The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

I've always thought of marketing's job as to get people to "look at the menu". This might involve getting them in the door, inviting them to take a seat and describing what the restaurant's about and what to expect, introducing your waitperson and things like that. That's pretty much where I think marketing stops.

Likewise, I've always thought of sales as the talented waitperson who describes what's on the menu and the specials the chef's got in the kitchen, takes your order, makes sure that what you're ordering is something you're going to like, makes suggestions for rounding out the meal, makes sure it arrives just as you expected and follows up in case you need anything else.

Yes, there is some overlap and it's still basically the pitch and the close. Anyway, with that in mind, the students decided to host their own site and provide all the content in order to take their project to the next step.

What follows is my email encouraging their decision. The rest of this arc will be the back and forth as they and I learn how to best promote UMass Lowell to potential students.

First, what's the overall goal of this work?

Once you've established the overall goal of the work, how does/will the TrueUML site contribute to meeting that goal? The YouTube site?

Which is your sales channel, which is your marketing channel?

Hint: Remember what I said about the sales funnel? NextStage uses a much broader concept, The X Funnel (you can also read about sales funnels in Listening to and Seeing Searches). What part does each site play in your X Funnel?

I'd like to document your progress in my blog. BUT!!! that means the pressure is going to be on because people will be watching. If you've been on the NextStage Evolution site and read through our Principles, you know that I won't knowingly put people in uncomfortable situations.

SO!!! I won't document this effort unless you all want me to. Talk about this amongst yourselves and get back to me, preferably sooner rather than later.

Also, I'm going to start using some of the pictures you provided in your signature files on my blog and elsewhere. Let me know if you DON'T want me to use your pictures. I'll use them unless I receive an email from you stating that I can't.

And a last thing...I want you to know I listen to and learn from you, probably more than you might think. In the 2:30pm class (I think that was the one), we were talking about the game and one student and Dr. Moser provided some good reasons for not playing it as it was originally presented. Take a look at my signature file now and you'll see that I've modified the advertising strategy.

See that? Old dogs can learn new tricks. Thanks to the class for teaching me something.

Joseph

Links for this post:

• Media Strategies blog posts
• Social Network blog posts
• UMass Lowell blog posts

I'll be speaking at the San Francisco April '07 Emetrics Summit on Quantifying and Optimizing the Human Side of Online Marketing on May 7, 2007. Come on by and say hello.