During the early to mid 2000′s, I had a gut instinct that my website would perform better if I kept it extremely simple and text-based, even though I was selling web design and marketing.

I was right.  Customers appreciated the direct message and the idea that I was accessible and — well —  imperfect.  The lack of gloss and glimmer made my often techno-phobic potential customers feel like they could trust me, or perhaps they could get a good deal.

Banner blindess is a real phenomenon that I’ve thought a lot about.  It is the culmination of widespread selective perception patterns where  we learn where ads are going to be placed on a layout, or how they differ visually from the regular content, and “tune them out.”

This is no surprise.  Human perception has evolved to distinguish the most minute differences in things, and as we log more hours online, the more we recognize subtle patterns of where an element came from.

The reaction to these analytic user trends is online advertising that has evolved into a hodge-podge of fake news articles, personal phone-self pics and anything that will fool us into thinking that somehow it isn’t mass advertising– that it’s a real person or group that is on the other side of that hyperlink.

The fundamental lesson goes way back to one of the truisms of the usability theory of Jacob Neilsen: we  hate it when we don’t have control over our interactive experience.  We’re engaged in an immersive experience where we are choosing the next step.  When we are forced to wait or lose control, we panic.  When we have to watch an ad that we didn’t choose, or see a slideshow that we can’t control, or sit through content we didn’t expect, it bothers us.

Even video streams have evolved to allow users to jump over a section by touching the timeline, we no longer have a tolerance for passive consumption in any form.

I think anyone who is online can relate to that, but it’s a problem that outlines a deeper shift in advertising that hasn’t been addressed enough in design or marketing theory.   How can advertisers make push marketing work again?

Well, banners are always going to be with us.  We’ve always been able to ignore billboards and newspaper ads, but perhaps this uncovers something that we missed along the way: that the deep cues of from whence something originates has more to do with it’s efficacy than it used to.

In other words, we are constantly engaged in a deeper and deeper test of authenticity.

What does that mean?  It means that when we get the feeling that we’re seeing a rehash of the same perfect commercial or magazine ad we’ve seen before, that once may have made our eyes water ten years ago, we now glaze over and get impatient.

This goes against everything that customers of advertising want: predictable outcomes that have worked for others using the established symbols of the industry.

So how do you explain that this doesn’t work anymore to a boardroom that is terrified of risk in this economy?  Chances are, you don’t.  You give them safe mediocrity and cash their checks.

Are the glossy feel-good production of pharmaceutical commercials and Madison Avenue magazine ads dead to us now?    The decision by many companies to shift their budgets away from TV ad time to more diverse interactive social marketing is testament that companies are reacting to this trend, even if they don’t understand why it is happneing.

We are highly suspicious of big anonymous corporations and the predictable symbols of comfort, safety and happiness they have bombarded us with since birth.  We know that guy in the photo is a model, or the woman in the commercial is an actor who probably never used the product.  We’re more cynical than ever — especially the younger generations.

The 20 somethings today are so engaged on a meta-level game of irony that many of the “hipsters” don’t know why something is ironic or from whence it originated.  They just have a gut feeling that authenticity is impossible, so they embrace the absurdity of postmodernism and pastiche.

Social media, the flattening of the planet and the growing ease in which your average person can create great content has transformed our expectations.  We crave authenticity or gut-busting humor.  We want something real.

Perhaps it is even to the point that interactive has conditioned people to be deaf or blind to what they sense is advertising.  Perhaps we learned to like commercials because we didn’t have a choice — we have to watch them so we might as well enjoy them in the greater context of this pleasant TV watching experience.  That’s probably why commercials have increasingly blurred into entertainment.

“Aha,” you may say — now you admit that social media is the wave of the future despite your previous denial!

No, that’s not what I mean at all.  For social media to transcend the efficacy and ROI of traditional advertising, it requires some serious work by seriously creative and witty marketers.  Authenticity is easy, but it’s incredibly difficult to manicure into something compelling.  Shifting your marketing to a social media team is a real leap of faith.  They better know what they’re doing and it better be appropriate for your business. If you are a company with a limited budget, it still makes more sense to buy signs.

We want you to be yourself, but if you’re not interesting, then we’d prefer someone else to be authentic on your behalf.

If something is good, it’s good.  The iPhone commercials are an example.  They showed us a product that blew our minds, but now we’ve seen it.  Been there, done that.

What seems to turn us off more than anything is when we sense that something is trying to be something it is not.  It is a nasty American habit: the desire to look richer than you really are, to buy a house and a car you can’t afford. Where this happens in marketing the most is on the small to medium business level, where a local business charades in the visual language of an anonymous multinational corporation,  but there are subtle cues that we pick up on that tell us that, “these guys are probably in a low-rent suite somewhere.”

Those cues are things humanist fonts, stock photos of beautiful models in big skyscrapers and words like “quality customer service.”   All these things aspiring business leaders salivate over, and aspiring designers deliver.

What would be much better instead is a good portrait of the proprietors, their story and testimonials and photos of real customers.

It’s a long way since we fast forwarded through commercials on the VHS tape.  We’ve discovered the “skip button” on our DVRs and on our websites and perhaps we’ve reached a point where we’ve truly internalized the skip button in our minds.  We feel that if we can’t skip over this section, it means that we must not have the right technology yet, or we’re operating on a sub-par channel.

We’ve carried our expectations of interactive control over to all parts of our lives.

Over the holidays I saw a billboard on a major interstate that said LIKE <Business Name> ON FACEBOOK.

My wife and I had been making fun of this trend for a while and here’s a billboard on a busy stretch of I-40 that probably cost the advertiser 5-7k per month.  At that moment I realized that the mania had finally hit critical mass.  The blind are leading the blind on a mass exodus to oblivion.  Businesses are willing to shell out unlimited amounts of money on something that they clearly do not comprehend.

Now, there is nothing wrong with making it known that you have a presence on facebook, but when this type of inappropriate advertising gets this brash, it’s clear that a significant part of the population is following convention for convention’s sake.

What if I bought a billboard that said, “Tell your friends that you support our company.”  Of course,that statement is appropriate if the company is a big auto dealership and the billboard is on the way out of the showroom lot.  In that context, we can assume that:

• Most viewers know you
• They probably have formed an opinion or have been a patron
• Will refer you to others if they are advocates

But what if the business was a start-up or was trying to inform people of  their products or service for the first time, as was the case of this company who bought the offending billboard?  Generally, that is the POINT of advertising – to win new customers.  In that case, telling people to refer or support you before they know anything about you is not only awkward, but a huge waste of money on something like a billboard.  That’s why people who really GET social media think that such efforts are just plain backwards, yet because others are jumping off the bridge, everyone else seems to want to follow.

The simple fact is that most businesses don’t have a clue of how social media is supposed to fit into their marketing.  What’s worse is that there are a lot of “Social Media Marketers” out there who bought into a series of early myths about social media that were based on traditional marketing paradigms and elevated them to gospel.

Myth #1 – You Need A Social Media Campaign

Ok, I just wanted to get that out of the way.  There are people who say that if you don’t have social media strategy that somehow your going to wither away and die.  That’s complete nonsense.  This myth is propagated by the sales pitches of social media marketers.   On the contrary, if you don’t have the resources or the knowledge to substantially engage in the social sphere, it’s probably better that you don’t.  For some companies, social media isn’t really appropriate.  Your budget would be far better spent on traditional advertising.

Every day I see businesses cheapen their brands and annoy their customer base with idiotic crap by some clueless “social media” person randomly tapped from existing staff because they know how to turn on a computer, or by a social media marketer who thinks that noise is good.

“Boy, we sure have been busy polluting peoples newsfeeds with pointless comments that they now associate with your brand!  Look at all these posts we’ve done for you this week!”

This brings us to our next point:

Myth #2 – Get Involved In The Conversation

This one kills me.

What conversation?  What are you talking about?  Literally, what the hell are you talking about?  Who’s conversation? Which one?   The conversation about your brand, or the 500 billion conversations happening about 5 billion different subjects?  Who’s leading the conversation?  Is it you?  Who’s listening?  Your employees?

This is the real kicker — most companies are either posting pointless crap that their own staff “likes” and calling it a conversation or blathering on about the same self promotional marketing speak over and over.  It’s completely internal and totally useless, or it’s making your customers wish they had never clicked that button. You savvy social people know what I mean, really stupid daily posts like,

“Today is a great day to buy a car! Come see us at Randolph Toyota!”

Oh, wow!  I am so glad you reminded me of that!  Who cares that all my real friends are involved in a heated discussion about political unrest in Zuquebestan, I’m going to drop what I’m doing and go buy a car right now!

I always imagine sitting at the high school lunch table and having an intense discussion with friends about which was the best Zeppelin album, and some idiot you hardly know walking up out of nowhere, “hey guys, I got 25,000 on my video game last night!”

The table goes silent and everyone turns to the guy in disbelief.

This is a sure-fire way to make sure that you’re on your way to running what I call a “deaf campaign.”   I’ll talk more about that later.

Myth #3 – The More Friends/Followers The Better

I’ve heard marketers boast the number of followers they have.  Who cares?  What’s more important is how many of your audience is listening, discussing what you say and reposting.  It’s much more important to engage with true advocates of your brand, or decision makers in your sales pipeline than it is to focus on feathers in your cap.  More on that below.

The Five Sacred Truths Of Social Media Marketing

Truth #1 – Social Is The Fine Art Of Pull Marketing

Push marketing is the old way of letting people know about you – you buy a sign, a radio commercial, you send them direct mail.  They look at it and they may learn something about your business.  It’s as old as business itself and everyone understands it.  You shove your message in front of people.

Push marketing is easy.  Just about anyone can do it.  It works.

Pull marketing is much more refined. You have to create things that people want to find out more about.  You write an article or post a video that people may be interested in and share with others.  You educate others on things that are your specialty.  You create a contest where people can win something.  You actively pursue and nurture one-on-one relationships with advocates who in turn refer you to others.

What you don’t do is PUSH market in a pull channel.  In other words, you don’t talk about your stupid business sale every day and shamelessly self-promote yourself on Facebook.

Pull marketing takes talent.  It’s asymmetrical, it requires creativity and not everyone can do it in the same way that not everyone can write songs.

With pull marketing, people have to want what you have.  It’s like hiring a really funny comedian to stand in your store.  People come to hear the jokes, and buy stuff while they are there.

Truth #2 – Feed Access Is The Platinum Thread That Is Easily Broken

If there is one thing that is more important than ANY aspect of social media marketing, it is understanding that access to peoples news feed is the name of the game.  When people follow you, you are granted access to their private personal news feed and your updates will appear there.

This feed access is how you connect to them and add value to their lives by sharing information that is useful to them, or opportunities that will entertain or give them reason to share with others.

It is extremely easy to screw up and lose access to this sacred newsfeeed.  Most marketers botch it within the first week and don’t even know it.  This is the crux of where social media marketing goes horribly wrong.

Truth #3 - Most SM Marketers Are Running Deaf Campaigns

Imagine a man stepping out on stage, head held high.  He walks across the stage to a podium, and with an air of confidence looks out into an auditorium of hundreds of “followers.”  He thinks about how popular he is and smiles.

He begins to speak, going on and on about himself, what he thinks and what he’s doing.

In the audience, every single person (except perhaps his mother) is wearing headphones and is staring down at their phones, listening to music, chatting, watching movies and other personal activities.  Not one of them hears or sees a single thing the speaker says.

If there is one concept that most people don’t comprehend it’s that every Facebook user has the ability to privately reduce or completely turn off your updates in their newsfeed.  You are still their “friend” and they get to save face by maintaining that facade of “friendship” but you don’t have any real access to them unless you want to send a private message to them.

In other words, the main reason you were trying to attract followers is now moot.  I call this, a deaf campaign.

I’ve read various numbers, but the fact is that most business fan pages run deaf campaigns.  They attract followers but because of their inability to engage with their followers appropriately or add value to their lives, they stop listening within the first week.

This is why the number of followers you have is only useful to impress your clueless boss or competitor.

Social media marketing companies regularly fool their clients by engaging in contracts that focus on “number of updates per day or week.”  This is a sure-fire recipe for a deaf campaign.  If your only objective is to SPAM your audience, you can be sure they will stop listening, even if they were dumb enough to listen the first time.

Truth #4 –  Don’t Be A Populist, Focus On Advocates

Let’s face it, it’s nearly impossible to be interesting or relevant to everyone.  Unless you are a true commodity like a hamburger shop, you should expect that your customers and therefore your followers consist of a niche group.  It’s much more important to attract followers who are genuinely interested in a conversation about your industry trends than attempting to please a mass audience.

It is possible to engage a mass audience, however the tactics usually rely on free giveaways or pure entertainment that isn’t specific to what you do and creates a positive association with your brand.

By focusing on the advocates and decision makers in your market, you target the people who matter and maintain focus.

Truth #5 – Let’s Not Talk About Me, Let’s Talk About You

Anyone who knows how to work a room, pick up the opposite sex, or be an effective conversationalist knows that nobody likes a windbag.  On the contrary, people love to talk about themselves, or even better, hear someone else flatter them or give them positive feedback.

One of the cornerstones of many social media campaigns is the magic art of the REPOST.

The repost is when something you post is reposted by one of your followers to everyone in their personal friend network.  This happens sometimes organically when you post an article or amusing video that they share.

The best way to predictably leverage the power of the repost is to create original content that features YOUR followers.  When someone is featured in a photo of an event, mentioned in an article, or wins a contest of merit, you can be sure that they will repost it to their network.

A smart social media strategist will devise contests and create original content that regularly features his or her followers so that they may spread the love.  For this to be effective, it’s best to attach it to some sort of contest with photos or video.   A good example of this is a contest where people submit a funny image of their children, show off their home decor, or share images of their pets.  Each week, you feature a winner and put their submitted content on your website.  If each winner has 200 friends, then each week you are getting exposure to up to 200 folks who may not have heard of you before.

Congratulations, you are now a social marketing genius.  Go forth and spread the good news!

The glove was heavy for my diminutive frame and the ball ended up making more contact with my massive head, which to this day remains out of proportion to my wiry frame.  How can you miss it?

Donk! (Crying ensues).

After a season of coaching my first grade T-Ball team and soldiering through the leadership of the most uncoordinated youths in Sullivan county, Dad’s interest in my sporting career diminished and his passions moved on to other things, like fine raised paneling and early american architecture.

Around my father’s wood shop and personal spaces I would discover drawings and sketches between the pages of Southern Living, American Heritage or US News & World Report of things that he was going to build.   They were drawn on wrinkled, torn out sheets of blue and white graph paper that had the Eastman Chemical Company logo or “Safety First” in the top right margin.  I imagine him daydreaming at the office, sketching out blueprints of the 18th century style home he would steadily complete from 1985 to 1995.

One night when we were hanging out in the furnished basement with the puke green carpet and the cheap wood panelling, he sketched my portrait.  I had never seen him draw like that before and was transfixed by the way he used many strokes to find the right lines.  From that moment until I was about twelve years old, I was determined to be the best freehand artist in my class.  Through relentless practice, I was.

Even though Randy Gray wasn’t a coach in contests or feats of strength, he was a powerful coach in my life.  In fact, his own relationship with his High School football coach he fondly referred to as “Coach Owen” was instrumental in his development at 17 and 18, when he suffered permanent ACL damage that ended his promising college football career and tried to comprehend why his father’s body was riddled with terminal cancer of the spine in a Huntsville AL hospital.  My paternal grandfather, who died seven years before I was born, instilled in him a way of familial interaction that was both invasive and cathartic.

Again and again through my time with him, he would force me to talk about things that I didn’t want to talk about. And we’d have these talks about every two weeks. Sometimes these life coaching sessions would bring me to tears because I didn’t want to face the truths that were obvious from his more mature and objective perspective.   He wanted to know what I was thinking about both emotionally and logically because he had a deep need to understand the motivations of the people around him. A compulsive instinct for control became a doorway to explore and reflect on his own mind along with his son’s, and I think now that part of my karma in this life was to be with him on his journey of growth and to benefit from the wisdom he was uncovering.

Like his father, he died in late middle age at 56.   A young man by modern standards at the peak of his power and professional success.  My process of mourning his death is an ongoing one of understanding how much of my own mind is part of his legacy, and how I can honor that in my life work.

The roles that our mothers and fathers play in our minds is very deep and unique to each of us. The story of that generational relationship goes back infinitely, and most of us spend our entire lives coming to terms with and defining most of our relations in terms of those early ways of loving, nurturing and guidance.

Since times immemorial there have been social roles for a member of the tribe to be an objective listener and guide – to play the role of the father/mother figure for those who want to continue to grow beyond the nest.  The role was often called shaman, elder, priest or pastor.  It wasn’t until advanced stages of specialization that we started to see those roles amplified into professional paths such as psychology, psychoanalysis, clinical therapy and that sort of thing. These relationships were established through the channels of science and medicine that were popularized in the 20th century, and continue to have a staggering influence on the way our society deals with physical and emotional health.

In India, people have said that you can’t wave a dead dog in the air and not hit what is known as a “Guru”. The guru is ubiquitous because of Indias melting pot of religious methods.  They serve the rest of the population by creating a highly customized game or method that a person can engage in order to reach a higher state of enlightenment and awareness of their karma.

A million different paths to the same place with a million different guides.

This is unique to India in that it affords tremendous diversity compared to other cultures, and indeed becomes a matter of commerce. The idea that you hire a person to help you get better is a normal thing — you get a Guru. It’s been a big business serving people all over the world since the 1960s when the Beatles and Harvard Professor Richard Alpert imported it to our cultural palate.

The US and European world has dabbled with inventing their own modern capitalist functional equivalent through the self-help movement via labels such as consultant, teacher, guru and coach.

The trick of course is that you can’t be taught if you are not open to teaching. It’s like taking piano lessons, but instead of someone next to you to keep you focused on your technique and the sheet music on the stand, you want guidance on how to improve yourself to play the music you want to make.  Or as Aristotle would say, to help you on your teleological growth toward arete.

A friend, partner and client, Micheal Burt was inspired by the path established by western paternal luminaries such as Steven Covey and made it his life work to serve as an objective advisor to both individuals and organizations based on Covey’s foundational philosophy of life.

Known as “Coach” to the many who know him, Micheal is deeply disciplined in the idea that to truly serve those who are open to coaching, he has to embody the lessons that he teaches and consistently do the self-work that the people around him want to aspire to.

From an eastern perspective, this is both admirable and normal for someone to take on the role of the Guru as a service, because to be effective and acceptable at the job one must live a relatively selfless existence in terms of the idle pleasure and transgressive patterns that so many people cling to for meaning. For those unfortunate enough to get involved with a charlatan , well, we could just say that’s their karma.

When I first met Coach Burt a several years ago, he was at the dawn of his freelance reinvention and I was skeptical of anyone’s ability to take on that kind of responsibility without it becoming subject to his own insecurities. No doubt the power, fame and persuasion must be a sweet taste, but what I’ve witnessed in my relationship with him is a man who has made it his life work to serve other people in a way that makes them better, and perhaps to serve as the father to many in the way Covey was the ideal father he didn’t have.

If that is for his economic benefit, then good. That’s the way we do things in our democracy. The yogis of India, as part one of the longest running capitalist societies in history, have been doing it for millennia. The life of a travelling teacher and Machiavellian advisor is ultimately one of dedication and service, and with that responsibility comes both sacrifice and risk of the king’s sword at your throat of things go awry.

I recently discovered a gentleman named Job Kabat-Zinn who has had great success not only introducing meditation into the western medical arena, but in framing meditation practice in a way that is extremely easy to understand.  He is is Professor of Medicine Emeritus and founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Zinn (his name sounding like “Zen” probably helped his career) calls his form of practice “Mindful Meditation” and when I heard his approach the first time I said, “That’s it — that’s the meditation format that your average American can grasp!”

Zinn cuts to the chase and doesn’t require any lotus position, pillows or any of that stuff: you can just sit upright in a chair or do it wherever you like.  As I often tell people, the traditions of meditation often obscure the simplicity of it for the modern person and make it seem silly.  Meditation is not praying to a god or a religious act.  It’s more like exercising or playing a musical instrument – it’s just a practice.

The primary method Zinn uses is focus on the breath, and does a wonderful job talking you through a proper understanding of how to practice a state of awareness without getting into mantras or other “kooky” stuff.

Below is a guided meditation session / talk Zinn gave on Google campus a few years ago.  The beginning is a discussion of meditation followed by a guided meditation.  For people getting started, I highly recommend using guided meditations by Zinn to help you understand the basic principles and to offer a little push in the right direction to do it.

I also have an mp3 of a simple guided mediation session available for friends who are interested.  Please email me for more info.

Email blasts seem too good to be true.  Many times they are.  Like walking into a post office with a machine gun, they are virtually guaranteed to get you in hot water!

Email systems do not work like they used to.  In fact, the technology behind email traffic and spam filtering becomes more sophisticated every day.  Understanding how email works in 2011 is critical to success in email marketing.

Get To Know The Rules:

Email networks are smarter than you think
Unwanted email threatened to destroy the medium in the early 2000′s.  In order to save email itself, systems were designed to stop unwanted solicitation.  The email providers who did this best, such as Yahoo, Google, Hotmail, and AOL grabbed more market share.  Google, who sprinted ahead of the pack with Gmail did so because they offered the best Spam control available.

Today, just about all email systems utilize standardized SPAM protection.  Companies with in-house systems spend thousands licensing firewall and SPAM filtering services.

Multiple Emails At Once Are Always Suspicious
Let’s not get into the technical details of how ISPs detect spam, but the bottom line is that sending a single email to someone from one system is usually considered normal.  But when an address sends out the same email or many similar emails to many addresses, that immediately triggers flags.

Strike one.

Email providers cooperate
Let’s say you send out a big promotional email to 100 people in your “database.”  Those emails are going to many different systems around the country — to different recipient “post offices.”  Let’s say that some of these recipients decide they don’t like your message and mark it as spam.  Oh well, I guess your future emails will just get diverted to that users spam box.  No big deal, right?

Wrong.  Email SPAM prevention systems cooperate within their own networks and beyond, sharing SPAM data.  When you get voted down, it counts against you and sometimes, it’s much worse.

Strike Two

One Bad Apple…
Many company mail systems run their own private “post offices.”  These post offices live on one or more addresses called IP Addresses.  If you have an unscrupulous or uninformed user on your system who decides they want to jump into email marketing with a purchased list, they could quite easily get everyone at your company blacklisted across millions of participating systems.  This happens ALL THE TIME.

Strike Three: You’re OUT!

The Ignorant Stay Blissful
If your system is blacklisted, you don’t get a notice from any central authority.  You don’t get bounce backs or undeliverable request returns.  The other systems just delete your emails and ignore them.   People can go weeks, months or even years without realizing they are blacklisted.  Only when a single user sending personal mails from the same IP system notices their personal mails aren’t getting to their client inboxes do they start to make phone calls to their system admins.

Blasting Into Thin Air: The Dedicated MailBlast Server
One of the common tactics of companies who offer mail blasting systems is to place your company blasting service on it’s own dedicated address that is unique and separate from the company personal emails.  This is the perfect combination as it allows users to compose blasts all day long without getting the company primary mail system blacklisted.

So what does this mean?
It means that your email marketing is largely a pointless exercise.  You think that the emails are going out to hundreds or thousands of people, but only a handful of recipients on cheap or unfiltered systems are getting them.  Your system will not report this otherwise.

Mail marketing services who offer dedicated company CRM mail blasting do this on purpose, and by necessity.  They know that most of your users will abuse the IP and it will get blacklisted, so they make you pay for a dedicated IP that they know will soon be banished from the real email world.  They keep that “junk IP” away from the good ones and just let the folks who are uninformed or careless play in a virtual sandbox that goes nowhere.

Keeping It Clean
Staying on the good side of the SPAM police is hard.  Not only should you comply with CAN-SPAM rules, but you need to take the extra step to ask users to please unsubscribe using a simple link instead of sending to junkmail.  Not with an obscure link at the bottom, but at the very top of your message IN BOLD.

The legitimate mail marketing companies out there like Emma, Constant Contact or ListBox watch their users like a hawk, and analyze any addresses input into their system against the same SPAM blacklists that ISPs use.  I’ve seen purchased lists get pruned down by 80% by Constant Contact! They know that in order to stay in business and be effective, they have to police their users because they know their average customer is either uniformed of the nuances or would like to game the system as much as possible to their benefit!

The bottom line is that unless your users specifically requested to join your mail list, and continually have an easy way to opt-out, you could put your entire email campaign and anyone else operating from your post office in jeopardy.

Wolfe, Jones, Wolfe, Hancock & Daniel, LLC represents clients in diverse areas of legal matters and have a reputation as one of the best law firms in Northern Alabama / Huntsville area, including:

Banking Law
Wolfe, Jones, Wolfe, Hancock & Daniel, LLC is regularly involved in commercial litigation concerning the issues of UCC law, secured transactions, lien priority, commercial paper, materialman’s liens, and related litigation.

Bankruptcy
Bankruptcy affords debtors and creditors certain rights pursuant to statute. Wolfe, Jones, Wolfe, Hancock & Daniel, LLC is knowledgeable in all aspects of the U.S. Bankruptcy code, including recent substantial revisions.

Business & Commercial Law
Highly qualified and thoroughly experienced in all aspects of Alabama business and commercial law.

Domestic Contract Law
Wolfe, Jones, Wolfe, Hancock & Daniel, LLC enforces the contractual rights of businesses, developers, contractors, and other parties in  Alabama, in a wide range of contract litigation issues.

Real Estate Law
With more than twenty-five thousand real estate transactions since 1990, Wolfe, Jones, Wolfe, Hancock & Daniel, LLC has become one of the largest and most experienced real estate firms in Alabama.

“What is that?” Jenny asked.

“It’s a process of optimizing your website’s code so that it performs better on search and ranks higher,” says Lawrence.

“Oh that ‘s very important.  I need to be on the front page of Google,” Jenny replies.

“Normally we charge over a thousand dollars for this process, but I tell you what, I’ll throw it in for just $300 if you sign today.”

“Wow, that’s a great deal.  I really appreciate it.”

“Now keep in mind, that due to the nature of search, nobody can make guarantees on ranking, but this has helped other companies achieve first place ranking on Google,” says Lawrence with a smile.

—–

The above is an example of a highly melodramatic web development sale.  Closing techniques like those employed by “Lawrence” have been common since around 2002, and rely on jargon and technological ignorance to sell what amount to “vapor services -” services that have little or no significant scientific effect.

I have worked with development companies and have known developers and salespeople who have sold a service product called “Search Engine Optimization.”  While it began as a valid, scientific approach to making websites meet guidelines of major search engines, SEO quickly grew into one of the  most profitable, yet least understood service products in the history of web marketing.

Unfortunately, 80% of it is a scam.

What if I told you I could sell you a scented spray that gives you more persuasive power and makes people like you?  What if I then told you that I can’t tell you the secret  ingredients, but it has been used “effectively” by several highly successful people?  I then show you a list of these people and even one of them you have heard of.

Now, if I told you that because it works differently on different people, I can’t guarantee that it will work for you all the time, or in some cases, it might not work at all –  would you still buy it?

Based on what SEO sales numbers suggest, I think the answer is that you just might buy a case.  Many people fall for this exact same ploy every day when they buy into SEO.

The technical side of what is often sold as “Search Engine Optimization” can be done by an entry level coder  in 20 minutes.  The methods used can be found quickly and easily online, and amounts to simply placing keywords repeatedly throughout the page and following a few rules of syntax so that your code is not penalized by search engines.

A lot of people have gotten wise to the uselessness of most SEO services, and thankfully more companies are requiring a results based contract .

In the defense of reputable SEO companies, real link building and content creation requires many hours of highly specialized work, akin to running a small newspaper. To truly drive search ranking, you have to make your website popular.  While popularity can be faked and manufactured, every day Search gets better and better at detecting tricks and “black hat” SEO techniques that attempt to inflate results.

Thanks to recent changes in Google algorithms and the purchase of a company called Alexa, they are better than ever at determining that your site is popular because it REALLY IS POPULAR!

While “experts” like our character, “Lawrence” are entering the global web market all over the world with no significant background in social research or statistics, there is a scientifically disciplined movement emerging that utilizes the fantastic array of tools available to understand and make marketing more effective and efficient. That movement is Conversion Research Optimization.

Conversion Research Optimization is a hot trend that attempts to improve design efficacy through testing and analysis. At  best, it is research methodology applied to achieving certain outcomes; at worst, it is a set of tacit assumptions by a consultant that may not be optimal at all.

A conversion is when your website achieves a measurable goal.  An example would be to make a sale in your e-commerce system, or receive a valid email address of an interested customer. Put simply: conversions are what you want.

Conversion optimization is a process that has been popularized by the rise of Google Adwords and their advanced traffic analytics system (technology they purchased from a company named Urchin several years ago). Put simply, it is a “process” that optimizes your website to achieve higher conversions.

Sounds good, right?

No. The problem is that unless this Conversion Optimization process follows the same research standards as academic science, it could be baloney.  The results could be completely arbitrary and as we say in statistics, spurious.

If a conversion optimization specialist redesigns your website, and your conversions jump 100%, then you can say that you increased your conversions. However, what if that is because your previous website was clearly useless and any professional redesign would have helped? You still don’t know if that is the best possible sign.

Chances are, it could be better.

Let’s say you have a sandwich shop that has a paper cardboard sign.  You buy a nice new neon sign.  You start getting more customers. That was a good thing, but it’s certainly not the same thing as conversion optimization.

Good research depends on standards of statistical significance that have been rigorously developed over past 200 years.  The goal of science is to rule out chance and demonstrate “objective” relationships or causality.

Lack of controls for unknown variables are a hallmark of sham science.  What if you recently got your website featured in a prominent blog  and you didn’t know it?  Would you attribute that bump in traffic and gross conversions to your conversion optimizer? You can bet they will take credit for it.

The fact is, conversion optimization is one of the most important fields of scientific market research today – it has the ability to dependably and predictably improve the effectiveness of your website over time through experimentation.  Instead of you, your staff, or your consultant guessing which design is best, you can find the one that is the most effective.  Even if it is ugly or unconventional, any smart business wants a goose that lays golden eggs.

You learned about the scientific method in high school, and the experiments used in proper CRO follow the same logic:

• You have to have a scientifically valid sample size
• You must at least compare two accurately measurable variables
• At least one should be a control group to rule out unknowns

The most accurate experiments performed by researchers involve randomly and evenly rotating web visitors between two designs or variations of your website to determine which is more effective at achieving a measurable outcome.   Once each version has been viewed around 100 times, you have a valid sample size and analysis can be performed that  determines that one is better than the other at achieving your objective.

In conversion optimization, everything is a variable: the colors, the shapes, the placement of images, the colors of the buttons, the language and the number of choices.  Early experiments might involve a simple competition between three unique designs.  Later in the same campaign, you might be down to which image of a family seems to be the most attractive and effective?

Another clear use for this type of research is for pricing structures.  Two identical layouts present the same general set of prices, but with some variations in payment terms or even in the order in which you list them.

It is real science folks, and it takes the guesswork and “bs” factor out of expert consulting.  There are a million “internet consultants” out there who are experts on what they think works best.  The only ones that matter are those that are willing to test their hypotheses scientifically.

After all, any advice you get from any consultant is a hypothesis, not fact.

The sad news is that while CRO is a popular trend in the broader movement of market research since the 1920′s, it won’t be long before it’s reputation is tarnished by scam artists, and the real science that builds results will be held hostage by charlatans and carpetbaggers.

As a friend said during lunch the other day, “people just aren’t opening their wallets.”

Groupon Madness and the Scarcity Mentality

The “Great Recession” hasn’t just changed the amount of buying going on, there is a total shift in the collective consciousness of the consumer. I can see it at the grocery store checkout: the looks on mothers’ faces as they tally their list and sift through stacks of coupon clippings.

My wife tells me of Groupons creating such demand that it downs the corporate web servers of GAP inc. I read recently that many small retailers issuing a first time Groupon suddenly find themselves unable to honor them because of unbelievable and completely unexpected demand. Businesses who unwittingly fall into the loss leader strategy trap using things like Groupons can find themselves playing a nonstop zero margin game for months.

Groupons get new customers, but they are only sensible if you have either a rock solid strategy for customer retention or a solid cushion in your margins!

The US consumer has entered a “hoard and protect” mentality, no doubt hard wired into our brains as a survival mechanism. People have desperate, hungry eyes, lurking like vultures from their home internet connections, looking for a way to pinch a penny — comparing prices, reading reviews, scouring coupon aggregation sites for a deal.

This puts small business owners in a difficult situation of tremendous comparative scrutiny. You probably find yourself having to answer to comparative pricing much more than you did a few years ago. For those businesses that operate in market segments with high competition, this can be absolutely miserable.

Fortunately, there is a way out. But it requires some soul searching.

When you find yourself trying to justify what you do or sell in an apples to apples game, you might be in trouble. You might be able to keep this up for a while if you are willing to operate at lower profits or if you’ve got lower costs that make it possible, but ultimately you are starting down a path of diminishing returns. In marketing this is called “operating from a low price position.” It’s a common strategy: you sell something cheaper than the others and the penny pinchers come flocking, right?

Uh-oh.. the gal up the street just lowered her price, now you are in a price war!

Not only is this a foolish game for you as a businessperson to play, but it lays the foundation for a more systemic problem: deflation. Yes, that’s right: deflation is considered one of the causes of the Great Depression’s “double dip” that was only relieved by wartime full employment.

When you see your competitors playing this game, it’s easy to follow suit.

Don’t: you should let them eat each other and do what the mavericks do: get out of that idiot wind! Your mother used to tell you not to jump off a bridge, right?  This doesn’t mean throwing in the towel and boarding up the shop, it simply means you need to protect and reposition your business away from the battle for the bottom.  Play it smart.

What your business needs is a creative differentiation strategy.

Here’s a nice elementary school example:

Selling Lemonade & Banjo Picking

You have yourself a little lemonade stand by the creek. Bobby and Betsy, your competitors up the creek are making lemonade too and dang it, they keep lowering their prices against yours!  You both use the same ingredients; the same paper cups, and the same general recipe for quality lemonade. Thanks to their cutthroat prices, they are getting all the customers, but you notice that they work all day, never sleep and their life pretty much, well… sucks lemons: a pretty sour routine.  If you worked that hard you would never have time to play your banjo, which is really what makes you happy.

You refuse to lower your price to match theirs because you don’t want to make it worse. Just as you are about to tear down your lemonade stand into campfire kindling and go back to playing your banjo for tips, an old man comes to you and offers you some advice.

“Well sonny, since yer about to quit anyway, why don’t ye’ play a little game just for fun to mess wit’ ol’ Bobby and Betsy’s heads,” he says.

Feeling like you’ve got nothing to lose you say, “OK… What?”

“Put yer lemonade in a bottle with a fancy blue label, add less sugar and call it somthin’ european soundin’ like Lemona Sveska Lite.  Double yer price, shoot — TRIPLE IT! Keep sellin’ the same old stuff in a cup too with a different name, but at a touch higher price than Betsy and Bobby, and call it Lemona Classic. Also advertise that you only use organic locally grown lemons.”

(Note: you already use organically grown lemons – I forgot to mention this is really way out in the Tennessee hills and everything is organic).

You think the old man is little crazy but he’s a really good banjo picker with a fancy gold watch and real nice authentic alligator boots, so you proceed to follow his directions.

Well, since I’m telling this tale for a reason, you can probably guess that pretty soon, people start noticing your products. A few of the high falutin’ folk come over to your stand so they can avoid the long lines up the trail and all the dull people with stinky unruly kids. Because they’re the high falutin’ variety, they buy the premium drink that’s three times the price. And they are sure to walk around with the pretty bottles down at the swimming hole so people can see them enjoying the pricier PREE-MEE-UMM bottled beverage.

“It just tastes better,” they say. “It’s worth every red cent!”

Before long, others start to wander over. They see the high price of the premium drink and rationalize that the regular lemonade you sell MUST also be a much higher quality too since it’s made by Lemona from fresh locally grown organic trees.  They don’t know what that means, but it must be good, cause it’s fancy soundin’. They say it tastes better too!

Within a few months, there are still the miserly money grubbers buying from Bobby & Betsy, but thanks to your premium price position, you are making more money than ever and working shorter hours.

Because you’ve got more time to enjoy life, your banjo picking is getting better too!  The old man with the gold watch and the gator boots stops by and shares a lick or two from time to time, and he’s impressed!

“not bad, sonny!”

The Maverick

Admittedly, the above is a rather oversimplified and rudimentary example of a differentiation strategy based on brand and price positioning, but it attempts to illustrate a point without getting pointy headed: when you got into a price war, you can change the game so you are no longer competing directly with the other players who become victims of their own drive to the bottom. You created a new “open” market segment for something different.  Something Mavericky.

Now, this seems pretty obvious to many of us, and as master consumers it probably sounds quite familiar — we can think of some brands that are probably way overpriced.  Like who the heck actually buys the $7000 Prada bag in the window?  But devising the right strategy can be very tricky. There are established systematic methods of market research that determine what may or may not work in any particular market segment. You might want to talk to a marketing professional about the right strategy for your business (wink).

The idea of “the Maverick” is a popular part of North American culture — the independent thinker who defies the herd and blazes a new trail.  Right now, it  might seem tough or scary to break from a herd that is fixated on delusions of scarcity. But frankly folks, If there was ever a time to be a maverick, it’s right now!

(cue western music)

—–

Hague & Harrison suggest that leaving pricing to your sales team tends to lead to problems and undervaluation.  Why? Because lower prices are easier for the sales staff.  This makes sense: it is advantageous for your sales team, but not ideal for your bottom line.  The study outlines the three research techniques that can be used effectively to determine the perceived valuation of your product by your customers.  They are listed below:

1. Simple Point Spend – presents the buyer with a list of the benefits and ask him to indicate their relative importance by spending a number of points according to which are most valued. This technique is somewhat limited because buyers don’t actually use this line of reasoning when purchasing (even though they probably should!).
2. Conjoint analysis – a trade-off model in which respondents compare different offerings and choose between them. This method can be revealing but tends to be complex and difficult to employ, requiring a large sample size.
3. SIMALTO analysis – a list is made of the many attributes which are considered in an offering. This can include product features as well as service and delivery features. For each of these attributes different levels are described, showing basic levels to the left and improved and better levels to the right.Your customers choose which of the attributes down the left-hand side of the grid are important when buying. For each of these, what level they are currently receiving (columns 1 to 4). Next they are asked what level they would like to receive. Finally, the customer is given a number of points to “spend”to indicate how much they would like to receive the improvement that would move them from what they currently receive to their ideal. The grid has numbers in the bottom of each square from 0 to 15 which indicate the ‘cost’ of moving up a level. Each movement up a level costs the respondent 5 points. With only limited points to spend, respondents have to choose what improvements they really want. This trade-off gives a utility or value to the different levels of the attributes.
   

Within those numbers are a lot of qualitative aspects, but it’s clear that the low cost of email marketing makes it a very smart investment for most businesses.

I like to classify or at least group social media in with email because they are very similar in form and function.  SM marketing usually amounts to your feed posts being consumed in the same way as emails.  Everything from becoming a fan (subscribing to the list), to reading a post (reading the email), to viewing less of or ignoring (opting out or marking as spam) is functionally equivalent.

Based on the email campaigns I’ve seen in the past decade or so, it’s safe to say that in a range of good (effective) to bad (useless and ignored) the majority of them are poorly executed and only achieve a fraction of their potential. Why? This article discusses how you can avoid rolling the dice and create a campaign that could become your most effective method of long term marketing.

Different business models require different approaches

Email marketing for a retail business selling products seems pretty straightforward right?  Just talk about your product and offer promotions every so often — easy enough!  For example, if you sell electronic equipment, you send out a mass email advertising a big sale on GPS devices with a teaser price in the subject line – that’s a tried and true technique.

GPS Systems- 40% under retail this week only!

Yes, people respond to teaser prices!  But let’s face it, very few American companies these days are dealing with simple products and commodities – many offer complex services or are simply there as a “hands free” service like investment, insurance, or they might be a service you only hire once in a lifetime, like a divorce lawyer.

For service companies, the ol’ tried and true approach of attracting business with teaser prices is best left to winning NEW customers using ads on search or on billboards.  Email and social media are about something more elusive: building a relationship and positive association in the minds of your existing customers over a long period of time to win referrals and repeat business.  The most successful companies in the world have built their empires on repeat business, even to the point of losing money on the initial sale or point of contact.

Let’s step back and consider an alternative approach:  brand building through establishing your campaign as a quality information source.

The People Love You

I don’t know why anyone in their right mind would volunteer for junk mail.   Most of the time lists subscribe you deceptively, or obscure the opt-in during a purchase or consultation.  You agree to have a stranger send you an email every so often, with no obligation to read it.  So how do you justify this sly little agreement?  You accept this relationship when the email proves valuable to you at least once, and proves to be potentially valuable in the future.

As an advertiser, how do you prove this value? How do you win a subscriber’s trust and get them to not only accept and not cancel your mail, but OPEN it eagerly each time you send it?

Make it interesting in it’s own right – not as means to an end between two parties.  Show them something that they will like.

Some businesses have it easy: you might service and sell to a very specific hobbyist market where your readers “geek out” over anything related to the subject.  But what if you are a construction contractor, insurance agent, or real estate company?  People don’t care about today’s interest rates, or your reduced prices, or limited time offer.  The average person is so inundated with that kind of “marketing speak,” that it goes in one ear and out the other.

So my advice is simple: don’t talk about yourself, your company, or your products at all.  Attract people’s trust and attention through interesting stories, facts, information, jokes, or anything that’s worth sharing.  Talk about people that use your service who have interesting stories.  Share successes of your clients and promote your community — ask yourself, would a busy person actively find an interest in this?

The masters of this art create a story of compelling human interest, and tie your product or service into it in a way that is favorable.  Instead of:

Low prices and interest rates mean great investment!

do something that is worth reading:

Tales of the Jonesboro real estate kings

Option one above is a boring circular that people have seen a thousand times, that your average “marketer” will put together for you.  Option two is a creative story about some select local families who took advantage of the current real estate environment and made money — with well placed name drops to some of your key people.

Which would you read during your morning coffee?

Use the most creative people you can hire or find and keep them away from the sales & marketing staff

I’m not saying that marketing professionals can’t be incredibly creative people, and there’s a breed of marketers out there that really get that the new marketing is all about being fun and popular, but there’s a good reason why newspapers and magazines draw a line between the business and creative side.  People in sales and marketing get caught up in the bottom line, and it has a tendency to make them use words like, reduced, discount, best, lowest, act now, offer, limited time, ROI and other marketing speak.

Your customers really don’t care about this. Keep them out of  your email and social media campaigns. Your email marketing and social media are aspects where every business should “have a creative side” – even if you sell trash bags.

Also, don’t make the mistake of using an uncreative, overworked, or grammatically incompetent member of your staff to be the spokesperson of your brand.  You’d be surprised how often executives tap the wrong person on staff for this job.  Just because Bobby is good with computers doesn’t mean he’s your guy.  Find the closet creative writer with a good social sensibility and challenge them to create interesting and appropriate content at regular intervals that will inspire awareness in your brand and become a positive voice to your community, or hire out a pro.

I’ve noticed a trend with my clients when it comes to discussing solutions for Email and Social Media marketing.  It goes something like this:

“So have you considered using direct email or social media for marketing?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“It can be time consuming, do you have someone who is handling this?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a friend who’s a stay at home mom who is really excited about helping for cheap.”

“So what are her qualifications?”

“Oh, she spends hours on Facebook daily and knows everything about it.”

Sorry folks, that’s the wrong answer. The correct answer would be, “she was a staff writer for the Washington Post for 10 years before she started her family.”

Selling The Dream, One Message At A Time!

The success of your social media campaign depends on your ability to create a strong, repetitive, positive association with your brand by being a source for creative information.  In other words, your email and social media marketing is like running a mini-newspaper where your business is the sole sponsor.

The company that builds daily content by “selling the dream” through human interest stories and great news is going to win the hearts and minds of the public.  Over time you create a strong awareness of the brand, so when the time comes to think of your market sector, you will be the first that comes to mind.

The wrong approach is to build an email and social media campaign that blindly attempts to win friends through gimmicks or sheer persistence- the result will be more useless information clogging our pipes.  The worst approach is to talk about “us, our sale, our company, our this and that.”  Dude, nobody cares.  Go away.

The right strategy is to build a great online information source with  stringent editorial guidelines:

1. Never blatantly promote your brand
2. Only post or talk about great things that people would love to know about – not your company.
3. Avoid marketing speak at all costs
4. Sell the dream of community and lifestyle
5. Talk about real people with real stories

I didn’t talk much about technology here or plug some brilliant system.  Why? because content is king in this business of propaganda, and it’s not easily quantifiable. If record companies could quantify what makes a hit song, they wouldn’t need to spend the earnings of the top one percent of their artists on the other 99% of their misses.

Invest in talent and it will pay off.  Find the right content producer(s), get them metrics and analytics systems to show their progress (scoreboards) and set the goals each quarter.  It would be better to send out one really well crafted monthly newsletter by a talented creative storyteller than weekly promotional junk talking about your brand name, your discounts, and great service.  BLAH BLAH BLAH.

You know the guy that always blathers on incessantly about himself, what he’s doing, and all his successes or failures whenever you hang out?  Don’t be that person.  Be the one who shares a heartfelt story, an interesting statistic, or joke.  That’s the key to winning the hearts and minds of people from cocktail parties to 1 million user media campaigns.