Deliberate Ambiguity

Product Messaging Basics

Even assuming a world of conversational marketing where the masses shape your message, it's important to seed that conversation with something coherent.  A tight message shows why your solution is unique and useful, what your competitive position is, and tells users what problem you are going to solve for them.

Messaging discussions tend to fall on two sides of a spectrum.  On one hand, nebulous high-level documents, endless wordsmithing of simple phrases, and jargon can create a jumbled, confusing message.  On the other hand, slapping a few sentences together in a press release can sound unfocused and unclear.

A product manager's job doesn't end with creating a great product.  It's also our job to tell the world why they should care.  So what's the best way to create a messaging document?  And what should the end product look like?  Every company, product, and situation, but here's a few guidelines that have helped me:

1. Stick to basics - One of the classic formulations of messaging goes something like: "For [target user], who needs [reason to buy your product], [product name] is a [category] which [benefit], unlike [main competitor], which [differntiation]."  You should be able to rattle off something like this statement about your product without thinking twice.
2. Don't spend all of your time fixing words - Don't confuse messaging work with copy editing.  If you've a clear message conceptually, then the words can always be honed later.
3. Find a great template  - Whenever I do messaging, I e-mail a few of my marketing colleagues at other companies to see what they're using.  My favorite template is the Marketecture from Practical Product Management.  It starts off with a problem and solution statement, which helps you to frame how you talk about your product.  Also, the product statement is supposed to be short (under 25 words!) and I recommend making that an absolute upper bound.
4. Run it past someone non-technical - this is certainly true in the consumer space, but even in enterprise software.  I realized there was a problem with "natural language search" when I had to explain it to my well-educated hair artist.  Powerset's About page now contains almost no technical jargon (and I'm happy to entertain ideas about how to make it better).
5. Avoid meaningless words - This is a corrolary to the above.  Even if you think a word or phrase has meaning (e.g. "best of breed" or "highly scalable") think about a simpler way to say it.
6. Write something functional - This could be your About page, your press release, or even try your hand at the article you'd like someone from the press to write about your product.  Some might argue that you need your messaging in place before you effectively write a press release, but I think the two are informed by each other.

Anything I'm missing?  Anyone else have experience in creating a great messaging document?

What's in a name?

Every company hits an inevitable point where it decides to think about picking a new name.  So many freakin' considerations: is the URL available?  Is the name spellable? Does it accurately describe the product/company?  Does it evoke positive images?  Does it have good "mouthfeel"?  Does it make our company serious/goofy/intellectual/consumer-friendly/etc.?  Is it already being used?  Does it look too much like our competitors?  Will it last?  Is there a racial slur in the middle of it?  Can it be used as a verb?

All in all though, I find a lot of these discussions meander through meaningless sessions of creativity.  Look at some of the biggest internet companies.  I can only imagine the conversations with these names:

• Flickr - it's too trendy, hard to spell, and sounds goofy
• Google - is an incorrect spelling of an existing term, suggests that the company is huge and powerful, and look at those damn Crayola colors
• Yahoo - another goofy name and what does that say about our directory?  And what about the people who have actually read Gulliver's Travels and know that a "yahoo" isn't a good thing to be?
• eBay - there are too many companies "eEverything" and we'll get lost in the noise.  And what the hell does a "Bay" have to do with auctions?
• Amazon - shouldn't we get "books.com"?

Brands that succeed get all sorts of retrofitted praise.  "I love the playful colors of the Google logo that comfort users even though they're using a complex technology."  The reality is that young companies should spend more time thinking about their messaging and positioning and less time thinking about their brand.  The time spent in considering how to talk to the press, how to have a conversation about your product in the blogosphere, and how to frame user problems is much more valuable than establishing an over-thought brand with no market traction. 

Sure, if you're P&G, brand-management suddenly becomes important.  But let's face it: what the Hell does a name matter for an unknown startup?  I remember back when Kosmix was being renamed from its old company name: Cosmix.  For all the time we spent looking at alternatives, we just changed the "c" to a "k."  The time was well spent, however, in that thinking about the name forced us to consider how to position Kosmix against our competitors.

Has anyone else been involved in product or company naming discussions?  I'm curious to know if there's a good process or good experiences out there.

What I learned from the Social Networking Toolkit

One must approach an alleged "geek" breakfast taking place before 10:00 am with a hearty dose of skepticism.  Especially at a "world famous" diner in Union Square (tourists will buy anything).  Nonetheless, I trudged over to Union Square with Julie Crabill of SHIFT at 8:30 a.m. this morning for a Social Media Club Breakfast.  Was actually a bit fun, though the pancakes were unremarkable.  The crowd consisted of a strong faction of PR peeps, flanked by hi-tech marketing slaves, and social media wonks.  However, my favorite part outside of the excellent chatter was certainly the Social Networking Toolkit, thanks to Mr. Jeff Pulver.

The SNT contains a pen, two Hello tags (for one's username/message and one's bio), stickers for "tags," and Post-It Notes for a "wall." This simple formula schooled me in social media:

• To find out if a person is interesting, talking to them is quicker than reading all of their stickers.
• Those with the most stickers were usually the ones that gave the most stickers.
• A corollary to the above is: the more stickers on you, the more you're expected to stick other people.
• Attractive people attract other attractive people; but loud people get the most attention.
• Birds of a feather tend to flock and form cliques.
• People tagged me with words that would only be helpful to that person.
• At least 50% of the total stickers were written by their owners.
• The more tags you have on you, the more you look like a MySpace page.
• Usernames are ridiculous and conceal your identity.
• I mostly talked to the people I knew.
• And, most importantly: it takes an offline metaphor about stickers to teach me the fundamentals of social media.

Sincerely,
philosophygeek (photos @ Flickr)

tags technorati : blogpost markjohnson smc socialmediaclub breakfast thingsilearned socialnetworkingtoolkit snt jeffpulver cliques bymarkjohnson thispagehasalotoftags

Expanded Groundswell Continuum

Whenever I see a linear scale, I'm reminded of the liberal/conservative dichotomy promoted by the Democrats and Republicans.  Socially liberal, fiscally conservative citizens like yours truly have to turn to the second dimension to get our views included, cf. the Nolan Chart.

Because of my bias towards a diversity of opinions, when I saw Josh Bernoff's description of the Purist-Corporatist scale and Shel Israel's complaints that he's not a pure purist, I tried to conceive of a more inclusive graph.  My guess is that the misunderstanding between these two fine social media theorists is disagreement about the classification system, not a disagreement about the fundamentals.

First, my interpretation of Josh's original scale. 

After reading Shel's commentary on being labeled as a purist, I sensed two forces at work here: the influence of users and the effect of the marketing department.  My expanded version of the scale has two axes.  The x-axis is defines who in the corporation should control the message; the y-axis describes the impact of users through social media.

I took a stab at defining the quadrants:

• Purists believe that users are/will be extremely influential and that marketing departments should be abolished.  The message will grow organically from the conversation between the individuals within the corporation and the users.
• Corporatists believe that the marketing department just needs to spend more dollars to control the effect of the groundswell and that, in the end, their message will prevail.
• Grounswellists are in the middle: they believe that there's a place for the the structure of the marketing department and the authenticity of individual conversations.
• I jokingly referred to quadrant 1, where social media and traditional marketing both rule, as the land of PR Flacks proclaiming to be experts in social media (not my PR firm, of course).
• Quadrant 3 is also somewhat of a joke, in that engineers hate both marketers and suggestions from users.  Am I a funny guy or what?

My definition of the axes here surely isn't the only one.  Did I pick the right axes?  Is there a better way to describe the groundswell vs. corporate marketing?