techfluff

This post was originally published on the RepKnight blog (www.blog.repknight.com) as “How To Make Social Media Work For You” by TechFluff & Co’s @LyraMcKee. For more information on RepKnight, visit the website: www.repknight.com or check them out on Facebook or Twitter (RepKnight).

Being in the business of marketing, I like to study other brands and marketing campaigns, taking note of what works well and what doesn’t. When it comes to channels such as PPC, blogging and advertising, I think we’ve nailed it. Not so for social media.

Social media updates from the big brands tend to hurt my eyes or make me feel slightly nauseous, as does talk of social media “experts”. Years after it’s rise to the mainstream, businesses are still struggling to get to grips with Twitter and Facebook.

Here’s why: we treat social media like an old-school marketing channel. I (big nameless brand) speak, you (powerless consumer with open purse) listen. Every time I hear marketing companies refer to social media as a “tool”, I cringe. (Disclosure: I’m probably guilty of it myself). Again, we treat it in accordance with 1950’s-style marketing: a broadcast medium in which we shout out and consumers listen.

Times are a’changing.

No one has quite figured out how social media works yet. This is because we’re all busy trying to answer the wrong question: how do I promote my business on social media?

Firstly, it’s not about you. When it comes to brands, social media should be a selfless transaction. It’s all about the value you provide to your audience. Whether this is in the form of contributing to the link economy (sharing and spreading useful and relevant content) or creating funny YouTube videos that provide distraction at lunchtime, the brand must always be bringing gifts to the table. The sell is indirect.

By adding value, your brand becomes the default choice for the customer. Consumers now buy from brands they trust. To enable that trust, you’ve got to build and nurture a relationship with them. So when I need a new washing machine and you’re a washing machine company and your Youtube videos have been keeping me amused for the last 6 months, I’m more likely to buy from you because you reached out to me when other washing machine companies didn’t. You nurtured that relationship and I’m going to reward you by becoming a customer. In short, I like you more than I like them. I know you better.

Brands, stop selling and start making friends.

Most startups test their product by building a “beta” (a trial version of the eventual product with fewer features and lots of bugs) prototype and conducting a trial with potential customers. They wait until they’ve built version 0.01 before they start marketing to customers and spreading the word.

This is like the old waterfall approach to software development; build a big batch of software, release it and then find out you’ve built something no one wants.

Market your product long before you’ve written a line of code. Set up a sign-up page and see how many people you can persuade to give up their email address. Run a Google AdWords campaign and measure how many clicks you get. It’s all about testing your message. Measuring what campaigns your target market respond to will tell you if your product is solving a big enough problem.

Test it. Give ten customers from your identified target market your product specification with pricing included. Make sure they’re the kind that could afford to pay for it. Then ask them to buy. If 4/10 hand over the money, you’re on to something and you should start building right away. If less than 4/10 hand over the money, go away and come back to them with another spec. Keep adjusting it until they cough up the cash.

Doing this will teach you more about what users need and don’t need than any beta test.

Folks, it’s been a blast blogging here for the last few months. I’ve loved it. Now that I’m running @TechFluffCo, I can no longer use this site as my personal blog. I don’t want to mix personal views and opinion with posts aimed at clients and annoy those of you who enjoy it so from now on I’ll be ranting over at www.foundrs.tumblr.com. Hope to see you over there. Thanks for all the great comments, arguments and most of all for providing inspiration for these posts every day.

If you’ve been watching the news for the last few nights, you’ll be familiar with the latest pictures from Belfast: rioting mobs doing battle with police. For those of you not familiar with the back story, Northern Ireland has a somewhat tense history.

In the 2 years I’ve been in business, I have felt proud to come from Northern Ireland. I met people who spoke like me and behaved like me yet who had made millions and done amazing things with their life. They were entrepreneurs, many born just up the road from my childhood home. They gave me hope. For the first time in my life, I felt proud to be called “Northern Irish”. Before, when speaking to tourists or holidaying abroad, I hid behind the word “Irish” to avoid being linked to pictures of petrol bombs and police vans.

The next time our politicians question “The Brain Drain”, the phenomena whereby our brightest young entrepreneurs and students are leaving our country for other shores, I’ll point them to their words and actions this week. They’ve reminded me why I spent the first 19 years of my life wanting to leave Northern Ireland.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t hope. But we can no longer rely on our politicians to change things. It will be the entrepreneurs who make the difference.

This is a follow-on post from a recent post, Making Payroll: Why Founders Can’t Sell.

I’m sick of reading posts and books from consultants promising the “secret” to running a successful business. If they actually knew the secret, I could live with it. And they wouldn’t do consultancy for a living because they’d have been there, done that and sold their company already.

I have spent the last 2 years trying to figure out “the secret”, the hidden rule for building a successful business or product. I’ve had about 20 different chefs add to the broth and it has yet to taste good. But I think I’ve finally figured it out.

Just sell stuff.

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This post was originally published on the RepKnight blog (www.blog.repknight.com) as “Talk To Me, I’m Human.” I hope you enjoy it.

Marketing on social media is hard. Unless you’ve a multinational brand to work with, it’s a push medium rather than a pull one. And sometimes it can feel like you’re in a room alone talking to yourself.

Where social media is effective is when it pulls people into conversations. They respond to that Tweet you sent, that link you pushed out. And it feels gratifying. But, working within the constraints of “what you should” say and “what you should” do, it’s a near impossible goal.

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I haven’t updated the blog in a few weeks: other projects have kept me busy. I am sticking to a mid-year New Year’s Resolution from now on: at least one blog post, if not two, per week. Keep me in check if I fall off the wagon.

Entrepreneurs have many fears. Fear of failure. Fear of poverty-or never leaving it. Fear of late payments, equity dilution, bankers, investors, losing customers, competition.

But what’s the one thing entrepreneurs fear more than taxes and bankruptcy?

Sales.

If you’re enjoying your breakfast or eating your lunch while reading this, I heard you choking on it before you even got to that line. Sales=revenue which is the lifeblood of every company. Without sales, companies die. Entrepreneurs afraid of sales are like humans afraid of oxygen: ridiculous and with a rather short life span.

Yet I’m amazed at how many entrepreneurs in the tech world find better things to do every day than make money. Sales leads aren’t followed up on. Partnerships are snubbed. Resellers queries never receive a reply. But the company Twitter feed is always updated and the board of directors will have a beefy board back each month, usually packed with jargon and 1,000 different ways of sugarcoating the 0’s on the balance sheet.

When I point this criticism at clients, the tech CEO will usually respond with “But I’m not a salesperson!”. If you are a CEO who cannot walk into a room with a prospect without breaking into cold sweats, you are in the wrong role. CEO’s set an example to the rest of the company. If you refuse to do sales because it makes you uncomfortable,  you are telling the rest of your staff that it is okay to not make money. This will impact their performance as the whole company loses sight of its reason for existing.

Selling is hard for the toughest of sales people but for founders, it’s like a game of Russian Roulette. The sales pitch is where the dream meets reality. You can brush investors rejections off but you can’t ignore the words of the customer it was built for. Sales pitches force founders to question their entire company, product and business model and decide whether it’s worth it or not to keep going. Sometimes it is and for every ten no’s, you get a yes-scale that into an operation and you’ve found a profitable business. But if you have so little faith in your product that you avoid rejection by not selling it, it is already a failure. Customers make products successful, not features.

It’s very easy to tell founders who are afraid of selling (which is most of them). They rely on “false prophets” to feel the illusion of success. False prophets come in many guises: meetings with big business, an email exchange with an investor, a serial networker who simply “loves” your product and promises to promote it to her peers. All have one thing in common: they never lead to revenue. They’re like movies with “Coming Soon” labels that never actually land in the cinema. And you can only survive on illusions until your cash runs out.

There is only one indicator of success in business: money-how much of it you’re making and whether or not you can keep making it. Stop being afraid of testing the dream: you can always pivot if needs be. Products can change from bad to good. Face your fears and make the change before the VC’s money runs out.

I know alot of entrepreneurial “ex-pats”, folks who left Northern Ireland for a better life in Silicon Valley in the 70’s, 80’s or 90’s and returned later to give back to the homeland. Within 2 years, most have washed their hands of us, frustrated by their inability to create change and get things moving.

I completely sympathize with them. It’s a tough market. But the wrong people are taking the wrap for it. It is not Invest NI’s fault that Northern Ireland is a hard place to do business in. It’s the entrepreneurs, the folks running the indigenous businesses. Or rather, 90% of us, the other 10% being the exception to the rule.

I had coffee recently with a friend. She’s an extremely experienced sales woman, having run the sales departments of some of the biggest technology companies in the world. She’d come home from London, hoping to join a local start-up and help grow it from pre-revenue to a global brand. She emailed five companies to request meetings, explaining who she was and attaching her CV. In London, she was tortured by headhunters and start-up CEO’s every day, with some even going as far as to doorstep her office or pinpoint her location via Foursquare check-ins. Yet not one of the NI companies replied to her.

In Northern Ireland, entrepreneurs (exceptions excluded) tend to look at opportunities the way Amish folk look at television sets: evil and not to be trusted. There is a fear of collaboration, of working with “outsiders” in case they “steal” their ideas or customers. Instead of grabbing every opportunity that comes their way, they sneer it out the door. Unlike the States, where even competitors will work together to achieve their ends, companies here operate a “better the devil you know” policy, shunning offers of help from the outside world and casting aspersions on potential partners. They call themselves entrepreneurs yet they don’t know how to do business. I see this all the time in the tech community, with CEO’s refusing to hire sales people and resellers, forgetting about what becomes of the code after it’s shipped. You can backslap each other all you want over your fine piece of gold-plated software and laugh at the people who don’t know their MySql’s from their Apache but if you don’t know how to speak non-geek, the language of your customers, you’re screwed.

We keep talking about Northern Ireland “competing on a global stage” as if she isn’t already. She is. The world is staring right at us. We’ve produced companies like Lagan, Omiino, APT-X, Chain Reaction, Wombat. As far as I know, none of them needed an Invest NI grant to get started. The reason more companies aren’t joining the stage with them is not lack of public money. It’s lack of hunger. It’s the small-town mentality that encourages us to groom the devil we know rather than courting the one we don’t. Bringing a company to the global stage means reaching out and seizing opportunities. It means working with folk from all walks of life-sales people, marketers, customers, competitors, investors- and using them as a launching pad to get to the rest of the world. When you complain about the lack of “help” for start-ups in Northern Ireland, you’re really complaining about having to walk beyond your own four walls to get to a sale. In the era of globalisation, sitting behind a desk in Belfast will not turn your start-up into a billion dollar company.