Drip Marketing

In an earlier post I wrote about what makes a good Tweet. The best Tweets are those that make me laugh or provide me with an interesting insight or make me look at something differently I follow about 150 people on Twitter and I have a pretty high bar for what I keep in my timeline. If a Tweeter isn't adding some kind of consistent value in those 140 characters, I'll stop following them.

There are a lot of similarities between being a good Tweeter and a good marketer. If what you're saying to prospects/clients isn't highly valuable and said very efficiently, it's a matter of time before they tune you out.

I've begun pushing my team to have "Twitter-like" conversations with clients and prospects; I've also heard this referred to as "drip marketing". That is, provide the client with regular, short and highly interesting/engaging/insightful pieces of information (most often without an ask) that educate the recipient and -- just as importantly -- change their perception of what you do in a favorable way. I like to think of these as small, mutual gifts -- they provide both parties with some benefit.

Ideally, I've asked my team to try to keep their drip emails down to 140 characters, though depending on the message this can be quite challenging.

Regardless, the aspiration is simple: be really concise and be really interesting.

7 Key Client Management Lessons

A few weeks ago I was asked to teach a "Client Management 101" class. I was happy to do the class but wasn't all that excited about its title.

I believe that the basics of client management are mostly intuitive.  And the parts of it that aren't intuitive can pretty easily be found in a book or online.

So a class on the basics of client management wouldn’t be very interesting or insightful and wouldn’t really make the listeners any better at client management -- not to mention it wouldn’t be very fun to teach.

So I decided not to teach the basics; instead, I came up with a list of 7 key lessons or insights that I've picked up over the years that would've helped me quite a bit had I understood them when I started my career.  Some of them are provocative and many of them are counterintuitive.  I decided to keep the list to 7 because it forced me to pick the most interesting.

I put the 7 lessons into PowerPoint, added some personal stories and took the class through each lesson one by one.  The class was very well received and spurred some great conversation during Q&A.

I thought I'd capture and share what I presented on this blog.  Here are the 7 Key Lessons:

1. Lead, Don't Follow
2. Partners, Not Customers
3. Manage Expectations (it's easier)
4. Ask for More
5. Everybody Has a Boss
6. Know Your Audience
7. The Bigger the Crisis, the Bigger the Opportunity

Posting them all at once would make for an extremely long blog post…so I’ll post them individually over the next several weeks.

What We Don't Know

Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, said this back in 2002 when responding a to a reporter’s question about links between Saddam Hussein and terrorists seeking weapons of mass destruction.  It came up again Monday in a column in the Wall Street Journal. “As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns: the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult one."

I’ve always loved this quote; it’s very humbling and so true in business and life (and of course politics and war).

In short, there are things we don’t know that we don’t know we don’t know.

Poke the Box

I just finished reading Seth Godin’s new book, Poke the Box.  Much like the book, I'll try to keep my thoughts concise -- it's only 96 pages.

Like most of Seth’s books -- I’ve read most if not all of them-- Poke the Box promotes a very simple concept.  Seth probably could’ve communicated what he was trying to communicate in a couple of blog posts; actually, he could’ve summed it up in a word: “Go!”

Poke the Box means make change, make it happen, start, don’t wait, ship!  Shipping is what matters.

It was a  quick read and I’d recommend it if you have a few hours to kill on a plane or if you're feeling like you could use a good kick in the pants.  The book wasn’t all that insightful -- most of what Seth had to say most of us already know,  but it was filled with good reminders that can help motivate.

For me, the two most notable reminders were:

1. Get started and iterate like crazy.  Sometimes the best thing you can do is simply move.
2. Most initiatives don’t work so don’t be afraid of failure and don‘t get frustrated when they don‘t work.  Real failure is when we don't start.

Of course sometimes the hardest thing about starting is knowing when to quit.  Seth tried to answer that a few years ago in The Dip.

All in all, a solid, quick read.

What Makes a Good Tweet

I've been using Twitter for two years. I check it almost everyday and follow about 150 people. It's a unique social graph for me in that I follow almost no friends or colleagues. I don't use it to interact, I use it to be informed and to learn. By the way, Fred Wilson has been writing some interesting stuff on the different social graphs we use and what he calls "implicit social graphs" -- social graphs that get built for us rather than by us -- definitely worth reading.

Anyway, so much of what I see each day on Twitter is wasteful: boring personal messages, links to sites I'm not going to click on, self promotion, etc. But I keep checking it reguarly because every few days I find a gem -- a piece of information or an insight that makes me laugh out loud, makes me more informed or smarter or causes me to look at things differently. I love when that happens.

I realize different people use Twitter for different reasons so they're free to Tweet whatever they feel like Tweeting.  But over the last two years I've noticed that the best Tweets, the Tweets that are really valuable, seem to have these  four things in common:

1. No web links; all of the information is communicated in less than 140 characters
2. No hashtags (#), they're annoying, unless they're added to make the Tweet funny, which can work sometimes -- see @bronxzoocobra
3. No @s, unless it's a Retweet; generally conversations on Twitter are lame
4. They aren't a simple statement of what someone is doing or where someone is; e.g. "mowing the lawn" or "at the movies"

To do this well you actually have to think pretty hard, you have to initiate, you have to create. That's why these kinds of Tweets are the best, and probably why they're so rare.