qualifies DiSpirito as a sell-out.

I thought about this conversation again when Senator Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania switched parties because, in his own words, he did not think he could win as a Republican.

I am unwilling to have my 29-year Senate record judged by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate.

He also added, "I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans,"  but if that's the case I wonder why it took him so long to discover what the rest of the GOP has known for decades.

Like DiSpirito, Specter has been accused of being a sell-out. But also like DiSpirito, Specter simply made a calculated decision to do something that was in his own self-interests.

That alone doesn't make either of them a sell-out.

Even Specter's 2001 suggestion that representatives not be allowed to change parties between elections doesn't make him a sell-out. If you're tempted to call him one, it just means you have to better identify the principles that motivate him, not the principles that you think he should have.

Alan Keyes, the former Reagan diplomat, political candidate, and occasional contributor to WorldNetDaily, deftly points out the hypocrisy of Michael Steel, the RNC chairman, to denigrate Specter's action as entirely self-serving. [pargraph breaks added for readability]

Steele has no problem sacrificing principle in order to keep politicians like Specter in the GOP ranks. He sees them as the key to victory and he has made it clear that, as far as he's concerned, winning is the only thing that matters.

Unfortunately for him, Specter's switch is entirely consistent with that principle.

Specter has rightly concluded that Republican primary voters will reject him in 2010, as they would have in 2004 had it not been for the help he received from Rick Santorum and others who put party loyalty above their commitment to the nation's fundamental moral principles.

By running as a Democrat, Specter feels that he stands a better chance of winning the general election. As far as principle goes, the only difference between Specter and Steele is that Specter will now reach for victory while being true to his leftist views.

Meantime, the Michael Steele Republicans, as they fume over his desertion, further demonstrate their willingness to seek victory by betraying the party's supposed conservatism.

Similarly, DiSpirito's decision to sell something besides the food he personally cooks doesn't make him a sell-out. It just means that he is interested in doing something other than what some people (like Bordain) want him to do.

That's his freedom. That's his right. And certainly in DiSpirito's case, it's entirely harmless.

To be sure, no one on this earth always live up to the principles they say they hold dear, 100% of the time with 100% consistency. One can make a mistake with respect to those principles -- or a series of mistakes -- and not be a sell-out.

But be warned: If you disappoint or mislead people who mistakingly ascribe certain principles to you, you will sacrifice your own credibility with those people, and you may not recover from it.

It's risky to be transparent and authentic, but hopefully the risk will just motivate us to be a better people who can act, more often than not, consistently with principles we've promised we have. - Cam Beck

P.S. For a great piece on branding and authenticity, I suggest this letter from Mike Rowe of The Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs.

FAA vs. NYC: A Federal Case Against Narcissism and the Abuse of Power

Like a lot of people, I was outraged by the presidential airplane "photo op" that frightened a lot of New Yorkers. In spite of professed knowledge that the stunt could stoke the fears of residents and visitors, federal officials demanded secrecy and even threatened federal sanctions against the city if the secret got out.

Think about that for a second.

This wasn't a matter of national security. It was an attempt to get a cool looking photograph to put in publicity materials.

In other words, it was a "branding" exercise -- or at least what passes as branding in some circles.

Still, federal officials had the hubris to threaten peacekeepers and representatives with the full force and weight of the federal government for being so dastardly as to try to prevent the public from panicking.

(This, by the way, makes a strong case for diligently protecting individual liberty, for it is the peculiar nature of granting the power to incite and destroy that leads it to its intolerable abuse.)

The cost for this photo shoot, not including the time spent on damage control after the fact, was already $328,835, and according to an FAA memo, they knew it would cost that much. On a federal scale, $328,835 isn't a lot of money -- at least, when you're not concerned about whose money it really is.

But if they were committed to wasting taxpayer money (and I've never been alive to witness a time when the government wasn't so committed) they could have at least wasted less of it.

A decent painter -- or even a Photoshop expert -- could have simulated the event for much less.

Heck, with all the Obama sycophants out there, they probably could have found someone to donate their time to the cause of promoting him or the office he now holds.

It's true that the terrible memories of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks are still alive in New York. Given the repercussions of forgetting history, we can all be glad of that.

I suggest we follow New York's example by learning a lesson from this:

No matter how brightly we think our star shines, we cannot fool ourselves into thinking that our wants are more important than those we're supposed to serve. That is a foolish trap. Branding is a farce if we make it all about us. When we do that, it's not branding at all -- but narcissism. - Cam Beck

Insights: The Case for Use Cases

Website design to some people is a little like a secret, magic box. You tell someone what you want and then presto-change-o, out pops a website, champagne falls from the heavens, and you win all sorts of awards and are gratified by the applause of your peers and colleagues. It never works that way.

It actually takes a lot of foresight and planning to build a website that meets the strategic needs of an organization. At the risk of oversimplifying, doing this requires understanding:

• what the organization's needs are (and hopefully what they should be),
• what their audience's goals are,
• figuring out where the two meet,
• how to make sure the audience knows about it, and
• how to ensure an easy, mutually satisfying transaction

This week, in my second-ever Click Here blog post, I wrote about one of the methods used to plan a website that accomplishes these goals.

If you're on the agency side, hopefully it will give you some ammunition for explaining to clients the time and effort it will take. If you're on the client side, this may give you a little peek into the magic box.

They say a magician should never reveal his secrets, but happily, as this article will clearly show, there's no magic to what I do. - Cam Beck

Related Blog Posts:

• Only The Fools Brand Lightly
• Can't I Just Get Ads and a Website?

Know When to Say When

I have no desire to jump on the dogpile that has landed on The Arnell Group and Pepsico for their handling of the redesign of the Tropicana packaging. It's always easy to be clever retrospectively. It's more difficult, in the face of a request from the client to "freshen up" a design, to question the assumption that it needs freshening in the first place. I'm going to critique it anyway -- but with the caveat that it's using hindsight wisdom.

In the AdAge podcast explaining the changes, Arnell states a few goals that, on their face, are perfectly reasonable.

First, they wanted to show "the product" in place of the orange. This, I think, underestimated the value of Tropicana's original design. With an orange, the design is iconic. It doesn't need much interpretation. An orange is an orange. And a straw implies drinking. Not only is "the product" implied, so is the idea of freshness: You can't get juice more fresh than directly from the orange.

A glass of yellow-orangish liquid, on the other hand, could be a number of things, and it takes the form of whatever glass it's in, which may or may not (and probably doesn't) represent what each family has in their home.

The second thing that Arnell did was to replace the cap with something that resembled an orange.  If I interpreted his comments correctly, the orange even has a little "give" in it to imply squeezing. In a subtle way, this ergonomically innovation served to remind buyers that the juice comes fresh from oranges.

So why didn't they just stop there?

I can only guess that the reason relates to a lot of problems we seen in a number of different fields:

Why do incoming CMOs need to fire the agency his company has been using for years? Why do they need to change an ad campaign when the old one seems to be working? Why do new managers come in to "shake things up" declaring a new sherrif in town? Why do politicians like allocating funds for building new bridges that they can name after themselves rather than fixing old ones that can't?

They want to leave their marks. They want to make an impact and say that they were responsible for it.

The new cap, while (in my humble opinion) brilliant, it's also very subtle, which means it would be difficult for anyone to take ownership in a design that represents an evolutionary -- not a revolutionary -- change.

Take into account the amount of expertise, time and effort it takes to even consider a complete redesign, it would be difficult for those who invested any of those things in the effort to take a step back, say "you know, it's really not necessary" and settle on a small change.

They would consider their investment "wasted," because the change would not have enough "Pow."

Once we acknowledge the limitations of our cleverness, we can feel comfortable challenging our assumptions. We don't need to prowl around like dogs looking for territory to mark. Some other dog is always going to come to cover up our handiwork, anyway.

If our goal in branding is to develop icons that people recognize and love, we have to set aside our own egos and truly investigate the root cause of the problem that is motivating the instructions to change what is already being done. Otherwise, our efforts may not only be useless, but actually harmful, as  a doctor treating a patient for cancer when his only problem is that he has the common cold.

 - Cam Beck

Five in the Morning

A little while back, Steve Woodruff tapped me for continuing his excellent "5 in the Morning" series, which allows bloggers to highlight articles you might have missed. Below is my contribution.

1. How to approach a problem by Inspire UX
2. Is the beautifully simple Macintosh OSX interface the panacea of interface design? Not according to Bruce Tognazzini of NN/g.
3. Anyone who has ever bought a bleeding-edge device and had difficulty trying to use it can surely appreciate this piece from the Onion via 90 percent of everything (language advisory).
4. Business Intelligence is rated a #1 technology priority for CIOs, and #5 business priority (Perhaps this second number should be moved up).
5. Steve Roesler advises us to look at presentations the same way Oglivy looked at advertising. Long live the big idea.

Thanks, Steve, for allowing me to participate!

Subscribe: ChaosScenario / Steve Woodruff's StickyFigure blog
Follow on Twitter: Cam Beck / Steve Woodruff

What have you done for me lately, social media expert

Since being on Twitter and following some of what I think are the greatest minds in social media, I've been overloaded with conversations and opinions. Some of are worthwhile, but I wonder whether or not they are tweeting just to tweet.

Those of us who work in this area, I have some news for you. We're not rock stars, even if we dress like them. Creating conflict for conflict's sake is not productive -- and sometimes it's just downright rude. Speaking in conferences, having your own podcast, pontificating about "new media" without providing specific examples, it's all good but of little value.

Maybe CMOs at big companies are impressed by books that you've published, conferences that you've spoken at. I'm not. Show me examples of where your ideas have been applied or better yet, show me where YOU have been part of the team who did it. I'm done with the fluff.

- Paul Herring

Authentic Suffering ... and Salvation

Recently I was honored to take part in redesigning the website for The Salvation Army's adult rehabilitation centers. Take a look for yourself and see how you like it.

The challenge was to effectively communicate the idea that when you donate clothing, cars, appliances, etc., to The Salvation Army, the sale of those items helps people in need of recovery.

This requires two things to make a compelling story:

1. People in need
2. People who were helped

Oh, and their stories needed to be real.

Happily, The Salvation Army has lots of stories that meet that criteria, and now they're posting them on YouTube. Be warned, though. It may be difficult to keep your composure as you watch them. Here's one of them:

Feed readers click through.

Sometime soon, these types of videos -- and other stories -- will find their way to their website as a means of communicating their message of hope -- hope they're able to deliver because of the people who donate items they're not using anymore, as well as those who buy these same goods.

If you need a reminder, just watch and listen to the stories of those who have recovered from some of the most difficult challenges anyone has had to endure.

Jason
Nellie
Patrick
James

I think we can all be glad organizations like The Salvation Army are out there fighting the good fight on the front lines of this personal turmoil.

But beyond that, I think we have to do our best to achieve our mission, in our own contexts and on our customers' terms, as successfully as The Salvation Army has for these people.

It isn't about whether we make commercials (funny or not) about overachieving horses or people throwing snow globes at other peoples' crotches. It's about truly helping others -- in whatever way that applies to you.

You want a way out of the economic mess? That -- not gimmicks -- is the way to do it. - Cam Beck