This post was inspired, if that’s the right word, by the cautionary example of a friend’s filled-with-painful-malapropisms blog. I wondered how to counsel them without deflating their passion for connection, and decided to try to work that out here.

We’ve all seen examples of spell-and-grammar-checked writing that was unintentionally funny; for a time, Lynne Truss built a business around misplaced commas. We’ve seen writing where spell-check failed (the New York Times has featured theirs). But what about the next level beyond: writing that riffs awfully off familiar ideas, mangling the writer’s intended communication? For writers who are blind to connotations and denotations, blogging can become a tar pit—attractive, sticky, and fatal to what they hope to achieve.

Social media enables us to fill the gaps between us, no matter where we are: one might say its practitioners exhibit true grout in their gritty pursuit of connection. While that pun was painful, the connotative and denotative senses of the words used, and the familiar idea of “true grit,” fit the intended meaning. It may not make you want to read more of what I write, but you likely won’t laugh at me.

How can marketers—or any businessperson—expect to achieve their business goals when the recipient of their communication has dissolved into a fit of unintended giggles? How can we help our clients and our executives when, in the age of authenticity, the edited voice is suspect and the unedited voice is a business risk?

The answer isn't a fast fix, but it will work: encourage more reading.

1. Encourage those you know to read widely, and do the same. Read outside the boundaries—read people you don’t think you’d agree with, read in genres you don’t normally like, read deeply at least some of the time.
2. Share business books by authors who are strong writers. My recommends would be David Ogilvy, Peter Drucker, and Ram Charan, for starters.
3. If you have the skills (those whose writing you admire will tell you if you do), mentor and coach those who love to connect.

I intend to do the last on this list with my friend; wish me luck. I hope I can keep them excited about blogging while helping them communicate more effectively.

Thinking about medieval marketplaces, traders, and merchants, I think about voice: the “look at me and my goods” chants sung out in the street, the elegant honorifics opening a letter from a trader, the chatter among participants and witnesses drafting business contracts, another letter concerning a shipment of bundles of silk and the trader’s illness.

The media we use today is in some ways very different, but a personal voice is still a form of authenticity, an authenticity that helps build trust. In a 2007 study of phishing, “[m]any subjects were suspicious of emails that were not signed by a person (Jim Smith) but instead by a position only (e.g., ‘Account manager, Paypal’).”*

People act as if trust occurs between persons; the fabled “trusted brand” is a dull mirror of what occurs between people. Doubt it? Betrayal is eponymous (for example, “he’s a real Benedict Arnold,” “she made off with the loot like Madoff,”) not corporatized.

So in my thinking aloud on this blog, in your emails to colleagues, in our outbound campaigns for our employers and clients, personal voice is a critical part of trust. It's not just for marketers: check the approximately 18,600 results for the Google search, “finding your blog voice.” (Interestingly, there are no results for “finding your blog voices.”)

Despite the popular quest for a singular voice, our true voice—that combination of phrasing, slang and formal language, pace and rhythm that create a sense of a specific person’s presence in their absence—varies with our audiences.

It varies with who we are at a moment in time, at a particular place, with particular people. If it doesn’t, it approaches depersonalized corporate-speak, and it loses power.

Marketers need to remember that they, like Whitman, “contain multitudes,” and like the medieval trader and merchant, their voice will vary. Stop searching for your voice, and listen to your voices—and your audiences’ voices. Hearing voices, in all their mutability, will make you better at growing revenue for your clients and employers.

* "What Instills Trust? A Qualitative Study of Phishing." Jakobsson, Tsow, Shah, Blevis, Lim, "Financial Cryptography," pp. 356-361, 2007.

Kevin Hillstrom’s post, Crutchfield: An Attribution Nightmare, led me to think about how marketing automation platforms like Eloqua and Marketo promise to help marketers connect tactics directly to revenue…and how fiendishly difficult this really is.

In Hillstrom’s example, he outlines all the activities he engaged in, and some of his wants/needs, related to the purchase of a television. He then challenges his readers: “Ok, attribution experts. Tell me what caused this purchase?”

His post presents a whopper of a Gordian knot, one that marketing automation/revenue cycle management platforms seek to address. And his post doesn’t even touch on the added complexities of B2B marketing and sales—multiple decision-makers and influencers, multi-touch sales engagement.

What’s a B2B marketer to do?

• Be mindful about confusing correlation with causation.
• Be skeptical about whether any tool, platform, or other technology is the gold standard for resolving the messy human complex of influences/timing/pricing on purchase decisions. 
• Accept that you’ll never know enough, but sometimes “good enough information” is good enough to win. 
• Apply Occam’s Razor to Gordian Knots: I try to use my own version of KISS (Keep It Salient, Stupid). 
• Be human; accept that you have biases, and strive to minimize their impact.
• Be humble in the face of these difficulties; the payback on hubris is a bitch.

Kevin writes in his follow-up post, “[W]e, as attribution experts, have clear biases that result in us giving disproportionate credit to the marketing channels that we align with. And that’s the important thing to take away here ... execute some tests, minimize biases, and always remember that a significant portion of purchases (in spite of what some say) happen because of brand loyalty, and not because of marketing activities.”

So what's a brand, for a B2B marketer?

If, as Amir Kassaei was quoted as saying, “a brand is not a product or a promise or a feeling. It’s the sum of all the experiences you have with a company,”* the brand comprises everything from the company phone tree, to outbound messaging, to how simple the invoice-and-payment process is, to easy information access on your website, to the warmth (or lack of) in the administrative assistant’s voice when they reschedule a meeting.

Marketing automation and revenue cycle management won’t get you sustainable, defendable business growth; better attribution won’t; in fact, nothing will, unless your (or your client’s) firm and its people care deeply about your prospect’s and customer’s needs and experience, and make improving those a priority.

Your brand is ultimately your people.

*More from Amir: "A brand isn’t something that you lead or guide, it’s something that 'becomes' and that’s a process that only happens based on people’s experiences with that brand.”

Why should the Marketing and Sales Funnel die?

It just doesn't work any more (see Part 1 of this post for some details and citations, and for the great post on Mark Schaefer's blog that triggered my thinking.)

What would happen if we used other symbols and images to describe the ways in which suspects become prospects become customers? We could consider…

• Nets: visual expressions of networks and nodes of influence, like these from LinkedIn. These foreground the social graph, the multiplicity of person-to-person exchanges that can influence buying behaviors, but they’re missing the environmental surround of marketing messages.
  And the environment matters—see the power of subliminal environmental cues as used by Derren Brown on a couple of ad agency creative folks: http://bit.ly/WkdF2. Or see Braun, Ellis, and Loftus in “Make My Memory”; or Rajagopal and Montgomery (recently noted in Wired Science.)
• Cycles: Steven Noble, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, used the term “customer lifecycle” in his bid to replace the marketing funnel in this article in Forbes. He notes four stages—discover, explore, buy, and engage, and each stage can encompass the network of influence that transforms a suspect to a prospect to a customer to an advocate.
  Forrester’s cyclical process is unidirectional and linear, and thus isn’t flexible enough for me. For example, “discover” and “engage” may be collapsible—one can “engage” with a brand before purchasing it (branded sponsorships of pro teams that weave a fabric of influence intended to lead to a brand purchase.)
• Spirals: David Armano at Edelman gets closer to the heart of what’s happening with his idea of a “marketing spiral.” I love that it’s people-centric, not process-centric, thus keeping our audience top of mind. The only issue I have: its excision of any explicit sales interaction, making it a little problematic for B2B sales (especially enterprise sales, with teams of buyers and sellers.)

My momentary favorite to replace the marketing funnel as a metaphor? A spiral galaxy version of Armano’s thought, with a Moebius strip “cycle” at the center. (Please pardon my awfully crude, and unpermissioned, rendering!)

By using this improbable image, we get the following metaphorical goodness:

• A vivid, memorable image. After all, that’s why the funnel persists, even though it’s been pronounced dead.
• A concrete vision of the vast and hard-to-imagine scale of influence networks and nodes.
• Inclusion of an operational cycle, but one where stages blur between beginning and end, and where sales and marketing are literally on the same side.

But enough about my galactic daydreams...if we live by our visual metaphors, what images do you think would work to update our funnel-thinking?

I was on {grow}, Mark Schaefer’s terrific marketing blog, May 17, and got into a comments discussion about the marketing and sales funnel—specifically, that I started thinking the metaphor of the funnel was no longer useful in our highly interconnected, 24/7 influence surround.

In my view, funnel-vision keeps us locked into the idea that conversion from suspect to customer is a unidirectional, linear process; the metaphor of the funnel keeps us focused on the process of a channel to revenue, rather than on the persons at the heart of the sales and marketing process.

 Brant Emery wasn't sure he agreed, arguing the funnel was audience-centric. The discussion in those comments made me realize how deeply entrenched the funnel metaphor is for marketing folks (and how half-baked my alternate ideas were.)

Although smarter folks than me agree the funnel’s outlived its usefulness—Steven Noble from Forrester Research, David Armano from Edelman Digital, and even the DMA, for instance—I want to explore in this post why these metaphors matter.

Metaphors, by their vividness and succinctness, help encode information for memory. Since marketers’ memories are full of the funnel metaphor, let’s take a closer look at what a funnel is and does, and what it’s doing in our marketing and sales thinking.

From Wikipedia: “A funnel is a pipe with a wide, often conical mouth and a narrow stem. It is used to channel liquid or fine-grained substances into containers with a small opening. Without a funnel, spillage would occur.”

The function of a real funnel is quite different than the funnel shape we use as mental shorthand for the suspect-to-prospect-to-customer pipeline and conversion process.

Our metaphorical funnel implies a reduction in the number of things flowing through, rather than a focalizing and channeling. The marketing/sales funnel is really a series of sieves, progressively filtering and distilling the raw material (suspects) through conversion stages, until the distillery yields customers.

It’s not just that the funnel metaphor is a little garbled; it has other flaws:

• It depicts the marketing process as linear. Even marketing/revenue cycles like Marketo’s and Forrester Research’s are linear cycles. Buying patterns, however, are not necessarily linear; a funnel doesn’t encompass habitual, repeat purchases of things like coffee, or an impulse buy of green nail polish by a teenaged girl.
• The funnel process has discrete stages. While this may be necessary for operational efficiency and forecasting in marketing and sales, do you think through your own purchase processes in stages—or does your behavior emerge fluidly, continuously, from a complex background of conditions, desires, opportunity, and context?

Why does this matter? An inaccurate visual metaphor can lead to inaccurate thinking. See Johnson, page 146: “category mistakes and similar errors [can] occur with improper uses of metaphors.” And entrenched visual trope makes it difficult to think differently. For years the controls on radios and similar audio devices looked like knobs and sliders; it took almost 100 years to imagine the iPod dial, a radically different solution.

Mark Schaefer’s excellent, heartfelt blog post, “Social media and the big conversation ‘fail’” made me think: what is a conversation, anyway—and can we have one through social media tools?

A number of best-selling authors seem to think we can. But as soon as the element of persuasion comes up, odd things happen to our conversations. As Brian Solis wrote, “The art of conversations is mastered through both the practice of hearing AND listening. … This is about humanizing the story in a way that empathizes with those whom you’re trying to compel.”

Uhm…"compel." Are we really conversing to compel?

Douglas Harper’s online etymology dictionary sheds some light:

Conversation: mid-14c., "living together, having dealings with others," also "manner of conducting oneself in the world;" from O.Fr. conversation, from L. conversationem (nom. conversatio) "act of living with," from conversat-, pp. stem of conversari "to live with, keep company with," lit. "turn about with," from L. com- "with" (see com-) + vertare, frequentative of vertere (see versus). Specific sense of "talk" is 1570s. Used as a synonym for "sexual intercourse" from at least 1511, hence criminal conversation, legal term for adultery from late 18c.

Compel: mid-14c., from O.Fr. compellir, from L. compellere "to drive together, drive to one place" (of cattle), "to force or compel" (of persons), from com- "together" (see com-) + pellere "to drive" (see pulse (1)).

The seeds of meaning in language say “conversation” is a form of living with someone, and “compel” is a way to drive them, bunched like cattle, to a destination.

If we live with someone, we’re privy to some physically intimate details of their life: their health, their daily habits, whether they’re messy or neat, whether their allergies are acting up. So conversation implies a physical presence—an IRL encounter over time—that’s missing in the world of weak social ties.

One way to make sure we don’t experience Mark’s sense of “conversation ‘fail’” may be to simply be more vivid about our physical, IRL selves as we tap out 140 character pings for connection. Some sense of our physical self may need to be brought forward to make a message exchange more conversational. Food chat, art chat, exercise chat can be openings to deeper connection, the kind of connection where someone feels safe enough to share important, vulnerable parts of their story and self.

There’s no reason that a tweet or a share in StumbleUpon can’t contain something to anchor a real conversation…meaning a conversation that unfolds over time, one that may extend to phone chat, IRL meetings, and deep friendships.

Can social media marketing enable conversations?

I think the answer is yes, but by the definition contained within the root of the word “conversation,” we can’t converse as a brand, or as a company. We need to converse, with all our disclosures accessible, person to person.

It’s a form of conversation that brilliant sales professionals engage in daily—they listen, they connect, they engage, and they bring their humanity to the job. If they don’t believe in their product or service, they look for one they can believe in. True to the roots contained in the word “sell,” they give time and attention, even if giving is sometimes a sacrifice:

Sell: O.E. sellan "to give," from P.Gmc. *saljanan (cf. O.N. selja "to hand over, deliver, sell;" O.Fris. sella, O.H.G. sellen "to give, hand over, sell;" Goth. saljan "to offer a sacrifice"), perhaps a causative form of the root of O.E. sala "sale." One of the first things a student of Old English has to learn is that the word that looks like sell usually means "give." Meaning "to give up for money" had emerged by c.1000.

Are marketers prepared to be fully, humanly present for those conversations? Ten years after the Cluetrain Manifesto, many aren’t—Twitter use as a push marketing channel for product announcements tells that tale. Shel Israel and Robert Scoble’s Naked Conversations seems to have fallen on ears deafened by the noise from outbound promotions. (And yes, I sometimes slide embarrassingly into using Twitter for outbound promotions; I’ll tell you more on that over a drink sometime.)

But if real conversation requires our full humanity, plus some sense of who we are as physical beings…can we balance the demands of real conversation with our need for privacy?

I’m not sure. Care to comment?

Om Malik wrote on April 19 that the interest graph “is the underpinning of a new kind of e-commerce experience,” because it’s “a way to organize a social network based on people’s interests.” Most of the comments are in agreement that what’s salient to growing revenue centers on the interest graph.

I’m not sure I understand how Om and the savvy folks leaving comments see what’s always been core to “push marketing”—the alignment of interests, products, and outbound messages to yield transactions and word-of-mouth referrals—as something new, simply because the delivery model has changed.

Rather than focus on the interest graph, I think real marketing and revenue success will come from leveraging the social graph—the network and nodes that reveal patterns of who-knows-who and who-trusts-who—to realize the “pull marketing” promise of social media.

Why? The social graph has longevity; interest graphs connect people in weak-tie ways, and it isn’t until they are socially engaged that strong ties form. And strong ties are what move business forward. As Sarah Jack wrote in the Journal of Management Studies, “Findings demonstrate that it is strong ties that are instrumental for business activity and used extensively to provide knowledge and information but also to maintain, extend and enhance business and personal reputations.”

Is there an industry that can prove this out? MMORPGs gaming may be the purest form of a non-IRL social network based on people’s interests—but while the interest graph is interesting, it’s the communal experience, the social engagement, that makes MMORPGs so compelling. See research by Cole and Griffiths on this subject, as well as Chen, Duh, Phuah, and Lam.

In the past, the social graph was sales’ turf, especially enterprise sales; they knew the ecosystems of relationships within their clients’ firms, and used social means to learn the same for their prospects. I say “in the past,” because social media marketing isn’t another form of “push”—it can be a way for marketers to explode “pull” by leveraging the social graph at an unprecedented scale.

Marketers won’t get explosive value from social media if we persist in using social channels to push out one-to-many blasts, broadcasts, and contests. (I’m guilty of using social for "push marketing," in part because of my failure to help execs understand the value and the difference; that doesn’t mean I don’t want to do better.)

We can, and should, look at social patterns and use them to make smart choices about who to connect with for our brands/employers, who to connect with each other, and what information or entertainment those we connect with want.

There are opportunities in this for entrepreneurs. Marketers need:

• Better assessments of influence based on salient metrics (neutral industry standards, rather than self-proclaimed “Industry Standard.” Jeremiah Owyang, are you working on something like this?)
• Easier, faster data mining for analytics on connection patterns and interesting correlations (imagine the findings you see on the OKTrends blog derived from other supersized consumer behavior and social media site data sets.)
• Easy-access data overlays of interest graphs on top of social graphs. (Radian6 offers powerful ways to listen, but I haven’t yet seen anything that provides the nexus of social graph/interest graph—am I missing a cool offering somewhere?)

Marketers then could use social media tools as a way to scale what excellent salespeople do naturally—listen, learn, connect, reflect, solve, sell, and build connections that foster the next sale.

It may take supporting technologies to help, but marketing that leverages the social graph will trump marketing that focuses on the interest graph.

• Want to reduce marketing spend while building a community around your products/services? 
• Want to expand your reach to relevant audiences and reduce wasted effort and time?
• Want to avoid paid link purges (like those suffered by JC Penney, Forbes, and Overstock.com) while building relevant web traffic?
• Want people to WANT to visit your site, download your white papers, share info about your offerings—rather than have to bribe or trick them into doing so?

Provide content your audience thinks matters, keep it coming fresh, and keep it connecting their work-lives to your offerings.

It’s not easy. Despite what you might find, there are no “five easy steps to content creation." It takes smart, hard work to do content right.

Here’s what I try to do, with varying degrees of success. (I did say it was hard work.)

1. Make sure you know who your audience really is. And I mean your audience ecosystem—the decision-makers, their influencers, the end users. Mine your house file, do your research, validate who they are. Then envision them as specific people; model them on, and create content for, the clients and prospects you know. Ask those people you know in your audience ecosystem to weigh in. Provide information that resonates for each.
2. Make sure you know who your future audience is. Look at industry trends, and see if your offerings can evolve in line with future opportunities. If not, think about how to carve out a clear solid niche for what you can offer. The people who bought in the past (or even last week) may not be your path to future revenue growth.
3. Listen to your audience by watching what they do. For example, on this blog, my first post on the topic of crowdsourcing got a lot of lurker traffic. Based on behavior, crowdsourcing mattered to people, and so I spent more time on the topic, leading to a very productive exchange with Brendan Wright (@bcwright1217) at TopCoder.
4. Do your homework, and don’t use the marketing equivalent of SparkNotes. My go-to for testing POVs and topics of interest? Recent academic research via Google Scholar, rather than best-selling business nonfiction. Primary research is still worth questioning, but you’re closer to real (and fresh) information than when you get info second-hand through popular aggregations of others' research and an author's experience (see Gary Vaynerchuk’s The Thank-You Economy for an example).
5. Test, test, test, test, test. A/B splits at least. And then see number 3—act on what you learn. A/B splits can be your best friend when your client or executive team “knows” what content is most of interest—it’s not about you, it’s not about them, it’s about your audience.
6. Respect your audience. To paraphrase David Ogilvy, the audience is not an idiot. If you think they are, your attitude will infuse your content and taint it. It may not get in the way of viral success, but the disease model of marketing will not produce long-term, probiotic wins.

 After all, it’s not about you.

To paraphrase Jane Austen, for most marketers “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a potential buyer in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a product/service.”

I chose Jane Austen because she published Pride and Prejudice the same year as the birth of the man widely credited with forming epidemiology as a discipline: John Snow, born in 1813 in England.

Why look at epidemiology in a marketing blog? Increasingly, the goal of marketing seems to be to replicate our target audiences’ “Patient Zero.” And by our adoption of the language of disease to describe our efforts—language such as “viral marketing,” “social contagions,” and similar—marketers have aligned themselves with the pandemic rather than its containment.

In that alignment, we reinforce the idea we are separate from, and parasitical to, our audiences. Any wonder our discipline (if we use the proxy of “advertising practitioners” for marketers) is viewed with the suspicion and mistrust shown in a 2009 Gallup poll?

If social influence marketing is to be a more effective path to business success, we need to address trust to close the influence gap between ourselves and our clients/employers, and our audiences. (Link opens PDF.)

Aside from the unpleasant comparisons between marketing and disease…let’s stay with our self-definition as agents of infection, and consider how biological infective agents behave.

• Infective agents iterate rapidly. Hosts develop immunity to those that don’t, and those infective agents that don’t iterate may not survive environmental changes.
• Infective agents need vectors to spread. The vector may be the infected host or an intermediary.
• Infective agents can replicate explosively. Their exponential replication continues until there are no places left to colonize.
• Infective agents can lie dormant until the environment is right to replicate. They also can lie dormant until the host’s immune system is weak enough for the infection to replicate.
• Infective agents are often simple in structure. Their low biological overhead increases their survival efficiency.
• Infective agents can kill their hosts, although this is not a long-term strategy for survival. Agents that don’t may, over time, become symbiotes.

Bacteria and viruses teach us that low resource consumption, rapid iteration, fitting into the environment/vectors, and host-sparing behaviors lead to successful spread.

Jane Austen’s characters were, according to scholar John Mullan, “preoccupied with illness.” The language of marketing reflects a similar preoccupation, with marketers as the disease agent.

Since trust is what’s missing from our disease model of marketing, marketing may need to keep the probiotic model in mind—to be something people are willing to ingest to improve their quality of life. That something may be community, learning, entertainment—but if we're viral, we need to give back to our hosts.

A special shout-out to Barbara French (@bfr3nch) for sharing research that inspired this post: Dearing, "a nice explanation of Rogers," and some folks at Wharton on marketing as contagion.

Let’s consider Fred McClimans’ tweeted question: At what point is a community right-sized to crowdsource? @fredmcclimans 

And let’s take Hollis Tibbett’s perspective: Crowdsourcing is a tool, neither inherently good nor bad. @i_integr8 

Let’s stir in some research on gossip, and see what happens.

To reiterate the difference between a crowd and a community: communities are networks based on mutuality and interdependence, and members of a crowd are a set of people with no connection other than the set’s boundaries. A community may contain weak ties between people or strong ties, but in all cases there is some shared connection between people. In this post, I'll consider people "nodes in a network," per a paper by Alison Shaw, Milena Tsvetkova, and Roozben Daneshvar.

Because crowdsourcing creates a new community comprised initially of weak ties—the project itself is the connection between people—Fred’s question might be better asked inside-out: At what point is a crowd connected enough through crowdsourcing to become a community?

Gossip is a social behavior based on information exchange by people within a network about people within a network. Its roots are in the sorts of exchanges that happened among those attending a birth. In “The Effect of Gossip on Social Networks,” Shaw, Tsvetkova, and Daneshvar show that “if gossip does not spread beyond simple triads, it destroys [the triads] but if gossip propagates through large dense clusters [of theoretical people], it strengthens [the bonds within the cluster].”

To simplify, if two people talk about a third, the bonds between the two are strengthened and their connection to the third is weakened, effectively dissolving the triad. If in a “small-world network” a number of people talk about one person, however, the ties within the network are strengthened overall.

Crowdsourcing creates a network of weak ties centered, not on the project/client, but on the crowdsourcing platform. By introducing elements that resemble gossip—by allowing people to exchange information with and about other people within the network—strong ties can be fostered.

The new emergent behavior is that of “community” not “crowd,” and the community is what attracts new people who might choose to participate in production. (I think it's the presence of this emergent behavior that makes crowdsourcing more than a tool, and different than offshoring or piecework.)

If the breadth and depth of the talent pool is relevant to the effectiveness of a crowdsourced business model, the communities that form around a crowdsource platform are the differentiator in attracting new talent. And (as Adobe may be learning) those communities are not indifferent to their own needs.

It seems income potential or interesting projects are less significant in developing crowdsource communities—thus maximizing the successful outcome of a crowdsourced project—than the use of crowdsource platforms that enable and encourage social exchange...