It’s great to see your friends succeed. It’s even greater to see your former students succeed. But it’s unbeatable when a friend who happens to be a former student knocks one out of the park.

I can’t take much credit for Seth Michalak’s success, because he was pretty bright long before he became my student a few years ago. But as his friend, I can sure as heck take pleasure when his hard work and innovation earns some well-deserved public validation, as it did the other day. Seth runs marketing for Savannah-based social media developer Balaya, which I’ve written about before. Balaya recently won the Metro Atlanta Chamber’s 2009 People’s Chocie Contest, thanks to a combination of a) a great offering, and b) Seth’s thoughtful, well-executed social media campaign.

As I’ve noted before, economic down cycles are important times for innovation. Creativity comes in all shapes and sizes, including everything from product innovation to operational improvements to marketing strategy. Maybe you’re getting a better offering ready for market. Maybe you’re finding new and better means of production. And maybe you’ve got a great service already, but you’re looking for inventive ways of getting the message into the marketplace – something that’s always a concern, especially when budgets tighten (as they always do in a recession).

In all cases, if you’ve making your company better while others are turtling – if you’re working to thrive while the competition is just trying to survive – you’re going to be pretty well positioned when the market bounces back.

Balaya and Seth are the only ones doing a good job of making lemonade in a lemon market, but since I’m a big fan I thought I’d say a public congrats.

Sonia over at Copyblogger has a great piece on “The #1 Conversion Killer in Your Copy (And How to Beat It).”

What makes people almost buy? What makes them get most of the way there, then drop out of your shopping cart at the last second? What makes them stare at your landing page, wanting what you have to offer, and yet, ultimately, close the page and move on to something else?

It turns out there’s a hideous troll hiding under the bridge. Every time you get close to making a sale, the troll springs out and scares your prospect away. Get rid of the troll and your copy will start converting better than it ever has before.

The ugly, smelly, dirty, bad-mannered troll is prospect fear. And it’s sitting there right now, stinking up your landing page and scaring good customers away.

She does a great job of explaining where the “conversion troll” comes from, and she’s 100% correct. If you’ve grown up in this society, you have probably have a degree of well-justified trepidation about trusting the claims of those trying to sell you something.

I’d go her one better, though, because I feel like the principles she’s articulating when she says that “[t]rustworthiness, transparency, credible authority, lots of high-value content, and just plain old decency are your best weapons” apply to a lot more than the point of sale. I’ve had the argument over and over again, in the context of PR and a variety of marketing communications discussions, about how important it is to build credibility through acknowledging the reader’s reality.

Old school PR pretty much never admitted that anything bad had happened. The whole world can see that the corporate headquarters is being strafed by dragons and the official comment would be something along the lines of “we’re aware of certain operational challenges and expect to have them all sorted out shortly.” That’s if there were any official comment. I used to deal with a large corporate group whose PR motto could have been “no comment.” I couldn’t get them to talk about even the least controversial subjects for an employee newsletter. I joked that you could have replaced the whole PR group with an answering machine. “Hi, you’ve reached the ABC Corporation Public Relations Office. No comment. Thanks for calling.”

The problem with this approach is that you can only communicate if you have credibility, and you have no credibility if you refuse to acknowledge what the audience knows and believes. If they think your service is shoddy and you lead with “we’re committed to outstanding customer service,” you’re either going to get dismissed out of hand or yelled at, and neither is conducive to a strong customer relationship.

So yeah – credibility (which stems from frankness), trustworthiness, transparency and a content base that reflects your belief in an honest conversation, these things are the key to killing off the conversion troll as well as his relatives, many of which lurk around other parts of your business.

Food for thought…

Thanks to Jim Burnett for passing this story along.

A few months ago I was in job-hunt mode, and during that period I had chats with a number of companies around Denver (mostly PR and Marketing agencies). In August I accepted a new position on the client side, running a wide range of marketing and PR stuff for a locally based financial services firm.

One of my very top priorities (along with assisting the VP of Marketing with a full-blown rebranding and heading up a complete redevelopment of the corporate Web site) was leading the search for a PR agency. I’d talked to most of the shops in town while doing my job search, so I had a decent idea what was out there, and a couple of the places I had talked with struck me as strong possibilities for my new company. So I put them on my big list and then called them to see if they were interested.

In both cases I got voice mail. I left a message saying hi, this is Sam Smith and I have an opportunity I think you might be interested in. Give me a call, etc.

Neither called me back.

Why, I wonder? Well, that’s obvious enough – since I didn’t say I’m running PR for a new company and we’re hunting for an agency, they probably thought I was hounding them about a job again and found it easier just not to return my call.

Obviously they both wouldn’t have gotten the business, and maybe neither would, but it’s extremely likely that one of them (maybe both) would have made the final round and been invited to present to the CEO. At that point, either might have won the business; my opinion mattered, but the CEO is the only guy in the building with a trump card.

If you’re cynical about my motives, you might be wondering why I played the game the way I did – why not be clear about my new position and why I was calling? Was I looking to dog somebody for not hiring me?

Hardly. Just because you don’t hire me doesn’t mean you’re not perfect for a situation down the road, and I’d be a moron to let that kind of junior-high pettiness get in the way of something that could make me more successful.

No, I did it that way because it was an opportunity to learn something important about the agencies in question. If they’re only going to take my call when I’m waving money in their faces, I don’t want them on my team. That’s not how genuine relationships work, and if you’ve been at this business for awhile you can smell that level of insincerity a mile away.

Reporters can smell it, too. It’s hard enough to build a solid relationship with a reporter or editor as is, and when they figure out that you only call when it’s about you, they stop taking your calls. (I have since learned that one of these two agencies has made its way onto the PR Spammer’s Blacklist, which I take as strong corroborating evidence for the point I’m making here.)

So those two agencies didn’t get to pitch, they didn’t get to meet the CEO, and they didn’t get the business of a company that’s going to absolutely blow up in the next two years.

My case isn’t going to change the world for anybody, but I can’t be the only one. I wonder how many other companies out there are hutzing themselves because they refuse to pick up the phone?

In the end, we hired a great agency and are very happy with how things are coming along. As a side note, they’re one of those firms that didn’t even bring me in for a chat. Remember that the next time the phone rings…

My company is in the process of a major Web redevelopment, and I’m the point guy on the project. Among other things, it was my job to identify, solicit and make the hiring call on the vendor. I’m happy with the company we wound up with, but as the letter below indicates, it was an odd and frustrating journey. The names have been changed to protect the guilty.

_____

Hi Jeff. I wanted to get back to you on your recent bid for our Web redevelopment project. We felt like XYZ Interactive represented an outstanding development resource, and in the end I was convinced that you were the most capable vendor we solicited. Additionally, you came in with the lowest bid.

However, we decided to award the business to another vendor. Since best quality and lowest price is usually a winning formula, I thought you’d appreciate some explanation.

You no doubt noticed, the last time we spoke, that I was pushing very hard for the ability to control and manage site content on my own. That I be able to create new pages, adjust basic navigation, move things around as needed, etc., was essential for our particular operation, but you were adamant that this wasn’t how it worked. I’m not sure who established your firm’s development and operations model or the reasons for it, but XYZ basically insists on owning all of these processes, even the really simple ones.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this approach doesn’t address our requirements. I can understand why having your company offer this kind of hosted, fully managed service would be a valuable option for many clients, but I can’t quite fathom why it’s the only option. In our particular case, the person running the site – me – has been managing site content for nearly 15 years. I founded one of the first 2,000 sites in the world; I directed a large, enterprise-level internal operation for a Fortune 150; I was managing editor of the corporate site for a prominent software company; and my “hobby” blog was one of the 124 sites credentialed to cover the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Clearly, there’s no reason why my organization can’t manage something as simple as adding a new PDF to the case studies page on our site.

After a couple of exchanges, you finally shut the conversation off by telling me this: “I’m sorry, but that’s a service we don’t offer.” At that point XYZ Interactive lost the business to a more expensive, slightly less capable competitor. That company had already accepted that they weren’t going to get the contract, and they were shocked to learn that they had.

I’m not writing all this to berate you, and apologize if I sound like I’m lecturing. After all, I doubt this was your policy and you did an outstanding job in understanding the scope of the project (this one issue notwithstanding) and presenting me with a highly competitive bid. But I thought that you and your bosses would like to know that I wanted to work with you, but you lost the contract over rigid adherence to what looks like, from my perspective, an unnecessary policy. It’s as though I’d gone into Burger King and ordered a Whopper, only to be turned away because they absolutely refused to make it without tomato.

At some point down the road I feel certain I’ll need someone to develop another Web site for me, and since your portfolio is nothing short of outstanding, I hope when I call on you I’ll find that you’ve changed your offerings so that they’re aimed at accommodating the customer’s requirements instead of your own preferences.

I appreciate your time and consideration, and wish XYZ Interactive all the best.

Sincerely,

Sam Smith

Hi folks. For the moment we’ve moved – to BlackDogStrategic.WORDPRESS.com. There’s some kind of weirdness up with my domain – it looks like it may have been claimjumped, although I’m still trying to sort out exactly how.

If this changes I’ll let you know. Sorry for the hassle.

I wanted to take a second to say hello to all my fellow bloggers participating in today’s Balaya conference in Savannah. I’m joining from Colorado via Skype and Tick-It, and am looking forward to learning more about developments with the company’s new social networking platform.

What I’ve seen so far suggests that Balaya has some interesting new ways of integrating the social media experience in ways that improve things for bloggers, users and advertisers.

I’ve written about Balaya before, and suspect I will be again…

MediaPost reports this morning on an interesting new survey from TNS, which says that “sixty percent of shoppers across the globe believe that they will be able to pay for purchases using just their fingerprint by 2015, rated top by 25% of shoppers.” Never mind the chill that should send down the spine of anyone who values their privacy – we’ll deal with that another day. For the moment let’s have a look at what people expect from The Future^®.

It’s hard to say which of these developments will come to pass by 2015, of course. It’s been said that we tend to overestimate what will happen in the next five years but that we underestimate what will happen in the next ten. 2015 is seven years away, so maybe. Shopping by mobile phone is a certainty, I’d say, but 3D body scanning? Technically feasible, sure, but will it make economic sense? Who knows?

I wanted to remark on one of the innovations, though, because it does seem pretty plausible. In fact, I think the likely scenario goes a little further, even. Look at that seventh item – smart shopping carts. Here’s how I look for that one to play out.

• 67% of respondents are expecting “interactive, intelligent shopping carts that locate products in the store, check prices and promotions, upload recipes and complete the checkout process.” Imagine a cart with a video screen that’s equipped with RFID technology and hooked into the store’s CRM engines. When you grab your cart you log in, allowing the store to access your consumer profile (which by this point in time will be frighteningly detailed, whether you like it or not). The cart knows where you are in the store, and has a detailed history of how you’ve shopped in the past. It probably knows where you’re going before you do.
• You’ve no doubt opted in to the retailer’s discount/couponing program, so as you approach certain featured items your screen will let you know where the savings of the moment are.
• The cart is accessible by the store manager, who can offer spot specials when he/she wants to reduce inventory on an item. Further, the cart is jacked into the corporate supply chain system, so these kinds of inventory moves can be managed from HQ and/or regional distribution centers, either by human managers or the computerized systems that monitor inventory levels and automate shipping schedules.
• I guess it goes without saying that this cart is a modern-day marvel of targeted advertising, right? Store and corporate managers can act on consumer profile data to activate real-time ad programs from their suppliers. In addition, the advertisers themselves will have the power to project messaging and a variety of incentives to the on-cart monitor.
• In more ways that my brain can quite imagine right now, this system will integrate with the Minority Report scenario outlined here.
• Done shopping? Forget checkout. Your selections will be bagged and as you leave the store it will be charged to your authorized card.

If I’m off in this prediction, it’s because I’ve doubtless underestimated things in spots. But the technology to do most, if not all, of what I describe here already exists – it’s just a matter of time before it’s all pulled together.

Let’s file all this away and make a note in Outlook to check back in 2015 to see how close we were.

Greg Stene, who’s an ad guy and a professor specializing in creativity (and one of the smartest people in general that I’ve ever met) has some interesting thoughts on advertising recall (or the lack thereof) in a new post over at Scholars & Rogues. A snippet:

Secondly, simply because one can recall an ad, doesn’t mean it has had a positive influence in brand preference. Certainly, there is the facile argument that you can’t choose a product if can’t you remember the ad – but that is so disingenuous in its suggestion that the rest of the world (friends’ recommendations, past experience, competing ads we may remember, etc.) has no greater profound effect on our product choice.

A good read from one of the brighter (if lesser known, so far) minds in the world of advertising.

I’ve written here on two or three occasions about the looming macro-succession crisis threatening American business. Well, my colleague Whytawk over at Scholars & Rogues has a great post this morning on the dynamics shaping our emerging recession, and in it he put some teeth in the retiring Boomer piece of the macro-succession puzzle. If I’m a staffing leader at a company that relies on its ability to attract and retain talented people I just got extremely nervous.

At the same time the US has not reformed either of Social Security or Medicare and fully 76 million people out of the total 150 million of the US employment base are due to retire over the next 10 years as the Baby Boomers hit 65. [emphasis added]

Yow. That’s over half of the current workforce hitting retirement age in the next decade, and as I note in my earlier posts the Boom is a huge generation. Generation X, which will be asked to replace the Boom, is only 2/3 as big, so even if everything else goes well (it won’t) that means two butts for every three vacant seats.

Whythawk is drawing on numbers from Alan Greenspan’s memoir as well as any number of recent articles looking at ominous talent shortages in a variety of industries. I’d argue that some of the stats are a tad off, as they define the Baby Boom as 1946-1964, but generational tags notwithstanding the raw numbers are chilling.

Good recruiters are going to be worth their weight in gold in the coming years, looks like…

If you know anything at all about the agency world, this new report tells you a whole lot of what you already know.

‘Agencies Don’t Get It,’ Survey Says
Feb 28, 2008

Clients are placing more emphasis on mastering social media but find their agencies ill equipped to help them succeed in that space, according to a new survey.

TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony polled more than 60 marketers in North America, France and the U.K. to gauge how they are faring navigating the world of social media. It asked them for feedback on their agencies’ abilities to help. TNS found, in its words, “Agencies don’t get it.”

What’s the problem?

Clients complained that their agencies — creative, media, public relations, design and others — typically treat social channels like blogs as traditional media. In other cases, their ideas are not backed up by practical skills in the area. What’s more, one client pointed out that his agencies have little of their own experience using social networks or video-sharing sites for themselves. [Emphasis added]

In a way it’s just stunning that we can be this deep into the world of Web 2.0 and mobile without ad agencies – you know, those businesses that are built on creativity – would still be so far behind the curve.

On the other hand, maybe it’s not surprising, at all. Everybody makes a big deal about their creativity, but think about it – how many people and businesses do you know that are genuinely innovative? By that I mean how many of them do things that nobody ever did before? Taking what others are doing and finding a way to push some part of the envelope a percent further passes for creativity in our business culture, where even the most convention-bound drone in the most backward-looking legacy company pays lip service to thinking “outside the box.”

The truth is that even today, when we all live on “Internet time,” businesses are very, very slow-moving when it comes to adopting innovation. This is a growing problem when the pace of technical innovation outpaces the rate of adoption – that is, if the innovation curve advances at a rate of X but the rate at which companies adopt and master those innovations is X-1, it means we’re potentially facing a widening adoption gap. I don’t have any studies to point to here, but this seems to describe what I see in the area of communication practice. We are, I believe, further behind the curve than we were a year a ago, and we’re dramatically further behind than we were a decade ago.

One of the main reasons is that technological change is usually driven by younger, edgier elements of the population, and how many companies entrust high-level strategy to The Young & the Edgy? With respect to the agency world, we need to acknowledge just how conservative and conventional it really is. I wrote last year about how ridiculously slow agencies have been in developing mobile strategies, for instance, and when things that were being done successfully in 1999 are still viewed cautiously, you know you’re going to need to look for your new ideas somewhere else.

The message, of course, is that there’s tremendous opportunity for those who can help businesses develop social and mobile strategies and campaigns that take advantage of media use patterns that their customers have been engaged in for at least a couple of years now. Given how far off the pace most businesses are these days, the best news of all is just how easy it can be to get out in front of the rest of the pack.

We’ll see who gets it and who doesn’t, I guess….