BrandingFire Blog

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So, the sesquicentennial (150th anniversary) of South Carolina’s secession (you know, that little event that started that whole War Between the States thing) is just 2 years away. The sesquicentennial of the Civil War is just under 3 years away.

If you’re involved with a historic organization, Civil War-related historic house, museum, Civil War author, etc and you’re thinking, “So what?” - YIKES!!! Now is when you should be planning out a heavy series of events, anniversary books, documentaries, tours or whatever. Don’t be like those retailers who wait till Halloween to start thinking about their Christmas promotions. Those guys lose out then wonder what went wrong. The time to plan your Christmas promotions is March or April… May at the latest.

Likewise, the time is now to plan for what I expect to be a major spike in War Between the States interest. Don’t find that the date is suddenly upon you and you don’t know why everyone else is getting attention and you’re being passed over.

Have you given this any thought at all? What are you doing to get ready? If you have ideas to share, drop me a line or share them in the comments section. That’s what it’s there for.

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It’s a well-known concept among hardcore marketers that economic downturns and recessions are the worst time to cut back on marketing. While it seems logical to cut back on all expenses during economic difficulties, the truth of the matter is financial downturns frequently offer your best opportunities to grab market share. Why? Because your competition is busy doing the logical thing and cutting back on their marketing.

It seems the state of Georgia and New York City are taking note of this marketing concept and making a move to draw in tourists. On July 10th, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Georgia is making more than $1 million in grants for state tourism development through their Georgia Tourism Foundation. The grants aren’t going specifically to history organizations, but they are in the mix including the Augusta Museum of History.

Likewise, I’ve commented recently that with gas prices skyrocketing, now would be a perfect time for historic sites to try to pull in local tourists. Especially since many of us tend to miss seeing local sites in favor of trips to other places. New York City is doing just that. They’re encouraging people in the area to “Go Local” and visit the many tourist sites within the five boroughs of NYC.

I hope somewhere along the way, we get to hear back how successful these endeavors are. Maybe they will inspire other communities and organizations to do the same.

Eric Wittenberg is an accomplished Civil War author, cavalry authority and fellow blogger, in addition to his day job as a lawyer. Eric has more than a dozen published books to his credit, including his newest One Continuous Fight:
The Retreat from Gettysburg and the Pursuit of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, July 4-14, 1863, and more than two dozen published articles. Eric is often called on as a speaker on the subject of cavalry and as a guide for tours.

A couple of months ago, Eric published a really good series on his blog titled “Things I Wish I Knew Then But Know Now.” The series discussed the lessons Eric has learned over his years as a published book author. The series inspired me to do an interview with Eric about marketing history books from the author’s point of view. (BrandingFire Note: I’ve never been a published author, but I have several years of experience on the distribution and publisher’s side of things.)

BrandingFire (BF): My friend, author Dan Miller, has told me several times that authors need to be prepared to do their own book marketing. He says that unless your name is John Grisham or Stephen King, publishers just aren’t going to invest the time and money needed to market a book properly. Do you find this to be true?

Eric Wittenberg(EW): Sadly, it’s absolutely true. The truth is that most Civil War books don’t sell sufficient copies to give publishers much of an incentive to invest a lot of money into major marketing campaigns. There are, of course, exceptions, as occasionally a Civil War book will hit the bestseller lists - Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals comes to mind immediately - and then the publishers will spend the necessary money.

BF: I know you’ve gone to the trouble of putting up your own websites to promote your books. Is this something you’ve always done?

EW: No, it’s something we started in 2006 with the release of Plenty of Blame to Go Around: Jeb Stuart’s Controversial Ride to Gettysburg.

BF: Do you build your own sites or do you hire out the job?

EW: I have no competence for that sort of thing, so it’s much better for me to hire a professional to do that work for me.

BF: When you put up a site to support a title, what is your goal for the site?

EW: Sell books and spread the word.

BF: How long do you leave a site up?

EW: Good question. I actually haven’t had to address that issue yet. Plenty of Blame continues to sell well two years later, and as long as it does, we intend to leave the site up.

BF: Have you tried any book marketing tactics that didn’t work? If so, will you share any?

EW: I have found that taking books to Civil War Roundtable meetings generally doesn’t work well. There are only a few I’ve encountered where people are hardcore book buyers, while most just don’t care.

BF: What other marketing tactics do you find to be successful?

EW: Honestly, there is no substitute for word of mouth marketing. Having someone say “this is a great book and you need to read it” is without question the best marketing tool that there is. I try to encourage that sort of thing as often as I can.

BF: How important do you think author signings are for promoting a book?

EW: I think that they’re critical. People like to collect signed first editions of books, and in-person signings are the best way to meet the public and sign for them. The location of the signing and the promotion work done by the sponsor is, of course, critical. If nobody knows about, it’s a waste of time, but if the promoter does a good job of getting the word out, a good book signing can be one of the very best ways to sell books that I know.

BF: You and I first became acquainted through your blog. How important are blogs in book promotion? Any advice to authors considering or involved in blogging?

EW: I have found that blogging is a great way to make and maintain contact with the readers of my books, and I have also found that it’s a great way to remind people of one’s work. If authors feel that they have something to say that’s not just shilling their books, then I would definitely encourage them to try blogging. In September, I will have been blogging for three full years, and I have a large contingent of regular readers. It never ceases to amaze me how many people invest their valuable time into reading what I have to say each day.

BF: How much do you consider the marketability of a subject before you write a book on it?

EW: Some of my projects are carefully calculated to try to select topics that I know will sell, but others are strictly pursuing things that interest me, nothing more, nothing less. As an example, this week, I decided to tackle a tactical treatment of the June 10, 1864 Battle of Brice’s Crossroads, and in part, I selected that topic because I know that books on Nathan Bedford Forrest sell well, and I’d like to make some money on the one of these projects.

BF: Do you have a set marketing budget before you start promoting a book?

EW: No. It all depends on the book and how well I think it might sell.

BF: My personal experience with publishing is that going through traditional mass market distribution channels is very difficult. The discounts distributors like Ingram, Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble, etc. are steep and leave little room for profit. Has this been your experience?

EW: Not at all. To date, all of my work has been published by conventional, commercial publishing houses, and I wouldn’t even consider a publisher that didn’t use the traditional mass-market publishing channels as the primary means of getting books out there.

BF: What methods of distribution have you found more effective than the “mainstream” ones listed above?

EW: To be honest, none. Short of selling books on the Internet, I can’t think of another means of selling books that is more effective.

I’d like to thank Eric again for kindly contributing his time and experience. If you haven’t read his blog, The Rantings of a Civil War Historian, you should. You can also find Eric’s books at major bookstores, including Amazon.com. I should also mention that Eric and author J. D. Petruzzi are leading a tour at Ted Alexander’s Mother of All Gettysburg Seminars on July 23-27. If you want the chance to have Eric and J.D. give you a personal tour of some of JEB Stuart’s cavalry ride during the Gettysburg campaign, you should sign up ASAP. It’s filling up fast.

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Over the past two weeks I’ve witnessed two product rollouts (from the consumer side) and learned a lot from them - especially how many things can go wrong. The most unfortunate part of it is that a lot, if not most, of the problems could have been avoided… or at least contained. You may be wondering what this has to do with history. Every day, across the globe, people are rolling out new history books, movies, music and artwork. Historic houses, museum and organizations are rolling out plans for events and products. Maybe these experiences will help you prepare for a more successful rollout.

Firefox is a popular web browser and users across the globe have been anticipating the release of version 3 of the software. Someone came up with the great idea of feeding & building that passionate community. They set a goal to enter the Guinness Book of World Records for the most downloads in a 24 hour period. They declared June 17th as Download Day. A nice website was built that hosted community forums, featured event promoters who were the most active, collected commitments for downloads from hundreds of thousands of people and featured a world map that showed how many people had committed to the download from each country. People around the world were planning download parties and the Spread Firefox site was the central planning place. This was great work on their part and when midnight came and June 16th slid into June 17th, the Firefox world was full of… really ticked off people. And lots of them.

You see, the globe has time zones and while the Download Day folks did announce the time it would start (10am Pacific Time), they didn’t do it very prominently. Most people just saw the date, June 17th, which was featured and promoted heavily. And June 17th in Tokyo, Japan and June 17th in Mountain View, California, USA are not the same. Potential downloaders stayed up till all hours of the night and early morning waiting for the promised Download Day and then trying to figure out what went wrong when it didn’t materialize. To make matters worse, when 10am Central time came, the Firefox download page changed to “Download Firefox 3 Now” buttons. But when you clicked the button, it took you to a page to download the old version of Firefox 2. In fact, this error wasn’t corrected for at least a couple of hours. Downloaders were mad all over again. At last, the problems were ironed out, download links were corrected and more than 8 million downloads of Firefox took place in that 24 hour period. But how many angry people just decided to download the software another day?

The second rollout was Verizon’s introduction of the new LG Dare. It’s a strong contender against Apple’s iPHone (Verizon’s strongest yet) and Verizon customers were already excited about it, even though Verizon didn’t appear to be and kept it hush-hush. In my opinion, Verizon had already made a mistake by not organizing and feeding the growing community of people looking forward to the phone. Despite LG and Verizon being very mum on the subject, photos and reports on the Dare leaked out and each lead ratcheted up the excitement. Verizon could have done a lot to really build this excitement, but they pretty much ignored it, only releasing (as far as I could find) one vague press release about the phone. In fact, it’s on sale date wasn’t even announced until June 25th, the day before the phone went on sale in Verizon’s online store. It won’t be in physical stores until early July. To complicate things, Verizon didn’t even inform their own staff very well about the phone. The answers customers got on when the phone would be released and the price varied wildly from Verizon employee to Verizon employee.

Figuring the online store would add the phone around 12:01 am on June 26th, hundreds, if not thousands, of Verizon customers stayed up hitting refresh on their computers to make sure they got their order in. I was one of those people. 11:30 - refresh (just in case they were early). 12:00 - refresh. 12:01 - refresh. 12:05 - refresh. 12:10 - Refresh! 12:15 - REFRESH!! 12:30 - Argh! It still wasn’t showing up in my phone upgrade options online. I went to a forum dedicated to the LG Dare and, to my horror, I was a post that said the Dare was available online… and had been for nearly an hour! What?!?! I completely logged otu and then back into the store. There it was. I went to the upgrade page and… no Dare. I attempted to call customer service, but they had closed an hour before the phone went online and wouldn’t open again until 6am. (Note that the website doesn’t tell you what time zone. And they have offices across the US.) I tried the online sales consultant, only to receive a terse stock notice that said the live online sales area had closed for the day and I would need to try back tomorrow. About 1:30 am I finally gave up and resolved to call customer service the next day.

The next morning, too early and grumpy from the lack of sleep, I called customer service only to be told that their system hadn’t updated yet and the phone wasn’t actually for sale yet online (despite my having seen it). They told me I would have to try again later or go to a store. (Huh?! A store? This customer service rep told me the phones woud be in store this same day.) Eureka! I decided to just go to my local Verizon store and buy one. Too bad that info was wrong. Good thing I checked before hopping in the car and wasting my lunch hour chasing down the phone. I called customer service again and was told that they were updating their system now and I should be able to buy the phone soon. This was crazy. I then contacted their online live customer service. They told me that they were having technical problems that were preventing exisitng Verizon customers from buying this phone and they hoped to have them resolved soon. How soon? We don’t know. I was so frustrated. This had now been going on for more than 12 hours. As a last desperate attempt, I connected with the online customer service again and got someone else. I asked if they were having technical difficulty with people upgrading their phone online. (I wasn’t sure I believed the story.) I finally got someone with a brain who said, yes, there was a problem. But if I would call telesales, they would process my upgrade order right away, with full online discounts. Thank goodness. Someone was finally implementing a work around solution! I finally got my phone ordered, but I know from online communities that many others were still stymied throughout the day.

So, what is there to learn?

1. Plan for things to go wrong. They will.
2. Pay attention to the details, like time and date. They matter.
3. Communicate with your audience! A lot of the frustration and anger experienced by Firefox and Verizon customers could have been alleviated by posting simple situational updates and solutions.
4. Make sure a problem-solver is around. Verizon closing customer service an hour before the rollout was a really, REALLY bad idea.
5. Find a solution or workaround for the problem as quickly as possible. Verizon should have had the alternative ordering method going within an hour, if not minutes, of the problem coming up. It was a simple workaround until the problem was resolved. If you have a problem, fix it. If you customer has a problem, fix it FAST!

If you are into history and marketing historic sites, you really should check out Heidi Glatfelter’s blog Marketing Early America. Heidi has more than a decade of marketing experience working with non-profits and she’s really connecting that experience with her passion for history and pumping out some good information for anyone involved with history-related organizations.

I didn’t know Heidi until I ran across her blog a short while ago, but I’m happy to find someone out there who shares my passions for history and marketing and is trying to be a beacon to help guide these worthy groups.

Now, GO, READ, COMMENT!! Be heard!

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I wrote in an earlier post that when it comes to marketing, remember that it’s not about you, it’s about your audience. That was driven home for me again today. This evening I went to Best Buy to test out the new iPod Touch (a product which, by the way, really engages its audience). I really, really want one. Here’s the problem I encountered: half of the applications are web-based. In fact, testing the browser was a big part of what I wanted to check out. But Best Buy doesn’t have a wireless network so you can try them out. I sort of understand why they wouldn’t want an open network in the store, but trying out something like the Touch is a big part of the customer experience.

Likewise, my son and I were looking at the video game consoles. There was the XBox 360 which, as far as I could see, only showed demo movies of their games. Next to it was a Playstation 3, with a fun racing game with killer graphics. We had a blast playing that game. If I was seriously in the market for a gaming system, guess which one I would have walked out with?

This reminds me of the times I’ve taken my son to Toys R Us, where they have several cool toys on display… behind Plexiglas. That’s just cruel. It’s also one of the reasons I usually take my son to Main Street Toys here in town. They put the toys out where kids can reach them and play with them. That’s what their audience really wants!

So, are you engaging your audience or are you locking everything up behind glass?

I ran across a nice site called Cultural Heritage Tourism run by (again) The National Trust for Historic Preservation. On their site, they list the Five Principles for Successful and Sustainable Cultural Heritage Tourism. It’s worth a read. The third principle - Make Sites and Programs Come Alive - really hit a cord for me.

Here’s one that definitely needs to be filed under “It’s a Small World”. I recently blogged about how Which Wich feels the love from their customers. In a very cool move, the president and founder of Which Wich, Jeff Sinelli, commented on the post about how they LOVE their customers. He also pointed me to their blog, which I had to check out.

You see, I’ve loved Which Wich since they opened up their local store. I keep two of their sandwich bags on my desk (I know, I’m strange). Once is from one of my first sandwiches there. The other is one with franchise information. I won’t be getting into a franchise anytime soon, but I really love the place and the concept and was enamored to learn more about them. I even read articles on Mr. Sinelli and hoped to meet him some day, to at least say hello and thanks.

My chance may come soon. When I read the Which Wich blog I saw a post about getting a free t-shirt. Since free is my favorite price, they had my attention. I read that someone had set out on an adventure to have all 51 varieties of Which Wich. The shock came when I realized I know the “someone“. Chris and I worked together at the same company for two years.

Here’s the really cool thing: Jeff Sinelli, or someone on his team, apparently has alerts in places like Google so that he’s notified whenever someone writes about Which Wich on the Internet. (Hint: If you’re not doing this, do it TODAY!) That means Mr. Sinelli can find people who are hot for his restaurant and fan that passion into a roaring fire. It also means he can head off customers’ troubles and deal with them immediately… and personally. Mr. Sinelli found out about Chris’s adventure and called Chris to support him in his endevor.

The Which Wich folks have even created this limited edition t-shirt (scarcity = demand) in honor of Chris (love your customers) and have offered them free to customers (love your customer… and collect their contact info). In addition, Jeff Sinelli and some of his team will be traveling to Nashville, TN to have lunch with Chris and 50 of his closest friends (love your customer, event marketing… & good PR) to celebrate. This is all such freakin’ great marketing that I almost can’t stand it. But it’s not normal, everyday, ooh-I-feel-icky, fake marketing. This is passion-for-your-brand, love-your-customers, open-the-lines-of-communication, un-ordinary marketing. I’ll be at that lunch, and I just want to shake Mr. Sinelli’s hand and say, “You and your team are awesome!” And to Chris Thomas I say, “Congrats on being the first one into The 51 Club!”

Now, I ask again, do your customers love you that much? Do you love them that much?

BTW, just found out the shirts are all gone.

I had a guy tell me he didn’t have time for all of this “marketing and internet stuff” and asked if I couldn’t just sum up the whole shebang in one sentence. Uh, no. Not really. But since he wanted one special nugget of information to take away with him, I boiled everything down to this simple idea:“It’s not about you. It’s about them.”

It’s an irony of marketing that when you’re trying to tell people about your product, you can’t make it all about you. You have to make it all about them. They don’t care about you or your product. (Sorry to be so blunt, but this is supposed to be brief.) They only care how your product solves a problem for them. People don’t buy from Dell, Apple, Southwest Airlines or Coke because their products or services offer lots of great features. They buy because the product feeds their need for higher self-esteem, being a part of the “in” crowd, saves them money, saves their personal photos, or a thousand other needs (or perceived needs) that people have.

If you want people to visit your history house, museum or buy your history book, don’t make your pitch all about what a great product you have. Make your pitch about how your remarkable product solves relieves some pain they have.

I never intended for my first post on the BrandingFire blog to be of a political nature. But Seth Godin, whose work and ideas I admire greatly, posted something on his blog today for which I just had to add to the conversation. In this post, Thinking About This War, Seth says that one of the greatest weapons we have in a post-9/11 world is good marketing. I’ve thought for more than 10 years that a good marketing campaign can be as effective (though not always as fast) as a strong army for implementing regime and policy change around the world. But what really got me was where Seth said government frequently prefers enforcement to changing people’s behavior with good marketing.

Take, for instance, my home town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Government and citizens will sometimes get cross-wise from each other. That’s to be expected. But when government continually goes against the public grain, that’s the sign of a problem. Three examples from Murfreesboro are:

1. Annexation - The city has been annexing stray areas of county land in order to consolidate the city limits. However, they’ve been doing it against a citizenry that STRONGLY doesn’t want to be annexed. The Planning Commission and City Council have held meeting after meeting to listen to angry county residents who do not want to be annexed. Then, they went ahead and annexed the areas anyway. When persuasion didn’t work fast enough for them, they chose enforcement. Now the city is having to spend precious money to fend off two (so far) lawsuits from angry residents.
2. The city has forced one business (a gas station/convenience store) to remove an electronic sign and has tried to force Lamar Outdoor Advertising to remove a digital billboard. The city has an embargo against electronic signs, but in both of these cases, they had approved the signs that were put up. Now, they’re forcing these businesses to foot the bill for removing the signs. Once again, the city chose enforcement over persuasion (and reason). Once again, the city is being sued and has to spend even more precious revenue to fight off a lawsuit.
3. Recently, a local car wash was forced by city officials to remove a U.S. flag they were flying. It seems the flag violated the city’s ordinance on how large a flag could be. Apparently, the car was owners were too patriotic. Again, the city chose enforcement. It was only under massive outrage by citizens and a small protest at the car was site that commission members hastily amended the flag ordinance to allow the flag.

In all of these cases, the city has handled the PR on these issues terribly. Instead of helping citizens to understand the issues (or rescind the rules if they were just nonsense), the city has chosen to stubbornly stand their ground and use enforcement instead. And they’re losing in the battle for the public’s hearts and minds. Losing badly. Sometimes, being right isn’t enough. You need to appear to be right. In marketing, perception is frequently truth.