Pirate Moves- Equip Your Ship

March 31, 2009 · Comments

privateer If I asked you to close your eyes and imagine what needs to be aboard your sailing ship, you’d be able to come up with most of it: a sturdy mast, sails, lots of rope, food, cannonballs, dry powder, a straight anchor, and a few other things.

It might take you a while to name it all, and you might forget something- oil for lamps, or candles, for instance. The exercise is useful, though. Applied to other processes, it’s a great way to see the larger story.

How to Equip Your Ship

When creating a marketing strategy that incorporates social media, this exercise comes in handy. What follows is a sample of an idea. You can do this exercise yourself. It’s basically the first line of the post: close your eyes and think up everything required to build a project including social tools.

What will come from the experience is a process that resembles this:

Listing, Extracting Themes into Frameworks, Revising

First, you’ll list out elements you believe should be aboard your ship (or those things you need to accomplish to execute your strategy). Second, you’ll note common themes within them and pull those back to build a framework of inputs and outputs to those processes. Finally, you’ll revise your efforts until you have a “plug in, plug out” ability to test your efforts.

Here’s a sample:

Project: Improve Event Attendance/Sales

Using the idea of closing my ideas and thinking through the efforts, here’s what I come up with:

  • Build email marketing databases.
  • Grow the list by offering promotional content and other “free prize” offerings.
  • Segment the list for better relationship management.
  • Add metadata around accounts to better understand variables of each person (consider using BatchBook).
  • Promote via blogs, via Twitter, via Facebook event page, via Upcoming.org, Eventful.com.
  • Seek media partners like Mashable, who fits our event’s demographic. (You’d think about other organizations.)
  • And let’s stop here.

So far, what you see is just tactics laid out as they came to me. But this is useful. Because once I get more of this down, I realize there are a few larger themes: promotion, understanding my audience, content creation and distribution, relationship management, outreach, more.

Extract that. Build that into a frame, and then go at it again, only this time, make the headings those themes (or the strategies you’ve picked for your goals), and then put tactics beneath them.

Continuing then with my project, only slightly revised after the first pass:

Project: Improve Event Attendance/Sales

Strategy: List Building

  • Build email marketing platform.
  • Determine content to trade for potential list growth.
  • Decide on qualifiers for prospecting.
  • Etc, etc.

Strategy: Content as List Building

  • Promote content via Twitter, Blog, Facebook updates, maybe LinkedIn group.
  • Make content helpful. Provide “gentle” opt-in for list building.
  • Tie all content to a call to action, be that a sign-up request for the newsletter, or for tickets to the event.
  • And so on.

    And so on.

    The Purpose of the Exercise

    When it’s all said and done, the goal is a simple visualization effort that ties things down to a mappable frame. What you can do with that frame is add, subtract, multiply, and divide all your efforts, your experiments, your strategic tie-ins, and understand whether it all lines up.

    For instance, what if we use the same process above for the same sample strategy effort, and we decide to put up a blog where we talk about the event. If the blog is sitting there just dumping content out for anyone to see, does that, in and of itself constitute a structural tie-in to your overall goal of improving attendance? Not without a call to action. Does it muddy other strategic goals? Maybe.

    The point is this: once you start equipping your ship, you’ll see pieces that are necessary. Once you work backwards from that list to figure out the frameworks required, you’ll see how to plug in and plug out various pieces of the model.

    As a planning method, it’s simple, and yet effective. Now, ask yourself this: what are your goals that you’re hoping to apply social media and online marketing to accomplish, and can you list out all the pieces you’ll need to make those goals successful? With that list, can you extract themes and build a framework? With that framework, can you plug in and plug out various aspects of your efforts for testing and improving?

    Once you’ve done this exercise a few times, and after you’ve run it through that third phase of plugging in and out various components of your plan, the next phase is to understand where your framework can be productized and applied against other opportunities.

    Did we miss anything in this method? Any questions? How can you extrapolate these ideas and use them differently?

    This is part of a series that started with While Others Paint the Trim. There are two more left in the series. If you don’t want to miss them, please consider subscribe for free, and you’ll receive them. When it’s all said and done, there will be a free ebook for you to take with you.

    Photo credit Chuck the Photographer

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    • The problem with reading your blog Chris, is that I want to reblog everything. Great post as usual.

      Thanks for the action steps, this is great for someone like me, looking for more than fluff and motivational posts.

      My only problem is that you don't use your list enough! At least not the one that I'm on.
    • Chris, what a common sense approach to tackling a problem. I am so impressed by the way you think and put together a strategy in a concrete way that everyone can relate to. Thank you so much for this post. So often we're daunted by the project in front of us, but yours is another example of breaking it down into simple steps, and than breaking the steps down into themes. I think the hard part is listening to yourself and your instincts to see what you've missed. Also, to slow down before calling your plans complete.
      Oh, btw, I had feared you were going to add guns to the supplies for the pirates who might hijack the ship. Glad it didn't turn out that way!
    • Haven't read "Grow Bigger Ears" yet. But I will!
    • Mind mapping software is definitely a valuable tool for this process, as you do a "brain dump" of tactics, then take a step back to identify the common themes and overall strategic areas upon which you need to focus - and then assign those tactical items to appropriate top-level topics. It's great for this kind of back-and-forth, iterative planning!
    • very good organized events , the best post i read in my day
    • Building on the earlier comments about a listening strategy. Listening should begin even before the event. Perhaps the most important question beyond establishing a clear goal is the most basic: what do our customers want ? This applies to events as with anything else in Marketing. My experience is that Marketers constantly try to think up interesting topics and content for events when they would be far better off really understanding what their customers want. Delivering highly relevant content to your customers via events increases your credibility and engagement and significantly increases the liklihood you'll achieve your goals.
    • What perfect timing! I've just been wondering how to cope with launching three new services in about as many weeks. We already use our blog and Twitter to let the world know about our services. This framework has given me a far better method of structuring what we do.

      It strikes me that a mind-mapping approach to this thinking could enhance the visual element of it and enable some connections to be easily mapped out.

      Thanks Chris
    • Very good post. made very good reading
    • Chris visualization is a very important part of planning overall, while I'm not an expert I know that taking what you have blogged here and apply it to my business is key for successful planning.

      Oh btw I would have definately left the oil for lamps and candles behind. lol
    • Great post - and as always great reading. However I think one thing you forgot was proper follow-up for any communication, attendance or purchase for any event. You always (in my experience) want the person who courted you to feel accepted and appreciated.
    • Great insights Chris - thanks for sharing!

      With regard to the first Matt's comments on lisening, I would like to recommend our RepuTrack™ service for businesses requiring listening/monitoring tools to track feedback and opinion on all campaigning, or even as part of an overall strategy to guage online audience intelligence and the perception value of their brand (s) and reputation.

      Joseph
      @RepuTrack
    • I've only flicked through this as I'm off to meeting, so I'll read it in more depth later, but I just want to thank you Chris for the way you write these practical lists.

      My very linear thinking appreciates it!
    • @Matts - okay, the next post will be about listening, then. You already read Grow Bigger Ears, right?
    • Excellent as usual. How about a strategy for listening? Gathering feedback from your efforts and making adjustments to your outbound communication strategy, tactics and event positioning as necessary?
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