Marketing and Management Thoughts

Twitter is quickly becoming one of the easiest social networking platforms out there today. While the membership numbers aren’t as high as Facebook the sheer portability of it, and the nice mobility of it make it worth while to me. Not to mention the ability to integrate our blog, twitter, and Facebook all together (How to is here).

Lee Odden (a man with nearly 14k followers on twitter @leeodden) wrote  a piece about the common mistakes he sees on twitter that dilute your following. Below are his top ten, and check out his blog for another 40 submitted by his followers.

Top Ten Ways to Fail on Twitter

• Don’t auto reply follows with a link to your free piece of crap ebook.
• Don’t provide an obscure description of who you are and what you do
• No photo or an image that only makes sense to you and your imaginary friends
• Don’t mention a great resource with no link
• Not customizing your background
• Don’t post 10 messages in succession (also repeated below)
• Don’t follow over 1000 people in a 2 hour period
• Don’t write about the cat/hamster/potted plant over and over again
• Don’t swear often and expect business people to take you seriously (Unless you work for Outspoken Media)
• Don’t over-abbreviate.

Final Thoughts

I feel like the last one here is most important for churches, and would add to it using insider lingo. If you have a nickname for locations or people, don’t use them in your twitter feed. Doing that will only make people feel unwelcomed and on the outside.

Make sure to check out the full list over at his blog.

We wrote about the re-design failure of Tropicana last week and this week the older style packaging should be showing back up on the store shelves. This video is from CNN showing a discussion over the new brand image. There is a fruitful interview with Linda Kaplan Thaler of the Kaplan Thaler Group Ltd.

While your church doesn’t have the market penetration and exposure that a brand like Tropicana does (or the $35 Million to dump into a re branding strategy) it does raise one last question I believe could prove beneficial for the church.

At what point does the church (any church) change their approach of ministry or marketing due to the response of those around them? Would it take five complaints? fifty? hundreds?

(hat nod Visual Culture)

Follow Up Post: Psychology of Tropicana Re-branding Failure

Yesterday it was announced by Pepsi Company (the owners of Tropicana brand Orange Juice) that the new packaging/brand that they rolled out in January for Tropicana will be removed. Over the last two months Pepsi has undergone a very aggressive re branding campaign of many of their largest products (Pepsi brands, sierra mist, mountain dew).

Now in a statement released by Pepsi Co and an article in the NY Times Pepsi says they are rolling back the brand to the much more familiar orange with the straw in it. So what was the problem?

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When leaders don’t fail, no-one else will ever innovate.

Who has ever heard of someone achieving success without failing first? Every professional athlete spends more time practicing and lets not forget they were all amateurs before turning pro.

So why do we manage as if we should only experience/expect success and not failure. Those failures are the building blocks of their success. They might be of yours as well if you don’t push them away.

Leaders have to take risks that both succeed and that fail. Without this no one will feel the freedom to take steps of their own (in addition to your explicit encouragement). This molds the culture that your organization projects, both externally and internally, and will determine if you will raise up innovators from within or not.

The problem here is that we love boasting and reminiscing in our successes. If we only have success, or never talk about our failures, those around us will fear trying to live up to your standards. The more humble we are, the more accessible opportunity (and then innovation) will become to those around us.

In the last post we talked about how the focal point (mission statement) can inhibit innovation through suffocation. Here we’ll talk more about developing that culture. (more…)