You don’t need to be Don Draper to get advertising – or marketing. You just have to be you – only smarter.
Smarter means thinking of your audience, and understanding the features of a product, and understanding who you are and what sets you apart. It always stuns me how people miss the opportunity to market themselves and extend their brand on any social media site they’re on. It’s like making a cup of coffee but using a spoon to drink it tiny spoonful by spoonful – why? You also have to look at the ecosystem around who you are and what you value – and if you have a presence on a social media site and you can’t update it even with interesting links in the absence of news from your company, you’re missing the point and the power of media. I’m not sure I’d go as far as to plan blog posts and Tweets for certain times other than events you’re sure of (Design Week, Holidays, large company news you know ahead of time). At the same time, I’m surprised that people – and companies – don’t harness the technologies available to them more fully. Even a simple thing like a LinkedIn profile can be turned into something ‘more’ as a branding opportunity- and I’m not even talking about integrating all the plugins LinkedIn has for third party sites (WordPress, Behance profiles etc.) I’m talking about the very basics of how to determine someone’s credentials, and to see if they know how to use the tools in their space – and in the case of social media based startups or startups in general, that can help build your business (more on that in a second).
On an individual level, I see profiles where people don’t explain who they are, what they’ve done – even what they’ve studied at school. I can understand sensitive around revealing the dates of when you attended because that can reveal your age, but honestly, if you want people to understand you and remember you, you provide details. Didn’t go to school? Not the end of the world – just explain what you did and how it provided value to who you were working for. Even if you have a great profile, people miss the opportunity to personalize the little touches that reveal what you value – like when I get an invitation to connect, and someone hasn’t customized the message. Again, the impression is that you don’t think of your audience – and you don’t want to have people feel that. Even if it’s a situation where you want to push someone to another more appropriate venue other than LinkedIn (like GitHub or Stack Overflow to show off your code, or your own site to shape the online experience), there are ways to do this without alienating your audience. I don’t tend to use third party portfolio sites like Behance because I believe in controlling my brand by hosting it on my own domain, but even with those sites, I at least have a presence on them, which points to my portfolio. The point is to at least have the link to your site somewhere. And add your skills. Add the details. Even if you’re happily employed, a social media presence means an opportunity to display who you are and what you know – including demonstrating your competence and expertise in your field, and showing what your personality is, which can be as valuable as any resume. I set out to do this with my blog – I realized that I haven’t actively and publicly demonstrated my written long form communication skills, so I set this year to change that and get over the hurdle of Posting Fear. I don’t expect to win any prizes for it, but at least I can note where there’s been a deficiency and what opportunity I took to address it. I still prefer to work in the presentation layer with interaction design, but there will always be a place to use words to convey a message – and being able to communicate in longer form, sell your designs and work with others is as much about design as it is about marketing.
I was thinking about the role of content in demonstrating competence and how marketing shapes perception when I was looking at a recent entry on the Adaptive Path blog mentioning to two SaaS startups, Pair and Avocado. Pair has a sexy app and site, but little information on it other than the push to immediately play with it via a download. When I go to the Avocado site, I see far more information that closes the ‘sale’ – description of features, the people behind it, and some key content I like to see, the Terms of Service, the Privacy Policy and the Help page. Obviously a successful startup has a lot of factors that determine their success, much like a perfect storm. You need a great idea, a great product, a good mix of competition but not too much of it or the wrong size, a solid team, a vision, and other important components, including a business plan. And success for any company or individual is as much about being in the right place at the right time, so the luck and ‘stars aligning’ factor does play a role – just as Goyte about that.
But if you’re missing the details you miss an opportunity to flesh out any questions your audience may have. Do you want to leave people wondering? Sometimes, perhaps mystery is necessary. It definitely plays a key role in an early relationship, so that extends to the online sphere. But in an attention economy where you need to 1.) raise your profile about the competition, and 2) show why you’re different – and better – than your competition, can you afford to waste any opportunity not to show who you are? I say this knowing how much the idea of selling one’s self is abhorrent to people – I’m not a fan of it myself. Once upon a time, I didn’t value the power of marketing and branding. Thankfully a little education and experience have made me see the power of seizing opportunities as a way to insert your message. There is a way to do so without feeling slimy, and being open to possibilities speaks well of a person’s mindset and flexibility – and in a business climate that evolves quickly, that flexibility matters. The photo I took for this post made me smile – the pub, Johnny Foley’s, used the Irish metaphor with ‘Blarney’ in their ‘marketing’, in this case the sign outside their pub; while humour is a topic for another post, the flexibility and understanding of the importance of marketing wasn’t lost on the folks at Johnny’s.
Leave a Reply