I might add a preface to to these “Five P’s” that is a fundamental precursor to success in web social media (as well as all other marketing).

Focus on your customers, clients, and prospects first – what is your value to them?

Focus on your customers, clients, and prospects first. What is it that they are interested in? What is the value they desire from you? What language do they use to talk and think about the problems you might solve for them? Use the proven tools of FABing to keep your focus on what your customers are actually interested in. Don’t fill up your web space with content that they are not interested in and which is not presented in their language.

FAB refers to Features and Benefits (some say Features, Advantages, and Benefits). This is a simple, powerful axiom of marketing (and sales) that proves elusive even to seasoned practitioners. Simply put: Customers buy Benefits not Features. Features are the physical, functional attributes of a product or service. Benefits are the values, as perceived by the customer, of using a product or service.

For instance, I use a PaperMate PhD pen without fail.  It has all of the usual features of a ballpoint pen: writes well on most media, retractable point, clip to hold on to my shirt pocket, cushioned grip, various colors (mine is black). It has mid range price of around $8. But none of these features interest me. I have been using this series for years because it is large diameter, impressive in size (especially compared to the cheap stick pens common to almost every office and store), has a PhD (something I never earned despite years at Cornell grad school) and you can see it in the hand of Jim Lehrer on the PBS News Hour every night.

An example of speaking in your customer’s language is the use of “low fare” vs. “cheap” in key word searches by customers of Southwest Airlines (this example comes from a presentation by Greg Jarboe at a Boston Social Media Club event in February 2008). A head-to-head test of online marketing for air flights between Philadelphia and Atlanta showed that customers searched for “cheap” airfares not “low fares”. The lesson for Southwest was that, despite a corporate policy of never referring to themselves as a source of “cheap” transportation, if they want to reach their customers they have to use “cheap” in their web media because that is actually how their customers think.

So, before you undertake any marketing, perhaps espeically in the social web sphere where attention spans are very brief and sensitivity to authenticity is high, understand your clients, talk with them in their own language and then take on the Five P’s of Social media.

1. Thanks to Brendan McLaughlin at Westglow Technology Consulting for pointing this article out to me.

The age-old problem of rolls of aluminum foil, plastic wrap, and other rolled goods jumping out of the box when you are dispensing them was actually solved years ago by a clever packaging engineer.

My sister-in-law, Meredith Morgan, an award winning chemistry teacher at Governor Livingston HS in Berkeley Heights NJ, learned this from her students one day when she was fumbling around in front of a class with a roll of aluminum foil.

“Dr. Morgan, don’t you know about the little tabs your press in on the ends of the box?”

She didn’t. But she learns quickly. Meredith was so impressed by this innovation that she demonstrated it to me on every box of foil, plastic wrap, and wax paper in the kitchen.

Now, you might ask, “What does this have to do with my business?”

This is a good example of a small innovation with very practical, day-to-day utility that has probably never been marketed beyond the end of the box. Yet, it works well, addresses an annoyance that every consumer has experienced, but, somehow the solution has remained unused, probably by most consumers.

Note that once you learn of this little push-in tab, you will probably look for it on the end of every box of roll goods you buy. You may wish to follow this discovery on the Web, search on Google for “press here to lock end”

A further example of hiding innovations comes from a customer advisory board meeting for the Albany NY region of a major telecommunications provider. During this meeting, attended by many major customers from health care, high tech, industry, and government, a number of customers said, in response to the comments of other customers attending, “They provide you with that service? I did not even know that they offered that!” Here were major customers of a large, successful telecom who were not aware of significant service offerings. Needless to say, this telecom learned that their marketing efforts were ineffectual and needed more work. If you current customers do not know of your product or service offerings, how could potential customers discover them?

Have you made innovations in your products or services but never told your customers about them? Do you make innovations without even involving customers? When was the last time you actually asked your customers what they like about your products? Have you examined how customers use your product or service? Do you have a formal process to gather customer feedback? Do you have a Customer Advisory Board to drive innovations?

The first billion cellphones sold in 20 years; the second billion in four years; and the third billion in two. 80% of the worlds population live within range of a cellular network. The uses cell phones are already being put to in the underdeveloped world are quite unlike those in the developed countries. The only way to understand these and to begin to elicit input from new users is to go out and ask them, face-to-face. So, Nokia has full time personnel, on the ground, sending reports back to headquarters and trying out mockups of potential new products with real people.

It would serve everyone who is envisioning a new product or service to ask themselves:

• “Have I actually asked real customers what they want or need?”
• “Have I tested my ideas and received direct feedback that my product actually delivers a value someone wants to pay for?”
• and so on.

Don’t let your engineers, marketers, sales people, or worse, you own enthusiasms, substitute for live human feedback.

The New Rules of Marketing & PR is a breakthrough book for me about the new world of web-marketing. Here is Scott’s list of the new rules of marketing and PR (I added the numbers to the list for reference later):

1. Marketing is more than just advertising.
2. PR is for more than just a mainstream media audience.
3. You are what you publish.
4. People want authenticity, not spin.
5. People want participation, not propaganda.
6. Instead of causing one-way interruption, marketing is about delivering content at just the precise moment your audience needs it.
7. Marketers must shift their thinking from mainstream marketing to the masses to a strategy of reaching vast numbers of under-served audiences via the Web.
8. PR is not about your boss seeing your company on TV. It’s about your buyerts seeing your company on the Web.
9. Marketing is not about your agency winning awards. Its about your organization winning business.
10. The Internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclsuive focus on media.
11. Companies must drive people into the purchasing process with great online content.
12. Blogs, podcasts, e-books, news releases, and other forms of online content let organizations communicate directly with buyers in a form they appreciate
13. On the Web, the lines between marketing and PR have blurred.

Numbers 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, & 12 are the core of the message. And I might add a couple of more notes here. First, all of this is hard work. You don’t hire some outside ad firm to handle this. People intimate with your company’s core values need to be involved. But, then, this means that with a bit of good focus and time management, you also do not need to spend a lot of money to utilize these tools. Second, the role of truth seems central to how you communicate, listen to, converse with, and engage your audience, your clients and customers.

Scott’s book is very well written and clearly organized. This is a must read for those of us still trying to figure out how to leverage the new web-marketing world. It provides a great introduction to seeing an overall strategy for web-marketing.

I would say that anyone in a startup or small business who does not already have a website and these other tools should immediately click on over to Microsoft’s OfficeLive site and check this out. This will require some real work to take advantage of all of the tools available here, but it is not often that such a comprehensive suite is available essentially for free.

If you add a few web-based applications for writing, number crunching, and presentations, clearly we are approaching the new world of cloud computing more rapidly than I had thought. I regularly use  Buzzword for my writing. Others may like the suites of tools at Google or Zoho, for example.

As I have been learning, the next phase of the Web is emerging on hand held devices. There may be 600-700 million PCs in the world, but there are already over 2 billion cell phones and the forecast is for 3 billion soon. Most of this growth will occur in the developing world. With the next generation of devices looking more like mobile computers, this means that most human beings will, in one generation, go from no telephone service to full-blown access to everything on the Web. I will restrain myself from further imaginings about the impac this will have on how and what we do.

Looking shorter term, I clicked over to the Mofuse website and hooked up my Management Notes blog to their mobile site creator. If you have a suitable mobile device you can now read this blog on the go at: http://businesscoach.mofuse.mobi/

I do not have a suitable mobile device so I am waiting for feedback from this distant universe.

The answer to this question probably lies in some basic thinking about who your target customers are.

In addition it would be useful to think of the many ways in which you might communicate with your customers. On the web you have a lot of modes in which to play. As suggested by the excerpt ( shown to the left) from Joseph Jaffe’s Join the Conversation, a consumer can play a range of roles. So, in thinking about content, it may prove most productive to engage a parent of middle school children (in the Participant and Community faces a la Jaffe) in a conversation about barriers to better school performance in web community using blogging, bulletin board, or wiki techniques. Here your content expertise in middle school eduction can shine through in the discussion. And, you might even learn something about how parents view these issues.

A future departure for thinking about how to target and communicate with customers on the web is to lay Jaffe’s contribution of the Six Cs mentioned in an earlier blog article (opens new window) on top of his “Many Faces” idea show here.

For startups and small business there are two interrelated tough issues; (1) how to formulate a productive web marketing strategy that reaches my target customers with the right balance of methods, content, and accessibility; and (2) how do I support, sustain, and improve the strategy and tactics over the long haul. Small organizations have a lot of difficulty sorting out the meaningful and effective from the blizzard of action in the web world. And, small organizations can not afford high-priced solutions.

Recently, I became reacquainted with HubSpot, Inc. an internet marketing software company (opens new window). HubSpot provides tools and guidance for how to optimize the chances that your website will pop up in the first page of Google searches for words approrpriate to your business. They do not take the hard work out of achieving this, but they do provide a really quite thorough suite of tools and the metrics to help drive you forward.

To get a flavor of their approach to the web marketing world take advantage of a webinar offerings:

Five Tips to Turn Your Website into a Marketing Machine

Let me know what you think of HubSpot and their approach. It seems very much a high-powered solution to a critical web marketing problem in a very accessible package.

notion that the traditional marketing categories of the four Ps (in case you have forgotten: Product, Place,

Price, and Promotion) are now quite outmoded. In place of the old tradition, Jaffe introduces the “Six Cs”: Content, Context, Customization, Community, Conversation, Commerce. Unfortunately, Jaffe does not develop the ideas behind Contecxt and Customization with any real vigor and in the end it is not clear even what these Cs mean.

Content is king. Content that is real, meaningful, and fresh in the eyes of the visitors to your website is king. There is a consensus that content is king. And, for most companies generating content is really hard work.

Jaffe spends most of his energies around Conversation, what is it, how to get it started, how to participate (listen), and how to build relationships on it. There are some good lists of characteristics of conversations and Dos and Don’ts.

Just as I have begun to attempt my own synthesis of these changes, I have come upon Marketing to the Social Web: how digital communities build your business by Larry Weber (John Wiley & Sons, New York 2007). The author has extensive experience in the Web world and provides more than enough examples and anecdotes to illustrate his case.

The basic argument of the book is that the interactivity of the web is now producing completely new ways in which companies and customers can interact.

Weber develops seven steps to marketing on the social web:

1. Observe - see where, what and how your customers do in the social web. Check out blogs, conversations, relevant content, etc.
2. Recruit – enlist core participants who want to talk about your company, its products and services.
3. Evaluate platforms – which platforms are best to reach your marketing objectives – blogs, reputation aggregators, social networks?
4. Engage – this is all about developing and maintaining content – user generated and yours.
5. Measure - develop metrics relevant to the objectives and measure.
6. Promote – connect with other communities in the web.
7. Improve.

Weber provides lots of discussion and anecdotes to illustrate each of these seven steps. Then he adds four strategies to expanding the reach of marketing on the social network – (1) SEO, (2) blogs, (3) e-communities, and (4) social networks.

This book is a solid contribution to understanding and participating in the ongoing development of the web world. This is esepcially so for creating a more productive balance between traditional web marketing, pay-for -click advertising and SEO, and the emerging world of the social web.