Luna Marketing Services made an (LinkedIn word warning) insightful point in a recent Instagram post.
“According to a study by Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman, certain pieces of online content that evoke high-arousal positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions are more viral.”
“This article takes a psychological approach to understanding diffusion. Using a unique data set of all the New York Times articles published over a three-month period, the authors examine how emotion shapes virality.”
But this was the insightful part. From Luna:
“The study also found that content evoking emotions such as happiness and sadness is less likely to be shared or go viral.”
From the original authors:
“Experimental results further demonstrate the causal impact of specific emotion on transmission and illustrate that it is driven by the level of activation induced.”
As I mentioned in a comment to Celia, I hadn’t thought of the distinction between high arousal and low arousal.
No, not that.
I’m thinking about emotions akin to complete bliss.
Usually you create a checklist of what you need. Or better still, a go-to-market processs that defines the internal and external collateral you need for different tiers of releases. For example, a Tier 1 go-to-market effort may warrant a press release, but a Tier 3 effort may not.
In the best case scenario, the product marketer is able to coordinate the necesary content so that all external stakeholders (prospects, customers, others) and internal stakeholders (sales, customer success, others) have all the information they need, at the right time.
In the worst case scenario, some content is shared before other necessary parts of the content are ready.
Google Gemini.
For example, it’s conceivable that a company may host a public webinar about its product…even though the company website has absolutely no information about the product for prospects who want to know more. Yes, this can happen.
Google Gemini.
If you need help with go-to-market strategy, Bredemarket has done this before and can discuss your needs with you.
Identity/biometric marketing leaders continuously talk about how their companies have reduced bias in their products. But have they reduced bias in their own marketing to ensure it resonates with prospects?
“Marketers are driven to accentuate the positive about their companies. Perhaps the company has a charismatic founder who repeatedly emphasizes how ‘insanely great’ his company is and who talked about ‘bozos.’ (Yeah, there was a guy who did both of those.)
“And since marketers are often mandated to create both external and internal sales enablement content, their view of their own company and their own product is colored.”
Let’s look at two examples of biometric marketing internal bias…and how to overcome it.
Google Gemini.
Internal bias at Company A
Company A does not participate in the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Face Recognition Technology Evaluation (FRTE) for technical reasons.
As a result, the company’s marketing machine constantly discredits NIST FRTE, and the company culture is permeated with a “NIST is stupid” mentality.
All well and good…until it runs into that one prospect who asks, “Why are you scared to measure yourself against the competition? Does your algorithm suck that bad?”
Internal bias at Company B
Company B, on the other hand, participates in FRTE, FATE, FRIF (previously FpVTE), and every other NIST test imaginable.
This company’s marketing machine declares its superiority as a top tier biometric vendor, supported by outside independent evidence.
All well and good…until it runs into that one prospect who declares, “That’s just federal government test data. How will you perform in our benchmark using our real data and real computers?”
Internal bias at Bredemarket
Well, I have my admittedly biased solution to prevent companies from tumbling into groupthink, drinking of Kool-Aid, and market irrelevance.
Contract with an outside biometric product marketing expert. (I just happen to know one…me.)
Google Gemini.
I haven’t spent 30 years immersed in your insular culture. I’ve heard all the marketing-speak from different companies, and I’ve written the marketing-speak for nearly two dozen of them. I can ensure that your content resonates with your external customers and prospects, not only with your employees.
All well and good…until…
Reducing internal bias at Bredemarket
“But John, what about your own biases? IDEMIA, Motorola, Incode, and other employers paid you for 25 years! You probably have an established process that you use to prepare andouillette at home, based upon a recipe from 2019!”
Google Gemini.
I don’t…but point taken. So how do I minimize my own biases?
My breadth of experience lessens the biases from my past. Look at my market-speak from 1994 to 2023, in order:
We are Printrak, a nimble private company that will dominate AFIS with our client-server solution.
We are Printrak (stock symbol AFIS) a well-funded public company that will dominate AFIS, mugshot, computer aided dispatch, and microfiche.
We are Motorolans, and our multi-tier Digital Justice Solution has a superior architecture to that of Sagem Morpho and others.
We are MorphoTrak, bringing together the best technologies from MetaMorpho and Printrak BIS, plus superior French technology for secure credentials and road safety…unencumbered by the baggage that weighs down MorphoTrust.
We are IDEMIA North America, bringing together the best technologies from MorphoTrust and MorphoTrak for ABIS, driver’s licenses, and enrollment, coupled with the resources from the rest of IDEMIA, a combined unbreakable force.
We are Incode, not weighed down with the baggage of the old dinosaurs, and certainly not a participant in the surveillance market.
Add all the different messaging of Bredemarket’s clients, plus my continuous improvement (hello MOTO) of my capabilities, and I will ensure that my content, proposals, and analysis does not trap you in a dead end.
Reducing internal bias at your company
Are you ready to elevate your company with the outside perspective of a biometric product marketing expert?
Let’s talk (a free meeting). You explain, I ask questions, we agree on a plan, and then I act.
Back in July, I shared a post and a video based upon the simple phrase “I Ask, Then I Act.”
I ask, then I act.
To be honest, this is not a revolutionary insight. A lot of people have described the things that do or do not happen before you take action.
There’s Nike’s famous “Just Do It.” This wasn’t necessarily intended to imply that you proceed in a thoughtless manner. Nike was instead addressing the tendency to hesitate, and urging people to move forward.
Now there are phrases that DO imply (at least in my humble opinion) that you proceed in a thoughtless manner, the two most famous of which are “ready, fire, aim” and “move fast and break things.” Both of these, especially the latter, suggest that the act of doing is itself empowering and that the negative consequences of doing something bad can be mitigated by doing the right thing later.
But on Wednesday I ran into another phrase that urges that you do something BEFORE you act, but it uses a different formulation than my two-step process.
Unlike me, Charest got a little more granular about what happens when you execute / act. In a LinkedIn post from a couple of weeks ago, Charest talked about each of the three parts of RPE. Yeah, he has an acronym. Because AARC.[1]
✅ Review: Where are you right now? You don’t need to be an expert. Just be honest about what’s working and what’s not.
✅ Plan: What’s the one thing you can do to support your goal? Not ten things. One. Focus is how you win.
✅ Execute: Block time on your calendar to actually do the work. If you don’t protect that time, distractions will take it from you.
Charest’s “review” step maps to my “ask” step, but I didn’t explicitly call out the “plan” step like Charest did. But I have talked about “focus” a lot, which is the emphasis of Charest’s “plan” step. Don’t go all over the place. Just do one thing. He parallels Wally Schirra’s thoughts on this issue.
“With my eyes fixed on the control panel, studiously ignoring the view, I began a slow, four degrees per second, cartwheel.”
When Schirra went into space as part of the Project Mercury program, he was focused on the goal of completing his engineering tasks. While the view from space was spectacular, he ignored it and focused on the control panel. And the engineering tasks were themselves focused, explicitly avoiding “Larry Lightbulb” experiments. This was a reaction to the prior Scott Carpenter mission.
But whether you review and plan, or if you just act, I believe you need to prepare before you do the thing.
I haven’t mentioned the Bredemarket 4444 Partner Retainer in a while (since May, in fact), but since I recently proposed it to a prospect I thought I’d mention it again.
Originally envisioned as a service for clients who wanted a flat monthly rate for high-volume content creation, I have since extended the Bredemarket 4444 Partner Retainer to also apply to Bredemarket’s analysis services and related strategic services. Embed me for the month and I’ll handle your strategy.
Imagen 4.
The structure: you pay a flat fee, in advance, and I give you a certain number of prepaid base hours for the following calendar month. In exchange for prepayment, you get a discount from my standard hourly rate.
Benefits to you include an “embedded partner” relationship.
Benefits to me include a more predictable income and a better understanding of your needs.
The brochure at the end of this post includes sample pricing for 15, 30, or 45 hour per month increments. Any additional hours above the maximum are billed at Bredemarket’s standard hourly rate.
Are you a technology marketing leader who lies awake at night worrying about the following?
“Keeping up with the speed and complexity of the digital landscape.”
Well, maybe not that exact phrase. That sounds like something generative AI would write.
And in fact, my buddy Bredebot wrote it when answering a question about Chief Marketing Officer pain points relative to content.
Bredebot is the one in the middle.
But I’m not going to let Bredebot write an entire post about it, because I’m going to write it myself.
The human way to reflect the sentiment above is to ask whether your content is up-to-date, or is as dated as a Pentium.
And that’s something that a marketing leader DOES worry about, because they (usually) want their firms to be perceived as innovative, not old fashioned.
Let me give you an example of outdated content that persists today.
SEO, AEO, GEO…I believe they’re different
For years we have been discussing search engine optimization, or SEO. The whole point of SEO is to ensure that your content appears at the top of results when you use Google or Bing or another search engine to launch a search. (Ignore “sponsored content” for a minute here.)
In case you haven’t noticed, fewer and fewer people are using search engines. Instead, they are searching for answers from their favorite generative AI tool, and now the new term the kids are using is answer engine optimization, or AEO. Or perhaps you can follow the lead of Go Fish and refer to generative engine optimization, or GEO.
Now some people are continuing to use SEO when they mean AEO and GEO, under the theory that it’s all just optimization, and it’s all just searching but just with a different tool. Personally, I believe that continuing to refer to SEO is confusing because the term has always been associated with search engines.
“Unlike traditional SEO, which focuses on ranking for keywords, AEO concentrates on providing comprehensive, authoritative answers that AI systems can easily process and deliver to users….
“Think about how you use AI tools today. You don’t ask for ‘electrician Auckland residential services’, you ask, ‘What’s causing the flickering in my kitchen lights?’ or ‘How much should it cost to rewire a 1970s house?’ You want answers, not search results.”
But forget about XEO and let’s return to the content YOU create.
How do you keep YOUR content up-to-date?
Let’s say that you’ve reached the point in your content calendar where you have to write a blog post about pop music.
And let’s also say that you’re old enough to remember the 20th century.
You may have a problem.
For example, when you see the words “pop music,” you may immediately spell the second word with a “z” and a “k” when you TALK ABOUT.
And now that I’ve lost half my reading audience, you can see my point. While personas are approximations, you need to refer to them when crafting your content. If your hungry people (target audience) tend to be in their 20s and 30s, they’re probably not going to understand or respond to songs from M (Robin Scott) or Kraftwerk.
So how does a marketer ensure that their content is not dated? By remembering to ask, then act. Question your assumptions, do your research, write your content, then check your content.
Question your assumptions
Before you write your content, ensure your premise is correct. For example, I didn’t assume without questioning that “keeping up with the speed and complexity of the digital landscape” was a pressing issue. I KNEW that it was a pressing issue, because I encounter it daily.
Do your research
Next, take a moment and check what you are about to say. Was your assumption about fingerprint examiner infallibility affected by the NAS report? Was your assumption affected by activities that occurred after the NAS report?
Write your content
At some point you have to stop asking and start acting, writing your content. Write your draft 0.5 to get your thoughts down, then write your draft 1.0. And keep your personas in mind while you do it.
Check your content
Once it’s drafted, check it again. Have your dated assumptions crept into your writing? Did you use the term “SEO” out of habit, by mistake? Fix it.
The results of up-to-date content
If you do all these things, you’ll ensure that your competitors don’t laugh at your content and tell you how out of touch you are.
Ideally, you want your competitors to show how out of date they are.
“Look at WidgetCorp, who doesn’t even know how to spell! Their writer’s left finger slipped while typing, and they typed the so-called word ‘AEO’ rather than ‘SEO’! Everybody know the term is SEO!”
Which gives you the opportunity to write a succinct reply to your bozo competitor.
I’ll give you the joy of writing it yourself.
Unless you want Bredemarket to write it, or other content. Book a free meeting to discuss your needs. https://bredemarket.com/mark/
I am a fan of song mashups…when they’re done right. Such as Mike Jones vs. the Cure in “Mr. Jones in a Forest.” Or a recent discovery of mine, Blondie vs. the Doors in “Rapture Riders.”
At their best, song mashups attract the hungry people for each component song and bring them together to appreciate the whole.
And in this case there IS a lesson for B2B marketing. While most marketers prefer emphasizing a single uncluttered message, a well-structured marketing mashup can be powerful. Take Tide and Bud Light.
By the way, I’m also a fan of shreds, such as “I Get Around.” But I haven’t found a B2B marketing lesson in shreds yet.
Bredemarket 