I missed doing Friday posts, and since I am working on building the business back up, it’s the return of Friday Funday!

Today’s post is one I have been wanting to write for a long time but because I of what I was doing workwise and because I wanted to see it play out a bit, I held off on writing until a good time.  Today I want to talk about intelligence, and it feels like everything has come together on this.

Thanks to my experiences with First Health Associates, I have a better appreciation for not only establishing clearer marketing goals in campaigns but truly understanding what your product offers.  Without the right intelligence that provides clear understanding on what you offer and where you need to go, developing a successful campaign is harder and less likely to provide the results you are looking for.

Product intelligence is essential because you have to not only understand what you are selling, but what the consumers think you are selling.  Offering the world’s best gazpacho is no treat for someone who only thinks you sell salsa.  To continue to tell that person how great the soup is only makes it worse; asking instead about what kind of tomato dishes they might be interested in and how daring they are in new cuisine is a better way to create a fan.

Perception is also a key ingredient of intelligence and if a customer perceives your product to be for something other than what you say it’s for you will again find resistance to your pitch.  If your gazpacho is perceived as a health oriented product, it will not do as well as one that is gourmet that is also healthy.  The difference is small but important.

Intelligence is also something that you need when responding to outside forces that may or may not affect your brand.  During the fall a politician from my home state of Kansas made the mistake of singling out a teenager for a disparaging comment made on Twitter (Full Disclosure: Governor Sam Brownback beat my father in 2010 for his seat).  The comment itself wasn’t worth the effort, but the response from his office took on a life of its own and caused a bigger incident than I’m sure anyone in the office meant for it to be.

Reacting without some knowledge or intelligence is a good way to find yourself in a similar situation, and as a gesture to those of you who have made it this far I wanted to talk a bit about Klout.  Klout is an online tool that measures the online activity of one’s social media influence.  For an example you can see mine here: http://klout.com/#/gthomasholland.

Had the staff of the Governor used Klout before forming a response to the situation, they would have seen that this was a High School Senior who was barely active on Twitter and not worth the effort.  Operating with a bit of intelligence about the situation before hand would have saved that office some work.

Klout is also great because it shows the activity style of the person you are researching.  I can look up a reporter on Twitter, plug them in on Klout and see some information about how they act online, how effective they are and what kind of audience they reach.  This helps in determining how influential someone is and what kind of effort I should look at using.

That’s it for today.  I am getting back to writing the new e-book and bracing for the Chicago snow storm we are supposed to see today.  Lake effect snow is my word of the month.