Why do you do what you do?

Why would anyone believe you can do a great job at it?

Why should anyone care?

Why would anyone pay you for it?

Quick:

Can you answer all of the above in a brief but memorable way? If you can use a story, or a picture, all the better.

____ Yes
____ No
____ Not Sure

Now:

Do your Web site and other marketing materials reflect all of the above?

____ Yes
____ No
____ Not sure

Do they offer a variety ways for your prospects and customers to engage with you – from free to up to your highest priced, highest touch offerings?

____ Yes
____ No
____ Not sure

Finally:

Are your colleagues and employees – assuming you have any – in synch with you on all of the above?

____ Yes
____ No
____ Not sure

Prediction:

If you answered “Yes” to all of the above, I predict you are off to a great year. If you answered, “No” or “Not sure” to some or all of them, at least you know some key areas for improvement.

And believe me – I’m not pointing any fingers on this one. I’ll be working on all of the above in 2010. You?

Jeff

P.S. – I’ve written about the importance of asking “Why?” in a number of places, but this particular post is heavily influenced by Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick – which, if you haven’t read it yet, I recommend putting at the top of your list.

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A colleague of mine recently gave me a copy of Brian Tracy’s book on advanced selling principles. I haven’t gotten all that far in it yet, but I’ve already been struck by Tracy referring to listening as a sort of “white magic.” It’s an extremely powerful concept – one most of us understand intuitively but do not practice enough.

Before strategy, there should be listening

Before solutions, there should be listening

Before tactics, more listening.

Listening to prospects. Listening to customers. Listening to members.

Then reflection  – though it needs to be very fast, agile reflection in many cases.

Only after that is it time to talk or to act.

Tracy points out that the best sales people, contrary to popular notions of them, are more often than not introverts. They don’t come out talking, they come out listening. (As an introvert myself, I happen to support any assertion that the “best” are introverts )

I’d add that anyone worth his or her salt who advises you on strategy – whether general strategy, social media marketing strategy, whatever – should be leading with the idea that you listen first. (And one of the magical things about the social Web is that there are so many great listening tools.)

The reason for the quotation marks around “white magic,” of course, is that this is not magic at all. But when an individual or organization does it well and consistently, it sure looks that way. Because it happens so rarely.

So, enough of me talking. I’m going out to do some listening. You?

Jeff

P.S. – If you enjoy what you read here on Hedgehog & Fox, I’d be grateful if you would subscribe to the feed or use the form at the upper right corner to subscribe by e-mail.

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I’ve had some version of this post in the back of my mind, and more recently, at the top of my drafts queue for ages, but a convergence of events has now pushed it to your screen – or inbox. You see, this is a post about competition, and within the past day I noticed that:

A – Chris Anderson, of Long Tail fame, has a feature article in this month’s Wired on the new Do-It-Yourself industrial revolution, basically what he is dubbing the industrial long tail. Anderson highlights some of the truly amazing ways in which very small businesses can now prototype and create physical products that in the past would have required years of effort and millions of dollars. It’s now possible for individuals and small companies to compete like never before.

B – Seth Godin recently pointed out that competition is everywhere, regardless of what we think of it or whether we are even aware of it. The point really can’t be made often enough. I continually find when I do market assessments for my association customers that there are all sorts of competitive offerings  cropping up of which the association was not aware. Many organizations resist the idea of even doing competitive assessments because they assume that they must be the only significant source of education in their niche.

Finally, with the Super Bowl approaching, it seems even more appropriate to trot out the title I had always wanted to use for this post, since it is based on the classic football movie, Any Given Sunday.

Instead of Sunday, I am thinking of Monday, when would be competitors come back into the office – whether that’s a traditional office, a spare bedroom, or a garage – feeling refreshed from the weekend. The ideas are flowing, the tools are available, and they have their eyes on your market. By Friday, they are well into the process of launching a new product or service aimed directly at your customers. In fact, maybe they have already launched it.

It can happen. It is happening. What are you doing about it?

Jeff

P.S. – If you enjoy what you read here on Hedgehog & Fox, I’d be grateful if you would subscribe to the feed or use the form at the upper right corner to subscribe by e-mail.

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Let’s face it, with the array of shiny new objects that seem to pop on a daily basis across the Web, podcasts are starting to seem a bit old fashioned. Even – dare I say it – a bit “old media.” Most businesses are much more concerned with getting a Facebook page up or attracting a gazillion Twitter followers than stepping up to the mic and producing some decent pod-friendly content. There are some very good strategic reasons to include podcasting in your Web mix, though. Here are 5 big ones for starters:

1. Podcasts help you connect with auditory learners
An obvious but often overlooked point: not everyone processes information in the same way. And few of us like to learn the same way all the time – our needs vary according to circumstances. Even if you are successful with blog posts, text ads, and 140 character missives, you may fail to connect with a significant slice of your potential customer or member base simply because that slice would prefer to hear rather than read what you have to say. And don’t forget, podcasts can include video, too, if you want to connect with both visual and auditory styles.

2. Podcasts enjoy a killer distribution network
Aside from leveraging the same RSS technology that  blogs, Twitter, and other social tools use, there are a wide range of directories dedicated specifically to podcasts. More importantly, there is iTunes. Getting your content set up for free distribution across iTunes is really quite easy (check out the guide I link to below for more on that). Finally, don’t forget that with audio content you can reach your audience in a very important place where no other medium can match it: the automobile. Most newer cars now include an auxiliary jack that makes it easy to plug an MP3 player into the stereo systems. And even for people who don’t have a newer car, burning a podcast file to CD is not much of a chore these days.

3. Podcasts give your brand a voice
I was struck by the power of this one recently when I was in the process of signing up for the mentoring program offered by Alan Weiss, aka The Million Dollar Consultant. I had e-mailed Alan with a couple of questions, and he picked up the phone and called me to answer them. As it happens, I listen to Alan’s The Way I See It regularly, so I have become quite familiar with his voice. The positive impact of hearing that familiar voice on the other end of the phone was many multiples of what it would have been had I never heard the podcast. Admittedly, Alan is already well-known, at least within consulting circles, but I’d argue the potential impact of the “voice brand” is even greater for those who are not so well known. Finally, establishing a “voice” can be a very powerful aspect of building your overall brand. I have no doubt that John Jantsch and the Marketing Over Coffee guys would agree with this statement.

4. Podcasts are a great learning tool
Don’t underestimate or undervalue the personal and professional development aspect of podcasting. Even if you never attract a large number of listeners, the effort of speak intelligently and coherently about a topic that is of interest to your audience will almost certainly make you better at what you do. And interviewing other people in your field or related fields – a staple of podcasting – can also contribute greatly to your learning.

5. Podcasts can easily be mined
Podcasts can easily be the starting point for creating a range of digital products and promotional materials. They can be sliced and diced into shorter segments. That can be sent off to be transcribed – at very low cost – and then transformed into articles, white papers, or eBooks. They can be packaged up into CD-ROM or DVD sets. The possibilities may not be endless, but there are certainly a lot of them!

So, how do you get started with podcasting, assuming you find some or all of the points above compelling? Glad you asked. As it happens, I started up a new podcast recently over at Radio Free Association. It’s aimed at association professionals, but even if you don’t fall in that camp, I encourage you to get over there to check out the Podcasting Mini-Guide. It will give you all of the basics for creating and distributing a podcast. And if you happen to launch a new podcast, be sure to let me know – I’ll be happy to mention it here.

Jeff

P.S. – If you enjoy what you read here on Hedgehog & Fox, I’d be grateful if you would subscribe to the feed or use the form at the upper right corner to subscribe by e-mail.

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This Tuesday I’ll be speaking at the Association New Media Summit hosted by Peach New Media. My topic is Learning 2.0, and as I have been working on the presentation, I’ve been trying to come up with a brief way to explain why I think it is such an important concept – one that goes right to the heart of strategy on the social Web.

The image above is how I usually illustrate “Learning 2.0″ as it plays out in the world of traditional education and professional development. (If you are viewing this on e-mail and can’t load images or otherwise do not see the image, click through to the original post.)

In the world of Learning 2.0, walls between classrooms break down. There is not the sort of teacher-student hierarchy like you find in traditional, formal education. Rather, everyone is a student, and everyone has the potential to be a teacher. What drives the connections – the arrows in the illustration – is a desire to learn and a desire to share expertise. These are, I believe, very basic human desires, and all the new tools of the social Web – blogs, wikis, social networks, etc. – help us satisfy these desires in ways that were never possible before.

It’s important to recognize that this dynamic isn’t really all that different from what you find across the social Web as a whole. Here, for example, is how connections across the worldwide user base for the photo-sharing service Flickr mapped out just a few years ago. It’s the same sort of thing as above, but on a massive scale:

Why do people make these connections? In the case of Flickr, the obvious “social object” is photos: people connect with each other because they have photos to share and they want to see other people’s photos. A similar thing happens with videos on YouTube.

Aside from the obvious social objects that exist in these networks, I’d argue that there is a higher level object – call it a “meta” object, if you want to get academic about it – that often drives interaction: namely, learning: People in these networks are learning from and about each other, and the core objects – photos and videos – help make this possible.

Important caveat: To accept this argument, you’ll have to get past the idea that “learning” is equivalent to formal education. I’m talking about learning in a fundamental, psychological sense.

And here’s the thing – if you understand that learning in this fundamental sense can be a highly effective glue for holding social networks together, you can focus in on maximizing the network’s potential for providing valuable learning experiences. You can use an understanding of learning to drive strategy.

Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the most effective ways to engender learning in the informal, psychological sense of the word is to provide for formal educational objects within the network. Articles, videos, tutorials, etc – these are often great catalysts for the informal learning connections that generate value in a network.

I think there are great opportunities for membership organizations to leverage formal educational activities as a way to generate more value within their social networks, and conversely, to make their formal educational offerings more valuable by making them more social. That is part of what I will talk about at the New Media Summit.

I also think there are interesting ways that an understanding of learning can help commercial organizations cultivate customer communities and even create new, revenue-generating products that leverage Learning 2.0. Stephen Covey certainly understands that. So does Brian Clark.

Bottom line: Learning 2.0 is woven into the fabric of the social Web, and vice-versa. I think a Web strategy that doesn’t take it into account will most likely leave many opportunities on the table. What do you think?

Jeff

P.S. – If this is a topic that interests you, you may also want to check out the free eBook, Learning 2.0 for Associations.

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I was listening to the Alan Watts Podcast recently when I was struck by a distinction that Watts drew between a view of the world as having been “made” versus a view of the world as having “grown.” Watts, for those who are not familiar with him, was a philosopher who dealt, as philosophers typically do, with metaphysical matters. But it struck me that his distinction between making and growing applies well to the practical business of marketing on the new Web.

The traditional view of markets – much like traditional Western views of the world – is that we “make them.” We concoct our plans, develop our products and services, and foist them upon the world. In many cases, we even put all the mechanisms in place to make transactions possible. This is a role at which Wall Street, for example, has failed so miserably in recent history.

Traditionally, “making” has worked best for those who had capital and could manage to get the numbers on their side. Making is the world not only of Wall Street, but of Hollywood, the big Three automakers, big Tobacco, big Pharma, and all the MadMen who serve these types of organizations. Making still works, but it has gotten a whole lot harder.

One reason it is harder is because it is so much easier. Nearly anyone can engage in the traditional “making” process now for a fraction of what it used to cost.

But a related, and more important reason that making doesn’t work as well, is that “growing” is what customers, members, donor and all the other constituents that make up a market are coming to expect.

The Cluetrain Manifesto guys, to their credit, recognized long ago the way in which the Web was transforming markets into communities that grow rather than things that are made. This was, in a sense, the oldest new idea possible: back before the age of mass production and mass media, markets were pretty much always about conversations, always about a close relationship between buyer and seller, always about growing.

Growing is a trickier business than making, mostly because the person who wants to grow something does not have nearly the level of control that the person who wants to make something does. The grower is always dependent upon what she attempts to grow. But think of the potential rewards. I can make a widget, and as a result, I’ll have a widget. But if I take the time to carefully cultivate a widget plant, it may well produce a thousand widgets for me.

This last point seems particularly important in times when resources are tight, because it speaks directly to the type of return you might expect off of your efforts to connect with a market for your products are services. It’s worth pausing for a minute and asking yourself: Am I making, or am I growing?

- Jeff

P.S. – If you like the “growing” metaphor you might also like Annuals and Perennials – Cultivating Your Blog Content. And if you like what you read here on Hedgehog & Fox, in general, I’d truly appreciate it if you would tell others and also subscribe by RSS or by e-mail.

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Teaching Sells, a program developed by Copyblogger Brian Clark, re-opened today. And while I don’t tend to use Hedgehog & Fox as a site where I promote third-party products or post ads, there are a couple of reasons I can’t let this one pass without mention.

First, the Teaching Sells program falls squarely in the area where I do so much of my consulting and research – i.e., the sale of online education and the strategic use of education as a tool for marketing and building community. These are exactly the things Teaching Sells teaches, and it does it very well.

How do I know? Well, that’s the second reason I can’t let the re-launch pass without comment:  I have participated in the program pretty much since it first launched nearly two years ago. At first, I was simply interested to see what Brian and his partner Tony could pull off. I was amazed to see them quickly build a vibrant learning community that the average education director or educational marketer would die for. Thoroughly impressive.

In my opinion, if you have anything at all to do with selling online learning, or if you have subject matter expertise you have been trying to figure out how to monetize, you’d be crazy not to sign up for this program, even if only for a while. There is no quicker or better path than Teaching Sells to understanding educational content and community as a business model. Period.

So what does Teaching Sells give you?

I encourage you to visit the Teaching Sells site for more detail, including a great video and a number of highly-valuable, free resources (I’ve actually signed up for all the free stuff again myself!), but basically what Teaching Sells provides is:

• A thorough and customer-centric process for developing and marketing online education and training. Teaching Sells provides what I consider to be a roadmap for creating a successful e-learning business.

• Specific information and instructions on the use of low-cost and open source software to create and manage your online learning site. Using the tools suggested, you can be up and running in relatively short period of time for less than $500 in software and hosting costs. Considering what the returns can be, this is an incredibly low investment.

• A very active and vibrant community of colleagues who are all engaged in creating successful sites for offering e-learning for members. This highly active community is one of the things that has impressed me the most.

It is worth noting, too, that the knowledge that Teaching Sells delivers can help drive high e-learning adoption rates for any interactive learning program, whether you actually plan to sell online learning, offer it for free as a member or customer benefit, or even use it for a public education initiative.

To be clear, this is not a free program, and I know some people will balk at making this kind of investment. But you have to ask yourself – what are the potential returns you are giving up by not learning what Teaching Sells teaches? Up to you, but I’ve found it worth every penny.

To find out more, visit Teaching Sells today. And feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Jeff Cobb
Hedgehog & Fox

P.S. – Yes, those are affiliate links throughout this post. Look around this site and you will see that I promote no other third-party offerings here other than the Thesis Wordpress theme, which I use, believe is a great product and which – not coincidentally – is another project of Brian Clark. In short, I trust what Brian Clark does, I’ve also tried what Brian Clark does, and I am highly enthusiastic about being an affiliate for Teaching Sells.

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Search engine optimization (SEO) is not really the core focus of my work, but I do quite often help clients with improving search results and traffic for their Web sites. The process can be incredibly clarifying, because it goes straight to the heart of creating value and connecting it with a market.

Here’s why:

1. SEO begins with understanding what the prospective market wants.

Every keyword or keyword phrase – i.e., the words your prospective customers or members might type into a search engine – is a stand in for a community of Web searchers who want something related to that keyword. If there aren’t many people searching on the keywords you feel describe the products or services you offer, you need to take a hard look at your strategy. Can you align to a more viable market or market segment?

2. SEO requires clear, concise communication of a value proposition.

Assuming the market is out there and you are able to catch a few eyeballs in the search engines, you have seconds to convince a searcher to click on your link. What do you say that most effectively and efficiently conveys the value of your offering? What’s going to make them click? You need to be able to hook them with the small amount of language that fits into a Web page title and meta description. A great exercise for any organization to try!

3. SEO ultimately depends on delivering value

Any respectable search engine optimizer will tell you that getting a large number of links from other sites trumps pretty much everything else when it comes to ranking high in the search engines. And why would other sites link to you? You got it – because you provide something of value. Something so valuable, in fact, that people want to tell other people about it.

So there you have it: know your market, communicate value, deliver value. Good strategy in a nutshell – and also a great way to improve your search rankings.

By the way, SEOMoz recently ran a great post on How Do I Build the Perfectly Optimized Page? And you may also want to see Checking in on SEO Essentials.

Jeff Cobb
Hedgehog & Fox

P.S. – If you enjoy what you read here on Hedgehog & Fox, I encourage you to subscribe to the feed or use the form at the upper right corner to subscribe by e-mail.

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One thing that is remarkable about blogging is that pretty much anyone can do it. Just go to Wordpress.com or Blogger, set up a free account, and start writing.

And pretty much anyone can post a document to share or sell using a service like Scribd…

…or a video using YouTube or a service like MindBites

…or set up an AdWords account,

…or even outsource production of a product or delivery of a service.

And have you noticed how easy – and increasingly less costly – it is these days to set up a corporation and offload any number of the rote administrative and technical tasks that go with running a business?

It’s easy. Pretty much anyone can do it.

Of course, when anyone can do it, it is going to take either

… a groundbreaking idea

… an unusual amount of luck,

… or a heckuva a lot of work

… for any single individual or organization to stand out. And I think that is increasingly true even in relatively niche markets.

Really, “a heckuva a lot of work” is the only option over which most of us have a consistent degree of control. So how do you focus your time and efforts to get the most return for each hour and dollar invested?

Funny, it’s the same old question. And it has always been a hard one to answer. It’s just gotten much, much easier for many, many more people to have the opportunity to ask it.

Jeff Cobb
Hedgehog & Fox

P.S. – If you enjoy what you read here on Hedgehog & Fox, I encourage you to subscribe to the feed or use the form at the upper right corner to subscribe by e-mail.

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If a product is pitched to you as lower priced and “more convenient” than another, similar product how does that impact your opinion of it? On the one hand, you probably think “Less money, less hassle. Sounds good.” But on the other hand, if it is both lower priced and more convenient, doesn’t it have to be a worse product in some way? Maybe you hesitate. Maybe you start considering other options or decide to do without.

I see this happen all the time with online products – and in my world, particularly online educational products. Organizations offer topics, subject matter expertise, and amounts of content online that are similar, if not identical to what they offer offline. And then they charge less for the online option and promote it as “more convenient.”

The implicit message? “This is a slightly worse version of what we can offer you in person. But you don’t have to travel to get to it, and we’re going to charge you less for it.”

The customer who is in it for the education hesitates. Maybe she starts considering other options or decides to go without. But naturally there are always customers for any product who are willing to trade value for convenience and price.

And they end up being your customers for e-learning.

So what are the options?

• If your strategy is to go after customers that are willing to trade value for convenience and price – and that can be a perfectly valid strategy – then make it clear how the value of the convenient, low-priced product is different. Don’t deliver essentially the same thing but then devalue it by cutting price and pitching convenience.

• If your strategy is to go after customers who value the original product, deliver the same value in the more convenient product and charge a premium for convenience. At the very least, don’t charge less for the more convenient product. If you think that can’t be done, then somewhere along the way you are either not providing the value you think you are or are not making that value clear to the customer.

There are important exceptions to the above.

For example, if want to offer an online version of a product at a lower price or even for free because the costs associated with it are truly lower or you have recouped your investment in it, then do it – but make clear the reason for the low price, and up until that point price it based on the value it delivers – not on how it is delivered.

At all costs, avoid positioning your online products as “a slightly worse version” without really meaning to.

Jeff Cobb
Hedgehog & Fox

P.S. – Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jtcobb

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