Agger Communications

There is a huge re-birth of “Word of Mouth” marketing. This re-birth has happened because of the internet and the evolution of social media. Social media has really flattened the world and allowed people to connect at any moment. Through these connections relationship building happens.  I can hop onto Twitter at any moment day or night and connect with someone who shares my passion for marketing.

Editor’s Note: If you haven’t watched Gary speak, you might want to check out this video. Some language is PG-13, so you’ve been warned.

This really is an amazing revolution. We talk, we share, we exchange ideas, we listen, we support each other. We are connecting and building relationships. The strength of relationships, the currency of caring, and the power of word of mouth are revolutionizing business today!

We talk passionately about things, products, brands, and causes we care about it. We tweet about it on Twitter. We post about it on FaceBook. If we really love something, we will even write a 1000 word blog post about it.

Social media is all about sharing and a total stream of consciousness of what is happening in the world and our worlds.

There are some people, businesses, and brands standing on the sidelines very wary of this whole social media train. This train is moving down the tracks and they are standing on the sidelines watching it move by them, moving forward into the future.

If you know any person, brand, or business that needs convincing of the Power of Social Media and that it is here to stay (maybe not always the same platforms, they are bound to evolve, and new platforms are being created right now) and that they need to hop onto that train, give them Gary Vaynerchuk’s book “The Thank You Economy.”

His book does an amazing job convincing you that social media is not just a fad or somewhere that a bunch of teenagers are hanging out. Social media is not just about a specific platform, it’s about the opportunity to listen and connect with people and customers. In the old days, you had to find and pay for an expensive focus group for a product launch or to get feedback. Now you have it all at your finger tips 24 hours a day for free.

Chapter 3: “Why Smart People Dismiss Social Media, and Why They Shouldn’t”

Gary has talked to countless businesses and brands over the past 6 years and he has compiled a Top 10 list of objections and excuses he has heard along the way. He takes each objection and provides fresh information, facts, and even case studies to obliterate those objections. Some of my favorites are:

#1 There’s no ROI
#4 Social media is just another trend that will pass
#5 We need to control our message
#7 We are doing fine without it

and the famous…

#8 We tried it and it doesn’t work!

Gary Vaynerchuk’s best-selling book “Crush It” was very insightful, but his new book The Thank You Economy is now my new recommendation!

This is a book that I will be reading again and again and is now an importantpart of my resource library.

Going through my files, I found a Wall Street Journal article by Katherine Rosman on how the social media world is embracing stationery — particularly of the heavy stock, minimalist, letter-pressed variety.

While United States Postal Service sees a decline in mailed letters overall, tech-savvy paper-lovers—in frequent contact via blogs, Facebook and Twitter—are giving rise to a host of small stationery makers.

There is no doubt that receiving — and writing — handwritten notes can make a powerful impression.

This is especially true in this era of text message-centric communication.

Notes can fall into three categories:

1) one from a super-busy somewhat important person

2) one from a non-busy but extremely important person

3) and the personal (like a thank-you note from your son who is learning how to write.)

In each of these cases, the note card is like a work of art, something to be safely tucked into a mirror above the mantel.

Think about the opportunity you have right now to reach out to clients and send a personal note their way.

Properly done, the handwritten note is a real relationship builder because it says to your client or customer that you have taken the time to recognize them as an individual and that their business is important to you.

It’s also a great way to differentiate yourself from the competition because so few people bother to follow up at all, let alone follow up in ways that are as impressive as a handwritten note.

As a former legal reporter, I used to get pitches from PR folks every day. Some were actually helpful to me, since I often needed “evergreen” pieces, or it may have been a slow news day.

1. Like Fight Club, the first rule about publicity, is not talking about publicity. Never mention that the reason why you’re calling the reporter is to get “publicity.” The only thing that would annoy me more was the qualifier “free” publicity.

2. Make your firm incidental to the story. Lead with compelling content and the fact that you’re a thought leader in a particular area — and the credentials and depth of resources your firm offers will be apparent to the reader.

3. “Call my secretary to schedule an interview appointment.” Yes, you are busy, but so are reporters. If getting a hold of you for an interview is like pulling teeth, they will almost always move on to the next credible source.

As we wait for Apple to announce its newest cloud computing service, lawyers and firm administrators may want to be careful.

The ABA’s Commission on Ethics 20/20 has issued proposed changes to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct regarding the use of Cloud Computing technologies. According to The Connecticut Law Tribune’s article, Attorneys in the Cloud May Get ABA Wake-Up Call With Proposed Rules, by Marie Grady, “Proposed rules would require lawyers to take reasonable steps to stay abreast of the benefits and risks associated with technology used by Dropbox and other popular cloud computing services.”

As digital communications continue to infiltrate the practice of law, it is important to remember that the rules regarding how attorneys conduct business remain ever steadfast and confidentiality is at the top of that list.

While Cloud Computing has its own set of risks, so too does storing any information on any computer that has an Internet connection. In today’s age of spyware, malware, viruses and hackers, it is critically important that law firms take every step necessary to secure and backup client information – don’t get stuck with your head in the clouds.

Whether you know it or not, when you compose an e-mail, you’re designing. When you reply to an e-mail, you’re designing. When you assemble a grant proposal, a business plan, an executive summary, you’re designing.

And good design gives you an edge. How big an edge? It’s the difference between getting read or getting ignored. You don’t have to understand Photoshop or other design programs to be able to create clean business communications. You just have to develop an eye for the difference between visual order and visual noise.

I often get inspired by the work in Communications Arts magazine. The subscription is not cheap, but when you get stuck, it’s great to see how the pros do it.

Everyone could benefit from taking an introductory design course at a local college or reading a great design book, like the aforementioned Communications Arts or A Book about Design- Complicated Doesn’t Make It Good by Mark Gonyea, which can be read in its entirety here.

But if you don’t have time for that, here are some basic rules:

• Blur your eyes and ask yourself, Does this communication have a sense of order, or does looking at it give me a headache?
• Have the decency to shorten your communication. Follow the wise insight attributed equally to Twain, Churchill, Pascal, and Lincoln (“If I had more time I’d have written a shorter letter”) or Richard Bach’s maxim (“Good writing is all about the power of the deleted word”) and remember that length is design, too.
• Clean up messes. If you’re sending someone a conversation thread but only one sentence of it is important, delete the extraneous 42,000 words. Delete automatically generated dotted lines, indentations, and fonts in multiple colors.
• Reduce the number of hard returns, especially in e-mails. They create visual noise.
• Avoid huge monolithic blocks of text. No one will read them.
• Don’t get fancy. If you haven’t taken a design course, stick with a classic font. Don’t use more than three font variations on a page. That means changing typeface, size, or style (italics or bold). Don’t underline.
• For e-mails, pick a font that’s web friendly. (Arial, Helvetica, Lucida Sans, Palatino, Verdana.) That way, you’ll be sure that the way your message looks to you is the way it will appear to the reader.
• Break some rules. Where tradition might tell you to fill every page of your business plan with text, identify the single most important sentence on a page, blow it up to 36-point type, and give it the entire page to itself.
• If you don’t know what the rules are, be careful about breaking them. The point is not to be, or look, rebellious. It’s to be effective.
• Learn to use pull-quotes. If you have a lengthy block of text, pull out the most important sentence and create an easy point of entry for the reader, the way a magazine would.
• Learn to love white space. Don’t fill the page edge to edge with content. Leave room for things to breathe.
• A picture is worth a thousand words. Break up a business plan or a memo with a professional image. Stock photography or illustration houses like istock are your friend.
• Don’t use tacky images. If you’re generally tacky, I can’t help you with that. Just try not to be. Think a nice black Armani suit or cocktail dress versus, I don’t know, a Worldwide Wrestling Federation t-shirt.
• Don’t give people whiplash. Don’t center one thing, left justify another, right justify another, center a fourth, and so on. It makes things look like an obstacle course. Pick one justification and stick with it.
• Be careful with color if you don’t know what you’re doing. You could hurt someone. Stick to one color to be safe — black — and use shades of gray to add sophistication.

If you forget all this, just think simplicity. Less is more. Good design doesn’t add stuff. It takes stuff away. Don’t get fancy, don’t overdo anything, don’t use gimmicks. Simplicity and power are not mutually exclusive. They are often one and the same.

Note: This blog post was adapted from a recent article in the Harvard Business Review.

Going through my files, I found a New York Times article, ”When a Trusted Brand Disappears,” that discusses how brands — in this case, the elusive Camay soap — can achieve cult-like followings in the online marketplace (Curiously, a woman quoted in the article is from “Jersey Shore,” PA…you can’t make this stuff up!)

I remember having to pick up some Lifebuoy soap for a family member in Nassau while attending a destination wedding in The Bahamas once.

And in case the title of this post is teasing you, during the 1920s, an outfield wall advertisement for Lifebuoy stated, “The Phillies use Lifebuoy”. One night a vandal sneaked in and added to the ad, “And they still stink.”

While thinking about an old New York Times article on digital fatigue, I thought it might be timely to list the bloggers that I read every day. In a half hour (about the time it takes for two small cups of coffee), a quick tour of these sites can get you up-to-speed on the world of social media and content marketing:

* Mitch Joel: Six Pixels of Separation. Mitch is CEO and founder of Twist Image, a successful digital agency in Montreal and Toronto. Mitch also has a very celebrated podcast which he regularly cohosts with Joe “not the 30 second” Jaffe.

* Scott Monty. Author of the Social Media Marketing Blog and head of digital marketing at Ford, Scott is full of great content. His blog focuses on the convergence of marketing, advertising, PR on the web.

* Brian Solis. “Defining the convergence of media and influence.” A forward thinker. Talented writer with a strong slant on PR as opposed to pure marketing.

* Robert Scoble: Scobleizer. Robert is Managing Director at Rackspace (cloud hosting). He is prolific and multimedia in his content creation. Lots of raw content, great links. Probably need to be a bit geeky to really get the most out of it. A great example of mobile blogging.

* Jonathon Baskin Dim Bulb. Jonathon is a great writer and often takes quite bold stands worth fighting for. His articles are usually thought and/or thought provoking.

Note: These ideas were shared by a good friend and social media mentor Minter Dial. You should subscribe to his e-zine ‘The Myndset N.E.W.S’, at The Myndset.

Skadden Arps launched an iPhone app (it works on the iPad too) called “Skadden Start Here,”  Users can follow Skadden’s recruiting schedule, locate its global offices and learn important facts about the firm.

And the app comes preloaded with contact information for Howard L. Ellin, the partner in charge of global hiring, and Carol Sprague, a recruiting director.

“It was time for us to do an update of our marketing materials, and seeing all of our summer associates connected to their mobile devices, we said, ‘Let’s put this information out there in a fun way,’” said Christina Fox, Skadden’s global manager of attorney recruiting.

The first rule of attracting Twitter followers is don’t talk about attracting Twitter followers.

Lately, I’ve noticed a trend to overuse the hashtag feature on Twitter in an attempt to “game” the search query features. Yes, has tags can have an ironic effect, where they have transcended the 140-characters-or-less microblogging platform, and have become a new cultural shorthand, finding their way into chat windows, e-mail and face-to-face conversations.

Using hashtags can add humor, context and interior monologues to messages — and everyday conversation. As Susan Orlean wrote in a New Yorker blog post titled “Hash,” the symbol can be “a more sophisticated, verbal version of the dread winking emoticon that tweens use to signify that they’re joking.”

While not terribly complicated, hashtags have some unwritten rules.

1) The primary one to remember: don’t overuse them.

If every one of your tweets is a hashtag, you dilute the usefulness of them by fragmenting the conversation. In addition, many people will shy away from you because it seems like SPAM. Also, the quickest way to lose or detract followers on Twitter (if more views and followers are a goal), is to write in a way that seems desperate to attract followers.

2) Another simple tip: give your hashtag context. Most people won’t actually know what your hashtag means, so give a quick explanation in one of your tweets or, if you’re making a hashtag, make it very apparent what it’s talking about.

3) Finally, if you’re looking to create a hashtag, be sure that it adds value for yourself and your followers. The best way to utilize them is when you need to organize information. Conferences, major events, and even reminders (i.e. #todo) can help organize specific tweets and make life easier on you and your followers.

On Twitter, content is king. Just play it cool and write high-quality, pertinent stuff on topics you care about and folks will find and follow you. No gimmicks necessary.

• Listen more, talk less;
• Ask thoughtful, open-ended questions to learn more;
• Avoid promoting your experience and that of your firm (it’s the cost of admission to even get this
far);
• Find out your clients’/contacts’ pain points and address how you may be of service in these areas
or offer qualified referrals;
• Under-promise and over-deliver with work product;
• Exceed expectations every time.

And as proof that rainmaking is always hot topic, here is an article I wrote for The Legal Intelligencer on the topic nearly 14 years ago.