MackCollier.com

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Your Brand Is the Sum of the Stories We Tell About You

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Facebook has just launched an elegant mobile reader/app called Paper.  Facebook is trying to position the app as less of a reader and more of a way for users to share and create ‘stories’.  Jay has a great write-up on the direction Facebook may be heading with the app.

Over the last few years, our ability to create content and weave multiple medias has increased dramatically.  Our smartphones are becoming computers that are far more powerful that the klunky desktops from just a few years ago.  The ability to create pictures, high-definition video and text has all been fused into a small item no bigger than our hand.

While our ability to tell stories via digital content has greatly increased, many brands are still missing what an opportunity they have in letting customers speak on their behalf.  It’s scary for many brands, I get it.  You spend millions in carefully orchestrated marketing messages designed to communicate specific points to a mass market.

What you miss is that we don’t care about that.  Well we do, but not to the degree you think.  Every customer has their own connection to your brand.  Many customers have complete indifference to your brand.  Some have slight levels of affinity and loyalty, and a select few are raving fans.

We are all telling stories about your brand.  And if you don’t connect with us, we will tell the stories on our own.

But if you do connect with us, two important things begin to happen:

1 – We begin to understand you, and the story you want us to tell

2 – You begin to understand us, and the stories we want to hear

The thing to remember is this:  While most of us have the ability to tell stories about your brand, most of us don’t have any desire to.  Unless we either love you, or hate you.

And again, either way it pays to connect with us.  If you connect with your fans, the customers that love you, those fans will work with you to make sure they tell the story about your brand that you want other customers to hear.  Read that again until you understand just how important that is.

On the other hand, when you connect with your fans, they will come to your defense against customers that are telling negative stories about your brand.  Truly a win-win situation.

Keep in mind that when you empower your customers to tell stories on your brand’s behalf, your customers tell your brand’s story in their own voice.  This is incredibly powerful because customers respond more to a message that’s delivered in a voice they recognize and trust.

Their own.

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Brands, You Have to Build Your ‘Trust’ Muscle

Steve Jobs was probably the greatest business orator and speaker of the last 50 years.  Jobs had a wonderful talent for delivering amazing presentations and captivating an audience.

With that in mind, watch this short video of Jobs prepping for his first on-air appearance in 1978:

Isn’t it interesting to watch a fidgety and obviously very nervous Jobs say “You need to tell me where the restroom is too, because I’m deathly ill, actually, and ready to throw up at any moment.”  Then he adds to someone off camera “I’m not joking!”

Yet 40 years later in 2007, he was delivering the presentation to launch the iPhone, considered to be one of the greatest business presentations of all-time.

Experience is a wonderful teacher, and it molded Jobs from that fidgety computer geek in 1978 to a polished professional that became the gold standard for delivering compelling business presentations.

Today, we’re asking brands to do something equally scary on a scale they’ve never had to before: We are asking brands to trust their most passionate customers.

One of the things that struck me the most while writing Think Like a Rock Star was to delve into the differences between how rock stars approach engaging with their customers versus how brands do.  While many brands are reluctant to connect directly with their customers and give them any control over messaging or promotion, rock stars literally view their customers as marketing partners that they trust to act in the rock stars’ best interest.

This graphic explains why:

InteractionsInteraction leads to Understanding which leads to Trust which leads to Advocacy.  Rock stars are constantly seeking interaction with their fans, because they not only want to better understand their fans, they want their fans to better understand them.  Because rock stars know that when their fans understand them, they can then trust them, and advocate for them.  Also, since rock stars understand and trust their fans, they know that these fans will act in the rock star’s best interests.

Most brands never start on this path because they don’t seek to have those interactions with their customers that are freely available thanks in great part to the rise of social media tools.  If brands would interact more with their fans they would begin to understand them more, which leads to trust, which leads to advocacy.

Which is also a two-way street.  When your brand purposely shuts itself off from your customers, you are also restricting the customers’ ability to interact with you, and then to trust you as well as deadening the chances of having that customer advocate for your brand.

And here’s why it’s an unfounded fear:  Because when you interact with your customers and they understand you they also trust you.  So not only will they advocate for you, they will also spread your message and trust you to spread the message that you give them.  This is what so many brands misunderstand about their fans, they believe their fans will spread a message that’s inconsistent with their ‘messaging’.  Instead, fans will want to work with your brand to make sure they are spreading the message that you want them to.

But it starts with your brand taking the first step to reach out to your customers and trusting them if you want them to trust you.

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Stop Chasing Shiny Objects, Invest in the ‘Classics’

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A few years ago an agency approached me and said they had figured out a plan to get ahead.  They were seeing at the time that Twitter was growing like a weed in the South in August, so they were going to hire a ‘Twitter person’.  This person would be an expert at using Twitter, and she would train the entire agency on how to use Twitter, so that they would have an agency full of Twitter experts.

She concluded by asking ‘what do you think?’ with a confident tone that told me that she fully believed she had just cracked the code on successfully propelling her agency into the next decade.

I told her the same thing that day that I will tell you today: Stop trying to understand the tools, and instead invest in learning how your customers are using the tools.  Earlier this month it felt like every marketer in the world was jumping on Jelly.  Marketers were infatuated by a new social tool and more importantly, a new sales opportunity.  These marketers had no clue who was using Jelly or if it would ever be relevant to their customers.  They rushed in at the promise of finding a hot new social channel to sell their wares via.

The true sales opportunity lies in figuring out where the customer is headed and then clearing a path to help them reach their destination.  The customer will eventually reach her destination with or without us, but the value we bring to the equation is to help the customer reach her destination as effortlessly as possible.  Helping the customer do this IS the sales opportunity.

There are two areas you need to focus on in 2014:

1 – Understanding how your customers are using these tools

2 – Understanding how customer behavior is changing because of emerging tools and technology

Over a decade ago, The Cluetrain Manifesto was published, and the work is perhaps best known for presenting the idea of markets as conversations.  The idea that the markets that companies sell to are actually made up of human beings having conversations with each other, and if you wanted to connect with these markets, you needed to understand the conversations they were having, and even participate in those conversations.

Marketers heard the ‘participate’ part, but they missed the ‘understand’ portion.  No matter how many shiny tools you master, none of that will help you if you don’t understand your customers.

BTW anyone notice that all the talk about Jelly died down as soon as it started up?  That’s because marketers got there, spent a few days with it and didn’t see an immediate sales opportunity, and left.  Agency folks camped out there long enough to see if they could sell their clients on ‘Jelly Management’ projects, and left when they realized everyone else was.

Which leads to another classic: There are no silver bullets.  Roll your sleeves up, invest in understanding your customers.  Do the work.

Pic via Flickr user dylan garton

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The Death Knell for Social Networking Sites: Mainstream Usage

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The first online portal I joined was Prodigy in 1991.  It was actually a great experience, there was just no one there.  But the few people that did use the mostly text-based service were very friendly and it wasn’t unusual to interact with someone on one of the pseudo-message boards and share your home address with an invitation for others to write a letter.  Different times.

From there I went to CompuServe in the mid-1990s and AOL soon after that.  Both CS and AOL were also internet providers, and at the time it was some outrageous amount, like $25 for 10 hours online.  For a month!  I often spend more than 10 hours online in a day!

Then around 1997 or so, AOL announced that it was changing it’s price structure and removing the hourly cap on online access.  They rolled out the $25 for unlimited access and it was a total game-changer.  Unfortunately, it also totally changed the experience on AOL.  Suddenly, there were kids everywhere!  I feel like the old man shaking his cyber-fist but suddenly I had to learn what ‘LOL’ and ‘OMG!’ meant, along with ‘trolling’, ‘noobs’ and the endless string of 🙂 😛 XOXO.

AOL had gone mainstream, and in the process, the experience that it’s core users had become accustomed to had changed greatly.  Ironically, we are now seeing the same thing happen in reverse with Facebook.  Facebook started out as a site for only college students.  Then the restriction of having an edu address to access FB was lifted, which meant that recent college grads and soon-to-be college students (IOW the younger and older siblings of current FB users) started checking out the site.

The social media geeks found FB in 2007.  Over the next 2-3 years its userbase grew at an astronomical rate.  Suddenly it seemed like every kid from the age of 14-24 was on Facebook.

Then the parents found out that their kids were on Facebook.  Suddenly parents everywhere that had little to no idea what their kids were up to, only had to go on Facebook at it was all there!

As you might expect, Facebook is quickly becoming ‘uncool’ to these kids. In fact, Facebook recently verified that young teens are leaving the site.  Where are they going?  To sites that their parents haven’t discovered yet like SnapChat, Instagram and Path.  Which are now growing like crazy, that is until mom finds out about them…

It’s truly the paradox of growing an online site or portal: You need to reach a certain mass of users to attract more users.  And you need to monetize those users, which is another reason you want more users.  But the simple fact is that adding more users changes the overall experience.  It has for every social media site I’ve used for the last 20+ years.  And when the overall experience changes from what made the site appealing to begin with, people leave.

If you are trying to create an online community site, or even if you are trying to build a blog readership, always focus on delighting and retaining your first users.  These are the builders of your base, the people that love your experience and tell others about it.  When you get in a rush to bring in new users too quickly, you change the experience, which means you lose those first users that are really the foundation for you entire community.  It’s like building a pyramid, you have a strong foundation, then you start slowly building the pyramid.  Then suddenly you start to quickly add on and going skyward with the pyramid, while at the same time you start removing the foundation.  Obviously the pyramid will soon collapse under its own weight.

Never pursue growth at the expense of user experience.  Facebook’s growth was driven by kids.  Kids that are now deciding they don’t like being on the site anymore.  When the foundation is removed the collapse isn’t very far behind.

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The Free Economy: Why It’s Making Everything More Expensive

Over the past several years as publishing and content creation tools have flourished, so has the idea that anything free is inherently better or at least more desired than content or tools that cost money.  Whether you are an individual or company looking to make a name for yourself, the path is pretty linear: Create gobs of free content or give users free usage of your tool, and eventually they will want to pay you for your content or tool.

Until, they don’t.

For years, this sort of freemium model was successful: Provide limited and free access, then when people saw the value of your content/tool, charge them money for additional access and features.  But over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend among my peers and networks.  People will stay with a tool or content creator as long as their content/tool is free, but as soon as they ask for money, most people jump off and look for another free source.  There’s so many sources of information that the thinking seems to be that someone else will offer better functionality at a free price.  Or instead of paying this writer $9.99 for their ebook, I can get the same information for free from blogs.

Too often, the most important attribute assigned to online content or tools is that they be free.  Free = better in the minds of many.

Here’s an example: My modest newsletter is now up to 1,000 subscribers.  I publish a new issue every week or so, and the newsletter is designed to give subscribers information they can use to better create engagement around their digital marketing efforts and create fans of their brand.  All for free.  Yet every 4th or 5th issue (often I will publish this as an additional issue for that week), I will use the newsletter to directly promote a product or service I offer.  Many people do this with every newsletter issue they publish, but I like to do it about 20-25% of the time.  Typically when I publish a newsletter issue, I will have 1 or 2 people unsubscribe, on average.  But every time I publish a newsletter issue where I am trying to directly sell to my subscribers, the number of unsubscribes always spikes, typically it’s 500% or more higher than the average issue.  The people that unsubscribed left as soon as I asked for the sale.  In other words, they were willing to take and use my content as long as I was providing value for them, at absolutely no cost to them.  But the second they saw an ‘ad’, they left.

It’s not just content, any of you that conduct regular meetings for organizations such as the AMA or Social Media Club have seen the same thing.  If the meetings are free, attendance is high, but when you begin charging even a few dollars, attendance falls off a cliff.

The thinking seems to be that if your offering isn’t free, you can’t compete.  Which means that if there are more free options, there are also more bad options.  And we all spend more time trying to figure out which free option is the best, without realizing that the additional time is costing us more than paying a few dollars for a valuable service or piece of content.

You don’t become an expert by reading an expert’s blog.  You become an expert the same way they did; By doing stuff.  I’ll let you in on a secret: I’m not writing this blog to teach you how to become an expert, I’m writing this blog to establish *my* expertise in social media marketing, online community building and marketing strategy, so you will hire me.  Sure, some people will be able to read my posts here, follow my instructions and launch a brand ambassador program for their company.  But what I hope happens is that a company would read my posts, realize how much time and money it would cost that company to launch a brand ambassador program itself, and instead hire me to do it for them.  I get paid, they save time and money.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but what I fear happens is you have a lot of very smart individuals and startups that throw in the towel because they can’t make money on a product or content by giving it away for free.  For instance, consider the plugins on your blog, how many are you paying for?  Are you paying for any of them?  I have about 30 plugins, and only pay for two of them.  In both cases, I wanted a plugin that did specific things, and couldn’t find a free version that did, so I paid for the services I wanted.

Many of us bemoan the glut of content being created these days.  Everyone is creating content and it’s all the same.  But it’s also (mostly) free.  We complain about how Twitter or Facebook isn’t working right, how the sites run too many ads, yet we forget that we aren’t paying a penny to use either service.

Nothing is truly free and I think we need to realize that if we aren’t paying for content or a tool on the front-end, there is a cost in terms of time, diminished experience, etc on the back-end.  The myth of the free lunch is just that.

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Teaching Marketing Students to “Think Like A Rock Star”

You might understand marketing technologies like social media and mobile search, but can you explain them so that someone new to marketing would understand the value of these tools to their business?

Since 2010, I’ve taught a four-week course in New Media Marketing in the Internet Marketing Master of Science program at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida. At Full Sail, students earn their master’s degree in 12 months, and the pace is intense.

Given that the tools of the trade change frequently, I’ve always emphasized principles and approaches, rather than relying too heavily on specific social networks or technologies. My objective is to provide students with skills they can apply in a variety of industries to best suit their unique goals.

The Professor’s Conundrum
Throughout my tenure, I’ve updated the course materials, topics and exercises, but continued to encounter certain objections from students.

1. “My company can’t use mobile (or social media) because…” 

The rest of that sentence could be “our clients are older and don’t use mobile or social media,” or “mobile marketing is too expensive for small businesses,” or “I don’t have time for social media marketing.”

Whatever the nature of their objection, I had to counter the student’s own resistance, which took up valuable time and hindered the learning process.

2. “My company already does X.”

Many students base their course projects on large companies with robust marketing plans. These companies have tried many of the approaches we cover, leaving students little room for expansion or experimentation in the name of learning.

If we were talking about blogging and online video, I’d routinely run into situations where students’ companies were already using these (at least to some extent), though possibly not to their fullest potential. I needed a way to ensure that the course would prove valuable to students in any industry, from all types of organizations.

The Interview
In August 2013, I interviewed Mack Collier for the MarketingProfs podcast about his book, Think Like A Rock Star. I read the book prior to our conversation, and felt incredibly energized and excited about his approach to helping brands build their business by turning customers into fans using techniques effectively used by rock stars to build a fan-base.

I was surprised to learn that very few companies had any type of formal program in place for cultivating brand ambassadors. While Mack and I talked, I kept thinking about how valuable a skillset my students would have if they understood his approach.

Students could analyze their audience to identify influencers and fans, research where their target audience spends time online and off, and develop an outreach plan that would help them to achieve specific program objectives, as well as support larger business goals.

The Epiphany
After my talk with Mack, I had an epiphany. I could use the principles from Think Like A Rock Star to build a course that would teach students to create a completely customized approach, based on their specific business goals and audience: one that would offer value to all students’ businesses, large and small alike, whatever the size of their budget or current marketing mix.

As Mack had observed in our interview, very few organizations have brand ambassador programs, so offering interested students the option of creating that type of program would equip them to blaze a trail in the marketing industry by supercharging their company’s word-of-mouth marketing.

The Plan: Complete Customization
In the first week, students would set their business goals and create personas for their organization’s customers, influencers and fans.

Then, students could engage in audience analysis, identifying actual targets for outreach.

Using this insight, class participants would create a plan to implement influencer outreach or launch a brand ambassador program (either full-scale or smaller-scale, like a customer feedback panel).

Finally, students would spend 25% of the class covering measurement, which is an area of critical importance that marketing professional can’t afford to ignore.

In an effort to ensure that students had access to course content that accurately and thoroughly covered these topics, I worked directly with Mack to create custom webinars for each week’s lesson.

For each of the four weeks, we created lessons that would enable students to apply the concepts of influencer outreach and brand ambassadorship to all kinds of businesses. I provided additional course materials on content marketing, social media, and mobile technology, so that students could learn more about their channels of choice once they knew where their audience was on- and offline.

The Results
Having run the revamped course once, I can already see that students’ submittals are much more detailed and applied to their specific business objectives and audience, and that they’ve acquired valuable skills for audience research, metric selection and measurement that will serve them well no matter which vertical their business operates in.

Instead of teaching every student every approach, we narrowed the universe of possibilities to those uniquely suited to each class member’s industry, business goals, and audience preferences.

I’m excited about the course, but more excited to see what students do once they’ve graduated from the program. Mine is just one class in one program at one university, but my hope is that the success these students will bring to businesses across all industries will inspire other organizations to establish deeper, more lasting relationships with their brand’s influencers and fans.

Even if other businesses continue to lag behind, my students can reap the benefits of the first-mover advantage. That’s not such a bad outcome, either!

I’m incredibly indebted to Mack for his contribution to the class, and highly recommend him as an instructor or trainer in his own right: he’s a fantastic marketer and educator.

Any organization that wants to learn how to implement influence marketing or create a brand ambassador program would do well to retain Mack’s services, or at least buy a copy of Think Like A Rock Star for everyone on the marketing team.

Clearly Mack’s lessons work: I’m a passionate advocate of his approach to marketing, and recommend his book every chance I get. If you want to talk more about it, drop me a line: like any true fan, I love talking about it!

Kerry O’Shea Gorgone teaches New Media Marketing at Full Sail University. She also hosts the weekly Marketing Smarts podcast for MarketingProfs. Find Kerry on Google+ and Twitter.

 

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It’s 2014, Let’s Stop Talking About Social Media

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Happy New Year, y’all!  2014 begins my 10th year of being immersed in the world of social media.  I can remember when social media was simply blogs and MySpace.  Then Facebook and Twitter came along, and we all began to wonder when companies would begin to notice these amazing tools and what they could help them accomplish.

Finally, around 2008 0r 2009, companies start to pay attention to social media.  But in the five or so years since then, the conversation has largely remained focused on the tools themselves.  It’s long-overdue that we stop focusing on the tools and start focusing on understanding how and why people are using these tools.

Let’s stop focusing on social media and instead focus on how social media usage by our brand can relate to larger and far more valuable business objectives:

1 – Customer satisfaction

2 – Customer loyalty

3 – Sales

It’s time to elevate the conversation.  Actually it’s about 5 years past time to elevate the conversation.  We need to stop talking about the tools, and instead focus on the larger business goals that the tools help us reach.  For too long social media strategists/agencies and firms have been trying to sell companies on using social media with a tools-oriented argument.  Key executives that work within companies that approve marketing budgets don’t speak in terms of tools, they speak in terms of results.  A 15% increase in sales in Q3, a 10% reduction in product returns for the year or a 20% reduction in staff turnover.

When we change our conversation to stop focusing on the tools and instead focus on how the tools impact the bottom line, we earn the attention of companies.  It sends a completely mixed message to companies when we strategists say that companies need to invest in social media, but we talk about how that investment will lead to increased social media engagement, brand awareness, Likes and comments.  We tell companies that social media is important, then speak about that importance in metrics that are totally unimportant to the average company.  

So there’s no wonder they aren’t listening.  Neither are customers, because we are focused on ways to use social media to turn customers into digital billboards for our brands.

Stop the insanity!

If it’s 2014 and you are just now considering using social media to connect with your customers, I have good and bad news for you:

The bad news is: You’re way behind.

The good news is: Most companies that are using social media suck at it, so you can catch up quickly if you are smart.

It’s not about understanding the tools, it’s about understanding the people that use the tools.  That should be your focus in 2014.  Tools change but it’s always a good idea to understand who your customers are and how you can create value for them, regardless of the tools they (and you) use.

Pic via Flickr user DigitalLeica

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Your Brand’s Guide to Creating Content That Earns Attention in 2014

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Unfortunately, we are all awash in content.  We have too much to see, to read, to process.  The shiniest pieces get seen, which isn’t always a good thing.

So how do you create content that earns attention?  For a brand, your job is doubly hard, because you are trying to connect with people (customers) that are purposely trying to avoid your content.  Most of us have an internal switch that flips in whenever we encounter any content from a brand.  Our brain immediately flips a switch and we view that content as ‘advertising’, and very few of us want to see more brand advertising.  We trust content from other customers, but not from brands.

If your brand wants to create content that attracts customers, you need to focus on the following:

1 – Understand that most customers don’t trust content from brands.  They are naturally suspicious of content from brands because they assume that the brand’s only desire is to sell them something.  You need to understand your customer’s point of view before you can create content that they’ll pay attention to.

2 – Understand that you build trust by creating useful content for customers.  That’s it.  If you create content that customers find value in, then they will pay attention to your content because they will trust that it’s valuable.

3 – You have to consistently create valuable content.  If you consistently create content that creates value for your customers, then they will trust your content.  No longer will they go through an internal vetting process to decide if your content is worth paying attention to.

4 – Your desire to sell will have to take a backseat.  This is the most important lesson to creating valuable content for customers, and the most difficult for most brands to grasp.  The great thing about social media is that it makes things happen indirectly.  What this means is that you have to stop thinking of social media and online content as a way to directly drive sales.  Instead, view these tools as a way to directly create value for customers, with the understanding that doing so will indirectly lead to sales.

5 – Customers buy from brands they trust.  Remember earlier when we talked about how customers don’t trust content from brands because they assume brands just want to sell to them?  This is why it’s important to shift your thinking on the content you create.  Because when you create valuable content for customers, then customers begin to trust that content.  Which means that by extension, they will begin to trust your brand.

And customers buy from brands they trust.

Want to use social media to sell more stuff in 2014?  Don’t focus on monetizing your customers, focus on creating valuable content for those customers, with the understanding that doing so, will lead to sales.

Pic via Flickr

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Millennials: They’re not Lazy, Entitled Punks

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By the year 2025, 3 out of 4 workers the world over will be Millennials. These oft-maligned young professionals will soon comprise the majority of our global workforce, so businesses should expend the effort to manage them in a way that maximizes their positive attributes and lets them excel.

Learning to manage Millennials will also boost the bottom line: it costs companies between $15,000 and $25,000 to replace each Millennial employee who leaves.

In the course of teaching a graduate and undergraduate classes in new media marketing, I’ve had the opportunity to observe how Millennials engage in an educational environment. Many students keep in touch after graduation, as well, and their professional experiences provide me with insight into how this generation works: their fabled strengths as well as their frailties.

Here are a few observations for companies who want to tap into Millennials’ brilliance and passion, while managing the traits that can sometimes make these workers less effective in a corporate environment.

1 – Provide recognition early and often.  80% of Millennials prefer immediate recognition over traditional performance reviews. And by “immediate,” they mean instantaneous, like your anticipated reply to their text message.

My students submit work at 11:59 p.m. on Sunday night, and by Monday morning, I routinely have several emails inquiring about grades.

Recognition also fosters competition, and Millennials love competition. Term after term, I see better quality work overall from groups that include a few standout stars: they raise the bar for everyone else, so long as I encourage them to continue putting forth the extra effort.

2 – Let them use social media on the job.  71% will anyway, and 56% of Millennials won’t accept a job at a company that bans social media. This carries over into education, as well. 19% of Millennials have said that they’ll be using social media to engage in the classroom.

My classroom is currently virtual, but having taught in a traditional classroom environment, I can attest to the fact that displaying a Twitter feed in class enables some students to participate in the discussion who would feel intimidated to raise their hand “IRL.” So long as access to social media isn’t undermining job performance, don’ t block Facebook and Twitter. (More to come on embracing a results-oriented business model!)

If you want to keep tabs on your Millennial workers, get on Facebook, which has the greatest penetration among that demographic. Nearly 2/3 of Millennials use Facebook.

3 – Facilitate giving back financially or through volunteerism.  Millennials are philanthropic. 81% have given money, goods, or services, and they place a higher priority on helping people in need (21%) than having a high-paying job (15%). Help them to help others: offer matching donations for their charities, or organize a volunteer project for your office.

4 – Get flexible, and fast.  In order to keep your Millennial talent, you’ll need to offer flexible schedules and location-independent work. 45% of Millennials will choose workplace flexibility over pay. Change your mindset from a 9 to 5 model to a productivity model. So long as your employees achieve the results you want by the time you need them, it shouldn’t matter how or when they do it.

Some of my students evenly divide their work into manageable segments, completing one per day leading up to the project due date. Other procrastinate and work all weekend. So long as the product demonstrates an understanding of our subject’s finer points, the approach they choose doesn’t matter to me.

5 – Give them a smartphone for work.  According to a recent survey, 74% of Millennial workers used a smartphone for work in the last 12 months. For coursework, students use their phones to email me, conduct research, and post to discussion boards.

If you’re planning to issue Millennial employees a desktop computer and a landline phone, you can expect them to jury rig a workaround that involves Skype or Google Voice. Make life easier for everyone involved: issue smartphones to new hires.

 

Whatever your opinion of Millennial workers might be, they’re a valuable asset to your company. Keep them engaged. Keep them, period! Recruiting a non-Millennial replacement is expensive, and will become increasingly difficult as older workers retire.

Note from Mack: This is a Guest Post from Kerry Gorgone, who is an instructor at Full Sail University, a lawyer, and also does an ahhhmazing podcast for MarketingProfs.  Check out her previous guest posts here on protecting yourself and your works online and on social media etiquette for brands.

Pic via Flickr.

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Seven Business Books to Make You a Better and Smarter Marketer in 2014

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I’m often asked about what some of my favorite business/marketing/social media books are.  Here’s seven of my favorites that will make your job as a marketer much easier in 2014:

Content Rules – The ultimate guide to content creation.  Walks you through how to create compelling content and the different ways in which you can do so.  If any part of your job includes creating online content then this is the book you must own to show you how to do so correctly.

Who should buy it: Anyone that is tasked with any form of content creation, be it blog posts, podcasts, video, anything.

The Passion Conversation – I love marketing books that focus on science and research.  For example, early on in The Passion Conversation, the authors tackle the three forms of motivation that spark Word of Mouth: Functional, Social and Emotional.  I won’t give it away but I did do a Q&A with John Moore a few weeks ago here that has more information on the book.

Who should buy it:  Anyone that’s responsible for connecting either directly or indirectly with customers, and who wants to increase customer loyalty and improve brand perception.

YouTility – YouTility is one of the breakout hit in the business/marketing/social media space in 2013, and it’s a great read.  Jay walks you through how to change your marketing approach and to actually bake usefulness into your marketing messages.  Because if your marketing is useful to customers, they will spread it.  Jay said you should try to create marketing that’s so useful that people would pay for it.

Who should buy it:  Anyone that has ‘content marketing’ listed as part of their job description.

Resonate – Slide:ology is probably Nancy Duarte’s best-known work, but I’m actually a bigger fan of Resonate.  Resonate walks you through how to incorporate effective and compelling storytelling into your presentations.  She takes some of the most famous speeches in history by some of the world’s greatest orators (Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King, Jr, Steve Jobs, etc) and dissects their presentations literally line by line and unravels why what they said was so compelling and why it held our attention.  I’ve incorporated so much of Nancy’s teachings into my own presentations, and it’s greatly improved them.

Who should buy it: Anyone that’s responsible for creating presentations and materials (both internally and externally for clients or the public) that wants to sell others on adopting a particular idea.

Think Like Zuck – I will be honest, I did not expect to like this book.  I’m not a huge fan of Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook, but I am a huge fan of Ekaterina Walter, so I decided to give it a shot.  I’m glad I did because Ekaterina created a wonderful book that helps you not only understand Mark Zuckerberg, but also a lot of the driving forces behind most successful entrepreneurs.  Packed with case studies and littered with scientific research and takeaways, it’s an interesting read, even if you’re not a huge fan of Facebook.

Who should buy it: Anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit or who loves reading ‘how they got there’ accounts.

The Invisible Sale – Again with the scientific foundation!  I love Tom’s focus on the science of Propinquity, which says that the more you come in contact with someone and have favorable interactions, the more likely you are to enjoy their company.  The same applies to online interactions, if you can frequently interact with potential customers/clients and give them valuable content, the more likely they are to buy from you, or at least the more likely you are to move them closer to a sale.  Tom teaches you how to help potential clients and customers self-educated themselves, so that they literally reach out to you and when they do, they are ready to buy.

Who should buy it: Anyone that’s responsible for driving sales online, especially creating online content that helps generate sales.

Think Like a Rock Star – Think only rock stars have raving fans that literally love them?  You’re wrong, many brands have extremely passionate fans, fans that love them and that are driving real business growth for their favorite brands.  TLARS shows you exactly how to find, understand, embrace and empower your biggest fans.  With dozens of case studies, it walks you through exactly what rock stars like Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and even Johnny Cash do to create fans.  The book also shows you how brands of all sizes and industries have built loyal followings of passionate customers that literally consider it their job to promote their favorite brands.  If you want to stop ‘acquiring’ customers and become a fan-centric brand where passionate customers happily bring customers to you, then Think Like a Rock Star is the book for you.

Who should buy it: Anyone in a marketing role that’s tasked with increasing customer loyalty, improving marketing efforts or generating sales.

 

BTW for each book above if you click on the title it will take you to Amazon where you can read the reviews and order.  You can’t go wrong with any of them.  Also, if you live in the US and want to buy a signed copy of Think Like a Rock Star for $25 shipped, click here.

Which books were your favorites this year?  Any that need to go on this list?