A long time consultant client, concerned about the recession, asked me to cut creative pricing to the bone on a couple of recent jobs then came back and asked me to cut again. I agreed because I was well, concerned about the recession.
An interesting thing happened on both these jobs. Instead of being happy they were getting fantastic value, both clients tinkered with revisions long past the point of reasonableness. In one case, I think the client tinkered to the point that he did his message serious harm.
I caution my students against doing spec work because free is worth what you pay for it; the spec work will be lightly regarded and clients will either not read it or will be butchers with the edit pencil. This is a similar situation, I think. The price is so low that subconsciously, the client thinks the creative can’t be very good. So no worry messing with it.
In general I’ve avoided cutting prices the past year because of experiences like this. If a client balks at an estimate, I ask what they are concerned about. If they have a number in mind, I try to deliver quality for that without compromising.
Hourly rates have been a particular concern. My rate isn’t the lowest. So if a client asks what my rate is and says “I can’t pay that” I say let’s throw out the hourly rate and look at an overall budget. They are happy, but I still end up charging my rate or close to it.
It will be good when times are better again and we can concentrate on doing great work that builds our clients’ businesses and pays for itself in measurable response.
A client and I got into a wrangle recently when he asked me to write a “CEO letter” to other top execs who would be joining him at an event, and the result was not what he expected. Here’s what I responded by way of explanation:
There’s been a fair amount of discussion and research on this topic in the DM community, as you might expect, and I’ve myself written a number of “C level” or “CEO” letters over the years. I think there is universal agreement the most important characteristic is BREVITY. An efficient CEO is not going to get down in the weeds of an issue because of an unsolicited letter. What you need to do is instantly establish relevance, describe an action which is quick and easy to take—eg NOT “I am going to take time to research this company because they have provided me with some interesting stats and education” but rather “I am going to ask my marketing director to include this company on his short list to check out”—and then get out.
As for tonality, the most important element is showing the reader you respect his or her time as a fellow CEO and makes clear the offer of a personal demo. The tonality consists in being brief, terse and to the point much as if you would be talking to him or her in person.
Do you write letters to high level executives in your own marketing? What works best—brief and to the point, or laced with personal elements? (That’s what my client was expecting, I think.) Inquiring minds (mine, anyway) want to know!
You too can have marketing which is meaning-based.
Maybe you are making no attempt to put any meaning into your marketing today. Or perhaps it has not occurred to you that you should be “understanding — not merely tracking — all forms of customer interactions to deliver online experiences that are more relevant, engaging and profitable than ever.” If so, this free event is for you. And you even get a steak dinner out of it!
Yes, that’s the sound of my tongue in my cheek. This is funny but it’s not. As hard as times are, it’s hard to imagine how somebody could choose as their “light bulb” moment that maybe marketers have not had it occur to them to make sense of their advertising.
By the way, the link is clickable to the real invitation.
You know I’m a fan of Southwest Airlines and a complainer about AT&T Wireless. But how much are my opinions actually worth to those companies? An former client, Satmetrix, has devised a back-of-the-envelope exercise that shows how to calculate the value of word-of-mouth (WOM, pronounced “wom”.)
Start with the following assumptions:
1. The lifetime value of a customer before considering WOM is $1000.
2. Promoters buy more at higher margins and defect at half the average rate, so their value before WOM is 3 times that of an average customer.
3. Detractors’ lifetime value is half that of the average customer due to complaints, higher service costs, and short tenure.
4. On average, Promoters make 4 positive referrals, 0 negative referrals.
5. On average, Detractors make 0 positive referrals, 3 negative referrals.
6. It takes 6 positive referrals to generate a new customer.
7. Each negative referral neutralizes 4 positives.
Based on these assumptions, you can now calculate the following:
1. What is the full value of a promoter compared to an average customer?
2. What is the full value of a detractor?
3. What is it worth to convert a detractor into a promoter?
The results may be eye-opening, and will certainly show why it’s smart to be good to your customers instead of treating them like crap. If you like this exercise, it’s worth converting the formulas into numbers that are are more reflective of your experience with your own customers. Have fun!
After the writeup on Texas barbecue, several folks asked if I would repost my original brisket recipe as text, not an image, for easier reading. Here you go. I’ve added a few thoughts on technique, in italics. This recipe came to me in a package of materials purchased through some kind of multilevel marketing exchange back in the 80s. You would pay the sender $1 for the packet and then send it on to 10 new people, each of whom would send $1 to you. For whatever reason, this did not make me rich, but the recipe is worth all of $1 and more.
5 Easy Steps to Delicious Brisket
(8 to 10 lb. Brisket)
1. First – Rub salt, pepper and brown sugar on both sides of brisket. Leave the fat side up thru entire cooking time. Unlike some, I recommend lightly trimming away the fat while still leaving a good layer over the meat. If you don’t trim at all you are going to end up with a lot of tasty smoked fat.
2. Second – Put on smoker “fat side up”. Remember not open flame, just hot fire with smoke. Charcoal broquett is fine. Smoking is cooking with indirect heat, in which the fire is in another part of the grill and the smoke and heat are drawn across the food by the way you manage your airflow. The good smoky flavor is going to come from chunks of hickory or oak (I find mesquite and apple too light in flavor) that you will soak for 30 minutes or more before adding to the fire. Also, you need a source of moisture, such as a pan of water inside the cooking vessel, to humidify the cooking atmosphere and concentrate the flavor.
3. Third- Leave on smoker for 3 hours checking fire every 45 minutes so bottom of brisket won’t burn. During this time you should be steadily replenishing the charcoal and wood chunks for a constant smoky fire. I like to leave the smoke vents open at the beginning to build up a good fire, then shut them completely to grab all that sweet smoke, then open them a little just before the fire is about to go out and leave that way for duration of cooking.
4. Fourth- To finish for perfect tenderness wrap in foil, put in loaf pan, and finish in the oven at 325 degrees for 2 to 3 hours. The last hour of cooking in oven, test by sticking a fork in brisket at both thick part and thin part. When fork goes in easily without force it’s done.
5. Fifth – Unwrap; let cool slightly before slicing. Remember: Never put B.B.Q. Sauce on brisket while cooking. The smoke gives the flavor and the oven gives great tenderness.
Brisket with perfect smoke ring from Snow’s BBQ, Lexington, Texas.
It isn’t hard to make good brisket. (Brisket = barbecue, at least for the purposes of this article.) You need a reasonably fatty piece of meat, USDA Choice or higher. You need a rub containing brown sugar for a nice crispy crust. You need a smoker with a good tight seal to keep the smoke in while letting air circulate so the fire won’t go out. You need moisture, in the form of well soaked wood or chips and a steaming pan inside the cooker. And most of all you need patience. Have all those elements at the ready and you can look forward to a tender and tasty piece of meat several hours hence, whether you use a massive smoker and aged hickory logs or a backyard kettle with chips on top of charcoal.
It is, however, hard to make great brisket. And that is why Texans of all ages and social perspectives travel considerable distances to taste the best that can be had. On a recent trip to South by Southwest I found myself on such a journey, repeating some of the same itinerary as when I coming down from Dallas in my college days not a few years ago.
Original dining hall at Smitty’s BBQ, Lockhart, Texas.
First stop is Lockhart, 30 miles south of Austin by a fast country highway. This is the home of Smitty’s and Kreuz’, two establishments with near-identical menus and customs. The tale is that the owner of Kreuz died and had a son and a daughter, and he left the business name to the son and the original smokehouse and market to his daughter.
For a proper Smitty’s experience you need to go in from the original entrance on a sidestreet, not the big parking lot next to the highway. You will pass through a long dark hall lined with hard wooden counters and benches. When I was young these walls had big dull knives hanging on chains. You would buy your meat by the pound, bring it to the counter, and hack it with a knife to your liking. I assumed somebody came along and wiped the knives clean at the end of the day. Even so they would not pass today’s health regulations and today the hallway exists only as a relic.
From this you emerge into the pit room, a dark smoky atrium which probably should be visited in summer heat for a properly hellish atmosphere. You will gingerly step past an open fire to get to the counter. In the background a butcher is prepping meats on a butcher block and a counter person will scoop up your order for “hot rounds” (sausages tied together at the end), brisket and ribs by the pound.
You’ll also get a few slices of white bread in case you want to make a sandwich, or crackers if you prefer. The counter person weighs your food and delivers it on a large piece of butcher paper atop a smaller piece of butcher paper (this is your plate) and you carry this into a big dining hall where you can buy sides and soda or beer. There’s sauce on the tables, not the sugary abhorrent “BBQ sauce” found in supermarkets but a thin red mixture that’s like a mild Tabasco.
I always take my first bite neat, no sauce. I am looking for a smoky dryness, an intense flavor of beef combined with the effect of long smoking. Even though brisket is a fatty cut, it has gone through hours of cooking and lost much of its original weight and the first taste and mouth feel should not be fat, pleasurable though that may be. And I don’t want chewy meat. Fall-apart tenderness is a plus, but not mandatory; what is essential is that the texture of the brisket should not distract from the taste.
My meal was a rib, 1/4 pound of brisket and a hot round. The rib was tender but the brisket wasn’t, and it had a row of fat across the top. (Even though brisket is sold as “fat meat”, a thoughtful butcher will trim off this layer before weighing.) And not a lot of smoky flavor. I’m not a sausage person, but the hot round was pleasant, a coarse grind of beef and pork with pepper flecks mixed in and (I think) a bit of grain for density. A side of cole slaw was forgettable.
Identical sausage twins in Lockhart, Texas. Kreuz is on the left (I think.)
Next stop is Kreuz’s which needs less description because everything is pretty much the same as Smitty’s except that the building and the smoke pit room are recently built. But you’ll find the same meats and the same procedures, down to the pair of straight-edged spatulas the server uses to scrape the meat from the butcher block onto the serving paper.
I can’t do a straight up comparison, however, because Kreuz’s was out of brisket! That’s right, they’d sold the last of it shortly before my arrival and no more would be ready for a while. So I had to settle for a slice of “lean”, or barbecued shoulder. It was surprisingly tender for “lean” and tasted fine on a sandwich. The rib was suspiciously light in color but had the smokiest flavor of anything so far. The sausage was fine and tasted a lot like Smitty’s—which isn’t surprising because they apparently come from the same source (see photo).
If you’re headed to Lockhart I’ll send you to Smitty’s, I think. The food is marginally better at Kreutz’ but not enough to make up for the atmosphere at Smitty’s. Still, neither one will give you the best barbecue I’ve had in Texas. For that you have to wait until Saturday and journey a little farther, in a different direction, to Snow’s in the tiny and out of the way town of Lexington.
Snow’s caused a stir in winter 2009 because it was named over the Lockhart twins as the best barbecue in Texas by Texas Monthly, and soon after that the lines were out the door on Main Street and the barbecue was selling out by 10 am. It’s a tribute that the folks at Snow’s (who have other jobs and only smoke for the weekends because traditionally that is when the ranchers brought their cattle to auction) kept their good humor and quality and perspective through it all. Now (4 months after the article) the lines are down to a manageable size again.
What makes Snow’s the best? First, the brisket is sublime. Mine had a perfect smoke ring… pink around the edges of the meat and also pink inside along a layer of fat separating two layers of muscle. (Brisket is the “chest” of the animal, in the very front between the two front legs where a number of muscles come together in a criss-cross arrangement.) And not only was it fork-tender, it fell apart at the first touch of the fork.
Ribs were at least as good as Kreuz. (You may have guessed that pork ribs aren’t really my thing. If made from a commercial pig, they have a pleasant and not very complex flavor and you really can’t go wrong so long as the excess fat is cooked away.) And the sausage was crackling with goodness, cooked until the interior fat was boiled through the skin leaving it crispy and the interior hollow in spots.
Aside from the meat, what makes Snow’s special is that they are good marketers of what they sell. And this is important. It is one thing to bite into a perfect apple in a farmer’s market, something else to dine in a restaurant where a good chef has taken the trouble to ensure that everything is coordinated for a satisfying experience. Snow’s does this where the other establishments don’t.
You can get a plate with sides (solid Texas renditions of mustardy potato salad and vinegary slaw). You can have endless, very good, smoky pinto beans at no extra charge. You can take it outside and dine on picnic tables surrounded by barbecue pits and assorted rolling smokers which I assume are used to cater events in other locations. And you can even get it mail order since they’ve discovered if you smoke once a weekend you might as well smoke again (on Saturday, while the counter is open) and freeze that meat and send it around the country.
But Snow’s does have a weakness and it is their sauce, a sour blend informed by the insidious Carolina influence which has spread across Texas in recent years like Johnson grass. (Thank goodness there is no “pulled pork” at Snow’s.) . Do not under any circumstances put it on your food until you have tasted the meat naked, followed by a trial squirt of the excellent Cajun Chef hot sauce on the table. This should be all you need, especially because Snow’s meat tends toward the salty side and the hot sauce acts as a corrective.
It’s nice to know that the best barbecue store in Texas still has room for improvement. I will be back.
What’s so different about Twitter? And how do you use it to best advantage? One wonderful SXSWi panel, featuring rhetoric professors from the University of Texas, answered these questions by going back to Aristotle, the original documentarian of the use of words as a persuasive medium.
The original rhetoric, as Aristotle described it in 330 BC, was temporal: arguments were oral and words could only be processed in the order they were spoken. Once the written word came along, texts could be read in any order but there was a new limitation, spatiality: once words were put on paper, the printed information itself could not be moved. The web has made possible easily movable written information and Twitter carries this to the logical extreme with a constantly moving stream which is in essence a personal newspaper with an audience of one. (Here I am brutally paraphrasing the segment of Prof. John Jones which can be seen on ZDnet.)
No two people will ever see the same Twitter stream, and you yourself will never see your stream in exactly the same way twice. Yet it is very easy to control and edit your personal newspaper through the people you choose to follow. My experience is that if you start with a few people you find inherently interesting, like @guykawasaki or @broylesa (the terrific food columnist for the Austin Statesman, who stokes my interest in eating and makes me feel like I’m still at SXSW) and then check out @ tags in their tweets to see who THEY correspond with, you will soon build a fascinating stream. And if you’re interested in a topic, whether news or personal curiosity, a # search takes you in another satisfying direction.
Back to the panel, they said the best way to write your own tweets is to take into account the possibility of modularity and reuse. Prof. Jim Brown observed that every tweet has both an intended audience (the person you identify with an @ tag at the beginning, plus your known followers) and an unintended audience (everybody else, now or in the future.) A corollary of this is that the often-levied charge of Twitter narcissism is bogus. “Narcissism isn’t in the status update, it’s in the person annoyed by the update. If you’re annoyed by the tweet, it wasn’t meant for you.”
Apparently last year was the year of Facebook at SXSWi, and 2009 was the year of Twitter. Many of the sessions were specifically about Twitter, and everybody everywhere was twittering away on the new TweetDeck desktop application. We SXSWiers seem to like Twitter very much. Savant and trendsetter Guy Kawasaki was asked in a session to confirm, “If they charged for Twitter you’d probably pay whatever they asked” and he responded “that’s right.”
During the last World Cup commentators often referred to the “samba wave” or “samba style” of the Brazil team…. the idea being they were carried along by an undulating wave that propelled them forward and confused their opponents. I never did understand this as it related to soccer, but it’s a perfect metaphor for SXSW Interactive. Here are a few thoughts in closing.
The attendees:
Unlike the typical tech or marketing conference, everybody is here because they want to be here. This makes them more engaged and passionate.
Everybody I met is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. It’s like graduating as high school valedictorian (not that I was) and going to a college where everybody is a valedictorian.
As a corollary, everybody is curious and wants to talk to you because they assume you’re as smart as they are. If you’re not, you get the benefit of the doubt. That’s a good thing.
The conference:
There’s no way to predict whether a session will be good or not or even whether it will be about the topic in the program. So sit on the end of the row and don’t be shy about getting up and leaving if it doesn’t work out.
Best events for me were the brilliant “Did Aristotle Twitter?” rhetoric panel with U Texas profs, the two food panels for personal interest, and most anything on Twitter including of course the now infamous #tweethall which wasn’t an event at all.
Core conversations are painful. You will be stuffed into a room like sardines and sit on the floor. Go to these only if you have a passionate interest in the subject discussed.
PowerPoints are over. With a couple of exceptions even the most visually brilliant presenters had basically no ppts at all, just a few text slides they barely referred to.
The venue:
The Austin Convention Center was designed by a lunatic, in a U-shaped configuration with the tips of the U 100 yards from each other as the crow flies but a 15 minute walk on the ground. And the SXSW management,with gentle humor, tended to put interactive events at the very outside with the film events in between.
When you go to the parties, pay attention to the music. You are likely to hear something seriously good. This is Austin, after all.
At the SXSW Web Awards on March 15, the Adobe presenter gave a shout out to “all the social media gurus in the audience” and a titter ran through the crowd. The reason it’s funny is that, certain people’s business cards notwithstanding, this whole business is simply too new for anybody to be an expert. Everybody is figuring it out as they go.
Here are a couple of examples of companies that are figuring it out. They’ll do as best practices until something better comes along, and they’re also good illustrations of why companies are so fascinated by the potential of social media.
Everybody in the US knows about the Oscar Mayer WienerMobile: a funky vehicle shaped like a hot dog that tours America and shows up in the oddest places. In years past, someone who saw the WienerMobile might have told a few friends about it. Now, they’re likely to Twitter to a much larger audience… and Oscar Mayer’s PR folks are regularly searching the subject #wienermobile so they can respond to these posters, thank them for their interest and offer a coupon or just a continuing relationship through mutual following. (This illustration was presented by their PR consultant in one of the SXSW Core Conversations. Didn’t catch his name.)
Steve Barnes writes Table Hopping, a lively restaurant blog on the Albany Times Union website. When he reported that Red Lobster was going to offer flame broiled fish, skeptical readers commented that installing a flame broiler is very expensive and they were probably going to just sear it with a poker. But then the Red Lobster president himself found the thread and commented that indeed they were going to install flame broilers with a plausible explanation.
Not only did this defuse the negativity in the comment thread, but it got a new post from Steve Barnes himself: “Check out comment No. 18 on the post below about Red Lobster. It’s from the company’s president — yep, the top guy of a 680-location chain — and it’s not a canned reply but one that addresses specific comments made by Table Hopping readers.”
That’s good PR you can’t buy, but you have to work for it. And what is happening here is that Red Lobster is monitoring comments throughout the social media space using a tool like radian6 or boorah, both previously mentioned on Otisregrets, to keep track of comments so they can be responded to.
I was looking forward to the session called “Twitter for Marketers: Is It Still Social Media?” but so were lots of other folks, and when we arrived at the stroke of 5:00 pm the doors were closed. So about 50 of us migrated down the hall to the Panel Green Room area where we conducted our own discussion that gave most of us exactly the shared perspective we were craving.
This discussion continues at #tweethall (do a search for that subject on Twitter) plus you can find a fabulous post at La Luna Blanca which documents the event in detail including a number of best practices. Thank you @lunablanca !
One question that did not quite get answered in the tweethall was how do you manage Twitter in a large organization where individuals are encouraged to tweet but you also have a corporate voice you want to maintain. Those who commented, including some folks from very big companies, said essentially that they do it ad hoc. You keep track of who is talking about your company with a #yourcompany hashtag (a subject search with your company’s name substituted for yourcompany) and try to coordinate efforts without stifling enthusiasm.
The session prior to this one, though, had an answer that made sense, maybe because it came from journalists who are used to communicating with their public. Presenters were @robquig and @dan360man from @statesman and @coloneltribune. For an example with lots of best practices, check out @statesman or @broylesa … the general blogging guy and the food writer respectively … and then click the links to both of their websites.
These bloggers know what their audience wants to hear about: insider tips on what’s going on around Austin plus late breaking relevant news as well as, since they are inside SXSW, their immediate take on the day’s events. None of this “wish I got more sleep last night” personal bloviation. Then, when you click through to the web pages, you’ll find an aggregate of other tweeters at the same organization with links to their own handles or blogs.
I think this model should make good sense for companies too. Anyone is encouraged to tweet, but they always include a link back to a corporate page that organizes the tweeters. Make sense?
