Most of the marketing books on the shelves today focus primarily on marketing a product. While there are some similarities between marketing a service and a product, there are many differences. These include:

Services are intangible
When you buy a product like a digital camera, you know what you’re getting. You can go to Circuit City and pick it up, ask the sales guy for a demo, and try it out before you buy. The selling process involves ordering the product, paying for it, and walking out of the store with it (or having it delivered within a few days.) (Read the article)

Marketing

When most people think about marketing, they think about all the stuff they see on a daily basis - emails, TV commercials, billboards, mail, posters, vending machines, signs, etc. What they often don’t consider is how much effort (meetings, money, time, people) went into planning, organizing, and testing each message and marketing tool. (Read the article)

Marketing

Whenever prospects call me up, one of the first questions I ask is “What are you currently doing to market yourself?” Many tell me that they’ve tried advertising but mainly get new customers by referrals. They may have tried sending some postcards or creating a website, but nothing has been effective in generating new leads.

Does this sound familiar? (Read the article)

Psychology, Marketing

In a previous article, I discussed Coca Cola’s failures with New Coke to highlight just how important knowing your customers is to you marketing campaign. In this article, I want to talk about what’s involved with a marketing campaign.

I often get prospects that call me up and want to outsource their entire marketing campaign. They don’t want to deal with it. They’ve tried a variety of different marketing tactics - tv, radio, print, web - and none seem to generate the calls they’re expecting. They know that something might be wrong, so they decide to check out marketing firms in hopes that these firms will be able to make their tv/radio/print ads/website better. (Read the article)

Rainmaking, Marketing

When many people think of marketing, they think of tv, radio, print ads, websites - the promotions they see around them every day. What they tend to overlook is just how much work went into producing that ad.

The Failure of New Coke
Take Coca Cola, for instance. They don’t just decide to air a Superbowl commercial, sponsor an event, or run a promotional contest. They go through an elaborate process to understand who the types of people are that drink their cola and what types of images, words, and emotions would appeal to them. That means doing all kinds of marketing research, from surveying and interviewing cola drinkers, doing focus groups, and reading websites to see what people are saying. They want to get to know their customers really well, so they can create marketing campaigns that are relevant to their lives. (Read the article)

Marketing

Let’s face it. There is nothing people hate more than to sit through a sales pitch on something they don’t think they need. You may think they need your services, but at least initially, they may think otherwise.

Why Selling Doesn’t Work
When you are focused on selling, you take every opportunity you can to get the prospect to close the deal and go with you. Instead of listening to their concerns, you think of what you might say next or how you can overcome their next objection. This causes prospects to become defensive and unresponsive to what you are trying to tell them. (Read the article)

Rainmaking, Marketing

Most lawyers I talk to hate the concept of marketing - it doesn’t work or they’re too busy or selling is unprofessional. This article will address some of these misconceptions about marketing.

Marketing does not mean you have to start using sleazy sales pitches or manipulative advertising to drum up business - in fact, I hope you don’t consider them. It can be done quite professionally and ethically with tactics you are comfortable with. And the good news is that once you have a marketing system in place, it will only take you a couple of hours of your week to continue the lead generation process. (Read the article)

Marketing

The Author’s Guild filed a lawsuit against Google yesterday to try to stop Google from digitizing library books as part of its Print Library Project. According to the Guild

“This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law,” Nick Taylor, president of the New York-based Authors Guild, said in a statement about the lawsuit, which is seeking class action status. “It’s not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied.”

To which Google responded:

Let’s be clear: Google doesn’t show even a single page to users who find copyrighted books through this program (unless the copyright holder gives us permission to show more). At most we show only a brief snippet of text where their search term appears, along with basic bibliographic information and several links to online booksellers and libraries.

Jonathan Band, an attorney focusing on intellectual property and the internet wrote an extensive article (PDF) about how a previous case, Kelly v. Arriba Soft, may be used in Google’s favor. He concludes

The Google Print Library Project will make it easier than ever before for users to locate the wealth of information buried in books. By limiting the search results to a few sentences before and after the search term, the program will not conflict with the normal exploitation of works nor unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of rightsholders. To the contrary, it often will often increase demand for copyrighted works.

It will be interesting to see what happens with this. A week after Amazon launched their “Look Inside This Book” search, they reported that books with full text search outsold books without the feature by 9%. (source Information Today) Of course, the difference is that publishers must give Amazon permission to make their text searchable.

Personally, I’m far more inclined to buy a book that I can browse through than one that has no information available. I can do it at the book store or library - why not online? I’ve certainly ended up purchasing far more books than I care to admit because I’ve started reading a few chapters and had to buy it. And I can also say that it’s rare that I’ve finished an entire ebook. Sure, I’ve scanned them in small portions, but reading 300+ pages on a computer screen is not my idea of a good time.

Apparently, I’m not the only one since some publishers are experimenting with online publishing. A few months ago, an article at The Book Standard discussed how sci fi/fantasy publisher, Tor, has been successful releasing Creative Commons versions of some of its books.

A CNN article quotes others who aren’t opposed to Google Print

“For a typical author, obscurity is a far greater threat than piracy,” said Tim O’Reilly, chief executive of O’Reilly Media and an adviser to Google’s project. “Google is offering publishers an amazing opportunity for people to discover their content.”

James Hilton, associate provost and interim librarian at the University of Michigan, said his school is contributing 7 million volumes over six years because one day, materials that aren’t searchable online simply won’t get read.

“That doesn’t mean it’s going to be read online, but it’s not going to be found if it’s not online,” he said.

Still, this phenomenon is much too new to convince old school publishers that allowing greater access to their intellectual property will end up benefiting them in the long run. Until then, the courts will have to decide.

Source: BoingBoing

Copyright

My dad, an attorney in York County, PA, informed me that today was a sad day for attorneys in the area. Today, it hit the media that a now disbarred attorney and his son were accused of stealing almost $1.1 million from their clients.

Mark Frankel was a widely known attorney in the area. Using the back of the yellow pages as a prominent way of advertising, he trademarked the phrase “Turn the book over” which later the firm shortened to “TTBO.” If you lived in York, you couldn’t miss seeing one of his billboards.

Last year, Frankel was disbarred for inappropriately touching his younger male clients. He denied the accusations and claimed the judge was anti-Semitic, thus persecuting him for being a Jew. Today, the big picture story of how the firm did business broke. It appears that Frankel and his son, Stephen, (who has been arrested twice in the past year for cocaine possession) were using the funds in their escrow account to pay the firm’s IRS payroll taxes. Stephen also allegedly withdrew $40,000 to buy himself a new Hummer.

Now, clients are mad. They’ve been lied to and their trust is shattered. As one client put it “After something like this happens, how can you trust another attorney again?” It’s like Enron all over again, though on a much more local scale. Unfortunately, these few rotten apples continue to reinforce the public’s negative perception of lawyers.

Ethics

Miami attorney Martin Sandler is getting some embarrassing publicity from the Smoking Gun. The website learned about a continuance motion he filed yesterday with a typo and promptly added it to their website. It seems that Mr. Sandler is recovering from back surgery for a herniated disk. Unfortunately, that’s not quite what he wrote.

We all make typos from time to time, so I’ll take this opportunity to provide a few quick proofreading tips.

1) Print it out. I find that it’s easier to catch errors in printed documents than on the computer screen where I tend to skim.

2) Read it out loud. When you read to yourself you can easily skip over words or insert words that aren’t there. Reading out loud makes it painfully obvious if you’ve skipped a word or something just doesn’t sound right.

3) Read the second half first. That’s usually where the errors creep in.

4) Take a break before re-reading. It’s much easier to find errors when your mind isn’t stuck in the stream of conscious flow. Take a 20 minute break to clear your mind so you can read it fresh.

5) Know your common mistakes. There are certain words I always seem to spell wrong. Unfortunately, spell check programs only pick out the non-words, so if you know you’re inclined to spell something wrong, do a word search.

6) Have someone else read it over. A second pair of eyes is always helpful for catching what you don’t.

Marketing