RonAmok!

I was attending a meeting recently where web-metrics were being presented. When the topic came around to the company’s corporate blogs, the presenter spoke enthusiastically about the thousands of unique visitors who had read our blogs.

Curiously, she didn’t mention the blog-subscription numbers. So, with the same level of enthusiasm that she described the thousands of hits, I explained that our RSS subscription-rates were steadily rising and that one of our bloggers had just broken into triple digits. The silence in the room was deafening. It was clear that my triple digits were being pooh-poohed compared with the quadruple digits that the marketing manager presented.

Marketing folks have a paradoxical view of numbers. On one hand, they love really large numbers. If you say, “We got a million new unique hits on our corporate website yesterday,” the news will be greeted with enthusiasm. Marketing folks also love small numbers. If you say that “We had a 6% hit-rate on our latest advertising campaign,” you’ll receive enough back-slapping to collapse a lung.

The paradox is a holdover from the Golden Age of Mass Media, where corporations shot messages pell-mell through mass media outlets to see what sticks. Because the response rate for these mass communications is so dismal, marketeers were forced to play “Probability Marketing,” where large numbers were required on the front end of a campaign in order for a small number of conversions to precipitate out the back-end.

I attempted to explain why my triple-digit “subscription” numbers trumped the quadruple-digit “hits” numbers. “Think about it this way,” I said. “The people who take the time to subscribe are so fascinated with our bloggers opinions on these super-niche topics, that they demand notification whenever we write something new!”

Now that’s influence — the currency of New Media.

Successful New Media isn’t about “Probability Marketing.” It’s about a unique group of people who are interested in your products and services. In these New Media Times, it is much more important to focus on a small number of engaged customers and prospects than to use the shotgun method and blast your message through all of the noise.

Tags: New Media Evangelist RonAmok! ronamok corporate blog influence metrics

• Last week my wife, Tara joined Facebook.
• This afternoon, she confirmed that we were indeed “in a relationship.”
• This is what it looked like in my News Feed.

Yesterday I had a great breakfast with David Jacobs. David is one of the original Social Media guys, who I met through the Orange County Podcasters. Two things that I like about David. He’s a “gray hair” just like me, and in his own words, “I’ve never met a technology that I wasn’t willing to try — at least once.” David is my early alert alert system to what the cool kids are playing with lately.

We were discussing the hurdles that any New Media Evangelist must overcome to convince the Traditionals to adopt new ways of communicating with customers. We talked about the fact that the Traditionals don’t see the value of a blogger, who can say anything that he/she wants, compared with the carefully chosen message that the Marketing Department has carved into Carrera marble. That’s when David added some serendipitous insight.

“Because Marketing people are trained to tell ‘Their Deal.’ Bloggers tell, ‘The Deal.’”

Brilliant.

The Traditionals have their own agenda. They have a message — their message — and will use it as a club to beat their customers over the head with until they succumb. The corporate message has nothing to do with credibility or truth, and yet everything to do about the sanctity of their carefully staged illusion.

Corporate bloggers, on the other hand, have a different agenda. They must maintain their credibility at all costs, even if it means telling the truth, and potentially casting a product or service in a somewhat less-than-perfect light. Marketing and sales people HATE this.

In David’s words, corporate bloggers need to remember to write about “The Deal” — the one their customers care about. The one that will help them use a product or service to provide the best customer-results possible. In the long run, “The Deal” is much more important than “Their Deal.”