Topic: this blog. I’ve been remiss in posting regularly, which has several key impacts:

• SEO – search engines like regularly updated content posted on a regular schedule. If you break that schedule, you negatively impact your SEO.
• Subscribers – subscribers are fickle. If they’re looking for content and you’re not posting content, then you’re going to lose them.
• Credibility – how can I tell people how frequently they should blog when I’m not doing it myself?
• Cross-marketing – if you’re cross-posting blog content to other outlets, then you’re not feeding those other outlets, either.

I was trying to avoid going from parts store to parts store looking for the stuff, so I started looking through auto parts websites. I quickly became frustrated because the the sites insisted that I enter the year, make, and model of my car in order to search for what is essentially a universal product. Of course, since the stuff isn’t model-specific, it didn’t come up in a search. I gave up, and drove to a couple parts stores and found what I needed.

Later in the day, I was online searching through my favorite vintage VW parts store, and found myself wishing I could just put in the year and model of my car, and it would come up with the parts I needed.

Sometimes, you have to make a choice in how you present products online. In these two cases, I’d choose the method the VW parts house used. Why? Because while it wasn’t as convenient, I was able to find the parts I needed for my car. If your website doesn’t show a product and you carry it, the customer is likely to look elsewhere because they don’t know.

One of the four P’s of marketing is place. Place encompasses a lot of things, but at the end of the day it’s how you get the product or service to the client. A portion of that includes payment terms, including the forms of payment you’re willing to take as an establishment.

As a provider of goods or services, it’s your job to make it easy for me to take delivery of your service, in order that I might want to repeat the experience or recommend you to others. Not taking the single most common form of payment in use today does not make it easy, and it certainly doesn’t make me likely to recommend you to others.

There’s a caveat to that. If you don’t take credit or debit cards, please make it known to me before I’ve gone to the trouble to shop, or in the case of some services, consume your service. A small sign on the door doesn’t cut it. If cash and check are your only accepted forms of payment, you should remind me at least three times before I have the opportunity to buy, in great big letters. Disappointing the customer is worse than not satisfying their needs.

Maybe if you have to go to the expense of having a huge sign printed, you might find a way to cover the small expense of taking credit or debit.

Me: westbound, sportbike, boots, leathers, gloves, full-face helmet, 1omph above the speed limit.

You perceive me as unsafe because you think I’m going too fast, and I’m on a machine that is marketed by its performance potential.

Read through the descriptions. You tell me who is unsafe.

Marketing has made perception into reality. Just because I ride a performance machine does not mean that I’m exploiting its performance.

Well, Nissan has dived right in there, too with this commercial spot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycGoucHWIjc

What idiot in their ad agency thought it would be a good idea to show a car intentionally hitting, and likely killing, a motorcyclist? Even presented in a video-game style, it’s still irresponsible and likely to piss off the millions of motorcyclists in this country.

Moral of the story: Do not sell to one group at the expense of another. And don’t assume that stylizing the death of any group of people makes it okay.

Medically fragile kids are those who, for a variety of reasons, have been left in medically stable condition, but require life-sustaining medication, treatment, or equipment, and need assistance with the activities of daily living. Without the Dream House, many of these kids end up in adult nursing homes or permanently hospitalized.

The transition care home provides a “half-way home,” with 24-nursing care, where the children live while families are provided skills training to prepare them to go to their permanent homes. This facility is licensed as the first and only Children’s Transition Care Center (CTCC) in the United States. The closing of this home heavily impacts Dream House’s mission.

I’ve supported this charity for the last few years by hosting the website, social media outreach, and participating in the Dream House 500. If you ride a motorcycle, I’d encourage you to participate as well – it’s a fantastic event. If not, you can donate in a couple different ways.

You can support my efforts in the Dream House 500 via Paypal in any amount you wish.

You can donate directly to Dream House on their website in any amount you wish.

I personally, and Dream House for Medically Fragile Children, thank you for your support.

The downside to that is the occasional e-mail like the one I received a day or so ago from a business contact and occasional client.

John, I know you have cancer, but I need your expertise to spread the word for [fundraiser deleted].  It looks like I stuck my neck out to lead this effort and things are dragging.  Help push the [event]. See flyer.

Note: the sender realizes that I have cancer, which means I may have other things to do, but still feels the need to solicit my expertise to pull his irons out of the fire. This also probably means that he’s getting in touch with me way too late for me to do anything, but I will certainly share the blame if this effort fails. I also know this event has no budget for promotion, which most assuredly means he’d like me to work for free.

To those of you out there who know consultants – understand that we get paid for our expertise. If we choose to give it away sometimes, that’s our choice – not yours. Call us, tell us your troubles, and let us volunteer if we want to do so. You’re likely to get better results.

GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
-Robert Herrick

Herrick is trying to spur his intended audience to action in this poem. I’d encourage you, as marketers, to do the same, but my intent is a little different.

It’s constantly drilled into our collective heads that we have to measure marketing results. We have to gather data about our customers for segmentation and other activities. This has resulted in seemingly endless data-gathering, but seemingly very little action.

To quote Elvis Presley, what your marketing may need is “a little less conversation and a little more action.” Sure, you need to gather data, but make it actionable data. Or, if you’re not gathering actionable customer data, figure out what data you need to improve customer service delivery.

Take as an example a hotel. As a business traveler, I frequent many of the same hotels repeatedly. While the reservation shows my name so that they call me by it at the desk, and their loyalty programs show I get to go to the manager’s reception and the upgraded breakfast, none of them seem to catch on that I make similar requests every time I stay, and I buy the same ancillary services quite frequently. Why not ask me up front if I want those services? Why not log my requests and fulfill them when setting up my room? That’s the type of actionable data that can result in improved customer service delivery, and delight the customer.

In this example, there are two other notables. Asking me up front if I want to buy the usual ancillary services may result in selling them to me more frequently, since I may forget to request them if I’m in a hurry. And fulfilling my usual requests in advance uses very few additional resources if any, but will create a loyal customer – lowering overall customer acquisition costs. So in short, higher sales at lower cost.

So why do my campaigns to motorcyclists frequently fail? What is it that I’m missing?

Let’s delve a bit deeper. I’m going to stick to the US market, since that’s the majority of whom I’m trying to reach. Digging about for demographic data, I find this knol on the US Motorcycle Market, which seems to have relatively recent data from reliable sources.

Using some of that data, I created this little demographic chart:

US motorcyclists by age - new bike registrations 2007

This chart quickly reveals that I’ve really got two major demographic groups here – Baby Boomers and Gen-X.  (For my purposes, I’m going to classify Baby Boomers as those born between 1946 and 1964, inclusive, and Gen-X as born between 1965 and 1982, inclusive.) Because of the behavioral variables and psychographic differences between those two groups, I will likely need two campaigns at minimum.

Using some of the other stats from the knol, I also know that 90% of these are male, and that about 2/3 of them are married.

Looking at market share data, it’s also pretty likely that I need to target cruisers pretty heavily. Why? Because Harley has 28% market share, and that’s the majority of their lineup. The other manufacturers make a much wider variety of machinery, but there are cruisers in their lineups, too.

So why are my motorcycling campaigns failing? Because I’m marketing to myself. And I’m a Gen-X sportbike rider. So I’m automatically missing half, or more, of my target. Don’t assume just because you’re part of a group that you are the group. 

• Posted the event on my Facebook wall
• Posted the event on Google+
• Sent reminders to everyone on LinkedIn to whom I had sent prior invitations
• Set up a drip campaign on Twitter across three accounts
• Linked StickIt2Cancer.com from my cancer blog

Torri’s response “Holy crap man, how did you do all that so fast???”

I started to write up a quick response to her, and decided there was enough material for a blog post. So here we are.

Here’s a few keys:

• Planning – social media sites are sticky, and can suck you in and keep you there for a long time. Decide what you want to do, drop in and do it, and then bail out.
• Limit interaction – This is related to planning, but a corollary. Limit your personal interaction to activities that forward the goals you set in planning. You don’t need to be there all the time – you have to seem like you’re there all the time.
• Notifications – Use notifications to help you limit interaction but still be responsive when you need to be. Avoid, however, the desire to respond to every notification.
• Be offline – If you have to create a volume of content, do it offline. I can very quickly knock out a bunch of tweets or a couple blog posts if I’m not trying to do them live on the site with other activity going on around me. Shut off your e-mail and other distractions, too.
• Use technology – Use technology both to monitor social media and to post campaigns on it. For example, the drip campaign I set up for Torri will continue to run through the event, tweeting across several existing Twitter accounts every four hours or so via SocialOomph, one of the few tools I recommend purchasing. The postings I did on Facebook and G+  were done in one fell swoop using the Start Google Plus browser extension for Chrome. The link on my cancer blog was done, of course, using WordPress, which I use for just about every website I build these days. The monitoring will all be done using notifications and Tweetdeck for Desktop. (Don’t use the phone app, it’s too much of a resource pig.)