If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got

So today I attended my regular Toastmasters meeting where one of the members gave a speech on learning from experience. He touched on a couple of points around failure which led me to some conclusions:

1. Learn to fail


2. Fail early, fail often


3. Learn from failures
   

This got me thinking...As a card carrying member of Generation Y (albeit on the cusp), I was lucky enough to have parents who encouraged me at every turn. Fortunately, as a child I did well at most of what I attempted. Unfortunately, what I didn't get early on was failure experience. We're often told failure is not an option, and I'm not saying it's something to aim for, but lets look at ways to frame failure as something to learn from.

Learning to fail involves trying something in the first place. As a Canadian living in Australia, I'm very aware of cultural differences, especially the ones engrained attitude of 'Having a go' which revolves around giving something the 'old college try' without fear of failure, which may well happen. So far, I've been reasonably successful at playing it safe, but if I want to move forward, it's time to take some action, and not treat failure as a personality characteristic.

Failing early has to do with the way we learn. Everyone knows we learn through experience and making mistakes. In theory, we should be able to increase the pace of learning by increasing the rate at which we try, right? More than likely, this will also increase the rate at which we make mistakes, and by that I mean different mistakes - new mistakes. But failing in your twenties is probably a lot better than failing when you've got a spouse, kids, and a mortgage or two. There is so much more time for recovery.

Learning from failure is probably the key element to take away from all of this. That means doing things differently. They say one definition of insanity was doing things over and over and expecting a different result. If you're not getting results from your current sales pitch, change it up. If you're not increasing traffic to your blog, try something new. If you've tried sending your resume to a hundred agencies and cold calling organisations to no avail, why not try tapping your network or running a personal campaign for a change?

Learn from failures by:

• Identifying the mistake
• Examining why it happened
• Take steps to prevent the same mistake again
• Move on!

In the end, if you learn something, it's not a complete failure is it? Failure is not a person, it's a thing, so go on, set some goals and have a go!

How do you learn from your failures?

Direct Marketing: Relationship-building Roadblocks

The increasing rivalry in the current business environment results in the necessity for organisations to forge strong customer relationships. These strong bonds are used to offer better products and services and gain valuable insight into keeping those customers loyal, deter them from defecting to the competition. It takes trust, commitment and communication to build and manage good customer relationships, but not all direct marketers are doing their utmost to capitalise on those oh-so-important relationships. Here are some of the more common mistakes:

1. Too much information
Some direct marketers believe that the more sales messages (mailers, catalogues, e-mails, etc) sent to their customers, the more likely those customers are to purchase goods or services. Communication is sent out willy-nilly, with no consideration for timing, frequency or the content of the message. Overloading the consumer with information has the unintended effect of alienating the consumer and lowering the probability of any purchase/response. Consumers are looking for trusted, proven relationships that save them time and effort by fulfilling promises of product, service or expertise. If direct marketers get committed to giving the consumers what they want - the "need to know" versus the "nice to know", keep in touch with valued customers, give timely, relevant accurate information on their offerings, they'll be rewarded with responsive consumers.

2. We're not all created equal
Some direct marketers treat all consumers as equals. Maybe they're sending 'cold' messages to those who have previously purchased, and acting all too familiar with potential customers whose trust they haven't yet earned. All consumers are not equal. Loyalty should be rewarded to build a relationship of the highest quality. That's why it's of the utmost importance to segment the message to engage the consumers, making them an offer they can't refuse. Keep them reading, clicking and buying by sending them focused, targeted content that they want (they've shown you that they want it from being responsive in the past; you know they might want it because you've done your demographic/behavioural research).

3. You don't make me feel special
While direct marketing has a focus of productivity, standards, volume and costs, consumers are more focused on timeliness, selection, relevance and value. When this divergence of priorities is made apparent to the consumer, there is disengagement. Customers don't care about your bottom line, they care about themselves, and they want to feel important. Make sure your content is benefit-rich, and allows the consumer to relate to your message and your offering. Make it easy for your recipient to reply to you, too. When it's difficult to engage with you, consumers get frustrated, dismiss your message, or click-away from the cool website/newsletter/mailer into which you've put so much effort (read: $$).

Keeping the above in mind when planning a campaign or evaluating direct marketing strategy might help avoid some major pitfalls and allow you to build and maintain long-standing profitable customer relationships.

Professional Services Marketing 2.0

We all know that marketers representing sexy products and services can leverage social media channels to generate buzz about their offerings. People become Facebook fans of your carbonated beverage, you tweet your latest fashion insights to your followers, right? Even Sharpie has been successful in using social media to showcase products and ultimately drive people to their website which increases profile and no doubt brand awareness.*

Success in professional services, that is, legal, accounting, architechture, engineering etc., especially in the b2b space, is more often than not driven by the management of relationships between the fee-earners and the decision-makers of their clients' firms.

These relationships, while they may be orchestrated via business development or sales teams, are mainteined through constant engagement with clients through online and offline channels. Those include events, seminars, bidding for work, newsletters, updates, surveys etc.

Hey, wait, isn't relationship-building the very fibre of social media?

But how do you leverage social media marketing in the professional services space? In 2007, the veritable jurassic period of social media marketing, a survey completed by the Professional Marketing Forum identified that marketing experts in professional services firms are unsure of how to approach Web 2.0 and social media marketing strategies.

In 2007, the key findings included:

1. 18% of firms banned Facebook on office computers as a ‘time waster’
2. 20% allowed free access anytime arguing their people should be trusted
3. Large firms were actively exploring the possibility of upgrading intranets with Web 2.0 elements including RSS, blogging and social bookmarking
4. No firms were reporting commercial success through using Web 2.0 sites

Isn't it time for marketers of these firms to get on the social media marketing train?

What if in house thought-leaders tweeted their insights and clients were able to subscribe to their feeds? What if successes and tender wins were the subjects of blog posts? What if boring firms got rid of their staid, stuffy appearance and attracted new, young, forward-thinking talent through their Facebook groups? And how about if those leading-edge video podcasts weren't held captive to the company website, but were search engine optimized and posted on Youtube? Wouldn't these serve as ways to build profile, engage influential decision-makers (or decision-makers-to-be)?

Am I way off here? What channels are the professional services marketers out there using to leap into the social media marketing fray?

*Sharpie is not actually un-sexy, especially when associated with talent like David Beckham...