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Content marketing / Building trust with trust

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When Lee Sherman ran marketing content at Mint, he crossed a line most organizations won’t dare to. He mentioned a competitor.

Oh, no! It’s one thing for a boss to say “you build trust by showing trust.” That sure sounds good coming from a glossy inflight magazine. But trying it takes guts. Often, a watered down “trust” creeps in, which tells customers that we don’t respect your nose for bullshit and unanswered questions.

“You have to assume they’re smart,” Lee says. “Give all the info without bias… When we didn’t, it was obvious we were doing that, which was bad writing. It was clear something was missing.”

Everyone knows there are competitors, and many prospective customers can even tell each one’s story. For some, Mint’s features and marketing story would work best. Let the others go.

“Companies need to get away from idea they’re going to provide every solution,” he said. “Not even Apple, Microsoft, or Google can do that. ”

Ultimately, this strategy worked. How could he tell? For one thing, the comments showed that people had actually read the blog post. He could also see that it made them think; they argued with others about the product.

The process has its risks, but it’s a lot better than the alternative.

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Notable marketing: Have imagination, will be read

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clocks-mirrors

For all the marketing collatoral the data industry produces, there’s little that I can read without forcing myself. But when the good stuff comes, it’s like a gust of spring air blowing into a stuffy room. That kind of marketing blew into Datadoodle headquarters Friday morning. VisualCue, maker of visualization software done with “tiles,” won the Datadoodle Occasional Prize for Notable Marketing with “Have Data, Will Travel.”

“This week we’re using data to travel through time!,” it declared. We’ll forgive the overuse of the exclamation marks and give credit for the rarest of elements, imagination. This tastefully designed, lively, and jargon-free creation is credited to the “Visual Crew,” but I’m sure it was hatched by just one person.

The email links to two blog posts about time travel with visualized data. The first asks how long would it take to travel from London to Los Angeles in 1914? That’s answered with a 1914 isochrone map of Earth created by King George V’s cartographer.

“It got us thinking,” the post said. “What would such a map of the world look like today?” That’s exactly the kind of thought that VisualCue wants readers to do, too.

The ending, “Until next time,” breaks the rules. It skips the call to action for something stronger, the reader’s little voice in the head. By the end, that voice might be saying, “Hmm. I wonder what I could do…” And who else to help do it than this vendor? There’s no better call to action than that, and there’s rarely a better marketing pitch than this post.

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“Good enough” data analysis will lead to good data analysis

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Someone on Quora asks, “What are the most promising disruptive innovations for the next decade (2011-2020)?”

The always incisive Venkatesh Rao offered a long list. At least one of his predictions brings to mind the decision support industry’s many do-it-yourself tools.

Deprofessionalization/democratization: if you thought blogging taking down professional writing, and amateur photography threatening professional photography were big, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Tons of problems that previously required professional expertise to solve can now be re-engineered so that amateurs can solve them. Movies and education are next.

…

Look around. If the tools don’t exist, but the high-margin professionals and eager amateurs do, try and invent them.  A big opportunity here is for amateur animated video shows. There are some primitive things that get animated characters speak out scripts, but we’ve barely scratched the surface.

Note the absence of data analysis. He could have listed it along with movies and education. But he didn’t, most likely because he knows too much about it to accept “good enough.”

People tend to go along with the good-enough except in their own field. There they see exactly why “good enough” just isn’t. Professional writers and photographers still scoff today at amateurs’ work even 20 years into that takedown.

When you need something done well, you hire a pro. But for many jobs, you can get by on “good enough” — until you’re skilled enough to know what you’re missing or curious enough to want something better.

That path played a big part in the California wine industry’s recent history. Back in the early ’80s, I talked to the finance officer of one of the many new craft brewers in California. He had seen how mass tastes work a decade before with the rise of a bad jug wine, Italian Swiss Colony. (“Made by that little old winemaker, me.”)

Sure, the stuff was awful by today’s standards. But the marketing got Americans drinking wine. Before long, many of them wanted to know how the good stuff tasted. So throughout the ’70s and even today, small wineries thrive thanks to that new thirst.

So it will be with data analysis, not to mention movies and education.

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Big Data, big hype, big danger

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A remarkable thing happened in Big Data last week. One of Big Data’s best friends poked fun at one of its icons: the Three V’s.

The well-networked and alert observer Shawn Rogers, vice president of research at Enterprise Management Associates, tweeted his eight V’s: “…Vast, Volumes of Vigorously, Verified, Vexingly Variable Verbose yet Valuable Visualized high Velocity Data.”

He was quick to explain to me that this is no comment on Gartner analyst Doug Laney’s three-V definition. Shawn’s just tired of people getting stuck on V’s.

How strange to be stuck on a definition, but we get stuck all the time trying to define Big Data. Other terms are easier. We’ve always known what visualization is. We seem to agree on “self service BI.” We also know what relational databases are, what ETL is, and all kinds of other established technology. We don’t agree on “business intelligence” or “decision support,” but somehow we don’t dwell on it. We don’t even quibble too heartily with “easy to use,” even though I could argue that we should.

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Still a “tool” by any other name

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A marketing manager I know stopped me in mid sentence. He didn’t want me to call his business intelligence product a “tool.”

Why? “It sounds small,” he said. But it is small, I pointed out. It’s smaller than many others in its space. It’s downloaded in under a minute and unpacks itself on a desktop in a few minutes.

But he waved that rationale away as if it were a fly, and I should have known. Marketing people, like the parents of gladiators, prefer their progeny to be perceived as big. Bigness casts dark shadows over competitors and conceals weakness. Industry insiders give big competitors good odds.

Users, though, have more immediate, personal concerns. They want something that feels good, works consistently, and adapts easily. This describes a “tool,” a label that should be taken as a compliment, not an insult.

To understand the value of good tools, read what farmer and essayist Wendell Berry writes about them. Over the years, he’s thought about them often, such as in his 1970s essay on the Marugg grass scythe.

It is the most satisfying hand tool that I have ever used. In tough grass it cuts a little less uniformly than the power scythe. In all other ways, in my opinion, it is a better tool because, it is light, it handles gracefully and comfortably even on steep ground, it is far less dangerous, it is quiet and makes no fumes, it is much more adaptable. In rank growth one narrows the cut and shortens the stroke. It always starts — provided the user will start. Aside from reasonable skill and care in use, there are no maintenance problems. It requires no fuel or oil. It runs on breakfast. Its cheaper to buy than most weed eaters and is cheaper to use than any other power mower. And best of all its good exercise.

I’d bet that everyone dreams, at least secretly, of software that matches the Marugg. Sadly, though, people with other agendas usually make the final decision — people whose careers depend on buying not tools but “solutions.” My friend the marketing manager has to appeal to those who write the checks. But I don’t care. I’ll keep saying “tool.”

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