I was going to try to somehow show what important lessons this video has for marketers. It wouldn’t have been all that difficult. We could talk about powerful writing, the importance of brevity, the need to be inspiring in everything we do.

But honestly, I just wanted an excuse to share this video with you. So forget the pretense. Here it is. Enjoy!

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If you read this blog with any degree of frequency, you’re no doubt aware that I have strong reservations about the usefulness of social media for most businesses.

For evidence of my prejudice on this, see:

• Is Groupon worth it? No. Here’s why.
• Think social media can replace advertising? Think again…
• The “New Media” Challenge

That said, I actually love social media. I love blogs (I’m a blogger, as evidenced by the fact that this is a blog). I like Twitter (here I am @marioparise). I don’t want to imagine a world without YouTube.

I think social media is extremely effective for some purposes.

Denis Bertrand, my colleague and french-language blogger at Développez votre auditoire, can attest to the power of social media for arts groups.

People participate in the arts. When you go to a play, you’re not there to passively watch a show. You’re participating.

You participate by:

• Clapping wildly when the curtain goes down;
• Laughing at the great jokes;
• Gasping at the shocking plot twists;
• Offering silent reverence at the really important, emotionally moving parts;
• Talking about the play before, during, and after the performance;
• Thinking about the play before, during, and after the performance;
• …and so forth.

Similar facts hold true when you go to a concert, see a comic live, or visit a museum.

The arts are inherently social. Even if you enjoy art all by yourself, you’re connecting with the artist through their work. Art is entirely about connecting as people in various ways.

It only makes sense, then, that social media is a perfect fit for arts groups. Social media is the most efficient medium ever developed by man for helping us connect to one another.

Politics is about connecting to people.

In almost every way, politics is simply a form of high-stakes performance art. The politician that connects with people the best wins.

That’s why they go from town to town, holding rallies, to see people face-to-face. Nothing is more powerful than that.

But you can only shake so many people’s hands. And once you do, you have to move on.

Advertising is useful at reaching anyone and everyone. It’s effective at getting a message out. But it doesn’t help you connect with voters. It’s shallow. (I think this is why ads tend to be negative. It’s easier to slander your opponent using mass media than it is to make people like you.)

Enter social media.

Social media fills the gap between one-on-one in-person connecting, and mass media message dissemination. (Say that 10 times fast!)

When Obama won the U.S. presidency, his use of social media was a clearly important factor. It wasn’t the only one, but it was important. I predicted at the time that his campaign would become the new standard, and all politicians would use social media in the same or similar way.

Much to my surprise, this hasn’t really panned out. Sure, they’re all on Facebook and Twitter, but they’re not really using social media. They’re mostly just pasting press releases and using it as an advertising channel.

This is an opportunity loss, and I’m very disappointed.

What every politician should be doing with social media:

1. Recognize that anyone who willingly follows/friends you on Twitter/Facebook is a potential volunteer. Not a hardcore door-to-door volunteer, but the passive kind. The kind that would be happy to plaster your logo on their Facebook page and retweet your posts – IF you’re inspiring. Which brings me to…
2. Learn how to inspire people. People want to participate. They want to like you. They wouldn’t be following/friending you if that wasn’t the case. So make it easy for them. Hire copywriters or poets if you need to, but learn to say things in inspiring ways. Be quotable, damn it.
3. Pay attention to the people. One of the great things about social media is it makes it easy to know what people are thinking. We’ll tell you exactly what’s important to us, if only you’ll listen.
4. Make it easy for people to support you. (More on this below.)
5. Be present. Yes, you’re busy. Yes, your team is managing your social media presence. But show up every now and then. Rally the online troops. Make it clear just how important they are to you and how much you appreciate their support.
6. Send a personal thank you (or make a personal phone call) to your most active supporters. Pick one person a day whose going above and beyond to support you, and take the time to say THANK YOU.

“4. Make it easy for people to support you.” - Expanded

Think of it in levels. Some people want to help you just a little bit. Some people want to lay their lives on the line for you. And there’s a whole lot of in between:

1. People Friend/Follow you.
2. People Like/ReTweet your posts.
3. People Share your videos and articles.
4. People plaster your party logo on their own profiles.
5. People send emails or Facebook messages or Wall Posts to all of their friends, encouraging them to Friend/Follow you.
6. People buy political swag (t-shirts, buttons, hats, iPhone apps…). You can charge a premium because people are also buying them as donations.
7. People opt to make phone calls on your behalf. (Obama’s volunteers could log into the My Obama site at any time and get a name and phone number to call to encourage people to vote for him. I believe they had sample scripts to read. Think of it as crowd-sourced telemarketing. )
8. People opt to go door to door on your behalf. (Same as #6 above, but in person.)
9. People donate to the party.
10. People join the party.
11. People become part-time or full-time volunteers at candidate or party headquarters.

You can probably think of a number of other things that could be done. But by and large, politicians right now seem to be doing points 1-3 and 8-10. They’re skipping items 4-8, which is where I think the real potential is.

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If there’s one lesson I’ve learned more than any other, it’s that when it comes to marketing, every business owner has 3 primary concerns: It’s expensive, it’s risky, and it better damn well make the cash register sing.

Thankfully, there’s never been a better time to do all of those things.

The principles behind low-cost, low-risk, high-return marketing are simple:

1. It’s not expensive if it pays. When marketing works, it pays for itself several times over. You’ve heard it before, but it bears repeating: “Marketing is an investment.”
2. You can lower your exposure to risk by starting small and seeing what works. The goal is to spread your risk over a large number of thoughtful experiments, in the hopes of discovering an approach that will work. Once you find the right approach, you invest more heavily in it.

It’s like poker: You wouldn’t go all-in on your first bet, would you? Sure, it might pay off. But the odds are not in your favor. Winners place smart bets and limit their risk on any given hand.

The Safe Way to Market:

Here are 8 tips I’ve learned over the years to minimize risk and maximize results:

1. Don’t rely on genius. Yes, your odds of success improve dramatically if you work with geniuses, but they are still fallible. Don’t rely on intuition. Use creativity, inspiration, and genius to develop ideas, but don’t assume those ideas are going to be winners.
2. Test headlines with AdWords. Before you invest in the development of an entire campaign, and the commit to all the  media costs associated to it, test the ideas out first. By creating an AdWords campaign, you can test different headlines, subheads, offers, and URLs to see what gets clicked the most. Don’t worry about where the ads go to when clicked; it can go to an error page for all I care. All we’re looking for is clicks. If a headline/subhead/offer combo pulls in drastically more clicks than all the rest, there’s a pretty good chance that’s a winning concept.*
3. Test headline/visual combos with an online display campaign. Again, don’t expect this to generate sales. We’re simply extending step #2 above to including visuals. It’s a bit more expensive, but not as expensive as committing to a TV campaign only to realize the concept doesn’t sell.
4. Test different email campaigns. Once you’ve settled on a rough concept and offer, you can run A/B tests on your email marketing. The bigger your list, the more chances you have to test different ideas, and the more info you can get from this process. Again, the idea is to try variations on a theme so you can see what works and what doesn’t. You’d be surprised how often minor variations of headlines or graphics provide drastically different results. By using a site like Campaign Monitor, you can see which versions resulted in the highest open-rates and click-through rates.
5. Test different landing pages. Setup your AdWords, display ads, and emails to link to a landing page address, and use Google’s Website Optimizer to run A/B tests on the landing page. Again, this is your opportunity to test even more variables, more ideas, more offers. By running Google Analytics, you can compare the results to see which versions resulted in the highest average time spent, highest clicks, and so forth. (If you sell products online, you can take this a step further and see which approach actually leads to the highest sales conversion rates.)
6. Grow your media buy slowly. It’s better to commit to a year-long campaign in just one newspaper than to go big and buy up media everywhere you can. You’re in business for the long-haul right? Do the same with your marketing. When you’re confident the campaign is working, add another newspaper or a magazine or a radio station. Slow and steady wins the race.
7. Reinvest your new revenue back into your marketing. By this point, your advertising should be paying for itself, and then some. Just put it right back into the marketing. In this way, your marketing will grow all on its own, your sales will continue to increase, and you won’t be investing any new money into that process. Congratulations, you have a money making machine.
8. Always measure your results! Even when you’re confident in an approach and decide to invest in print, TV, radio, or direct mail, make sure you have some way of knowing what works. Common methods include using different 1-800 numbers, different landing pages, coupons with trackable codes, or just plain comparing sales before, during, and after a campaign.

* Not all concepts are going to be AdWords friendly. In the words of the immortal Bill Bernbach, “You can’t storyboard a smile.” You certainly can’t reduce that smile to text. But if your primary goal is to limit risk, maybe you should stick with ideas you can test.

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Continuing my line of cranky “social media couldn’t sell its way out of a paper bag” blog posts, it seems someone has finally managed to scientifically measure how effective services like Groupon and Foursquare are for businesses.

And by “effective”, I mean their ability to boost revenues.

The answer? About 2%.

So let’s get this straight. Let’s say you offer $100 worth of product for $50 (Groupon deals are typically half-off or more). You then pay Groupon and their ilk an additional $25 for the privilege. (Or so I hear. I haven’t used it myself because I’ve never thought this was a good idea.) If that’s true, you’re now receiving just 25% of the revenue you used to get for the product you’re selling. Odds are, that’s either a losing sale, or you have very high margins on your products.

The hope, of course, is that this is a loss leader. You lose a little money now, but hope to get people to keep buying, thereby making up for it with after sales. The trouble is even the world’s greatest retail companies appear to only be able scratch out an extra 2% of revenue for all that risk and effort.

In other words, what you receive in return for slashing your price by 75% is a 2% boost in revenue in the short-term and irreparable damage to your brand in the long term.

Wake up, folks. Anyone can boost sales with radical discounts. But it’s a dangerous road to take. If I can buy your product for 50% off today, why should I pay full price tomorrow? Deep discounts should be reserved for getting rid of old stock. It’s not a great way to build a business.

If it was, we’d all just give our stuff away for free, because if slashing prices can boost sales, bringing them down to $0 will boost them even more.

Marketing is supposed to increase your perceived value, not erode it. The point of driving up demand is to be able to command better pricing. The only businesses that win in the discounting game are major retailers like Wal-Mart (who have the clout to force their suppliers to slash costs) and discounting services themselves. For your average small business owner, this type of marketing “strategy” is a loser.

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Businesses everywhere seem to be flocking to social media as the answer to their marketing needs. Why spend money on advertising when you can put up a Facebook page for free? Or so the thinking goes.

I’d like to dispel a few myths right now.

Myth #1: Social Media is Free

Only if your time has no value whatsoever. Any success in social media is the result of lots of hard work. How much money do you usually make per hour? Every hour you spend on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or blogging is an hour where you earned zero dollars. Social media is not free. It costs time, and for most of us, time is the most limited resource we’ve got.

Myth #2: Social Media Can Sell Anything

I’m not saying social media hasn’t helped anyone build their business. There are success stories. But what’s right for one business isn’t always right for the other. It’s notable that most of the people who’ve truly enjoyed success in social media are people who trade in information.

Social media gurus make their living selling books, workshops, and speaking tours. Of course social media works well for them. It’s the perfect medium for what they do. If you’re selling candy or heavy machinery or a line of clothing, good luck with that.

Myth #3: Social Media is Proven to be Effective

If anything, it’s proven to be ineffective. Just ask Pepsi. Last year, they started the Refresh Project. They slashed their TV budget, didn’t advertise at the Super Bowl for the first time in decades, gave away $20 million to charities, and went whole hog on social media. It seems safe to assume they spent another $20 million promoting that fact.

By every measure that social media gurus tell you to measure, the project was a huge success. Over 80 million votes were cast; the Facebook page was “liked” 3.5 million times; their Twitter follower count reached about 60,000. Good news right?

Except it failed to sell any Pepsi. In fact, not only did their sales not increase, they decreased. Dramatically. Pepsi dropped from being the #2 soft drink in the U.S. to #3, behing Diet Coke. It’s estimated that sales dropped by $350-$500 million.

If ever there was a brand that tried to prove social media could sell products, it was Pepsi. And social media failed.

Myth #4: Traditional Advertising is Dead or Dying

More people are watching more hours of TV per day than ever before. It continues to be the most effective form of advertising ever created.

Here’s a trick for knowing what works in advertising: Just ask yourself whether or not direct response marketers are doing it. This trick dates back at least to the 60s, when David Ogilvy chastised the industry for looking down on direct marketers.

Direct marketers measure everything. They don’t just think something works; they know it does. That’s why they run ads in the middle of the night or in the early morning; it’s why they prefer long-form ads to short-form; it’s why they seem to love the 30 minute spot known as an infomercial; it’s why they continue to send “junk” mail and email; and it’s why they don’t use social media.

Oh sure, you can find an almost-dead Facebook page for Snuggies - those backwards robes that look quite comfortable. But their ads don’t tell you to visit them on Facebook; they don’t encourage you to comment on their blog. They invest as little time and money as possible into it because they know it doesn’t sell.

The Simple Truth:

Social media is about people. If your friends invited you to a party and you found out they had been paid to throw that party and force you to talk to sales people, how long would you stick around? Would you come to the next one? People don’t want to be friends with companies; they don’t want to have conversations with brands.

Social media is fantastic on so many levels, but not as an avenue for promotion. If you think people resent being interrupted for a “commercial break”, imagine how they feel when their friends fill up their “walls” with promotional spam. At least TV advertising enables the budgets to pay for the creation of amazing content. Social media marketing is just a buzz kill.

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