The zero resilience Warcraft PvP marketer

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Feb 10, 2012 in Advertising, Marketing, World of Warcraft | 1 comment

In World of Warcraft, player vs. player combat (PvP) is one of the most engaging, frustrating, and defining aspects of the game. You match up with other players in battlegrounds, arenas, and out in the virtual world, looking to gain honor and rewards for defeating the opposing faction.

One of the greatest advantages a player can have is proper PvP gear loaded with resilience, a property that reduces the damage you take from other players. Players with high resilience gear are extremely difficult to kill. Players with no resilience gear can be crushed relatively easily. Getting resilience gear is something of a catch 22: to get the best gear, you have to play a lot of PvP, but you die an awful lot as you earn that gear.

The other night, I was playing in a battleground on my druid and noticed that one particular member of the opposing faction was fairly easy to kill but was playing their class very effectively, a warrior. This particular warrior wasn’t trying to kill us outright – we were too overgeared for him to do so, and he had relatively little resilience on his gear.

What he did have working for him was knowledge of how his class worked and what abilities that were gear-independent, like stuns, snares, silences, and other forms of crowd control that make life difficult and inconvenient for your enemies. He’d keep a healer silenced and unable to do their job while his better geared buddies would kill the rest of us. He’d do stuns and fears which kept our team out of commission just long enough to achieve their objective.

What does this have to do with marketing? As a marketer, you don’t necessarily need to have the best of the best in gear, equipment, paid services, and ad budget in order to be effective. You do have to know the tools, tactics, and methods you have at your disposal inside and out. If you only have a few dollars in your ad budget, you know how to play them for maximum benefit. You know what social media channels work best for which kinds of content, and as a result, you can dance around competitors that are slower, less agile, less aware, and less effective, even if they have bigger budgets, more staff, better tools, etc. Eventually your proficiency with the tools you have will yield greater rewards, enough that you can play on an even footing with previously better equipped competitors.

How do you become this legendary marketing professional? The same way you become that player in PvP: lots of practice, lots of reading up to see what abilities you have access to, lots of watching videos and studying your competitors and the best-in-class models for how they do things. Copy what they do until you can mimic it effectively, then adapt it until you’ve fine tuned it for how you work best.

May you soundly beat your competitors in the marketing battleground.

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Get the first cup on the table as fast as possible

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Feb 9, 2012 in Advertising, Customer Service, Marketing | 1 comment

This morning, John Wall and I were discussing the merits and drawbacks of the diner in which we do Marketing Over Coffee each week.

One of the hallmarks of good service at a restaurant is that things initially happen at a rapid pace. You get seated quickly and your first order of drinks or appetizers is taken quickly. If you run a tight shop with great service, you get that first cup of coffee/drink/appetizer on the table as soon as possible.

Why? Because up until the point that goods and services are actually delivered, it’s really easy for the customer to walk out. There’s no check to pay because nothing of value has been delivered. Once that first cup is on the table, you have now created a legal and social obligation between you and the customer. If they walk out, they now must pay for the goods and services already rendered.

If you want to sell more, if you want to get more out of your marketing and sales efforts, try getting the first order on the table as soon as possible. Deliver at top speed. Get the commitment, even if it’s something as meager as a cup of coffee, and you’ll be on your way to bigger business opportunities.

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Twitter favorites power tips

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Feb 8, 2012 in Advertising, Marketing, Technology | 2 comments

When I first started working with Blue Sky Factory, I noticed something peculiar about the company’s Twitter favorites. It wasn’t actual favorite tweets at all – it was instead a collection of praise the company had received online. This was the brainchild of DJ Waldow, the community manager, and what started effectively as a content management system (because Twitter doesn’t provide search outside of a 2 week window) has become one of my favorite sales and marketing tools.

Here’s why this is powerful. In many ways, it’s just like recommendations on LinkedIn: a public set of testimonials and endorsements that other people have given you. What makes it more powerful to me than LinkedIn is that it’s a pile of tweets: very short, very compact praise that you can easily aggregate and show to any prospective customer. They can see for themselves just how many people think highly of your company (or you), and do so quickly through a very fast scan. For individual sales people and marketers, you can favorite any tweet you want, so if you don’t want to leverage a company’s entire collection of positive tweets, you can always favorite just a subset and showcase those.

Want to kick it up a notch? Take the raw text of your Twitter favorites page, clean it up a bit, and feed it to Wordle. (the process for preparing text for Wordle is outlined in this blog post)

Now you’ve got an idea of what words people are consistently using to praise you or your organization. Start using those words in your marketing materials instead of your standard marketing-speak, because what other people say about you now will resonate with the experience prospective customers should have with you.

Kick it up another notch! Using the SimplePie PHP library, add your Twitter favorites to your blog and suddenly you’ve got a curated feed of nice things people have said about you or your company available right on your website:

You’ve earned the praise already. Take these powerful methods of aggregating it and displaying it so that it can work for you to land new business, reassure and reinforce your value to existing business, and help grow your business reputation even more.

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