Revenue Journal®

One of the most important skills of a marketing strategist is to know "where the heat is." What matters now? Who matters now?

One of the things that matters now is your buyers, trying to get relevant, useful answers in a sea of irrelevant, self-serving blather. Anyone can publish a blog and post a video. Almost everyone does. Every company has a website. Publishing companies that used to have a monopoly, those large lumbering newspapers, magazines, and networks, are now surrounded by swarms of publishing gnats. The giants are dying, one gnat bite at a time.

Meanwhile, the gnats - the bloggers who publish text and video - have become the kings of Influence Hill. Of course, as with all media, bloggers who provide useful and relevant information get more attention than those who publish self-serving or silly content. Well, that's not entirely true. A lot of very silly content gets its share of attention - but not for long. The blog authors that get the long-term attention are like lights shining in the darkness, and they shine for a long time.

If you are trying to make sure people know about you, you should be courting these bloggers. The smartest companies started their "blogger relations programs" a couple of years ago, so if you're still focusing on the lumbering giants, you're way out of date. Bloggers deserve as much - or more - of your PR time and resources.

Frankly, and sadly, very few PR houses have figured this out. Too many of them are still "doing what they've always done," creating press kits and press releases for the legacy media. They're using the same old resources - press directories - to determine who should get pitched.

When you're a buyer, trying to do your initial research and ultimately make a buying decision, you come to appreciate the better blogs. Last week, I compared this incredibly useful blog article to this not-very-helpful manufacturer's site. It's interesting to compare the Gizmodo review to one I found in a traditional "giant media" website. There's no question that the Gizmodo review is more helpful to the buyer.

Note that the Gizmodo site starts with an "immediately useful" bit of information: all the ThinkPads, in a row, showing screen sizes. Gizmodo also briefly describes each ThinkPad model, in a way that helps you narrow down your decision. Lenovo, in spite of its valiant (but not very helpful) attempt at providing comparison tools, doesn't understand how people make buying decisions as well as Gizmodo does.

Now let's go to one of the useful, relevant video blogger sites - phonedog.com. If you're looking for a cell phone, this is one of the better video bloggers. Here's one of their reviews, where Noah Kravitz is doing a head-to-head comparison of the Samsung Instinct to the Apple iPhone, performing different content-based tasks.

One thing that many of the video bloggers do, when comparing one cell phone to another, is to show them side-by-side, physically, so you can see the width, height, and thickness of the phone. Manufacturers tend not to do this, because they don't want the comparisons to reveal their shortcomings.

You would think that they would at least let you zoom in on the various physical aspects of the product - so you can clearly see ports, for example. Sometimes you think they're going to do that, but when you click on an image to "enlarge" it, the picture is only slightly bigger or there isn't enough resolution to see what you need to see.

A type of video blog that has grown in importance is the "unboxing" video - where someone orders a product (or receives it from a smart marketer) and unboxes it on video. This answers the most important question that technology buyers ask - and the question least likely to be answered by technology vendors: "What's going to happen to me after I buy?"

These useful blogger text and video sites are literally revolutionizing the "PR space" for anyone producing an electronic device. What I'd personally love to see are the same kinds of comparisons for more complex types of products - starting with email, calendaring, and project management software, and going all the way to side-by-side comparisons of enterprise-level software.

Without these resources, buyers are simply having to work too hard to make a buying decision.

Let's say you're in the market for a complex software program. First you have to sort out all the features. You have to make sure that your Critical Criteria are going to be met. As you gather data from manufacturers, via their websites, salespeople, and literature, you also have to test every single claim against references and reviews, because you have learned the hard way that vendors lie.

Vendors usually lie because some aspect of their product is substandard. They lie by omission in their marketing content. Managers who know that an attribute is behind the curve should be pushing their developers like crazy to upgrade the product so they can be proud of it instead of ashamed. Meanwhile, it would be nice if they just told the truth about the product, inadequacies and all. I don't expect that to happen in my lifetime.

The rest of the lies are due to salespeople trying to answer every question with, "No problem - we can do that!" And, to marketers who write marketing copy by stringing together words they don't understand. These two problems have plagued the tech industry for years.

The real fault lies with top managers, who have not yet realized how terrible the situation has become, and are not yet dictating that all salespeople and marketers get trained on some aspect of the product's technical features - every single week. Training should include:

• What our product can - and cannot - do.

• Useful comparisons, similar to the ones we are now seeing on YouTube.

• Answers to the question, "What's going to happen to me after I buy?"

• Familiarity with the competition, because many buyer questions arise from the claims that competitive sites and salespeople make.

• A "Critical Criteria" list, including why each criterion is critical to the buyer, and how the product meets it.

• A clear understanding of how the product is priced. Note the comment from Craig Stull to last week's article (scroll down to the comments when you get there) about how a sales manager couldn't answer a simple price question, and even said, "Uh, I'm not supposed to talk about price, but well, uh, the list price, uh, well, uh, it's about $3,000 but you should talk to a distributor about the discount price you should get."

• All the tasks that the user wants to perform, and how the user can perform them.

When it comes to selling your product, bloggers are important for two reasons. One, they're now the influential giants in the PR world. Two, they are filling the void that manufacturers have, so far, never filled - providing information to buyers that actually helps the buyer to make an "informed decision."

If your PR people aren't doing the necessary research and courting bloggers, you're missing a big chunk of your potential buyers.