Do You Have a Conversation Strategy?

Perhaps one of the reasons why the news business is declining in Y/Y sales is that everyone followed industry accepted best practices. In other words, it did not innovate in step with understanding -- and moving ahead of -- the marketplace. It was a new kind of media company that launched the Kindle: Amazon. 

Why is Amazon so successful?

Because it understands the digital medium and learns from customer behavior constantly. Go to the site after a book search and browse on related links on that page. What do you see up top in the URL? Exactly. Each unique URL is tracked from the source and provides a picture of someone's path to the site and through it. Then, the company serves up content based upon what is stored in the site's database memory about you.

Tracking is one component that allows the media company to create a specific experience for the buyer.

It's the same mechanism that allows serving up the right ads and offers at the right time in the browsing experience. You can have a similar result on your Web site, if you implement software such as Silverpop, Eloqua, or DemandGen, tools of varying features for multichannel marketing.

If you're not familiar with these tools, you may want to take a look. They have features such as (check out individual offerings for specifics):

• email marketing personalization
• lead management or nurturing automation
• multichannel integration
• data integration
• lead segmentation
• customer life cycle management

And so on. Tools that learn about your customer preferences -- and now geographic locale -- have been fore and center with the exponential growth in acceptance of digital and now social media. Geotagging is the promise of what's next, especially as we think of mobile communications. From the Wikipedia definition (emphasis mine):

Geotagging can help users find a wide variety of location-specific information. For instance, one can find images taken near a given location by entering latitude and longitude coordinates into a Geotagging-enabled image search engine. Geotagging-enabled information services can also potentially be used to find location-based news, websites, or other resources.

There are ways to geotag your photos with Google Earth images, for example. Yelp allows you to pull local restaurants on your iPhone, for example. And the all popular foursquare allows you to find friends in the neighborhood and them to find your.  Robert Scoble writes about a few of these applications and compares them to foursquare.

Venues are starting to promote their involvement with foursquare on Twitter, with signs at cash registers and even sidewalk blackboards and to offer something back to the repeat visitor. Nick Saint at Silicon Alley Insider has more information on the growing user base -- 275,000 -- the company's potential business strategy, and step by step instructions for iPhone use.

You still need two things to succeed

Even when you become really smart about the tools and implement repeatable processes that allow you to track interest, and get people to your business, you still need two things to succeed with sales. You need:

1. a steady pipeline of great new content that keeps people coming back to interact

2. a conversation strategy to make that interaction helpful and memorable

We've talked a lot about content marketing in the last year. We'll continue to talk about what works, what doesn't with that and how it's evolving with mobile. Last week we talked about mobile news. Will geotagging help the news business? Relevant, local news, when you need it. Will news organizations start behaving more like media companies, a-la Amazon?

Moving forward, we will also talk about tying all the pieces together with a conversation strategy. Something that is still missing in many business strategies and could help the next wave of the news media.

***

Do you have a conversation strategy? Have you assessed its effectiveness? What do you think is missing from it? What is ok to outsource to a third party and what should you keep in house? Weigh in!

[image credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/krazydad/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]

© 2006-2010 Valeria Maltoni. All rights reserved.

Comments

[Chris Oquist]

Great post (and a sweet graphic), Valeria - a couple of days ago I posted something similar on my company's blog, so it's nice to see someone agrees.

Tracking and serving up personalized content, syndicated your presence and content to multiple channels, geo-targeting - these things are all to many successful sales organizations (or they will be in the coming quarters).

The striking thing is that they all center around content. Having compelling content that you can target an individual site visitor with, based on his behavior, geography, or click-path on your site, for instance. Or user-generated content you can deliver via mobile or other channel. Or a continued focus on driving inbound traffic with content that compels prospective customers to join a conversation.

Look forward to hearing how you think these pieces can all be tied together to create a conversation strategy.

[Carolyn Ann]

Is the Kindle a success? I will argue it is a failure. It's one of those products that could have been trendy. Instead, it's not. They forgot one really important item: Black and white television? In this day and age?

Amazon might have a fairly good understanding of what their market is, but I will (again) argue that they forgot their basic business: the long tail. I know (at least) a couple of authors who aren't included in the Kindle's offerings. Guardian Prize* runner-up authors not being included, and not being published in traditional terms? There's a business model for anyone interested. For that woefully named Apple product. (I was quite startled by your rather profane suggestion! On the other hand, it convinced me there is hope in the world.)

*I immediately forget what it's called, and as it is ... 2:21AM in England, I'm not inclined to call my friends and wake them to find out which prize they were runners-up for! Sorry.

I think the news business, along with the citizen-journalist, will become more fractured, and maybe less dependent upon goecentricity. Is that even a word? Forgive me inventing it, if it isn't. And if it is - forgive the inventor. He or she knew not what they wrought. Clearly. (If they did know, hang 'em from the nearest yardarm. Not that I encourage violence (of course), but clearly, exceptions need to be made!)

The über-local newspaper? Perhaps, but not based geocentricity. (Goodness gracious me.) Affection and interest for an area will drive that sort of news gathering. Union Square, in Manhattan, could support a weekly newspaper or a half-decent blog and twitter feed, for instance. Union Square in San Francisco - less so. (As an aside, I would definitely subscribe to a newsletter about the arts district in Omaha! I really liked it.) Which sort of proves my point.

One thing we did before moving into the unknown (aka southern New Jersey) was call the local police and find out crime statistics. A five minute conversation with a local cop told us all we wanted to know. Once we had a local thief arrested, he stole from us and was seen (and identified) by me), we found out a lot more. The whole thing reminded me of how I used to justify some very strange expense reports: ask the managers, and you get one story. Take the technician for a beer, and you will get a different story. It just might take a few more beers than you expected. (Implications are..?)

If I go to Times Square (something I love to do, but, alas, it's hell on a Ducati) I don't really want to know who's there that I know. I may not want them to know I'm in the vicinity, either. Perhaps I'm passing through to go to Restaurant Row? For a private date with my beloved of 20 years?

I'm also thinking about how people move throughout Europe, these days. Local information would really help people make decisions that are right for them.

The locality of information is important for a global audience. I don't think it's enough to link the information to where I am, right now. In fact, it's probably information overload.

On the other hand, Valeria, I looked at a home town newspaper site because of this post. First time I've known what went on in my hometown in about 23 years.

Carolyn Ann

[Justin Goldsborough]

Important for thought leaders like you to keep pulling clients back to a conversation strategy. IMO, it gets lost because of how hard it is to tie conversation directly to ROI. Integrating offers, deals into Yelp or Foursquare (big fan of where LBS can take us, but that's another convo :)) make more sense to traditional marketers and execs because they alone serve as sales driving mechanisms.

Would be great to do/see a study that shows companies that use Yelp, Foursquare, etc and actually engage with customers they provide offers to see more of a customer redemption on those offers as well as brand loyalty and repeat visits.

Here's my question...Are we moving toward a scenario where a measurable ROI tactic (e.g. mayor eats at discount or Yelp customers who comment on X brand get notices of special deals where redemption is trackable) is required to open the door for the conversation about conversation strategy? We know it's important, integral in fact, but conversation alone doesn't always make the sale in this type of economy.

What do you think? Thanks for a great, thought-provoking post.

[Carolyn Ann]

Oops. That should have been "black and white television". No capitalization needed. Sorry. :-(

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Chris - thank you on the post and the selection of the graphic. For the graphic itself, we both thank krazydad ;) Content and conversation need to go hand in hand, and in many cases need to become very specific and situational. We crave little gestures, a human touch, some consideration that says someone thoughts of us. Now I know that our loved ones usually fill that role, but social media has exposed a bigger promise of this dynamic, along with the personalization we were seeing with pure digital technology. As with everything in life, execution will make it more than a promise... or not.

@Carolyn Ann - I haven't held a Kindle in my hands, haven't felt the need to. The iPad on the other hand, iWant one. It does all the things that bridge my phone and my laptop nicely, at a decent price point. You're right, online, we don't pay extra for 4-color process. Imagine I go back to see my family or visit with friends and want to learn what's going on in their home town, the movies that are playing, and so on. The tools are now there for me to plan the trip ahead of time -- if I'd be willing to endure the international travel rules; or not go at all and let my imagination fill the gaps. I think you want the option to do that (geotagging) and choose when to do it.

@Justin - we're getting closer to measuring impact every day. As to tying to ROI, how many deals has the executive team done on the golf course? How about that sports team sponsorship? We seem to continue to have double standards, yes? This kind of economy is the result of scarcity mindset and greed or stupidity. Certainly we're where we are because we did not have many conversations, some of which about accountability.

[Jeff Hurt]

Valeria:

Thanks for inspiring me, as always, with your provocative thought and challenging questions. In your opinion, what are the important elements a conversation strategy needs to contain?

[Warren Whitlock]

I agree with what you say.. but find it easier to sum up conversation strategy with 2 words:

1) Listen

2) Love

Like we learned as kids. Listen more than you talk.. then make sure people know you care by acknowledging them, thanking them and doing what you can to help.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Jeff - that's where the next posts will come in ;) Thank you for the kind words.

@Warren - in principle, I agree. However,I've learned that in organizations, people need to have more direction as to how they can do those two things in their function. Which is interesting because we come equipped with them as humans.

[Adam Needles]

Valeria, this is a great call-out.

I obviously work for a marketing automation vendor, but as one of our evangelists, I spend an increasing amount of time talking about content marketing.

Why is that? Because the marketers I speak to say that the key to their success -- once they have the right tools -- is actually what they do with the tools. At an operational level, that means tuning your lead management strategy, but at a buyer-engagement level, that means leveraging buyer-centric content marketing.

So great call-out on your part -- both on the tools and on the importance of having a conversation strategy.