January 7, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Notes on Optimizing

From Bob Lewis, IS Survivor: July 9, 2012

Posted here because I can never remember all six of the “good, fast and cheap” real life dimensions, and they matter.  Just like change comes in project change and application change, and defects come in project defects and application defects, and they are all very different things.

Understand, I’m a theory-of-constraints guy.

Theory of Constraints says that for every business function, right after ranking the six dimensions of optimization (fixed costs, incremental costs, cycle time, throughput, quality, and excellence) in order of importance, the next step is identifying the most serious barrier to improving the top-ranked dimension, doing what’s necessary to remove it or reduce it until it’s no longer the most serious barrier. If that means customizing the supporting software, so be it.

Repeat ad infinitum.

It’s straightforward. It works.

Even better, you won’t need to renegotiate terms after the thrill of an outsourcing deal is gone.

Filed Under: 80/20 658.3, B2B 658.8, Leadership 303, Metrics 389, Process 153, Project management 658.4
December 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Hubspot says, Dump Pinterest

In a free eBook, Hubspot says,

If the social networks you’re using aren’t working — 2013 is the year to stop using them. For example, if you gave Pinterest the old college try, and it simply is not driving any meaningful business results for you, cut the cord. Just make sure you’re making your decision based on analytics, not gut feelings.

Then, to make sure you didn’t miss it, they repeated the book in a blog post.

OK–so it’s “an example,” not a directive.  Not so fast.

I’ll have more to say about this in a different article.

Not clear why they singled out Pinterest as the target. Seems that Instagram might have been a better example of a social site not designed to drive traffic.  For that matter, Twitter has been around long enough so that it’s possible to know it doesn’t work for you and your business. I don’t think the same is true in ANY way for Pinterest.

The people who are “not seeing any meaningful business traffic” from Pinterest are the ones who gave their Pinterest account to the receptionist at the front desk, who has no marketing guidance or oversight, who pins images from the company website with captions like, “cool kitchen!”  (Face it, if trained marketing department employees are writing those captions, the business has an entirely different problem…)

Or what about the images that are all “uploaded by user?” They CAN’T drive traffic–no link!

Sigh. So let Hubspot run your marketing and decide that Pinterest (which has only offered business accounts for a month when this post was written) won’t work for your business.  My clients would rather you weren’t using Pinterest anyway.  All the more traffic for us…

From the comments on that post, added after I wrote this one:

Pinterest is a complete waste of time for most B2B companies, unless you’re a company like Procter and Gamble that can promote through multiple channels.

Interesting.  P&G is not a B2B company. SAP, which IS exclusively a B2B company, is testing Pinterest.  CSC is even more active.
Pinterest is definitely a hit or miss for some businesses. But, if you know exactly how to market it to your audience, then it is sure to succeed. One must think outside the box 🙂
I would say, NOBODY knows “exactly how to market it to your audience,” because Pinterest is far too new and much too fluid and metamorphic right now for “exactly” to apply in any way.

OTOH, if you have even a glimmer that Pinterest may be a game changer that we haven’t figured out how to use reliably yet, give me a call or come to a class and let’s see what we can figure out together.

Filed Under: B2B 658.8, Content marketing 658-8, Pinterest
December 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Follow Your Customers

If your business is closely aligned with the kinds of items your clients will pin, consider putting a form on your website or a sign-up sheet at the front desk:

May We Follow You?

May We Follow You? Sign up sheet for a brick-and-mortar business

For some businesses, this is a non-starter.  If you sell children’s music lessons, you may see more crafts and recipes than you can stand.

However, for a business selling home decor items from a brick-and-mortar store, it’s an instant winner.  The owner can keep an eye on what her customers are wanting, pinning, and sometimes buying.  Because “following” is often reciprocal, individual users she follows will generally follow her store account back.

Notice that you must include a note about what you are using the email address for and that you will not (or do, if you do) share the email address. Use text that works for your business about why they may not want to be subscribed to your list.

“Following” Etiquette

If most of the people you will follow this way have personal accounts, consider following them at the account level (follow all), and then unfollowing any individual boards that are outside your  business interest.  This way, Pinterest will tell your customers that you followed their account, and they won’t know you unfollowed individual boards.

If you only follow the boards that fall under your business category, Pinterest will tell those clients that you “followed their ‘living rooms!’ board,” and some of them may feel a bit hurt that you didn’t like their “brunch recipes” collection. Better they don’t find out…

Website “Follow You on Pinterest” Experiment

I’m testing this on my Rugs site now using one of the Fast Secure Contact forms.

DIY Follow You form

DIY “Follow You on Pinterest” sign up form for a website.

If my programming skills were better, I’d create a button that performed the same function. It would look better.

I may have to go back and add a captcha. Will post here when I have results.

Filed Under: Marketing examples, Pinterest
December 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Pinterest for Home Improvement

Insider’s joke about green building

One energy company experiments with Pinterest

Drywall board

Replacement windows from an end user’s (client) perspective (look at what else he is pinning and think about how you might also intersect with him, or at least, understand him when you’re in the sales conversation)

As expected, the window treatment companies (in this example, Levelor) are already playing well in the Pinterest.

Eugene is another user with an interest in home improvement, although these boards might also be created for his SEO clients.

Vic Resto pins home improvement information to feed his website design business.

Garage doors

Security doors and related products. Good pins, account needs logo or headshot.

Insulation

Boards found while searching on “insulation”  (Note that most pins called “insulation” are pictures of glass electrical insulators.  Fiberglass, foam and foil insulation falls way down the chart.)

Underfloor acoustic and heating

Basement waterproofing: GREAT use of before and after! (or at least, “afters”)

Filed Under: Marketing examples
December 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

How To Showcase Clients’ Work on Pinterest

Last month’s newsletter from the NextGen photo gallery plugin for WordPress contained an invitation to showcase a gallery on the NextGen Pinterest account. I use NextGen on two sites to manage large numbers of photographs, and Pinterest sends lots of traffic to one of those sites, so I jumped at the opportunity to create additional pins.

Their system could be used by anyone who makes a product / app / system used by other creators to further their work.  First, create a board named for the most common name of your product (the name your users call your product = better SEO value).  Use the description of the board to spell out the steps your users need to follow to be invited to guest pin.

Then, add a logo pin to that board.  In this case, anyone who comments on the logo pin will receive an invitation to be a guest pinner on the board.

Because NextGen is a live photo display system, they are asking users to pin screen shots of the software in action, rather than any actual live gallery display.  Anyone who uses the NextGen plugin will know how to do this; it’s possible that people who make other apps may have to provide more detailed instructions.

Because the screenshot images will, most likely, be uploaded from the users’ PCs, the instructions include a reminder to edit the pin so that it points back to the original website.  Again, NextGen users who play in Pinterest will probably know to do this already; other users who are uploading images may need a few more instructions.

The board is fairly new and I expect it will grow quickly.

NextGen Gallery Board

Board showing screenshots of image galleries created with the NextGen plugin for WordPress.

Filed Under: B2B 658.8, Content marketing 658-8, Pinterest
November 16, 2012 By 1 Comment

How to Photograph Jewelry for Pins

Look at the following boards:

Diamond jewelry on white background

Diamond jewelry against white background looks flat.

and this one, from Michaan’s Auctions:

Jewelry on a black background

Jewelry shown on a black background shows up.

Any one of the pins on the first board is probably worth more than everything seen on the second, but which one are you more likely to repin?

If you don’t have Harry Winston’s brand recognition or advertising budget, make your jewelry do your marketing work for you.

(I’ll write a whole ‘nother post about all those “uploaded by user” tags that leave clickable URLs on the table…)

Filed Under: How to 680, Images 770, Marketing examples
November 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Linkedin Endorsements

Linkedin is, in general, not full of LOLs. However, its new “Endorsements” functionality has made me smile more than once. I’ll have to go back to find the one about my best friend and politics. I’ll collect future funnies here.

Jan Swicord


Does Lt Col Jan A Swicord, USA (Retd), USMA’83, know about “Army?”

Here’s another one:

Bob Burridge


 Does Bob Burridge Know Art?

Funny how these go by. Some people are obviously endorsible; I worked with them and know they have the skills they claim. Others are claiming (or be associated with) non-obvious skills that make sense for what I know of their profession; fine. Other people are strangers to me (albeiit connections, from one source or another, and I just let them go. ANd a few I don’t like now and never did, so I skip them, too.
And then you get something like this:

Billy


No, no, not at all. C’mon, Linkedin, what ELSE would a guy like that do for a living?

Filed Under: How to 680, Marketing 658.8
November 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Pinterest for the Conway School (CSLD, Conway, MA)

A discussion on the Conway School of Landscape Design Linkedin Group about “what projects are you working on?” prompted me to offer, “we should have a Pinterest account for this…”

Volunteering….

People weren’t sure how we could use Pinterest as alumni, and what putting projects on a CSLD account would do for their own business.

Here are some ideas for boards:

  • Board showing the school, inside and out.  Might need someone with a smart phone & Pinterest app on the ground to load this; not sure if there are enough on the school website.
  • Board about Conway the town (need someone on the ground locally if Conway doesn’t have an image inventory on its website)
  • Board with pins showing the staff; linking to the Faculty pages (or other bio information)
  • Board with this year’s students, linking to whatever website they want to point their pin to
  • Board with the 2013 projects
  • Alumni board (Would have to do some web research plus work with the alumni list; realize I’m volunteering to do this bit)
  • Group board with alumni projects; if we have enough activity on this I can see it being subdivided in to different types of projects.  I’m not working in landscape now but I certainly have enough projects.  Link to Behance or other portfolio site; Pinterest can pin video, presentation, audio.  Could be a lot of material.
  • Group board with books written by or recommended by faculty and alumni
  • Board about attractions / points of interest in Western MA.
  • Board with pins about other landscape programs in the area, or in the country.

One person said, “I’m not sure how I’d interact with a CSLD account” (paraphrase).  My thoughts:

Benefits of participating (following AND pinning to) a CSLD account:

  • Additional recruiting tool for the school (mixed thoughts on whether it would be cost-effective compared to everything else the staff does to recruit)
  • Access to different / more followers (presuming we can make the account rich enough & active enough to hit the magic “100” number where followers start growing exponentially (OK, they do at any level, but the first part of the curve is virtually identical to a straight line, not a curve)
  • Access to different sources of ideas
  • Traffic to your own website.  What you do with it there is up to you.  (I could write a much longer rant about the need for marketing if you’re self employed; alums either know this first hand, or don’t need to know it because they’re in jobs that don’t require self-marketing.)
  • More active connection with the alums
  • Where the FB page is linear, a Pinterest account is horizontal and less prone losing information “below the fold”
  • Where the FB page tends to lose information quickly (within days, once new stuff is added), Pinterest pins have an internet half-life second only to YouTube videos

That’s enough for this morning.  I’m willing to do some of this work; need someone locally to be the official contact if this will be a “business” account (and it should be).  I’ll be away over Thanksgiving but can get back to it in early December.  Ideally, comment on the LI group entry because I have moderation turned on for this post and won’t be able to read or approve any comments while I’m gone.

 

 

Filed Under: Marketing examples
November 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Pinterest Business Accounts!

ass=” wp-image-259″ title=”Pinterest widgets” src=”http://pinterestdone4u.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11Great news, we don’t have to pretend anymore! Pinterest released a Business category of accounts today, and you can either create a new account under the Business type or convert an existing one to the business category. Add a snippet of code to your business website (root directory) and get verified, and you’re set.

Mostly, nothing else changes, but putting yourself in the business category means you will receive different education material (short term) and business marketing opportunities (longer term) in the future.

Rather than rewriting what a lot of more well funded bloggers have already written, I’ll simply refer you to Hubspot’s article about the change. I expect they will keep it up to date as / if anything changes in the near future.

Two nifty new widgets are available from the Business Pinterest pages:

Pinterest business widgets

New widgets for Pinterest Business Account users


Those last two are fun: you can embed either a board, or your 30 most recent pins, in any page of your website. You can embed each board on a related page of your website, if some of your boards relate specifically to work you create.

For Karen Tiede Art Rugs, I’ll be linking each color board to the appropriate page showing rugs in those colors. See the Purple Rugs page for an example of how it will work.

Filed Under: B2B 658.8, Pinterest
November 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Pinterest Marketing for B2B Companies

I gave a basic Pinterest Marketing introduction at the Capital City Club in Raleigh this week.  New-to-me group of people, all men, in a variety of positions.  CPA opening a new satellite office in Raleigh for a larger firm, Equifax Commercial, Time Warner Cable, PC maintenance services, web site management software developer (large catalog sites), two non-profits, others.  Mix of solopreneurs, small business, and big business people.

A few of the attendees had Pinterest accounts for their business; most of their wives and/or girlfriends used it.

One man said, “The car pictures there are SO GOOD!  not like the junk you find in Google images.” (We do reveal ourselves…)

Everyone was surprised to see how much Pinterest activity CSC and SAP had.

Afterwards, a tiny bit of business heresy floated across my mind.  I’ve had this battle before, and lost more than once, but I believe:  Businesses don’t buy from businesses.  People buy from people.  “Business” may be the wrapping, and the logo on the sales order and invoice, and I fully understand that no-one ever got fired for buying IBM.  That said, the direct marketing people have been teaching businesses that sell to other businesses to use the same techniques that move merchandise on the Home Shopping Network, and they can’t be all wrong.

If there is any chance, any chance at all that the person you want to reach in a B2B setting MIGHT be a Pinterest user, or her admin or her sister or her brother the designer might, you owe it to your BUSINESS to have a marketing presence in Pinterest.

I understand that it can be hard to think of some businesses in terms of pinnable images.  But here’s a question:  is your business MORE B2B than CSC (Computer Services Corporation)?  They run NC Medicare claims processing, among other LARGE. IMPERSONAL. HIGHLY TECHNICAL systems.

Pinterest is (currently, briefly, temporarily) full of midwestern Morman mothers (in other words, that will shift).  Fine.  Many of them have day jobs.  Some are purchasing agents.  Some are electrical engineers.  Most of them are married, to men who have day jobs (and if they’re not married now, they may well be planning a wedding…).  Anyone whose partner uses Pinterest has heard the phrase, “I saw this pin that ____.”

Make sure the next time someone says that about a business in your industry, it’s your pin they’re talking about.

afterword:

An article on MarketingProfs discussed “How to Evolve Your B2B Customer Experience Using Images” The article is over a year old, and Pinterest was too small in 2011 to be a player in the B2B space.  If the article were written today, the research would be conducted with Pinterest contests–design a board that reflects your understanding of our brand.

Want to talk about how your B2B can be marketing through Pinterest?  Call me.

Filed Under: B2B 658.8, Pinterest
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