ISA Marketing & Sales Summit

Let’s say you run a day-care center and you’re tired of parents being late to pick up their kids. What do you do? How about instituting a fine? That seems like it’s logical and could be effective. If parents had to pay extra, one would assume that they would be more likely to be on time. But one would be wrong.

In January, 2000, Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini published a study titled, “A Fine is a Price.” In this study, they followed six day-care centers in Israel. They found that, on average, there were seven or eight late pickups per week across the ten centers they were monitoring. At six of these centers, they instituted a fine for late pickups and the effect was immediate and striking. The incidences of lateness steadily increased over a four week period. Eventually, the average number of late pickups peaked around twenty – almost triple the original rate. What happened? And what has this to do with social media?

Mixed Norms

Gneezy and Rustichini attributed this to something they called an “incomplete contract.” The rules that were in place were sufficiently ambiguous that customers had to figure for themselves what was appropriate behavior. In those circumstances, we tend to fall back on social norms. Social norms are a set of unwritten rules that determine what is and is not acceptable behavior in social situations. However, in the case of the day-care experiment, instituting a fine shattered the ambiguity and replaced it with an economic norm. The parents no longer feared social repercussions. They determined that the convenience of showing up whenever they wanted was worth the price.

Oil and water courtesy of andredoreto on Flickr

This is an example of “mixed norms.” When we combine social behaviors with an economic situation or vice versa, we get unpredictable (and sometimes volatile) situations. Consider, for example, finishing a holiday dinner at your parents’ house. You compliment the cook(s) on a terrific meal and pull out your checkbook asking, “How much do I owe you?” Most people would be offended and might even throw a utensil in your direction. Dating also carries such risks.

Social media also carries such risks.

Social Media and Norms

Make no mistake. Social norms are in play in all social media channels. The main reason for this is that when it comes to social networks, the users are also the owners. This is not the case in most other media with which companies are used to dealing (e.g. television, radio, newspapers, even Google). And so their tendency is to dive into social media with their economic norm behaviors. The result is that people will automatically tune them out and unfollow/unfriend them. In a sense, the companies have placed a virtual fee on their social media presence. This fundamentally changes the relationship from a social one to an economic one. Game over, influence squandered.

And here’s the really bad news…

Mixing Norms is Irreversible

Back to Gneezy and Rustichini. After five months, the day-care centers rescinded the fining policy. However, the behaviors didn’t change. It turns out that once you change the relationship from social to economic, you cannot go back. It’s altered permanently and there’s nothing you can do about it.

This should give pause to companies currently or planning to be involved in social media. You had better get it right the first time, because you won’t get a second chance. So how does a company insure it’s following social norms? Well, there’s a four letter word that spells social media success; gift. Make sure the vast majority of the content you’re creating and sharing can be considered as a gift to your audience and you should be fine.

This guest post is provided by Brent Ozar.

Brent is the co-founder of Brent Ozar PLF, a technology consulting company. He lives in Chicago with his girlfriend, and when they’re not traveling or working, he’s writing. He gives away The Free Simple Twitter Book.

If you’ve never been to a conference or trade show before, it’s time to make you one of us – an attendee. To do it, we have to get into the boss frame of mind: let’s break this down into numbers.

What It Costs to Attend a Conference

People usually think conference attendees fall into two buckets: people who paid everything, and people whose company picked up the tab. Truth is, there’s a lot of gray area, and when you’re getting ready to attend for the first time, you want to aim for that gray area. You don’t want to pay the full costs plus take vacation time to attend. We need to make your attendance as easy-to-digest for everybody involved, so let’s break out the three costs to attend:

1. Your salary for the week. I bring this up first because it’s your negotiation tool. Companies love paying your salary because it’s already built into the budget. They don’t have to do any extra approvals or paperwork to get you paid. It’s already happening. Your goal is just to keep it going during the conference week.

2. The registration fee. Registration for a 3-day conference is around $1,500 for early-bird discounts and around $2,000 for late registrations. Focus on the $1,500 number because we want to get you registered as fast as possible.

3. The travel & hotels. Companies hate paying for travel, and managers hate asking companies to pay for travel. There’s a lot of opportunities here to save money by staying at cheaper hotels and eating fast food value meals. Add these two things together, and this is actually a huge benefit for your negotiations. Watch how this works….

How to Pitch It To Your Manager

Think like a boss: cost #1 is already covered, and they want to avoid touching cost #3. Let’s make negotiation easier by starting from a place they might just approve immediately:

“Good morning, your highness, how’s it going? Wow, you look fabulous this morning. That combover takes fifteen pounds off for sure. Just fifty more to go! Comb harder. Hey, I was thinking about going to training next quarter. It’s not available locally, and I know it’s hard to get travel approved, so how about if the company just pays for the $1,500 registration and I’ll pay the travel? Nobody needs to know it’s out of town. Here’s the list of topics they’re covering, and I’ll brief everybody on what I learned when I get back.”

See what I did there?:

• You erased the money and political problems of travel
• You didn’t even mention your salary – it’s an assumed win for you
• You’ve reduced the entire discussion down to $1,500 for a training class, which isn’t unreasonable
• You didn’t say it was a conference – I know, it’s a little slimy, but negotiations are usually slimy
• You gave a list of topics the manager wants his staff to learn more about

Now that I’ve got your attention, I have to admit that I’ve skipped a few things. Before you talk to the boss, you need to be armed with a few things ready to go. When you walk into that office, you need to have the following:

A printed list of the most high-value sessions you’re going to attend. Don’t just print out the entire session list and dump it on your boss’s desk – cull through it to find the sessions that give the most value to your company. There’s no need to tell him that you’ll be attending those professional development sessions or the after-hours vendor parties. Just keep it to 10 session abstracts max, one page front & back, and for every session, have one sentence about what the business will gain from you attending that session.

The registration link for the session. There is a slim chance your manager will say, “Sure, let’s do it,” and you want to be able to strike while the iron is hot.

Your next half-hour free. He may ask you to fill out some budgetary approval paperwork, and you’re going to need to track down the right people to do it. Offer to do everything for him – just get the contact name of the person in accounting who manages this kind of thing, and hound that person.

The Three Most Common Ways to Say No

Here’s some of the most common management objections to sending you to a conference, and how to neutralize them:

“I can’t have you gone for a week.” I’ll have my cell phone with me the entire time. If there’s an emergency, I’ll leave the conference and walk across the street to my hotel where I’ve got fax access and a nice quiet room, and I’ll spend as long as it takes to fix the problem. Work always comes first. (If they continue to object, remind them about the last vacation you took.)

“We’ve already used up our training budget for this year.” Well, I really want to learn this stuff to do my job better. How about we split the costs – I’ll eat the training cost as long as I don’t have to take vacation for the week?

“Let’s talk about this in a couple of months.” Only if you agree that the company will pay registration. If I have to pay registration out of my own pocket, I need to have an answer this week because registration cost goes up.

After The Boss Says Yes

Register as fast as possible. Ideally, you’ll get someone with a company credit card to pay the registration fee, but if not, use your own card and submit an expense report right away. You don’t have to wait for the event to send an expense report. You worked hard to get to yes for this cost, and it’s the single biggest barrier standing between you and a week of happiness. Knock ‘er down fast.

During the registration process, you’ll be asked if you want to attend any pre-conference or post-conference sessions. These are day-long events taught by a highly qualified instructor, so they tend to go much deeper into a single topic. These pre-cons typically cost around $400-$500 and I think they’re a huge bargain. You don’t have to sign up for these right away, but if you can get the company to pay for one, I’d highly recommend it.

Block that week out in your group calendar. When people try to schedule team meetings, software releases, projects, whatever, you want to be able to say, “No, I’m going to training that week, and I’ve had it blocked out in my calendar since June. It’s already paid for.”

Book your airfare. My personal favorite travel booking tool is Bing Travel because it has nifty sliders to change your arrival and departure times. I would recommend flying in at least one day early, preferably two if you can afford it. You’ll either decide to attend a pre-conference session, or you’ll want to join in as other attendees roam around town doing things like photo walks and tweet-ups. It’s a great way to meet your fellow Twitterers in a relaxed session, and the networking pays huge dividends in your career.

Reserve your hotel room, but don’t pay for it. Hotels will let you reserve a room with a credit card, thereby locking in your room and your rate, without charging your card. It’s called guaranteeing the room. You usually have to cancel by 6pm on the day of the arrival, but that’s plenty of time. By prepaying your room, you get a discount, but you lose flexibility. If you get the chance to share a room with someone else and they’ve already prepaid their room, you’re out of luck.

Finally, when it works, post a note here in the comments. Your fellow readers are just as scared as you are to approach The Boss, and they need encouragement to know it can be done.

This article by Jon DiPietro originally appeared on the Domesticating IT blog and is re-posted here with permission.

I’ve read a few blog posts recently from a tribe of people I’m going to call the “Grumpy Old Marketers.” Not because they necessarily are actually grumpy, but because their rants remind me of Dana Carvey’s “Grumpy Old Man” character from Saturday night live. Members of this group include grizzled industry veterans who insist that, “In my day, we didn’t have all this social media stuff. We spent 60 hours a week cold calling people who cursed at us and hung up on us until our ears were bleeding. That was the way it was and we liked it!”

If it stopped there, it wouldn’t deserve a rant. But one article recently set me off. The author had a sales and marketing automation system running on a Digital minicomputer back in 1982. He insists that his customers enjoyed the marketing collateral and white papers he sent, lovingly arranging them into three ring binders. In his post, the author wants us to believe that mailing brochures is the same as crafting an e-book, and pressing the flesh at a cocktail party is the same as connecting on LinkedIn. And while I agree with his central point that human behaviors are the same as they have always been, his final conclusion – and thus his advice – is simply dangerous in my opinion.

Permission Marketing

He argues that they did “permission marketing” back in 1982.

How exactly did he know when somebody no longer wanted their propaganda? Does he really think that people took the time to fill out his little postcard and mail them back to stop receiving his junk mail? Doubt it. And today’s permission marketing is all about people opting into the medium as well as the content. He had one tool – direct mail – where now, people can subscribe to email or RSS, fan pages, Tweets, SMS, etc…

Content Marketing

He argues that they did “content marketing” back in 1982.

“They [customers] received high quality, current information about products and the industry free of charge.” While this may be true, it’s like a caveman laughing at a tank saying, “We had artillery back in the stone age too! We called them ‘rocks.’” His brochures and white papers cost his company a fortune in production, printing and mailing costs. Today, I can write my own e-book with free open source software, upload it to a cloud-based host like Scribd for free, register with an affiliate sales channel for free, Tweet it, share it on Facebook and have it downloaded by a million people without spending a nickel. I can record high definition video on a $150 Flip camera and upload it to YouTube where millions more can watch it – for free.

Furthermore, his content was not discoverable. Your name had to end up in his database somehow or a colleague had to give you his/her copy. You couldn’t simply type some keywords into a brochure search engine and have it magically fly onto your desk.

I don’t think today’s low/no cost multimedia environment is anything remotely like what he’s describing.

Social Marketing

He argues that they did “social marketing” using telephones back in 1982.

Again, that version of social marketing was done on a one to one basis, where today’s version is one to thousands to millions. Apples and oranges.

Social Networking

He argues that they did “social networking” at trade shows back in 1982.

This one’s just flat out wrong. The definition of social networks today is a many to many network of producers who are also its own audience. When you’re exhibiting at a tradeshow, you are a producer and the attendees are the consumers. Period. Completely different paradigm.

Marketing “In Enfilade”

His conclusion is that marketing is “simple” and hasn’t changed at all – only the technology. I strongly disagree. When the machine gun was first introduced into warfare, they tried to use it the same as they would a rifle; head on. It turned out not to be very effective since they were so immobile. But when they figured out that moving them “in enfilade” (flanking the formation shoot along the longest axis), they created interlocking fields of fire that became the death traps in Word War I. The point is that the battle strategies had to change dramatically when they went from single shot rifles to machine guns.

Likewise, just because there are some similarities between direct marketing tactics and social marketing tactics, it doesn’t mean the strategies are the same. In fact, they are very different.

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