The New Four P’s of Marketing — Part 2

So we’ve discussed Proof and why it’s critical to demonstrate that what you do and what you say means something to customers.

Now let’s discuss what you can do to demonstrate that Proof – go get yourself some Presence.

• Presence — You can’t prove anything to anyone without having a Presence. And not just in terms of being there when there’s a need, or having an ad in the right place, or dropping a direct mail piece at the right time. Presence is also being there when there’s not a need. Presence means providing knowledge. It means creating or defining needs in addition to meeting needs — for example, by providing content and establishing credibility as an expert.  Or using customer interaction and knowledge to develop meaningful solutions. Presence helps you deliver the Proof.
  There are many ways to have Presence — and you need to be knowledgable about all of them, from traditional tactics like emails and direct mail, to online tactics like Google keywords, to social media engagement tools like Twitter. Maybe you don’t need them all, depending on your audience, but you better know their strengths and weaknesses. 
  And you better make sure your Presence evolves with your customers.  Otherwise, they move on and your Presence is meaningless.  There are alot of things you should be doing to stay up-to-date on new aspects of social media that allow interaction and dialogue with customers. Like Google Wave, for example. Your customers may be in all these social media nooks and crannies, and if you’re not there with them as part of the conversation then you have no Presence.
  Sure, you can still have 20th century Presence.  We still need it!  You can still send direct mail and email, run ads, hand out samples and all the other marketing tactics we develop and refine with great effort.  Hell, traditional marketing works wonders when done right. Yet if your bag of tactics has not expanded to include social media in whatever ways and websites and widgets your customers love and interact with — then you will now find that your traditional marketing has alot tougher time succeeding.  Competitors who create interaction are too easy to find, and they’ll steal your business with with their Presence.
  Presence is scalable, and it depends on your customers.  It may require people who live and breathe social media every minute of every day — bloggers, Tweeters, Tumblrs and Diggers. Or it may require a simple Facebook fan page.  And it certainly requires a mix of traditional marketing in some form.  So it must be guided by someone with comfortable vision of both traditional and new.

Next post discusses the third P: Persuasion.

The New Four P’s of Marketing — Part 1

In a way, it’s not even appropriate to say “Things change fast” any more. It’s like saying “The sky is blue” or “AT&T sucks” or something else equally obvious.

Change is such an engrained part of the marketing landscape now, sometimes things change and you don’t even notice. Hell, you even start doing things the new way without even missing a beat or sometimes acknowledging the change. Stakes are so high and time is so precious. You evolve in real time and stop at some point later to reflect and evaluate what you did and how it performed.

The Four P’s are one of marketing’s hallmark principles. For decades, marketers were raised on Product, Price, Place and Promotion as the backbone strategic drivers behind what we do. And since so much of marketing was driven by companies and not customers, there was never a need to evolve. The Four P’s have driven our education, our strategy and our tactics for years.

Enter the rise of social media and the connected customer.

Now, even the Four P’s of marketing — the pillars of our discipline — have changed. Companies, marketers and our co-owned strategies have to find and keep customers using a new set of driving principles. It’s time to relearn what we do, whether you like it or not. We have to embrace a new Four P’s of Marketing: Proof, Presence, Persuasion and Price.

We’ll look at each one in-depth in a four-part series of posts.

• Proof — It’s no longer good enough to just produce a product, put a price on it and put it out there. That’s recipe for failure.  In an era of ultra-competition, you have to prove that your product or solution is the right one. That you’re reliable and ethical. That you provide a unique value or experience. That you’re consistent. You may even have to prove many things to many people depending on your customers’ values. For example, that you’re service-oriented or socially conscious or financially sound (especially now). You have to prove that your product is right too — that it’s meant to solve a customer’s problem or need, that it’s quality, that it’s worth their time.
  Hell, even when the customer believes your product is right, even if they believe what you stand for, you have to prove that you offer the best place to buy it — several other options are always a nanosecond away online. How many mashup sites are there that compare product prices for people?  Several dozen, maybe.  So you have to prove your retail or online experience is all the things discussed above also.
  Plus. how you prove it matters. Do you engage customers where they live and communicate, or do you implore them to come to you? Do you blare monologue or encourage dialogue? Are you reactive or interactive? You can’t just say something and call it Proof — you have to engage customers in conversations and meaningful interactions, and let them decide and label it.  That seal of approval — the customer-driven one, the viral one –is worth more than any other.
  Experience matters too. If you have a great product yet a lousy purchase process, you lose. A great event with a lousy registration process, you lose. A great retail store with average service or vanilla employee passion, no way.  A slick-looking website with poor functionality, you lose. Excellence matters, from first contact through shopping cart checkout, upsell messaging to customer service, website personalization to employee friendliness.  It all has to be right.  Otherwise the only thing you’re proving is that you know how to get it wrong, you know how to do it the old way.
  Hence, Proof now leads off the Four P’s of Marketing.

Stay tuned for a look at the next P soon: Presence.

Social Media Revisited

I’m not even sure that’s the right title for this post. It seems like everything we do nowadays involves social media — maybe this should be called “Social Media Yet Again.”

Anyway, in the past I’ve focused on things like measuring social media ROI and the demands of doing social media right. I took a good, long look at a couple articles recently that I want to pass along, since they highlight several important points about the evolving nature of social media.

• The 5 Phases of Social Experience — this CRM magazine column from a Forrester analyst makes a compelling case for the evolving nature of social media and your social experience online, ultimately climxing in the Web becoming a completely social, customer-controlled experience driven by portable identities, personalization and relevance. Do you know what phase we’re in now? Read up.
• Social Shepards — also from CRM, this article point out the tenuous relationship between social media and corporate liability, transparency and risk. The growing number of employees who participate in social media on behalf of brands, as well as in the interest of building strong personal brands, increases the liklihood of inappropriateness or information-sharing that could negatively affect the company. Don’t think you need a social media policy? Read this and then go start working on it.
• The New Currency of Social Media — yet again from CRM, this article highlights this solid key point:
  

  “We spend most of our social media energy passively capturing from the information any feedback we can…Passive feedback loops give us a good understanding of how things are now, but they don’t give much hint about where things are going…you’re essentially driving by watching the rearview mirror.”

  The point is you need to actively engage customers to learn about customer needs in the future. Can be much more important than passive listening. Want to know why? Read up.

• How Speakers Should Integrate Social Into Their Presentation — an insightful post that highlights ways that speakers can not only counteract negative audience reaction in the backchannel, but act on and incorporate real time backchannel feedback into their active presentation. Have no clue what that first sentence means? Don’t think real-time audience reaction is important? Do you speak alot? Run events where people speak? Then read this article now.

I also want to highlight one last key point, highlighted in a CRM recap from some Twitter conversation. A very sharp @dmscott (speaker and author David Meerman Scott) chimes in with this:

“Social media is like a cocktail party. Do u shout “BUY MY PRODUCT”? Ask for business cards? Or just meet people and talk?”

Perfectly said in terms of how you should charge ahead into Twitter. It’s amazing how many people and companies don’t get it right.

Don’t Overlook Legal Issues

The field of marketing evolves so fast now. If you can’t process information quickly, you might as well look for another occupation.

As you take a good, long look at blogs, talk to customers, read articles and do the key things you need to do over the next 7 days and beyond, keep in mind that legal issues are one thing you shouldn’t overlook. While we do have a number of legal issues we keep abreast of as second nature — CAN-SPAM, privacy, contest laws, etc. — new issues always pop up and have immediate implications.

Case in point: check out this article on two important new potential legal issues for marketers. One issue involves marketing to kids under 18 in Maine. It raises alot of questions. Are there kids on your marketing lists, even if your products aren’t targeted to them? Do you need to age-verify your customers? Will other states follow suit? These questions and numerous others merit your time to discuss with your legal team and take steps to rectify any potential pitfalls.

The second issues concerns the deliverability of email to Yahoo inboxes. It raises a valid point about the necessity of certified deliverability services. Above all, this reinforces that you have to stay current with and build your emails based on the current best practices to best position your message to be delivered. Yet it also begs the question will we move towards an email environment where third-party approval is a must to get your message delivered? In some cases it may, and you should be ready to charge ahead and sell up that extra cost to the person who approves your budget.

When Sales and Marketing Don’t Mix, Part 2

Since it’s part two of the story, I’ll share two examples of ineffective sales strategy.

And even though I say “sales” in these cases, if you take a good, long look it’s clearly marketing that shares the blame. As a marketer, you have to align with and win over the sales team, and implement a holistic strategy that gives the customer consistency and value all the way through the value chain. If you don’t then you’re not doing your job. And making your job harder at the same time — because crappy sales contact leads to customers who don’t respond or come back in the future.

Example one is from a company in the meeting business. I get an email out of the blue from someone I don’t know — which in itself isn’t terrible, although we all know that the From Line is the most important factor in email open rates. We won’t even red flag this. However, the subject line of the email was “(E-mail Subject)“. Literally, that was it, character for character. Tells me this is a broadcast email gone wrong. That’s red flag #1.

Red flag #2, as you see in the graphic above, is that the company’s logo doesn’t appear correctly. So not only does it push down the message in the email, it takes away from the brand and the message because it’s cut off. Again, this is a broadcast email done terribly — or a horrible cut and past job by the sales person who sent it. Lastly, red flag # 3 is the damn message is all about the company, nothing about the customer. No questions about my need for such services, no inquiries about my goals and problems, no facts about my industry. No dialogue.

I’ll actually throw in one more red flag too — when I asked how this person got my email, her response made it clear that it was harvested off of a website where it appeared. Now, that’s fine if you send me a personal email — but if you’re harvesting to broadcast, you’re setting yourself up for some very unfortunate consequences if you hit a honeypot and an ISP blacklists you. Did you know there are more than 43 million email addresses being monitored as spam honeypots?

Example two is from a genious operation (sarcasm) called InsuranceAgents.com. Same old story: unexpected email from sales rep, message that’s irrelevant to my business because they know nothing about me, terrible email copy and message. Well, all that and the fact that the email did not provide an opt-out mechanism. So now we’ve moved from just terrible judgement to actually violating the CAN-SPAM law. However, this person was actually — and sadly — all too honest when I asked how he got my email address. His reply was “One of my web spiders picked it up I guess.” Are you kidding me? Then after I informed him what a horrible practice this is and that not providing an opt-out for commercial email is illegal, he say “Thanks for the heads-up. Didn’t realize it was illegal.”

Now, this person is either a really clueless sales rep, or it’s a strong example of why you need to provide your sales team with training and messaging with which they can engage customers. Clearly these examples show that if they lack clarity and guidance on how to make the customer experience value-laden from the first point of contact, they will create an environment that’s actually counter-productive to things that customers value and that makes it harder for marketing to do its job. And while email is the most popular channel for these kind of abuses, it can also extend to telemarketing, direct mail and social media channels like Twitter.

So charge ahead right now and make sure your sales team isn’t engaging customers in any was similar to what’s mentioned above.

When Sales and Marketing Don’t Mix — Part 1

I know what you’re thinking. You’re simultaneously saying “They never mix” and thinking of all the things those annoying sales people down the hall have done to you, from using outdated materials to sending customers letters and emails wrought with incorrect grammar and off-brand language. I mean, the notion that sales and marketing butt heads is not a secret — go Google “sales and marketing get along” and you get 57.5 million results.

Believe me, there is many a day that I side with you. I had one recently. Fortunately, in this case I wasn’t the marketer being wronged. I was actually on the receiving end of ill-conceived, ill-delivered, and out-of-context communications from over-eager sales folks. It’s the perfect example of what happens when marketing and sales don’t mix right (i.e., don’t have a unified, buttoned-up approach to the same business goals).

The guilty party is a company called Point It. The company is actually a notable and expert SEM/SEO agency with a great message and blue chip clients. They offer several valuable, free webinars and whitepapers on various aspects of SEM — and I love to attend and read that stuff, so it was a good match. This is a great way to engage potential customers. I gave them some basic contact info to access their materials.

A few days later I get an email out of the blue from someone at the company (withholding name here). I mean, it’s not totally out of the blue — you know that if you register for these things, you get contacted by a sales guy, it’s the third certainty now behind death and taxes. Yet this person, who knows nothing about me, proves that he knows nothing about me. Because the message is all about him. The subject line is about the company — actually, it’s the company’s name. And the message starts with “Thank you for your interest in Point It.” Really? When did I say that? I was interested in your whitepaper, yes. I guess that implies more. Fine, I’ll be flexible. “Attached is some basic information about our company.” So, you started me off with rich, deep content about the market and about SEO, and now follow it up with basic information about the company. Odd, I can find that on your site if I needed it. “When would be a good time for us to discuss search?” Did I say I wanted to do that? My flexibility ends now. Why start out with something so customer-centric — free whitepapers, free knowledge — and screw it up with a hard sell, me-talk-you-listen approach that alienates the customer? If I look for myself in that message, do I find myself?

To top it off, the entire rest of the email was about the company. Nothing about the customer. Nothing about me. No more free knowledge, no intuitive questions to learn more about me. No dialogue.

Email body copy

The good news is this can be fixed and these mistakes can be avoided. Sales and marketing do not have separate roles — marketing does not stop when someone raises their hand, so sales can pick it up and run with it. It’s your job as a marketer to equip your sales team with the messaging they need to engage. Marketing and sales need a unified strategy for the entire process of customer engagement. The standard is different now — it’s not about delivering leads so they can be closed. They must be engaged. That’s why social media and social networking are so powerful. You must listen first, have dialogue, and learn what you can do to provide value and be relevant. Relevance and engagement trumps spiffy sales pitches.

Now charge ahead and sell that to your sales team.

A Post to Remember the Fallen of 9/11

You typically read about all kinds of marketing in this blog.

Not on 9/11, not this year.

I signed up for a great cause, Project 2,996. It rightfully seeks to shine the light on the victims of 9/11, instead of the heartless radical cowards who caused it.

As part of Project 2,996, the person I am writing a tribute to is Luis Eduardo Torres. An immigrant from Mexico, Luis started with nothing and worked his way up to being a senior broker at Cantor Fitzgerald, a job he ironically started on September 10, 2001. He was a bikerider, hiker and skydiver. This was a man who paid his dues, worked hard, and had accomplished alot. There are a few more details on Luis on his page at Legacy.com, and several people have left beautiful comments in the guestbook.

Take a good, long look in the mirror today. Enjoy the day, breathe the fresh air. Tell your family you love them. Find something you’re passionate about and charge ahead after it.

Because you never know what will happen tomorrow.

Cascading Questions?

It was a good week wasn’t it? Got alot of work done and accomplished alot, but always alot left to do, right? Looking forward to the weekend?

I started with a few questions because many questions popped up for me today, all day. I read some articles and heard some comments that made me think, and it resulted in a series of cascading questions about marketing, marketers and our jobs. Make sense? No, you say? Then here, let me give you the question that started it all:

Why do some marketers totally disregard Twitter?

I answered that question with a question, which was also an answer…and so on and so on. Enjoy.

Do you not want to hear what customers are saying?

Isn’t listening to customers part of our jobs as marketers?

Hell, isn’t understanding new media channels a big part of our jobs, too?

Isn’t there something — anything — we can learn just by listening to customer conversation?

Even if you think Twitter is crazy, why wouldn’t you jump in and at least understand what it’s all about, especially if it’s part of your job?

Do you disregard other media and tactics without understanding them fully, too?

Are you doing your job by doing that?

Technology and marketing evolve fast nowadays, aren’t we supposed to learn and evolve along with it?

Even if most of Twitter is “pointless babble,” shouldn’t you be able to find a creative way to mix dialogue with tasteful marketing?

Would you hire a marketer who doesn’t learn and evolve, stay up-to-date with technology, and get better at their job?

If you’re the supervisor of a marketer who doesn’t evolve, why are you employing them?

Are you not evolving because your organization doesn’t evolve?

Even if that was the case, why wouldn’t you still want to learn and be a better, more marketable marketer?

Don’t you want a strong personal Brand Y-O-U?

If you’re not on Twitter or other social media where customer conversate, do they notice?

Do they wonder why you’re not there?

Would you know if they did?

What are you going to do about it?

Charge ahead and answer the last question.

Charge Ahead Blog Top 10 Posts

I launched the Charge Ahead blog a year ago, and have enjoyed sharing many a random thought about marketing. Many semi-organized ones too. So much has changed in the field of marketing, even in just a year.

To celebrate my blog’s one year birthday, I took a good, long look and gathered a list of my top 10 posts over the last year.

• Steps to Improve Your Social Network
• A Letter to Marketing Professors
• Marketing Has a Role in the Future of Content
• Brand Y-O-U
• The Demands of Social Media
• Customer Utopia (I’ll mention my love for JetBlue whenever possible)
• Where’s You Value Proposition?
• A Friendly Reminder
• Customer Service Impacts Marketing (I’ll mention my disdain for AT&T whenever possible)
• How NOT to Treat Your Customers, Courtesy of Excite (had to throw this one in…I still hate Excite over this)

I thank you for your readership, and am ready to charge ahead with continued posts over the next year for you.

The Dark Ages Persist

They’re still out there. You know who they are. They’ll all around us.

They’re people who still do it the old way. Still live in the dark ages and do it just because. Still do it because it’s too much work to change.

I ran into some of them today. They called me, on my personal iPhone no less. How they got the number I DO NOT know, and they would not tell me. They work for Fidelity Home Mortgage, some shady mortage company in California. They called me to offer some kind of home mortgage deal — the shady kind, of course (it’s a shady company, what’d you expect?). There were no questions about me or my needs or even if it’s okay if they called, they just launched right into a canned, continuous schpiel. My response to that was to ask how they got my number, in which case they didn’t answer but launched into another schpiel. I told them it was on the Do Not Call list and they should change their practices, and they launched into an apology and took my number and assured me it’d be removed.

Let’s count the offenses:
1. Buying telemarketing lists to cold call with no knowledge of the customer they’re calling, OR harvesting numbers from somewhere — one or the other (or possibly both, who knows, they’re shady)
2. Not buying DNC-scrubbed lists, OR not DNC-scrubbing their own list — one or the other
3. Not asking the customer ANY questions about their needs, just monologue-pushing their own product
4. Not offering customers a product customized for them, just some generic schpiel
5. Not even knowing if the customer wants or needs their product, just pushing their product blindly
6. Not engaging customers with knowledgable brand ambassadors — customers hear from a robotic employee reading relentlessly off of a script (not the kind of thing that endears you to anyone — read about how they explain it on their own website)

Benn through this lately? More importantly, know any marketers that still operate this way? Please tell me it’s not you.

Listen, take a good, long look at the way you work if it sounds like what you just read above. It’s a tough economy, but customers don’t settle for subpar treatment just because it’s tough. And when things get better, do you really think customers are going to go back and settle for what it was like before? Think they’re gonna come back to the same old thing?

Are you engaging customers in a dialogue? Do you target your marketing messages based on customer knowledge? Are you innovating your tactics? Are you a thought-leader in social media? Are you reading about what technology is coming next and preparing now to evolve your tactics in the future? Do you talk to customers regularly, not to sell them something but to learn about what makes them tick or keeps them up at night? Are you leveraging content?

Charge ahead and change your ways wherever the answer is “No” above.

The Culture of Culture

People are different.

And that’s not just marketing speak to kick off some rant about targeting messaging to various customer segments.

The people we work with are all different too. Take a good, long look around your office today. Some just show up to work and go about their business, maybe you rarely ever see them (Rares). Some are, as one of my former bosses would put it, the “perfect corporate employees” who do everything completely by the book, politically correct, neat and tidy (PCs). Some are the gossip-furtherers and water-cooler-whisperers who give the Rares and PCs knots in their stomachs (Whisps). You could get even more granular and break it down even further, yet the point is this: all the various types of people come together to make up the corporate culture. And if you’ve been through a few companies, you know that corporate cultures can be as different as the people who make them up. Hey, it’s a hot topic, to the tune of 79.3 million Google search results.

Of course, one thing that impacts corporate culture is strong leadership. And in the blink of an eye you could rattle off a few names of executives who strongly impact their corporate cultures: Richard Branson, Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos, Meg Whitman. Did you ever see a robust corporate culture policy that did the same?

Well, now you can, and that’s the purpose of this post. Tell me that NetFlix’s corporate culture and policies document doesn’t do an effective job of setting high performance standards and expectations for the company. At best it’s unbelievably motivating and passionate stuff for the PCs, and at worst it makes the Whisps chatter even faster about their imposing leaders. Yet either way it’s a great example of how to define a company’s culture, in this case with specified policy instead of implied example.

Also check out Greg Verdino’s comments on the NetFlix policy, I think he illustrates some key takeaway points for today’s companies that plan to evolve into tomorrow’s leaders. Does your company show the door to non-performers in a moment’s notice? Do your finance and HR teams have simple and easy-to-follow instructions, or long lists of processes and guidelines? Would they ever dismiss tracking vacation days? Do you think this is crazy stuff, or do you think this translates into motivated employees who are passionate about their work and powerful brand ambassadors to customers?

Would you consider these kinds of issues as part of your next career move? Do you have a strong personal brand and social network that employers want to attract? Do you want to work with Rares and Whisps, or the type of talent described in NetFlix’s policy?

While some of NetFlix’s policies may be shockingly different from the norm, I bet they had the desired impact: top performers from far and wide charged ahead and are banging on the NetFlix front door.

New Acronym, New Urgency to Measure Your Social Media Metrics

It used to be so simple.

At first, social media was easy because the standards of traditional marketing didn’t fit. It was new and different. It was personal and customer-driven and you were just feeling it out. It was Facebook and Twitter and what was to measure? If you knew how many Duggs you got on Digg you were ahead of the game.

But now that you invest time and resources in those customer conversations, it’s time to take a good, long look at what you get out of it in the traditional sense of marketing ROI. Even if you can’t or don’t need to measure down to an actual sales or revenue-driven metric, you should look at some the standard metrics of involvement and engagement in social media — followers, friends, comments, retweets, etc.

That’s where this helpful blog post from MediaPost (courtesy of @B2BOnlineMarketing) comes in. It suggests adding a new choice to the marketer’s toolkit of measurement metric acronyms: CPSA, or Cost Per Social Action.

The main benefit of CPSA is that marketers know they’re paying for something social and relationship-oriented. More importantly, marketers know they’re not specifically paying for exposure, traffic, conversions, or interactions (though those can all provide additional value). It’s an acknowledgement that social media is something else, so it’s deserving of a new model, one that stresses relationships above all else.

I like this logic alot. In social media, engagement and interaction is the holy grail, no matter what your goal. Whether you need to plant a flag as an industry thought-leader, or build followers for a Facebook page so you can reach them for a much lower CPA than other channels, the need to measure CPSA at some level is now an expectation. And it’s different that traditional measurement, because relationships are less tangible yet potentially more valuable in the long term.

The article does post a great question that only you can answer:

What’s a social action worth anyway? The further anyone veers from reach and sales, the harder it’s going to be to tie this into marketers’ traditional metrics.

Depending on your ultimate goals for your social media involvement, the true worth is for you to determine. For some, bigger Authority on Technorati may be the most valuable thing for your blog, while for others it may be Facebook followers, Twitter retweets, overall size of your social network, or something else. Or maybe you have a different way of measuring worth already that’s more complex and gives you a sales-driven ROI.

No matter what the answer to the question is, it’s definitely important to charge ahead and embrace CPSA as a new and valid metric that we look at often.

Think Your Emails Are Compelling?

They very well may be. But what if they’re never delivered? Your customers never get a good, long look at your message.

A new study from Return Path just came out that shows a little more than 20% of business email doesn’t get delivered. And that’s across all email addresses — when you look at emails sent to just business addresses, the number climbs up to 27%+.

Is this news to you? The study just reinforces what we already knew. A couple of my posts in recent months have talked about email — here’s one that has some thoughts on email volume and relevance, and this one also discusses relevance. B2B also had some good observations recently about reasons to reign in your email volume.

Customer email addresses are too valuable. We spend alot of time acquiring customers, maintaining their data, and meeting their expectations. Don’t let .30 worth of emails, sent in too short a time period, fatigue your lists and ruin all that other work. And ultimately damage your brand.

Charge ahead with that revised email plan.

Craft Your Personal Brand With Care — Or Else

Personal branding is certainly important to career growth for any growing or established executive. It’s arguably more important than your resume, as when your personal brand is strong, it makes the job of your resume that much easier.

That’s why it’s critical for you to take a good, long look at a few short videos, courtesy of the very valuable AdMaven blog, on the legal implications of personal branding. These videos, taped during a recent Chicago Media Marketing and Advertising June Meetup, feature Daliah Saper discussing the nitty-gritty details of the employer-employee relationship as far as who owns what in regards to your personal brand and how you build it. The discussion of course includes a focus on personal branding via social media, including Twitter and blogs.

You may be surprised at some of the answers.

Kudos to AdMaven for making these videos available.

7 Things To Do in the Next 7 Days — Part Two

Hopefully you’ve been able to make some progress on the first three to-do’s posted not too long ago. Or, at the very least, you plan to start on them now, then come back to these four after. Anyway, here you go — four more things you need to do for the latter part of the next seven days, for all the reasons discussed here.

4. Open a Twitter account and watch the conversation.
Ok, I know for a fact alot of people think Twitter is just plain crazy. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “I just don’t get it.” However, if you’re anti-Twitter, you’re anti-customer. You’re anti-being-informed. You’re…anti-marketing.

Let me explain. Love it or hate it, customer conversation occurs on Twitter every day. Check that…every minute. And you don’t want to be part of that?

If you’re not on Twitter already, you need to open an account right now, on Day 4. Don’t like the concept? Fine, don’t even participate then, just watch the conversation. You read stuff to stay up-to-speed right? The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, or now the five blogs you’ve already lined up, per my earlier post. Isn’t a huge group of potential customers talking amonst each other valuable too? So start the account and watch the conversation. Follow hashtags relevant to your business, products or customers, and see what’s being said. There is powerful dialogue going on and powerful sharing of thoughts, gripes, praise and ideas that you need to know about. Here’s a good WSJ tune-up article, and a video below.

You need to do this — what you learn from the dialogue impacts your marketing strategy AND your knowledge of customer needs. Guaranteed.

5. Find information about Google Wave and read it start to finish.
Part of our jobs as marketers goes beyond just using what tool are available today, like Twitter. We need to stay aware of what’s coming next, so we understand what can help us be more effective, help make our messaging more impactful, and get us closer to our customers. Enter Google Wave.

Google Wave is positioned to be a ridiculously cool new communication tool. Incredibly powerful, and alot of promise for empowering web-based conversation on a whole new level between people and among groups. Here’s an excellent article to start with, and another article that’s a preview for developers on the Official Google Blog. Mashable also has a nicely detailed article.

After those, find a few more and read those too. As marketers, when this launches, we need to be ready to use it. It’s customer dialogue on steroids. The world of social media moves at a speed unseen before, and we need to move just as fast. What’s next after Wave, what will be the next cool tool that helps us be more effective? Do your homework and you tell me.

6. Look at your current marketing spend — are you over-invested in a particular area? Fix it.
I’m not a big advocate of change for the sake of change. Yet even though the lion’s share of your customers or sales may come from one place (and by place, I mean channel or medium), you need to fix your budget and strategy if you’re spending too many of your dollars in that one place.

Being over-invested right now likely means you’re sending too much direct mail, running too many print ads, or most importantly sending too much email. You need balance — more than ever, customers have different habits, different preferences. Don’t discount channels until you’ve tested. “It’s always worked the way it is” is not a valid enough reason anymore to avoid trying and testing different channels or different messaging. Mail less, test some creative. Hell, try sending LESS email for a few months that has more relevant messaging. You may be pleasantly surprised.

7. Stop planning “monologue” marketing campaigns and create campaigns based on “dialogue” instead.
My friend Alex Krawchick said this a few weeks back, and it stuck with me. His actual quote was:

I’ve had it. If I see one more “industry thought leader” pontificate about how to “…use Twitter to increase awareness of your business…”, I’m seriously going to lose it. You s are completely missing the point. Twitter (and FB… and LinkedIn) was built as a tool for dialogue. The days of the marketing and advertising ‘monologue’ are over. Move on. Or just shut up already. Either way, smarten up.

I don’t think I need to add to that much. Well said. If you have a Twitter account, blog or other social media endeavor, use it for what it’s meant for, not as a megaphone for a one-sided message.

So there you go. Seven things to do in the next week that can make a great impact. Charge ahead.