B2B Marketers: Should You be Festive this Holiday Season?

This December, should your content go all-in on the normal holly-jolly? Or should you just skip the festive look and feel?

Bear in mind, more than half your customers are despondent. Should your company pretend otherwise?

I have six suggestions:

Dial back the ho-ho-ho. Would you wear a sequin cocktail dress to your brother's funeral? Leave the snowmen and candy canes in storage this year; they'll be an eye-sore to many. Stick instead with your year-round branding.

Step up your social outreach. B2B social media users spend more time sharing in December, so beef up your posting, social advertising and social selling. But avoid syrupy stuff. Provide value.

Make it personal. Personalized messages will help you stand out from the automatons deaf to the nation's mood.

Re-gift your best content. Republish the year's best content. Package a blog-post series as an e-book; an article as a year-end checklist; customer research as a white paper. 'Tis the giving season.

Align with sales. Alignment with sales is critical every December; maybe more so, this year. Create content sales can use to close deals—data sheets, testimonials and case studies.

Ask for wisdom. Don't just eschew frivolity; promote serenity. In 1963, when LBJ lit the National Christmas Tree a month after JFK's murder, he urged Americans to turn from "things false and small" to "things true and profound." He went on to say:

We have our faults and we have our failings, as any mortal society must. But when sorrow befell us, we learned anew how great is the trust and how close is the kinship that mankind feels for us, and most of all, that we feel for each other. We must remember, and we must never forget, that the hopes and the fears of all the years rest with us, as with no other people in all history. We shall keep that trust working, as always we have worked, for peace on earth and good will among men.

NOTE: Opinions at my own.

Don't be a Blabbermouth

No matter the forum, choose your words wisely.

That's the advice of 17th century Jesuit Balthasar Gracian in The Art of Worldly Wisdom.

"There is always time to add a word, never to withdraw one," Gracian says.

So be prudent when you speak, particularly when your audience doesn't agree with you; and, when it does, speak only "for the sake of appearance."

"Talk as if you were making your will: the fewer words, the less litigation."

And make good use of everyday conversation, because every encounter is another chance to rehearse for "more weighty matters of speech."

Blabbermouths don't have much future, Gracian says. 

"He who speaks lightly soon falls or fails."

PRUDENT DISCLAIMER: Opinions are my own.

CMO, Want to Avoid Extinction?

No CMO wants to be left on the sidelines. Sidestepping the confines of traditional marketing to deliver a more relevant and integrated customer experience will ensure the future of the CMO on the digital playing field.

— Accenture White Paper

Dear CMO:

Afraid you'll be banished to the North Pole?

Ready to declare every conventional marketing tactic passé?

Well, be warned: your rush to "embrace digital" is abominable.

The reason's simple.

Just like people who use an online dating service, B2B customers use digital to eliminate you from consideration. They don't use it to start a relationship.

Relationships come from face-to-face.

And relationships are the wellspring of growth, the most valuable off-balance-sheet asset your company has.

So why on earth would you "sidestep" face-to-face?

Do you want to avoid extinction—or accelerate it?

In Praise of the Short Sentence

Want to release a powerful idea?

Use a short sentence.

The short sentence gains its power from its adjacency to long ones, which comprise the bulk of most any piece of writing.

Long sentences, says writing teacher Roy Peter Clark, "bring clarity, create suspense or magnify emotion."

Short ones pack punch. They're pithy, truthful, Tweetable.

Consider how our world is the better for these bantams:

• Hunger is the best sauce.
• Good is the enemy of the great.
• A little learning is a dangerous thing.
• No man is great if he thinks he is.
• Be sincere, be brief, be seated.
• You can’t always get what you want.
• Eighty percent of success is showing up.
• Easy does it.
• To finish is to win.
• Do, or do not; there is no try.

Stranger Things

While heading the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover spied on many left-leaning artists.

James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, Albert Camus, Truman Capote, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Gene Kelly, John Lennon, Dorothy Parker, Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger and Orson Welles all crossed the G-man's radar.

But Hoover's strangest suspect, without doubt, was French Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.

Hoover distrusted all philosophers (particularly French ones) and in 1945 asked, "Are Existentialists just Commie shills?"

To find the answer, Hoover assigned a team of agents to spy on Sartre, who was visiting the US in April of that year at the Office of War Information's invitation.

Hoovers' agents applied routine FBI methods—surveillance, eavesdropping, wiretapping and theft—to find the answer. But the agents were stymied. One stole notebooks from Sartre's personal effects, only to inform Hoover "this material is all in French." Their findings, in the end, were inconclusive (a lot like Existentialism's).

Twenty years later, Hoover again focused on the philosopher, tagging him for a co-conspirator in JFK's assassination, because Sartre had belonged to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which Lee Harvey Oswald was also a member. That investigation never quite panned out, either.

INTERESTED IN EXISTENTIALISM? Join The Authentic Existentialist, a private Facebook group.   

PHOTO CREDIT: Victor Romero