1. If you don’t have it, install Thunderbird (I’ve also was careful to say “no” to the various “set it as default for…” questions).

2. Set up your Gmail account in Thunderbird; don’t worry! This does not mean that you’re reverting to use a client, you still will have all your e-mail online. You will use this just for the export.

3. Install this import export tools plugin in Thunderbird.

First download it, then to install it,  in Thunderbird go to tools –> add ons –> settings icon –> install add on from file

4. After Thunderbird synched your label (you can check that the number of messages is the same as on Gmail), select the label, go to Tools –> Import Export tools and export the label (which in Thunderbird will appear as a folder) in CSV or any other format.

This made my day.

Addenda to the previous post on fatal flaws in marketing:

Flaws and miracles

Yesterday I saw a big ad of the new mini saying more or less “If you feel like you are not living –> get a Mini.”. Their new ad line is that by buying a mini your life will be full full of adventures – an absurd and silly idea, but that doesn’t matter.  The fatal flaw here is clearly boredom. The ad must be here extremely elaborate because of the weakness of the link between the flaw and the proposed solution.

I just wanted to add that to each fatal flaw focused by the ad creator, a corresponding promise of a miracle is formulated by the ad: smell –> perfume, weakness –> strength, boredom –> adventure…

Flaws and pop

If you want to apply the “fatal flaw” reading to a different theme, just listen to the effective lyrics of Lily Allen: a fatal flaw is always evoked.

I have been fighting in software and games marketing for a while, and I’ve read many books and tried several techniques. I’ve launched several software products with diverse results, and I’ve also taken creative writing courses, studied storytelling techniques for marketing, studied TV advertising, even created a game on this theme.

Whenever I see an ad, read about a new product idea, see any kind of promotion I’ found it useful to ask these two simple questions, that somehow are my brief “extract” of all the experience and study process (I use “product” as a generic term for product / solution /service):

1. What is the fatal flaw that this product meets?

2. No direct fatal flaw met: so what is the narrative transmitted by this message?

Products that don’t meet any fatal flaw usually need more investment in narrative construction. If a product does not make me beautiful, perfumed, seducing, healthy, slim… (fatal flaws) – e.g. its an iPad – so its a solution is search of a problem – I need to create a powerful narrative so that some fatal flaw solution is evoked.

Next ad you see, ask yourself the two questions above. May be a useful exercise.

I recorded a short webinar on how to use bookmarking for improving online marketing campaigns, here. I’ve also put my notes on Slideshare here.

One factor that I found to be quite important in my software marketing experience is timing. When selling software to enterprises and companies timing is  important because software is mainly bought in times of change. And change can come any time – in times of crisis and in times of affluence.

I am not speaking of software sales in general, like people buy video games all the time. And also considering just sales to companies there are exceptions: some software is bought for maintenance, like the OS for the PC of a new employee, and so at any time – but notice that new employees too come (and go) in herds when some reform  is about to come.

Many large companies are buying custom development most of the time – so those kind of sales come easier; but for software products, the logic is different.

Marketing policies of product software houses small and large in my experience should take into account the timing factor when thinking about their promotional efforts.

When times for change have come, often companies do surveys of existing solutions. What is most important is somehow in that moment to be present in the minds of the choosers and in the sources they will check. This is one of the reasons why direct sales of boxed software rarely work and instead a good online presence can be very effective. Direct sales come in a random moment – not the moment of change. Only when companies are changing they will enter the searching phase – and then it is important to be found.

Shameless self-promo: we will soon launch a free online service to help people that want to bring consensual change in the enterprise – stay tuned.

Every single participant (about 15 people) had somehow transformed their initial quite boring report “I am a software engineer graduated in… working on…” into a life story, like “Everyday I go to work cycling. And you know when I feel great going to work? It’s when…”. The list and quantifiers descriptive language began to be replaced by an emotional, personal and more appealing story.

Below you find the material I used to do this “magic”: I actually didn’t invent anything new, I just brought old and known storytelling techniques to startuppers. The slides are not “self-sufficient”, they are just a support for progressing in the workshop, and they assume some familiarity with the theme which can be acquired by reading the references – or by inviting me to do the workshop .

WHAT IS THIS ABOUT?

The workshop is for startuppers trying to learn marketing. The question dealt with in the workshop is this:

How to communicate your product idea?

This is a basic and most important question for a startup, and it’s never too soon to think about it. We introduce some narrative techniques that can be used for this end.

One of the aims of the workshop is to help startuppers describe their product using a terminology closer to an emotional model of the user.

Resume

The workshop starts by a first exercise: write down a brief self and product presentation. We set that aside and we present a “communication model” for startups, that models startup’s changing communication needs: the “Marketing Ziggurat”. Then we discuss how to prepare your communication for the press, which is at the top of the ziggurat. The idea of story-based communication begins to be shaped in contrast with the USP-marketing model. A simple mythical / emotional grammar is defined for stories, and a product narration schema is presented. A set of writing exercises is given, in particular the first exercise is redone using the emotional / storytelling model.

SLIDES

The link is this: http://www.slideshare.net/ppolsinelli/storytelling-for-software-marketing

REFERENCES AND Readings

A great book for acquiring a “grammar for emotional analysis” is

Mythologies by Roland Barthes.

A booklet of links for this workshop:
http://bit.ly/storyTell
Marketing Ziggurat:
http://bit.ly/mziggu
A rich resource:
http://twitter.com/#!/storytellin

Finally, a suggestion: if you are a software developer  / startupper / marketer why not take a creative writing course? If my thesis is correct, this will be more useful than any traditional marketing course.

IN ITALIAN

If you read Italian, a great book on this theme is this: Story Selling by Andrea Fontana.

Last weekend I was at the sea side with my family, at Albinia, a small village by the sea in Tuscany. It is the main and almost only street in Albinia, there are two cafes where people go to have breakfast – Italian breakfast, which means a coffee or cappuccino and for some a pastry.

I had just been at a seminar on storytelling and marketing by Andrea Fontana, where we also discussed the importance of finding the desired bio-narrative of the potential customers – actually would be right to call them readers. In this seminar we went through some examples of brands and their narrative – one example was Illy, the well-known coffee producer, whose market metaphors are often along the seductive line.

So I went experimental and checked the two cafes in Albinia: what was their message? And what effect this has on their public?
Well’, one café is branded by Illy, and its public is made of people obviously interested in seduction and exploration, by their age, dress and social behavior. Design and art are themes emotionally linked to seduction, and are both components of Illy’s marketing. The other café, not using Illy coffee, is inhabited by older specimen more interested in discussing football than social seduction.

I was quite surprised by the uniformity of the customers, how perfectly they do fit the seduction story . Italians on average give an awful amount of attention to dressing (maybe that’s why there is so little attention to anything else), but the guys at the Illy café where even smarter looking. And the place had no exceptions.

Two older women that came to the Illy, they were the kind no longer that young but desperately trying to look so. Had probably the most expensive clothing and bags, well tanned, and they kept checking around for incoming looks. “I want to remain in this story – don’t throw me out”.

Narratively, people going to Illy café tell themselves that that is the place to go in Albinia to proceed with their self narrative. Clothing, habits, and cafes must fit in a story. And it may even work in practice, as they will meet people in the dynamic of seducing and being seduced. But this is not what they will tell you if you ask them why they go there: they will tell you that the coffee and pastries taste better, and that is the reason for going there. This for those who believe that asking customers opinions is a help in building brands: people’s biographies “know” reasons very well – people don’t.

What some companies do is get Illy’s coffee while telling the wrong story. Getting Illy would be a useless effort for the customers of the second café – use less expensive coffee and be coherent with another story. Alternatives are reassuring stories, stories of health, of caring. You have to understand the biographical moment of the target reader.

Expanding the reach of Google Chrome

Look at the recently released Google Chrome ad Dear Sophie. Here Google has the problem of having conquered part of the explorative market segment, by establishing a technical legend about the speed of its Chrome browser (another myth, as no user actually checks the details), but Chrome is not used in other segments. What they target with the Dear Sophie ad is the caring segment, users whose basic values are “taking care”. There are several hooks for this kind of reader, starting from the theme, growing a kid. And them:

- A romantic reassuring melody.

- Lightly teasing the kids mother from the father “this was mother’s idea” – classical, solid family that is capable of self-referential humor.

- A relatively long piece on “The Hospital”: the central emotional aspect of the ad is the caring model, and here they create a few seconds of anxiety – they also print in big fonts “Helpless”. The problem is quickly resolved, the kid is fine, celebrating her birthday, but the hospital/helpless quote helps keeping the attention.

- Use of very basic web technology. In fact there is no real technical reason for doing what is shown in the Chrome browser and not say in Firefox. In fact the ad makes no single real argument in favor of Chrome – but it’s not important.

- Kid loves the father, writes him nice notes for father day. This is a promise of happiness for the father that introduces Chrome as a family tool – yes it sounds ridiculous but unconscious promotional messages don’t need to make sense. The father is the real target of the ad, the child is the mediator; the father is the one choosing the browser in such family.

- The video respects the three-part story of every journey – with the finale being that it alludes to the kid being grown up and happy sharing memories with the father. Of course the truth will be a resulting teen ager ranting about the father caring more about the PC than the kids, but again, truth is irrelevant in this kind of marketing.

In the You Tube comments I see “this made me cry too”. Hitting caring, emotional public. This is a very well done ad, with no relation to truth, science, improving anything, and to a critical mind testifies that the efforts to maintain the slogan of “don’t be evil” (another myth) have become secondary.

Consumer’ dynamics and possible rhetoric

Here are some themes that may be applied in creating and analyzing ads:

(This table is translated from Story Selling – a marketing guide in Italian.)

Analysis of “spreading stories” in the literature is most focused on cases where the marketing story is not only told and spread by word-of-mouth, but also “pushed” by mainstream media using considerable economic means: Obama, Berlusconi, major brands (Diesel, Google Chrome etc.). But there are cases where stories, actually micro-stories, self propagate, and this is a theme most interesting for software startups, and not only them. For inquiring about how this happens, I’ve put together a poll, “Learning about new software”:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dHU1Q1JQUXY2azVzSGNGZVVLRkVqaVE6MQ#gid=0

Please answer it!

Why should you answer my poll?

If you answer my poll, you get my eternal gratitude for a few seconds, which is already something worthy . But more, by taking the minute it takes to fill up the answers, you will start thinking about which kind of messages and wordings are most convincing to you, and this may increase your awareness of the messages you are hearing and creating – becoming more capable of analysis. All by spending a minute on my poll! And you don’t even have to give me a kite in exchange, unlike Tom Sawyer’s lucky friends at the fence.
Further reasons are that you will become rich fast, enlarge all your extremities, meet Russian girls and then get a large amount of unclaimed money  from Nigeria.

Startups’ evolving communication needs: the marketing ziggurat
Listing features vs. telling stories
Example’ analysis
Working on texts
Discussion

One of the aims of the workshop is to help startuppers describe their product using a terminology closer to an emotional model of the user.

Some materials that will be used follow. The material is mainly inspired by Story Selling – a base text on marketing and storytelling in Italian. At the workshop the material will also be available in Italian.

To enroll to the workshop write to startup@bettersoftware.it.

Base schema for product narration

Exercise: The product is a story

Which story does you product tell? Is it heroic, moving, a thriller, noir? A redemption story or a apprenticeship one? A lucky intuition or a hard earned success?

Try to guess the kind of story that you’d like to tell through your product and select its essential roles.

- Which kind of story would you like to tell?

- What or whom does it involve?

- Which problem or need it must solve / fulfill?

- What or who is the opponent?

- Which trials it must pass?

- Who is helping and who is hampering?

- How do we know the target has been reached?

- Which other characters appear?

Compose all this elements in a story: [write write write]

Exercise: Opponents and needs

Who are your opponents and competitors?

Which is the need you are fulfilling?

Which is the deficiency you are fulfilling?

The desire you satisfy?

The problems you meet?

For each of the above create a character, then try to take their point of view and tell the story: [write write write]

This interview at Mixergy with Brad McCarty, editor of The Next Web is about delivering a pitch pitch to the media so they may write about your company.

I am unable to express how important I believe this is for a startup; in my experience its more important than any feature creation, bug fix, product enhancement. I think this should be a mandatory watching for any startup.

Some mistakes Brad lists:

- the 1000 word e-mail

- lack of a story

- pitching on Mondays

But as always advice make sense in context – you’ve got to watch the interview.

For those who seen my grumbling about the evolving needs of startup communication at DD-Day, this is a perfect addition to my talk.

A while ago I wrote a blog post where I said that often Mixergy is often not about mentoring via tips, but about hearing good life stories. This interview is actually a great example of the former