I recently attended an International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) professional development session. The topic was social media; but what I got out of the session stretched far beyond the online world.

One of the speakers, Mary Pat Barry, Corporate Communications Branch Manager from the City of Edmonton, spoke about a program called Edmontonstories. Edmontonstories, if you haven’t already heard of it, is an image and brand enhancement program for the City of Edmonton. The goal of the program is to build awareness about Edmonton by uncovering the essence of the city through the experiences of real Edmontonians.

Mary Pat’s presentation included an overview of the program, and a discussion about how the program is being communicated through online social media. But what really caught my attention was how this program was executed.

The City of Edmonton conducted an intensive research study with Edmontonians, as well as with non-residents, to test people’s perceptions about Edmonton. The results were surprising: the image and brand of our city ranked high for the citizens of Edmonton, and extremely low for non-residents. In fact, the company that conducted the research said that they had never seen such a gap in opinions.

Clearly, the city had some work to do in developing a strategy to communicate Edmonton’s story to the world. To do this, they launched Edmontonstories.ca.

The program has been extremely successful. Since the launch of the website, Edmontonstories.ca has reached 163 countries (there are 195 countries globally), and 62.4% of all website traffic is from people living outside of Edmonton.

As a marketing professional, I couldn’t help but to consider why this program has been so successful. In one word: research.

We’ve all seen it; organizations that don’t invest time or dollars to do their research. Instead, they develop strategies and entire marketing programs without doing their homework first. The result? Ineffective marketing.

Mary Pat’s presentation reiterated one very important thing for me: Research is the first step in developing an effective strategy. If you want to develop a successful marketing program, such as Edmontonstories, you have to be willing to invest both time and money in research. Here are steps to developing a successful marketing program:

1. Do your homework
   The City of Edmonton invested lots of time and money to conduct research before launching Edmontonstories. Without this research, they would never have known about the gap in opinions between residents and non-residents. Their research illustrates just how the perceptions from within a company can be vastly different than those outside the company. Had they not known this, they would never have been able to develop an effective program.
2. Analyze your homework
   Just when you thought you were finished, you’re not. Once you have the research in hand you need to analyze, analyze, analyze. What does the research tell you? What are your strengths and weaknesses? Where are your threats and opportunities?
3. Develop your strategy
   Once you know what people’s perceptions are, you can develop your message and a strategy to communicate that message. Edmontonstories was developed based on the research findings that Edmontonians had the greatest ability to communicate the city’s attributes to the world. And thanks to Edmonton’s ability to invest the time and money, it’s working.

Ultimately, you can never really know what your stakeholders’ perceptions are until you invest the time and money into finding out. Once you fully understand how you are perceived in the minds of your audience, you can develop a message that’s relevant, and a strategy for communicating that message effectively.

Blog Definition (according to WordPress): A term used to describe websites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information.

I’m sure a few of you have had internal discussions about whether or not your organization needs a blog. Before making your decision, I recommend reading my last post: “Is Social Media Right for Your Organization?” The post offers guidelines to follow before implementing any social media program.

With knowledge gained from the recent implementation of Incite’s Blog (Nov. 2009), here is our advice on what you need to think about before starting your own corporate blog:

• What will be the objective of the blog?
  Before you brainstorm topic ideas, you need to determine the objective of the blog. Is it to create brand awareness? Position your company as a thought leader in your industry? Generate new leads? The objective of the blog will help outline the type of topics you should be writing about.

• Who within your organization is going to be responsible for managing the blog?
  Identify one or two individuals within your organization that will take ownership of the blog and become the “Blog Manager(s).” It will be their responsibility to ensure the blog entries are written. It will also be their responsibility to properly manage any comments that come through.

• How often do you plan on posting a blog entry?
  This all depends on your resources internally. If possible, post a blog entry at least twice a week. If you feel this not a realistic goal, then scale it back to once a week or even once every two weeks. The best way to stay on track is to develop a blogging schedule.

• Who will be writing for your blog?
  Don’t force anybody to write for the blog. Only those individuals within your organization who show an interest should be encouraged. This will lead to better posts that are written more genuinely.

• Whom will you be writing to?
  Develop client personas to help you identify and understand your primary target audience. A client persona is a detailed profile of an example client that represents your real audience. You always want to be writing for your audience, not for your organization.

• What topics are you going to write about?
  Your client personas will help generate topic ideas that appeal to your target audience. When choosing a topic, always ask yourself whether one of your client personas will be interested in and intrigued by that particular topic. Referencing your client personas will help align your topic with the blog objective.

• How are you going to deal with blog comments?
  When comments are written for a particular blog post, the “Blog Manager(s)” should inform that writer. The writer should be the one responding since they initiated the topic and are most likely the experts in that area. Be prepared for both positive and negative comments. Make sure to reply in a timely manner as the objective is to generate some sort of conversation online. For negative comments, the worst thing you can do is ignore them.

The answers to these questions will help you move to the next step—getting your blog designed and built!

Over the course of the past decade the effectiveness of yellow page marketing has decreased dramatically while costs continue to increase. Ask your vendor about this rationale and they will provide big fat reports telling you all about how consumers still use yellow pages and trust them to provide relevant resources.

The trouble with this is these reports will never be focused around those individuals you should be targeting (demographically and psycho-graphically) – in fact the studies were likely not even done anywhere near your city / province / country.

Here are 3 key reasons to reconsider your yellow page advertising:

1. You are not a follower
   Just because many or all of your competitors are spending thousands of dollars each year on yellow pages doesn’t mean you should too. You should be striving to stand out from the competition, not blend in.
   
   
2. Difficult to stand out
   It is very difficult to standout at all in the yellow pages. Of course you could always consider buying a larger ad, or adding a white background, or full colour (oooh, fancy) all at an additional cost. Don’t bother your returns won’t vary that much.
   
   
3. Hard to track
   Most likely you do receive some leads and sales from yellow pages and each year when it comes time to renew you think twice, but then some doubt enters your mind and you think “I did get that call last week so I guess it’s working”. That’s not enough.

What should you be doing instead?

1. Understand your target market – Do a little research to understand your clients, their needs, their problems and challenges and what messages connect with them.
   
   
2. Experiment online – Search Engine Optimization and Google Adwords allow you to focus on individuals looking for your specific service and measure and manage your results on a monthly (or even daily) basis. Yellow Pages commits your spend for the entire year, even if it’s not working.
   
   
3. Measure your success - Each time you get a lead you need to understand to some degree:

• The lead source
• Whether it converts into a sale
• Revenue from the sale
• Profit from the sale

Start tracking and find out how your marketing efforts are rewarding you. Yellow pages should be paying you and not vice-versa.

Shifting away from advertising in the yellow pages will improve and focus your marketing efforts and it’s better for your bottom line (and the environment too!).

My recommendation: be selective.

Relationships are valuable, and good ones take time. Given that time is in limited supply, we need to be selective when it comes to choosing who to focus our energy on.

In my experience, those who take more energy from you than they bring aren’t worth your time—or your energy.

Those who bring energy are worth the effort it takes to build and maintain a lasting relationship with. They’re the people I’ve decided to focus my efforts on. In my experience, the individuals who energize me are:

1. Honest
2. Reliable
3. Interesting

Honest

Anyone can be honest. Being honest well is something of an art form. In my mind, this means giving a well thought-out answer while softening the blow.

I’m learning this from someone who brings energy to the table every single time I meet with her. This person makes the brass knuckles under a velvet glove concept work in her favour.

When she says you communicate clearly and you’re so good at letting people know how you feel, what she’s really saying is you’re direct, bordering on aggressive. Constructive criticism can often be tough to receive, but she was honest so well that she gave me the energy to work on improving this aspect of my personality.

Reliable

You know that person who cancels two out of every three meetings you’ve scheduled?

This was another learning curve for me. The first step to being reliable is to know how to say NO. If you don’t know whether you can make it—to a wedding dress fitting for your lovely sister-in-law-to-be, to a board meeting, or to family games night—don’t commit.

It’s like dating: most people would prefer to have no plans at all than to be ready to go in fabulous black pants, a black silk top, killer stilettos, hair curled, and mascara perfected, only to receive a last minute cancellation from the dinner date.

If you aren’t sure if you can fulfill your commitment, don’t make one. Your excuses will be transparent, and will zap energy faster than you can get out of your killer stilettos and into your Lulus.

Interesting

Think of the most interesting person you know. This is the person who, when you plan a cocktail party, you look into their availability before selecting a date.

This is the person who shows up with a bottle of pink champagne sporting a massive ribbon around the neck, who’s telling a story before her coat’s off, and who causes everyone sitting at the kitchen island to breathe a sigh of relief because they know with absolute certainty that this individual’s arrival signals the end of strained conversation and water refills.

These are the people who bring energy—life—to a party, and to your life.

Those who give more energy than they take—people who are honest, reliable, and interesting—those people are worth every ounce of energy you devote to fostering a strong relationship with.

Not only are these ideal qualities to look out for in other people, but they’re also worth cultivating in yourself. Develop these qualities and you’ll find that people will put more effort into fostering their relationships with you—business and otherwise.

The Olympics are an enormous undertaking. The different venues, throngs of athletes, and ticket sales are a few aspects that make it extremely challenging to pull together. Though I haven’t worked at an Olympics I have been fortunate to work on some large international events. Early in my engagement at the 2001 World Championships in Athletics I attended our Integrated Planning Team meeting. This brought together all 17 of our divisions to discuss what each division was doing to plan and execute the World’s. Approximately 55 people were at this meeting underscoring to me the level of complexity in pulling off this major track and field championship.

Having attended the recent Vancouver Olympics this level of complexity was brought up to me again just walking around town. Whether it was the numerous 2010 marked vehicles driving around or the multiple banners flying all over the city it’s difficult to comprehend how much detail goes into making an event of this size a success. I bring this up because it underscored how crucial those details are and how, from a marketing perspective, they can make or break an activity.

There are two examples that stood out for me in Vancouver. At the gold medal hockey game (yes, I was one of the very fortunate ones who was there live and in person) the atmosphere was amazing. A loud ocean of red spread inside and out of Canada Hockey Place but it was two little things that truly enhanced my experience.

• First was a simple countdown with five minutes prior to faceoff that led into a great, high energy video showing athletic accomplishments from all winter games sports.
• This was immediately followed by the Black Eyed Peas song “I’ve Got a Feeling”. Now whether you like or dislike the song, it was a perfect choice to keep the crowd on its feet, clapping in unison anticipating the arrival of Team Canada.

The second example was the other ocean that spread around Vancouver. This was one of blue clad volunteers who were located literally everywhere. If you were going to an event, they were directing you with megaphones. If you were on the Sky Train, they were there greeting you coming out of the station. If you were simply standing on the corner of Granville and Georgia they were there saying hi. The key though isn’t that they were there it’s that they were very helpful. In my time, it’s often difficult with a large pool of volunteers to ensure they’re fully trained but this group was amazing. Each volunteer was part information provider, ambassador and crowd motivator. The attention to detail to have these people not only blanketing the city but also fully trained was fantastic because it made the experience as a visitor much easier.

The events are what capture the attention at an Olympic Games but it’s the high attention to detail amidst the planning chaos that makes the difference. Those seemingly little things cap the experience and make it memorable. It could make it easier or more fun but it does something to enhance it. This is one detail good marketers know already.

This title, first shared with me by a friend and mentor and often attributed to Peter Drucker, encompasses the power of setting expectations. Measurement is not always fun and sexy, but it is powerful. It allows you to build a real understanding (rather than rely on a gut feeling), make informed decisions, and ensure accountability.

Below are a few quick thoughts about measurement.

Get A System (And Use It!)

Leads, conversions, client interactions, and the success of specific channels, promotions, or individuals are all relatively easy things to measure. If you’re doing this now, then you’re already off to a great start. If you’re not, there are many systems available to help you and your team track this information. Pick one and start collecting.

It never ceases to amaze me how many times I speak with successful business people and find out that they have no system or rigour for tracking their success. What they are failing to understand is how much more successful they could be if they just gathered and evaluated some basic business intelligence.

Figure Out What’s Important

Not everything you measure is of equal value. Some of what’s important may change over time or depend on circumstance, but there are a couple of key indicators that really drive your business and that you need to pay attention to. Here’s a hint—it’s not revenue or profitability. Yes, these are important, but what’s more important is understanding what causes improvements to revenue and profitability. If you’re thinking customer retention, repeat purchases, referrals, results by channel or segment, or client and employee satisfaction, you’re getting closer.

Figure out what’s important and focus your team around these key indicators.

What Gets Measured Gets Done

After you’ve figured out your key indicators, the next step is to have a plan. Developing a plan with measurable objectives for each area of your business sets the expectation and allows you to have informed discussions about what is and isn’t working.

A traditional example would be when your salespeople need to generate X leads with a conversion ratio of Y and an average sales Z to meet your basic sales expectations. If you set the expectation and measure the results, you can manage against it. This goes for all areas of your business, not just sales and marketing. HR, IT, Finance, and Operations should all have specific key measurements with regards to how they contribute to your business.

Measure it, understand it, and get it done.