Archive for the ‘Dialogue Marketing’ Category
Building Content: Share Your Research—Even if Incomplete
A few days ago I talked with a company about their research efforts into a growing subset of a particular business process. This firm’s business is all about helping other companies make personal connections with their customers. Over the years this company has built a strong reputation for their expertise even as they continue to grow and adapt. They already know the benefits of being perceived as experts. Now they seek to add to the already strong understanding of the tools, process and attitudes needed to help companies remain connected.
One of the new opportunities before all of us is to provide leadership around a topic and invite others to talk with us about that shared passion. Seth Godin talks about it in Tribes. This company I had been speaking with has already caught the bug for growing themselves and helping others along the way. But one of the things about research is a commitment to doing something new. By definition, research means you are answering questions and finding things out fresh. Naturally we want to apply our new understanding to the problems and opportunities before us. That means we might not get it just right all the time. We may make mistakes. And don’t mistakes force a slip in our perception as experts?
I’ve been arguing all through these articles that what we gain in authenticity more than makes up for momentary slips. Social media is about real time communication, so if we read our research at some future point and realize something happened that changed everything, we’ll understand that we knew what we knew when we knew it. “Now we see things differently,” we might say to ourselves at that future point. I’m arguing for grace. I’m also arguing we’ll understand the nature of social media in this way.
This topic has a personal application for me. I’m currently writing out a book-length project that develops a theology of communication. But I’m reluctant to chunk it out into a blog format because every part of the book changes as I move forward. What I thought was true in the first three chapters is actually changing as I write chapters four through six. I’m certain change will continue all the way to Chapter 12. Do I have the courage to make mistakes in public?
How do you approach sharing your research? I’d love to hear.
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Tale of a Communication Fail that Lost a Sale
We stood looking at the broken window. I wanted an estimate. But the window salesman was unspooling a monologue about the wood in windows these days: something about 80-year old trees, then 50-year old trees and 35-year old trees. Then came sealant rates, the attributes of vinyl, why his company of craftsman were utterly dependable and more than just sales guys, and then another round of features so precise and minute I would need to plot them on a spreadsheet to begin to understand them. Most of what he said was entirely unverifiable—especially at the rate he was spewing it out.
The sales pitch is dead. Long live dialogue!
I suddenly realized it’s been some time since I’ve heard one of these old-school sales pitches. And I remembered why: I hate listening to sales pitches. I’ve been writing about the switch from monologue to dialogue so much that perhaps I had convinced myself the sales pitch was dead.
Not so.
For all the reasons I’ve been writing about, from lack of curiosity to the absence of questions to simple lack of insight into his audience, his sales pitch did not address my central question: Will you give me an estimate on replacing this window and, even more, can I trust you to do the job effectively?
It’s too bad, really. I used body language to say “I’m not interested” and “I don’t believe a word you are saying.” And two or three times directed him to the question of the estimate, even so, the pitch soon came tumbling out again at full speed. I despaired of getting back to work. He seemed to not get that the pitch was not working, nor that it was affecting me negatively. Maybe he didn’t care. He clearly seemed to not care that I didn’t care.
Even Mrs. Kirkistan, in later conversations with the window pitchman, found herself attempting to cut through the monologue to force an estimate. In fact, long before the actual estimate came, we decided we could not trust this guy or his company.
Two things about the pitchman and his monologue:
- Dialogue is a way of establishing trust. It proves someone is listening. By way of contrast, monologue proves someone is not listening. Do I really want to work with someone who is not listening?
- Feature-laden promises delivered at a rate that makes them unverifiable (even if we cared, which we didn’t) have “scam” written all over them. Maybe the pitchman and his company were legit. His monologue led me directly away from that conclusion.
Dialogue helps disperse skepticism.
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Please, Back Away from the Controller.
It’s about interest, not control.
It’s not like you can just adopt this new channel, buy space and you’re good to go.
It’s more like learning to be a friend again. I described the equivalent of “winning the lottery” in a dialogue-based medical device marketing context, but Seth Godin takes the next step with his Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us. Instead of focusing on the tools of social media we all find so interesting (or not), he posed the provocative question “Who is it we should be leading?” His question presupposes this inward-looking beginning point for any who care to begin dialogue: “What change am I passionate enough about to lead?”
I like that Godin helps me see that the coming dialogical world is much broader than today’s set of bloggy-twittery-searchable tools. The questions we ask when moving from monologue to dialogue have more to do with what we all care about together. Finding what we care about together is a necessary stop on the journey. And knowing what we care about together is a step beyond carefully controlling the conversation with fine-tuned messages.
What we care about together as humans has always been different from the one-dimensional messages with which we’ve surrounded our product messages. The secret to dialogue is what we learned years ago when our first friend showed up that summer day: we look for common interests. We expect give and take, and a willingness to hear and try something new. Friendship is formed when we stop claiming to know all the answers. Inviting marketers to rethink friendship is a step toward dialogue and a step away from monologue. Inviting marketers to find their place of leadership within friendship and within dialogue is a step toward freeing them to be the leaders they secretly want to be. The tribe-formers we need them to be.
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Medtech Using Social Media #5: Winning the Lottery
Our conversations help individuals lead groups forward.
Working on a client’s factory floor yesterday, I heard a guy describe how his troubles would be over if only he won the lottery. It’s a common enough thing to say and I’m sure we all think it from time to time. I happen to think winning the lottery would be more like trading one set of problems for another. Without the life disciplines that build on any skill (including making money), without a bit of thankfulness, suddenly receiving lots of money may not change all that much about a person’s life. Maybe for the moment more expensive toys enter the picture. But without discipline, the money eventually runs out and even larger debts take their place.
In marketing communication, just like in every other area of life, we search for the perfect tool that will solve everything. The perfect strategy of engagement. The perfect ad or the perfect media buy. The perfect social media tool. But deep-down we all know that perfect tools don’t exist. Or perhaps the perfect tool for the job does exist, but it gets corrupted when interacting with us.
The vision for engagement using these new social media tools is a vision for engaged contact with a group of people who believe in what you are talking about because you are talking about what they believe in. The vision is precisely not sharpening the perfect tool for the perfect kill (that is, the perfect sale, or the perfect implantation of our message in some consumer’s brain along with the instruction to “Buy!”). And even though lots of folks are—for the moment—listening to the social media channels, with Twitter and Facebook making headline news daily, newer channels will arise and suck away attention. The enduring lesson is that we all do better when we talk things through—no matter what technology enables that talk.
The equivalent to winning the lottery for a medical device firm using social media is a group of committed friends, colleagues and fellow-travelers making a journey together. It is a group where questions are shared as freely as answers. It is a collection of conversations where your brand is given legs and flesh as the brand promise works its way out through conversation after conversation. Winning the lottery is about building a fierce loyalty along the way.
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“Mad as Hell” Points to Need for Restored Trust. Dialogue Can Help.
Trust builds with honest talk.
Frank Luntz writing for the Los Angeles Times (reprinted in the StarTribune) points to town hall meetings as evidence that “Competing ideals are actually competing.” Though the dialogue is rowdy, it is dialogue. With leadership generally viewed as lacking integrity (for lots of reasons, from scandals to bail-outs to clear hypocrisy to “Question Authority” in modern or post-modern guise), talking together is one of the beginning points to rebuilding trust.
What if marketing and marketers led the way by engaging audiences in real talk–talk that is broader than just their product?
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Medtech Using Social Media #4: The Power of the Question
Yes--what is your question?
A question changes everything. A question mark sets a thought on a pedestal in the street and invites comment. It says, “I don’t know the answer—do you?” When I teach, a question is one of my most powerful tools. With a question I ask for input while simultaneously implying “You’ve got something valuable to say and I want to hear it.” The best, most fruitful discussions happen when I present what I know and then invite students to contribute from their experience and thinking. Something alive often happens, something I could not plan for or even predict. Something that moves us all forward.
For marketers, the question is equally powerful. If we’re lucky, we’re in a team where we can ask questions openly rather than pretending to own all the answers. Our usual path to outward communication is to ask our questions in the (relatively) protected environs of conference rooms and among colleagues. Then we polish and hone the messages into one-way barbs to shoot out through our media channels. But what if the questions themselves were our communication points? What if we started with questions to our growing community of similarly-interested people, long before we ever started polishing messages for public consumption?
Once upon a time my team worked on promoting a new heart failure device. We identified a single main message that incorporated three strong benefits (based on market research) which became the core of our campaign. We tested our messages informally, received anecdotal feedback and pushed forward. Today, with the help of social media, that scenario might look like this: take the received market research, our questions and immediately begin dialogue. Proceed with message polishing and honing even as the community dialogue continues. At some point the internal and external dialogues blend and the end result is something beyond what we could conceive on our own. Best of all, this new something already his mind-share in a community of interested people. And if you have a sales force, you know that mindshare is a key gear for turning sales.
Next Up: What would dialogue success look like?
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Photo credit: Colt Elementary PTO & JustHost.com
Medical Device Firms Using Social Media, Step #2.1: Curious People Make Better Conversation Partners
I'm interesting? You're fascinating!
Frenemies are talking—according to one medical-device insider—but mostly because the genie is out of the bottle. What we need is a wave of curiosity to beset our organizations.
You know and love curious people: they are the ones who unearth some fact about you when in conversation, find it fascinating, and then probe your knowledge of it. And when anybody finds us fascinating—they are instantly fascinating themselves.
Seth Godin, in Tribes, describes the difference between a fundamentalist and a curious person. He wasn’t talking (only) about religion. A fundamentalist receives new information or experience and immediately compares it with established dogma with the intent to reject (or perhaps even approve). In contrast the curious person receives the new information or experience and immediately engages what they have learned with what they know, looking for areas of overlap and disagreement. The curious will also reject ideas, but not before engaging, understanding and even mentally giving the idea a test drive.
Bless the hiring managers who incorporate curious regulators and lawyers into these positions—people willing to explore a changing communication landscape even while respecting the letter of the law.
Can we resolve to test for curiosity before hiring?
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Photo credit: OpenPhoto / Sarah Klockars-Clauser
Does Social Media Provide Too Big a Reveal?
What will be your single most embarrassing moment?
My industrial client sees the logic behind building a community of interest around the technology and processes they expertly provide. But building community means sharing information—and that’s problematic. This client’s industry is rife with corporate espionage, where one small step ahead of the competitor is a huge win. So they want to share their innovation story but they don’t want the information spigot open too wide.
The alternative is to continue to hold back the necessary ingredients for building relationships with would-be brand loyalists. Silence in a room gradually filling with talkers will eventually remove you from the game entirely.
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Medical Device Firms Using Social Media, Step #3: A Busker’s Tip for Making Friends in the World
Studio perfect or street-corner authentic?
When thinking about social media or advertising, there’s a familiar hurdle for every medical device marketer: a narrow audience. Unless you are marketing consumer goods, most target audiences need to be found through existing channels that cater to the specific needs of that particular, well-defined audience. It was a function of our old scarcity economy, where there were few channels that spoke directly to, say electrophysiologsts. So we ponied up our advertising dollars to buy a double-truck ad in PACE.
But communication is changing as fast as media opportunities emerge. How to take advantage of them? Let a busker answer the question. For Rob Firenix, a fire-dancing comic I met in Windsor, Ontario at the International Busker Festival, the best part of busking is “speaking directly to the audience.” Standing before an audience he has gathered lets him tweak material and get instant feedback.
Glen Hansard, the Irish musician, “Once” actor and Oscar winner (with Marketa Irglova) for best song started his artistic life as a busker. “When you are playing in the street, you are open to the street around you. The street becomes your club and people start to trust you.” Hansard describes the difference (around six minutes into this World Cafe recording) between making music in the studio and making it on the street. The studio allows the opportunity to perfect the sound while putting together something light and airy out in the public has a different kind of authenticity.
After looking for dialogue partners and pursuing the important internal conversations, find a way to get your conversation going with the people you want to reach. You want to start a conversation that will attract the dialogue partners whom you would have only received 10% interest from with your PACE print ad. But engaging them the way a busker attracts and holds an audience is worth the effort. Find your dialogue partners with authentic posts, useful information and well, entertainment.
Why not start today?
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Medical Device Firms Using Social Media, Step #2: Make Nice with Your Frenemies
- Dialogue starts inside a corporation.
Swapping one-way messaging for dialogue in medical device marketing starts with a question. But “Who am I talking with?” is just the beginning. Conversation requires more than just a change of audience—it requires a reversal of communication style. Preparing for this change starts deep inside the protected medical device community. Marketers must talk with regulatory folks. Lawyers need to join the same discussion. It’s important that all the right people join the conversation so it steers clear of the legal and ethical issues different sectors of the medical device community are currently answering for.
Starting conversations with the right people has always been something of a tightrope walk: back when internal regulatory folks and lawyers were thought of as enemies of marketing, they were not invited to the discussion so as to quiet their nay saying—at least until the final review process. But those days are gone—and thankfully so—because the different disciplines will have the best discussion when they speak openly about the requirements they represent, but with the willingness to bend as much as possible to service their patients, physicians and clinicians.
The kind of conversations needed are far from adversarial. Marketing, regulatory and legal need to open new ground for discussion. Opening that new ground includes the goals and parameters of each disciplines. It also includes the rhetorical elements of conversation: the giving of an idea and the listening to what someone else says. It’s just regular, ordinary dialogue. And if it cannot happen inside a medical device company, can it really happen outside?
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conversation is an engine 