Jan 6, 2011

I was skeptical.

I have too many things to keep up with already.

Half the time I suck at the things I do keep up with.

I routinely fail at Twitter and checked my Google Reader and Tumblr for the first time in three months today.

Enter Quora.

I like good marketing books as much as the zombie kid likes turtles. I asked this simple question.

Now, I honestly can’t keep up. I’ve had incredible responses in minutes. Including Dave Morin, Ramit Sethi and other folks that I look up to. Minutes.

I’m getting an update notification per sentence typed in this post.

Which leads me to my main point…

I am an idiot.

I refer to myself as a dumb guy, but I honestly doubted Quora. Purely for intelligent Q&A alone… this is gold. Consider me sold, hooked, signed, sealed, delivered. This is awesome.

Now I have the best marketing and product book list there is and it is being added to as I type.

Join in with your suggestions.

Want to be a better marketer? Start helping out with Customer Support.

Are you really in tune with your product? Can you name the top three issues that customers are experiencing? If you’re trapped in an elevator with a user of your product, could you solve their issues?

The 300 pound gorilla in the room… do you know your customers and the problems they face?

Too often as marketers, we focus on fluff instead of substance. There are plenty of fluffy things that have to get done and are valuable to do well, but distancing ourselves from our products is a huge mistake to make.

Coming from a product management background definitely gives me a little advantage, but there are ways we can make sure that we know (in detail) the product we’re branding, promoting, marketing and helping grow. I’ve helped support Phonebooth since I’ve been at Bandwidth.com, but in the last two months… I’ve been given a bigger responsibility in responding to our support tickets. While it can definitely be time consuming and requires patience, it is helping me to get to know the product even more intimately. Take into account that our Product and Marketing teams are joined at the hip… and I’m still learning a lot by assisting in the support charge.

Taking for granted the questions that are asked (or not asked) is a critical mistake. Not only does it help with product knowledge, it aids in the shaping and creation of new documentation, collateral and branding to make sure that your message is resonating with users.

So how can we improve our marketing by understanding customer issues?

Partner with Customer Support to listen in to calls or help respond to email or support tickets.

If you’re scared to make this jump, don’t be. Nearly every time I’ve reached out to another department at any company to learn about what they deal with… they have welcomed me with open arms. It is nice to understand what others do on a daily basis and you may even hear answers to problems or objections that you haven’t thought about… they may not even be on your Key Message Architecture (do you even have one?).

If you aren’t currently involved with the support of the product you are marketing… you have to get involved in some way.

Reach out to customers via phone, email, social media or face-to-face and ask them questions.

If you’re truly listening, you will never have a problem finding someone to talk. Think about it… if we face issues or have things we’d like to improve, what do you do when someone asks us to talk about it? This usually excites me because it means that even little ‘ole me can have a say and they may even act on the things I experience. Reach out to your customers.

If you don’t know where your customers are… that is a bigger problem. Odds are someone in your company can point you in the right direction with phone numbers, email addresses and even a few local contacts you could take to lunch. But are you talking with your customers on Twitter? If not, here are a few tips from an article I wrote for Pragmatic Marketing “Twitter for Product Managers.”

Create ways to receive feedback.

At @Phonebooth, we use @UserVoice to get a pulse of what our customers want (check out “How Phonebooth uses UserVoice” on the UserVoice blog). Many companies use Get Satisfaction, Salesforce Ideas or a number of other tools to get an idea of features that customers would like to see implemented. Creating these feedback channels gives you the ability to receive great insight into how your product is consumed and also allows you to create a dialogue with folks using your product. Don’t solely use those channels for status updates, start and engage in conversations.

If you’re not using a tool to manage your feedback, try writing a blog post soliciting feedback from your users.

Discuss the top issues with other folks in the company.

Internal discussion will teach you a lot. You may learn new issues. You may learn that internal communication needs to be revamped. You may learn new ways to solve existing problems. Don’t forget the power of talking to other people with different responsibilities and see what you can absorb from them. Everyone has a different perspective and can give you valuable insights as to what they’re facing. You may also be surprised to know how out of the loop some of your coworkers are about your product… find ways to remedy this…

Many companies still deploy job rotations and keep everyone on their toes and constantly learning. Are you doing the same? If not, how are you finding ways to get customer feedback and use it to improve your products?

Photo from GlennPeb

Want to improve your company, product, career or self? Be humble.

In 2001, I spent a week in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti helping to build a mission house to allow missionaries better access to the Afghan Village. It was one of those life changing experiences that doesn’t really hit you until you get home. The people, the heat, the hard work, the dire conditions, the supreme optimism by folks who don’t even have water to drink and genuine kindness are just a few of the things that I remember.

I’ve always been a bit sarcastic and one to make light of most situations (thanks Dad!) and wanted to describe my experience to my church once we were home. As typical, I was prepared with a few funny stories (humor always works in presentations) and some very descriptive depictions of what it was like there. I remembered one of my favorite quotes from the trip, “You don’t know what it is like in Haiti until you’ve seen it, smelt it and felt it.”

I stepped up to the podium ready to wow everyone and demonstrate my communication skills that were about to lend themselves to NC State University for the next six years and I froze. I realized that this wasn’t about storytelling, or how the people there were more inclined to give you the shirt off their back than 99% of the United States, but it was about how skewed our views and perceptions are – er – my views and perceptions.

I fought back tears as I described the experience (and lost for the most part) and advocated that everyone should find a way to go to Haiti. That was my senior year of high school and it changed my life instantly. Many of the superficial high school things were suddenly so petty and immature…it was like I grew wise beyond my years in one week.

Almost 10 years later, Haiti has been hit with one of the worst disasters in history. A nation with a history of corrupt leaders and incredible people is in peril once again. As meaningless and insignificant as I am to that situation, it has forced me to re-evaluate things a bit…just like when I returned home from my trip in 2001. The home I stayed in is now rubble…five people died in that house last week. The children’s hospital (very last picture) I spent some time in collapsed…it was one of the incredible images in the Boston Herald.

“Only after disaster can we be ressurected.” – Chuck Palahniuk

So what?

It is extremely easy to keep pushing forward without evaluating your performance. Do you have a baseline? As companies and professionals, representing products and services, it is all too easy to find ourselves in the superiority bubble trying to inform the masses on why our widget is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Which coincidentally, the inventor of the bread slicer never made a huge impact…he sold the slicer and not the sliced bread.

We need to focus on meeting consumer and customer needs. Too often decisions are made in corporate war rooms by many smart people, but that could be missing the mass-market mark. Cough, cough, let’s put an inferior television in a refrigerator and bump the price a couple thousand dollars.

I challenge you to evaluate how you are meeting the needs of your market more frequently than infrequently. Don’t wait for a disaster to shake you into action. If we are proactive with our companies, products, careers and selves we will see exponential improvement.

Listen, learn and react smartly.

My experience in Haiti always reminds me to continuously improve and not to take anything for granted. To be people-first.

If you sell wheelchairs, have you spent a week in a wheelchair? If you sell games, have you played them? Have you watched passively to see how customers or potential customers use and interact with what you’re selling?

There are a lot of smart people in the world…heck…you are probably one of them, but sometimes it pays to be the dumb guy (that’s the basis of what I hope to present at Ignite Raleigh actually).

Humility is scarce these days, but if you take the time to remove the World’s Smartest Man cap and listen attentively…you may be surprised what you learn.

Going to Haiti changed my life. I went with New Directions International and it was incredible. Please do what you can to help the Haitian people and make sure you give or volunteer with a reputable organization.

Twitter for Product Management

Twitter birds by Luc Latulippe

A few months ago, I was fortunate enough to connect with Steve Johnson (@sjohnson717) at a Pragmatic Marketing training and we chatted about the need for a guide to Twitter for product managers. There had been an introductory article, but they needed some examples.

I was happy to oblige and ended up being published in the Pragmatic Marketing newsletter.

I didn’t even post it on my blog for some reason. My bad there. :)

To read the full article, “Real World Twitter Usage for Product Managers” simply hop over to Pragmatic Marketing.

Earlier this year, Nicole Reineke introduced Twitter to many product managers with Using Twitter for Product Management. The topic was well received and had a few comments about applying Twitter to markets that aren’t the most tech savvy. As a product manager in a niche that isn’t often talked about, I felt it would be useful to walk through some of my experiences using Twitter in a niche where customers aren’t seeking out industry experts.