Trust Me — Your Reputation Really Matters 

The past two years have been transformative for us as marketers, consumers and employees. The economic upheaval has certainly touched us all. But has it changed us?

In fact, I believe the past two years have presented us as marketers with one of our biggest challenges — reestablishing and rebuilding trust. We’ve been hit with redefining moments at every turn — the Great Recession, the Gulf oil spill, Wall Street financial/foreclosure crises, even the Cuyahoga County government scandals here in Ohio. Are the cars we buy safe to drive? Is this new drug safe? Can I believe my CEO when he says our jobs are safe?

Simply put, trust is the front door for business. You can’t make a sale unless the consumer trusts your company and its products. And you can’t expect your employees to perform unless they trust the company to treat them right and to treat their customers right.

Although we intuitively feel that trust has taken a hit (we all have that sixth sense as effective marketers!), survey data bears this out. A study by Right Management in May 2010 showed that only 20 percent of 4000 employees in the United States said they always trusted their managers to make the best decisions.  Think about that. (The next time your CEO is about to give a speech to company employees, lean over and say, “Don’t be nervous. Remember, only one in five employees here today is likely to believe what you say!”

Why does trust in the workplace matter? Forget soft concepts of altruism; let’s just look at financial payback. A 2010 survey of 211 companies by Interaction Associates found that companies in the top 10 percent of its Trust Index showed a price/earnings ratio that was 28.5 percent higher than those in the bottom 10 percent.

Going forward, this will be a time when employees and customers judge companies and their leaders by how they act as much as by what they say. And as marketers, it’s our charge, our mission, to lead this effort. That’s tough duty, but given that we’re the only ones at the table — not manufacturing, operations, finance, engineering — charged with the responsibility for listening, it’s our responsibility to make sure our executive leaders are truly hearing what customers and employees have to say. Honesty and authenticity will be key values driving business going forward, not just our usual value-proposition, features-and-benefits discussion. Is your organization up to those standards?
 

How Much for Online?

It’s marketing budgeting time, the annual discussion we have with all of our clients. Our position has always been that it’s important to surround the “sweet spot” on all sides; in 2011, that remains an online and offline world.

In fact, last year, according to our annual study conducted jointly with Hearst Publishing, 56 percent of budgets were spent on traditional tools and 44 percent were spent online. What decisions are you making for the upcoming year? Share your insights with us, at goo.gl/h4A3.

Press Tours Go Social

Trade magazines are applying new ways of thinking throughout their business, and that extends even to the tried-and-true press tour. On a recent agency tour through the electronics and manufacturing media, we met one group of editors who now call themselves “Content Managers.” We think that’s the right approach, as we’re all in the “content distribution” business today. An article we would have once written just for publication in a magazine now is destined to be re-purposed as content for a wide variety of end uses — as a webcast, a white paper, a blog post, even content directed to Wikipedia.

Other interesting changes: one editor took pictures of the presenters on his cell phone to post to the magazine’s Facebook page; another asked if the presentation could be recorded on video.
 

Congratulations to Goldstein Group client Radisphere, whose new web presence (www.radisphere.net) took top honors in the web category of the “eHealthcare Leadership Awards.” The new web site (can you guess which agency created the site?) is part of a total rebranding and name change effort for the company as it crafts a new identity and platform to appeal to the hospital market.

A Great Use of Home Page Real Estate

Our agency has always been a big fan of a great idea, whether it’s ours or someone else’s. That’s the role of a good agency — to act as a harvester of “best practices,” to share great ideas that work in one company with others who could benefit from them. So here’s our latest great idea from one of our clients, Diamond America. By locating a highly shortened lead form right on its home page, this company immediately multiplied its lead flow by five. The form’s no different from what might be found on the “Contact Us” page, but its new front-and-center visibility makes it a far more effective lead generation tool.

Facebook Advertising Now at Work for
B-to-B

The debate over whether Facebook is an appropriate environment for b-to-b marketers has been largely settled. With 2000 new people each week joining the IEEE (Institute for Electrical/Electronic Engineers) Facebook page (now totaling 106,000), many technology and business-related organizations are finding that Facebook serves as an ideal platform for building connections and minimizing the space between customers and companies. We saw this recently with one client, which promoted its popular tutorial handbook via the relatively new medium of Facebook advertising. Handbooks have long been the “home run” in lead generation in traditional and other web venues; will they have the same draw in a social media environment? The answer for us was immediate and definitive, with 100 handbook requests generated within two weeks after the ad’s launch.