michaelklein.ca

With the civic election coming up in Saskatoon there has been an increase in the number of more well-established politicians who are jumping into social media. Folks like @seanshaw, @electainsley and @markhorsemen having been leading the way for months (if not years), but recently Mayor Don Atchison (@atchisondon) and even challenger Henry Dayday (@HenryDayday) have decided to throw their hats in the Twitter ring. This follows a provincial trend where we are seeing established leaders, for example @premierbradwall, using social media to communicate and engage with potential voters.

No doubt, social media is a major tool in the modern-day politician’s arsenal. It provides an opportunity to connect with voters on a one-to-one basis without the need to walk for hours around the neighborhood. However, despite it’s positive potential, social media can also be a metaphorical nail in the coffin for those who fail to use it properly (ask @chad4mayor).

To help some of the newbie politicians I have assembled a short-list of tips. Some are my own and others have been from contributions from Twitter. Consider this thousands of dollars worth of free consulting from the community. Ignore at your own peril.

Be personal (inspired by @gingerk)

Make sure you have a complete profile, including pic, contact info, and interesting bit about yourself. Nobody wants to see the Twitter egg or some generic profile. Fifteen pieces of flair… (if you don’t get that joke, do yourself a favor and rent Office Space)

Be transparent (inspired by @gingerk)

Make sure you list your views or political viewpoints. Transparency is important; people will respect you being up front with them.

Social media is not a forum for shouting (inspired by Saskajules, @SaskGatz and every Twitter user on the planet who ‘gets it’)

Don’t treat this as a way to just ‘blast out your message’. Instead treat it as a place to connect with folks on a one-to-one basis. Think of it as more like a telephone vs a megaphone. You’d never phone up your friends and just start talking without waiting for a response. Don’t do this on Twitter.

Social media is not for bragging (@kayayarai)

Save the bragging for your press release. You’d never walk into a cocktail party and just start talking about how great you are. Social media is all about the soft sell.

Social media takes a real commitment (@kayakarai)

Don’t come on social media, blast a tweet out and then be silent for six weeks. If you are going to commit to it, make sure you’ve allocated enough time in your schedule to be able to engage at a meaningful level.

Social media is on 24/7

Nobody expects you to tweet at 3 a.m., but realize that the conversation is happening all day, every day. Sometimes this might require you to be active on a Saturday or tweet a response on Sunday night. If a twitstorm starts on a Saturday night, you may not be able to wait until Wednesday to respond. Don’t be that person who responds three weeks later.

Expect conversation on everything you tweet

When you tweet, expect it’s going to lead to a conversation. If you don’t want to have the conversation, please don’t start it.

Don’t ever blame ‘the hackers’

If you accidentally tweet a photo of your junk or say something ludicrous, please don’t blame it on ‘the hackers’. Learn how to use your computer or cell phone well enough that this won’t happen. Own your shit.

Social Media is a great place to help others (@jplaurentian)

The world (or at least the city) is watching you. Why not help others with your audience by provided a few caring re-tweets. Helping others is an unassailable position. Even if you do it wrong, you still do it right.

Do you have more tips? Leave them in the comments or tweet @dezguy and I’ll add them to the list. Let’s create a comprehensive tip cheat sheet for our newbie politicians.

I’ve never been a big fan of UFC, but over the past few months I’ve found myself watching the odd fight. Of particular interest (and entertainment) are the ‘best knock-out’ episodes on Netflix.

One night, after watching a few shows, my wife pretended to hit me in the chin while proclaiming, “I hit you in the button!” Apparently this was an imitation of the announcer the night before. I was amused by her impersonation and slightly disturbed by the fact that she learned how to knock me out from watching tv.

If you’ve ever watched UFC you know that just one punch, kick or submission can end a fight in seconds. One good shot to ‘the button’ or one good submission-hold can be all it takes to end the match.

Conversely, some fights seem to drag on forever. They get locked up, rolling on the ground in a physical stalemate where only the judges’ scorecards can decide the winner.

We all know marketing can be a bloodsport, so this got me thinking about what we can learn about marketing from watching UFC.

1. Train to Fight (Never stop training)

Nobody steps into a UFC ring without years of practice and training. It’d be suicide. Every fighter that steps into the octagon has provided a level of evidence that they can fight and that they stand a reasonable chance of being able to survive the match.

Good marketers educate themselves on marketing. They understand consumer behavior. They study the latest techniques. They never stop learning. Nothing bothers me more than meeting a marketer who has turned off their brain. Your brain has the exact same capacity as my brain, so get out there and read a damn book already. Or take on a pro-bono project just to do some learning. Stay sharp. Otherwise, stay out of the ring.

2. Have a Plan

No UFC fighter would step in a ring without having a basic plan. If your opponent has longer arms than you, it might be a good time to get inside and drag them to the ground? Or, if you know they are experts in submission perhaps you focus on keeping them upright in a boxing match. The point is: you don’t wait until stepping in the ring to know what your plan is going to be. By then it’s too late. You’re staring at the ceiling.

Developing a marketing plan is not rocket science. Here are a few questions to get you started: What objective are you trying to achieve? Who will help you reach your objective? How do you reach those people? What’s the schedule for making everything happen? How do we make things better over time?

3. Be Flexible

Charles Darwin once wrote, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

A good fighter starts with a plan, but knows when to adapt.

All too often the execution of the marketing plan is simply a todo list. Brochure done? Check. Radio ads playing? Check.

This is a poor approach to marketing.

Instead, you need to treat your plan as a breathing document. You need to adapt to new data and new information. This leads us to the next point…

4. Know Where you Stand

Fighters always have a good idea of how they are doing vs their opponent while the fight is happening. Every landed punch or kick should be doing damage. The desired response – your opponent showing signs of visible damage – is generally immediate and obvious.

Marketers aren’t so lucky. Often the tactics are long-term and it’s difficult to tie activity to outcome. But, for long-term success, it is necessary for good marketers to strive to understand their position (at all times). This starts by ensuring every activity in your plan should have a way of knowing whether it was successful.

Did the campaign lead to more sales? How much more awareness did you garner over the course of the campaign? How many people clicked the ad….

5. Know When to Go for the Knockout

No fighter (unless they are really overmatched) steps in the ring is looking forward to making it to the judges’ scorecards. They are all looking for the big W. However, if a fighter walks into a ring and continuously seeks the knockout at every opportunity they will tire and be quickly overrun. It’s a game of pacing and precision (and sometimes a little luck). Good fighters choose their knockout opportunities wisely.

Good marketers ensure they have the training and plan to potentially deliver knockout punches, but ensure they have the data to know when to swing.

If you are from Saskatchewan* you’d be hard pressed not to have heard of the campaign to save the Sask Film Employment Tax Credit. Since the Saskatchewan Party cut the credit in the latest budget the province has erupted in protest. Almost 8500 people have sign a petition asking the government to reduce their decision. There have been rallies. Thousands have tweeted, and retweeted messages of protest. Elaborate videos have been created. It’s been liked, commented and shared out of the kazoo.

The folks involved in opposing the government have been very effective of mounting their resistance and letting their voices be heard. Politics aside, this all serves as an interesting marketing case study.

They’ve really nailed the four C’s of building a movement (both on and offline):

1. Caring

One of the foundations of any movement is that people need to care. They need to be fired up. Emotional. They need to be willing to put a ‘pause’ on their day-to-day lives in order to take the time to get involved.

Many cause marketing efforts struggle because they lack a foundation in emotion. I’ve seen it over and over again.

In this example I actually think the government accelerated their own resistance. Had they simply phased in small incremental clawbacks the industry would have likely had difficulty mobilizing.  People rarely get emotional about small changes in their lives. But, because the government tore the jugular of an entire industry with the swipe of a pen, they forced thousands of people to worry about their livelihood. Fear of well-being is a powerful motivator.

If the government was looking to get between a momma bear and her cubs, mission accomplished.

2. Community

A bunch of individual people who care about an issue isn’t a community. It’s a crowd. Caring isn’t enough to start a movement. It takes leadership. It takes organization.

The industry was lucky to have a bunch of media savvy (and community-minded) folks amongst their midsts. It was less than a day from the budget announcement before I started to see tweets about the issue. And shortly after a Facebook page was established. Within days the community had a leadership structure, formalized roles and a strategy to define their resistance.

3. Content

Once you have a community of caring individuals, the goal of the movement is to snowball. 10 people today, 100 people tomorrow and so on. To do this you need to get your message shared. You need to get other people fired up. You need to convince other people to care. And finally you need a way they can join, participate and belong to the community.

To do that in social media today you need great content. Emotional content. Content that is shareable. Content that begs to be viewed; listened to; or read.

If I’ve learned one thing from the Sask Film Employment Tax Credit example, it’s that you don’t fuck (pardon the language) with an industry of content producers. Damn, these people know how to tell stories. Check some of their content out here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH0TUPl5Dnw , here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4XIdJyjpjc  and here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPEBc_9bxCk.

Conversely, the government’s only content is the odd press release or off-handed remark on Twitter. They’re getting hammered with great content and their defense is driven by a communications strategy devised in the 1960s.

4. Conversation

If you want your movement to be successful you need to be talked about. You need to be on the top of people’s minds. Lack of conversation leads to less emotion, which equates to apathy and your community shrinking.

The Sask Film folks have been successful at driving the conversation and being at the forefront despite the government’s attempts to ‘turn the channel’ (come on, Mulcair can’t be the most important issue in the Government today). Simply put, you need to keep people talking.

What are your thoughts? What makes a great movement? What did I miss?

*Actually this is no longer a Sask-only story. It’s been talked about world-wide. In fact any savings from cutting the tax credit have surely been eroded by the bad PR the province has received. I’m normally a supporter of our government, but this decision doesn’t make sense to me (in my humble opinion).

Monday night I was out fishing at the pond when my phone rang.

Paraphrasing the conversation…

“Hi I’m calling from Shaw. How are you tonight?” the girl asked.

“Really good, how are you?” I replied.

“Wow, nobody ever asks me that.”

“Well I’m nice like that. How can I help you?”

“We would like to upgrade your internet – because your a good customer who always pays his bills on time – to be faster for only an extra $3 per month. But, I’m told I can only offer you the promotion if you agree to try our cable for six months. It’s free to try the cable for that time-period, and you can cancel at anytime.” she explained.

“Really, you can only offer it if I get the cable?”

“Yes, that’s what I’m told.”

I smell a rat.

“Well, if I order it and get it installed can I cancel the next day without any penalties?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“That doesn’t seem very profitable for you. I mean you’re going to send somebody out to my house and I cancel the next day it seems like you would lose money.”

“Just wait I’ll be right back.”

“No problem, I’m sitting beside a lake. It’s a beautiful night.”

“You’re sitting beside a lake? I was on the lake on the weekend.”

A little banter back and forth on the lake. It seems like we are now becoming friends. A short pause and she comes back on the line.

“So would you like to make the upgrade?”

“Sure, so do you think you can get me to change my tv watching habits in six months. Trying to get me hooked on cable?”

Pause.

“Ok, I’ve made the change” she said and we continued to schedule an appointment for the install.

Two days pass. A thought pops into my mind. I wonder what the catch is?

So, I hop onto the Shaw site and take a look.

It turned out the offer is available to anybody without the cable. And, although it’s only $3 more the new package offered me considerably less bandwidth than what I currently have. Plus if I forget to give them notice my bill would double after the promotion.

I immediately called Shaw and cancelled the upgrade and cable installation.

Two hours later their installation guy showed up at our door (they forgot to call him). I kindly told him the story and sent him on his way.

Duping your customers like this is a desperate marketing strategy. It’s insulting and deceitful and in the long-run this bullshit really accumulates with people.

It’s a completely short sighted marketing (businesses) strategy.

Until the call I was a perfectly happy Shaw customer. Now I’m searching for other internet options. And for what? A chance to get me watching cable again.

Next time the phone rings while I’m at the lake I’m totally hitting ignore.