“That person ends up turning around and saying, ‘No.’”

Reminiscent of Steve Job’s famous dictum that “Focusing is about saying no,” one can say that social media strategy, if not born, is at least best expressed in this “no.” You say “no” because you have a clear sense of what does and doesn’t belong in the social media channels you’re using. And you have that clear sense because you have developed and articulated a social media strategy.

Of course, as Shannon is quick to point out, the conversation doesn’t and shouldn’t end there! Instead, because you have a strategy and you want to help, you turn around and say, “I could just tweet this announcement, but it would be better if we thought about how we could generate conversation around things related to this product.”

And so engagement grows.

Shannon compares the process of applying social media strategy in this way to the use she makes of the editorial policy at the blog she manages, A Healthier Michigan. The stated mission of that blog, which is sponsored by Shannon’s employer, is to “help everyone in Michigan get healthier from the inside out.” Accordingly, the content combines a focus on healthy living with a focus on life in Michigan. This mission serves as a yardstick when deciding what and what not to publish, particularly when others are pitching them.

So what is a “social media strategy” exactly?

To Shannon, it’s two things. On the one hand, it answers the question, “What is my brand’s role in this place with these people?” It expresses the “how” of social media for your organization: How are we going to approach social channels? How will the brand live and breathe there? In what spirit? With what tone?

On the other hand, and as a practical manner, social media strategy addresses the question of organizational alignment. Specifically, your social media strategy describes how social media will be used to support the strategy of your department (communications, PR, what have you), and, more broadly, the overall strategy of the organization.

Once the strategy is laid out, it becomes possible to integrate social media into the plans of an organization at the outset—as she puts it: “when products are designed, when communication strategies are put together”— rather than as an afterthought.

If you’d like to hear my entire conversation with Shannon, in which we also talk about the key to effective content marketing and the art of “being human,” I invite you to do so here:

Of course, if you want to never ever miss an episode of Marketing Smarts, you should subscribe to the podcast in iTunes! If you enjoy the podcast, please leave us a review there. If there’s someone you’d like to hear on the podcast or an issue you’d like us to address, leave a comment.

Thanks for listening!

Transcript: Marketing Smarts, Episode 11: Shannon Paul

“For the new cyber-site, each department should be able to control its own area.” “My daughter hates the blue we use in the header now. She thinks it should ‘pop’ more. Can you do that?” “The new site needs to have the Tweeters and MyBooks.”

Stop me if you’ve heard these before.

You nonprofit marketing directors out there have it seriously rough. For one, you probably answer to a board of directors, your executive director, other staff members, a departmental oversight committee, an advisory council, and on and on—almost none being professional marketers.

As much as you’d love to just ignore everyone and do what you know is best, you may not have that kind of organizational power. (And if you do, kudos!)

You need a process that builds internal consensus and buy-in, but also results in a compelling website that moves your mission forward. After all, if you can’t do this successfully, you’re the one who will be blamed when the website doesn’t meet everybody’s individual, uninformed, and contradictory expectations.

6 Steps to a Successful Website Development Process

Here are the steps:
1. Include stakeholders at appropriate times and contexts, but focus them on what’s actually important.
2. Clarify exactly how the website will become an expression of the organization’s offerings, priorities, and target audiences; the image the organization wishes to portray; and the values it wishes to live.
3. Identify who the website is really for—and what valuable content the organization is going to provide for them.
4. Take actual data into account. (You are tracking metrics on your website now, right?)
5. Articulate how the organization is positioned within the “nonprofit marketplace.”
6. Recognize that a website will need consistent care and feeding after its launch. You’ll need to plan for that.

What’s more, all of this should be done before a single wireframe has been created, comp has been designed, or functionality has been spec’d. Certainly it should be well under way before you start paying a web-design firm.

An Example

We recently helped a client through a very successful website launch, but they did make one mistake. The marketing director waited too long to include the executive director, who had more conservative opinions about the colors, fonts, and navigation scheme (and a designer cousin who put a bug in his ear.) This led to additional creative revisions, costing lots of extra time and lots of extra money.

On the other hand, we’ve had clients like the Indiana Historical Society, which did a fantastic job including all stakeholders without derailing the project. At the website kickoff meeting, I walked into an enormous room that seemed to stretch as wide as a football field. I sat in the middle—a dozen people to my left, a dozen to my right.

While that meeting (and the table) was long, everyone’s voice was heard. This allowed the marketing director to manage the process without having to involve everyone in every little detail. Throughout the project, she picked the right times to get feedback from the broader group. In the end, the website launched on time, on budget, and with strong buy-in from all key stakeholders.

So, how do you do it? Creating a new website is a big investment for you and your organization. This might all seem a bit overwhelming, but you’d be surprised how much you can accomplish with a strong process and a little guidance.

Good luck. And don’t forget the Tweeters and Mybooks!

Learn a whole lot more about how to create nonprofit websites that work from the free eBook, “Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail.”

Scott Paley is the managing partner at Abstract Edge, a creative online marketing agency that has launched new brands for Clairol and Vera Wang, inspired a million moms to march on Washington, assisted American Idol’s fight against malaria, and helped increase web traffic so successfully for Discover Magazine that it was recently acquired. Follow him on Twitter @spaley.

The “Think Different” campaign—and all that it entailed—helped rescue Apple. This same message, if accepted, will be what rescues B2B marketers today.  Here are some of the lines from the commercials:

“Here’s to the Crazy Ones … The ones who see things differently … You can quote them, disagree with them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing that you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They explore. They create. They inspire.”

These words (change, invent, imagine, explore, create, inspire) encapsulate the approach and attitude that needs to be adopted and embraced by today’s B2B marketer. Marketing receives so much negative press today. We read about the marketing skills gap, our lack of visibility at the C-level, our lack of lack of alignment with sales, our in ability to justify our budget, etc. Unfortunately, much of it is true. That’s because we keep doing the same thing over and over again.

I submit that the time has come to change, to change for the better, to think different. Here are 5 things marketers can do differently:

1.   Don’t Believe What They’re Saying

A good friend of mine played professional baseball for 12 years. He was a relief pitcher—specifically, a closer (the pitcher who comes in at the end of a game to secure a win). I asked him what kind of mindset was needed to be a closer.  He said, “You can’t let yourself get too high, or too low. And don’t read the press clippings after you blow one.”

Good advice for marketers. Too many marketers are “too low,” believing what everyone tells them: that marketing is a necessary evil, providing little value. But that doesn’t have to be true. So, as the commercial says, start to “Think Different.” Rather than accepting the characterization,  begin believing that being a B2B marketer is one of the most exciting and promising careers of today. Embrace what’s in front of you. Go for it. And if you fail (and at times, you will), so what? Just keep plugging. Success over time is the goal. When you achieve it, others’ perception will begin to change.

2.  Defy Tradition

During my tenure as a marketing director for McAfee, I made the decision to move to paperless collateral. This decision was not particularly well-received by some of our veteran field sales people. In their traditional way of thinking, I was overlooking the “need” to have something to hand to customers. They told me that we would lose sales, miss out on opportunities, and that this was a bad decision. I didn’t care. Why not? Because our analysis showed that we could redirect the huge printing budget and spend it in areas that would generate a better overall ROI. Before I announced the decision, I showed our Sales Management how the extra budget would be spent on demand generation and even showed them the forecasted increase of leads. They bought in immediately.

Many traditional marketing activities (tradeshows, collateral, telemarketing, etc.) are done simply because things have always been done that way. But as Mark Twain said, “Sacred cows make the best hamburger.” So, take some initiative and do some study and analysis on what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and the return you’re getting from it.  Tradition should not be a driving factor when it comes to marketing spend.  Revenue and ROI should be.

3.  Fight for the Right Change

“We already have an in-house teleservices team.”  This is what I heard two weeks into my new position with a software company. This comment was a response to my suggestion that outsourcing our teleservices would be more efficient, effective, and economical.

In the process of making my case, I had to have meetings with the head of sales, the head of marketing operations, and the president of our division. The head of the in-house teleservices team made sure he was present at all these meetings, so he could counter my arguments.

During one of these meetings, after quite an animated plea by him to keep things in-house, I said to him, “Dave, this isn’t personal. I believe we can do better. That’s what all of us in the company should strive to be doing  … better.”  The meeting resulted in a “bake-off”:  For 45 days I gave 50% of my teleservices work to my chosen outsourced vendor, and 50% to Dave’s team to see who would win. And  45 days later, we reviewed the results, and my outsourced vendor had 100% of my work.

Was I trying to discredit Dave? No. We simply needed “better,” and I wasn’t going to stop until I got it. As for Dave, he never spoke to me again, and he went out of his way trying to make our team look bad. But our case had been made, and our success was known throughout the company.

If there is something in your organization that needs changing, don’t stop driving for it.  Although people will fight back, if it’s the right change, it will make it worthwhile.

4.  Be Realistic

I was speaking to a client a few weeks ago about our approach to implementing the Lead Management Framework^SM.  Halfway through the discussion, he asked, “Will we be able to get this all completed within three months?”  I told him, “No, that timeframe is unrealistic.” He said, “I figured as much, but I had to ask.”

Anything worth doing takes time. Yet, many B2B marketers (and their management teams) have unrealistic expectations when it comes to turning things around.  Initiatives, such as lead management processes, buyer journey mapping, sales processes, and software deployments take time, people, and resources. The change that has to occur within marketing often requires modifying behavior and culture. Studies show that such change can often take two to three years.

So, develop a plan a plan with realistic timeframes. Include milestones that will allow you to highlight the small changes along the way, but realize that the ultimate change will occur over time.

5.  Lead

In his book, Balancing the Demand Equation, Adam Needles states, “Sales managers and general managers lead, and B2B marketers do not.” This is a bold statement, but is too often true.

Colin Powell has stated the following in terms of leadership:

“You don’t know what you can get away with until you try. You know the expression, ‘it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.’ Well, it’s true.  Good leaders don’t wait for official blessing to try things out. They’re prudent, not reckless. But they also realize a fact of life in most organizations: If you ask enough people for permission, you’ll inevitably come up against someone who believes his job is to say ‘no.’  So the moral is, don’t ask.  Less-effective middle managers endorsed the sentiment, ‘If I haven’t explicitly been told yes, I can’t do it,’ whereas the good ones believed, ‘If I haven’t explicitly been told no, I can.’  There’s a world of difference between these two points of view.

It is time for marketing leaders to adopt this philosophy. Stop waiting to be told “yes” and go for it!

If B2B marketing is ever going to get out of the doldrums of being viewed as inefficient and unnecessary within the organization, they must change.  They must invent, imagine, explore, create and inspire. To put it simply, the must think different.

There’s no secret that many new business ideas never get off the drawing board. The risks and initial investments are just too great for the majority of new business ventures. However, I will reveal a few secrets that most people don’t realize they can do at home to determine the viability and potential market of a new business idea.

When researching demand for a new business venture or idea I have, I always start online. There are a number of procedures and tools that you can use to determine demand for a particular product or service—even if no one else is offering it yet and it’s completely unique to the marketplace.

With five simple (and free) steps you can easily determine whether your new business idea is viable.

1.) Use keyword tools to estimate the search volume of the keywords relevant to your business idea. To determine how many people are interested in products or services relating to your new business idea, use search tools to get an estimate on how many people are actually looking for them. For example, at my site, I found out the number of monthly searches for things like: “customer appreciation program,” “customer retention,” “customer thank-you gifts,” etc. That gave me a good idea of how many people were actively interested in a customer-retention program or gifts for customers.

There are a number of free and paid tools you can use that are fairly accurate. Google Keyword Tool is the best free tool. SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool, Wordtracker, and Wordstream are also great applications to estimate keyword search volume. By using a few different tools and comparing the results, you can get a very accurate picture of the demand for your product.

2.) Search the terms on Google and analyzed the results found. Find out who else is  offering comparable services and ranking for those keywords that you just analyzed. After filtering out the results for relevance, you can use a number of other free tools to identify the estimated traffic for those domains and the top referring keywords for each site. This will help you identify how successful the competition has been and helps give you a clearer picture of what you can hope to accomplish. You can also analyze the backlink profiles of those domains to see what kind of press their comparable products have been receiving—and it can point you in new directions of where to research your ideas further.

3.) Look at the CPC (costs per click) for each keyword in Google Adwords and Microsoft Adcenter. By looking at what the competition is paying for traffic for all your relevant keywords, you can get a clearer picture of what kind of return you should expect for each visitor you can get to traffic your site. A low CPC shows that people searching for that term are not very likely to be qualified buyers. Testing different ad copy and targeting different keywords, then analyzing the results, gives you a better idea of which terms/aspects of your business and marketing message should be reevaluated.

4.) Browse the question and answer sites online for questions relating to your business idea. By searching sites like Yahoo! Answers, Ask, Quora, and a number of other Q&A sites, you can see if others are interested in the new service you are thinking about providing. You can even start looking in forums if you don’t immediately find what you’re looking for.

5.) Crowdsource your friends, family, and business contacts. Besides the obvious ways of calling and face-to-face contact, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ are great methods for crowdsourcing opinions from your contacts. Facebook even offers built-in polls that you can use for this very purpose. You could pay to outsource this service as well with things like focus groups and group surveys … but this should always be done last, because after doing the first four steps, you might not even need to!

If your results are still inconclusive, it might be a good idea to plan a small-scale product/service launch. For example, create an informational website about your product. Make it known that the product or service is coming soon and that visitors can join your mailing list to be notified once the product/service is available. (Offer some sort of discount or incentive as well.) Use PPC methods, email marketing, or even SEO to get traffic to the site. Depending on the result, you can determine the interest level of potential customers in your new business idea.

New business ideas are dreamt up every single day. The difference between going broke and becoming a multimillionaire is determining whether your business venture is viable and potentially profitable. Taking these five steps into account, you should be able to save time and money the next time you get a great idea for a new business.

Chris Wise is head of SEM at Customer Rave.

Here’s how some of our Facebook and LinkedIn friends answered the question, “What’s the best marketing advice you ever received?”

“If it ain’t being measured, it ain’t being managed.” (Kate Shopper)

“The customer can’t articulate his problem—that’s what you have to do it for him.” (Pamit D. Anand)

“Don’t tell the customer where to go—tell them why they need to be there.” (Teri Fisher)

“Your opinion doesn’t matter… Only your customer’s does.” (LuAnne Kay)

“Think creatively. Act strategically.” (Tricia Hrotko)

“Don’t assume anything!” (Stephanie Weagle)

“Marketing is not looking in the mirror.” (Mark van de Sande)

“Don’t always trust your gut … Test everything.” (Bob Hebeisen)

“Do not discount. Discounting for the most part kills your brand and your happiness level. You fee like you’re working thrice as hard for the same amount of money. And guess what? You are!” (Sean D’Souza)

And last but not least …

“Start by defining your target audience very precisely—the narrower and more specific the better. Then learn what makes them tick, how they think, what they value, attitudes, habits, practices, needs, current experiences, emotional connections, even the words they use when they discuss your category and their unmet needs. THEN develop your strategy. It’s too easy to take the shortcut and go right to strategy (or even implementation!) based on what YOU think and what YOU want. That’s a quick way to get in trouble. Better to assume nothing and ask the target audience for input first. And THEN test everything.” (Michael A. Goodman)

Your turn: What’s the best marketing advice you ever received?

Altimeter Group has published another Open Research report, this time outlining how social media crises occur—and what could be done to prevent them.

First, here’s a workable definition on what we mean by “social media crises.” A social media crisis is an issue that arises in or is amplified by social media, and results in negative mainstream media coverage, a change in business process, or a financial loss.

In our report, we found that, out of 50 crises that received mainstream media attention, 76% of them could have been diminished or prevented, had companies only been prepared.

We interviewed and surveyed some of the world’s most advanced companies in social business, and found most invest in four social business requirements (but are still deficient). Advanced companies establish governance, define real-time processes, foster a culture of learning, and organize into a scalable formation. However, despite these investments, even advanced companies have yet to tie customer data to the product road map and into support systems. Furthermore, they continue to struggle with a fragmented technology set and lack standard measurement frameworks.

To become advanced, companies must climb the Social Business Hierarchy of Needs. I’ll be discussing this at the PRO seminar, but here’s a visual of it:

Here’s the report for you to read: Social Readiness: How Advanced Companies Prepare.

Learn from where others have succeeded and avoid how others have failed—see you on the 29th!

Beth wrote, “As the research shows, it’s the quiet ones we all need to look out for, not the flashy rock stars.” That reminded me of a slide I once saw at an early WOMMA conference. While I don’t recall the presenter, I’ve never forgotten the actual slide and have often used it to demonstrate our misconceptions about what makes someone an “influencer.”

The slide was very simple: just a headline and photo. The headline was a simple question: “Who is the most influential person?” The photo featured a group portrait of the typical people who inhabit the modern-day corporate office:

In an early effort to begin aligning with sales, I decided to eat lunch with the Western Region sales team and its vice president. When I sat down and introduced myself, the vice president shook my hand and greeted me with these words: “Welcome to the company.  I’ll be honest. Marketing has never made a difference for me and my team, and I don’t expect much to change.” 

With that I was put on notice. I had a very, very tough crowd!

Four years later, I attended my last sales meeting at that company. That same vice president stood up, told the story of the day we met, and then told the entire group that he was glad he was wrong.

How did this happen? How had we aligned my marketing team and with sales by the end of my tenure at that company? How was it that we were now working collaboratively? How did we find success when the beginning looked so daunting?

In short, we dropped the “and.”

Historically, marketing and sales have been kept separate, viewed as two separate departments. They are even measured on different goals. However, as the B2B buyer has changed dramatically, this separation of marketing and sales is proving less effective. In response, leading companies are dropping the “and” in sales and marketing. As one vice president I spoke with recently said, it is now “smarketing.”

In one of his latest blog posts Gerhard Gschwandtner of Selling Power Magazine says, “Organizations that want to win must find a way to get sales and marketing to speak with ONE voice. Ideally, sales and marketing leaders should be able to complete each other’s sentences.” The key words here are “win”, “must,” and “ONE.” It is no longer effective to have the two separated. After all, the objectives of both groups are engaging buyers, creating new customers, expanding current customers and ultimately creating more revenue. Why wouldn’t they be doing so together?

So how does a company make the jump and transform to a place where they lose the and? Here are a few quick tips:

1.  Common Goals and Measurements

As mentioned above the ultimate goal of any company is to create revenue and profit. This can be accomplished in a variety of means (new customer acquisition, upselling/cross-selling, retention through customer service, etc.). Your company will meet its revenue goals faster and more efficiently if marketing-sales both have their eye on the measuring revenue and on those things that impact revenue, such as:

• Contribution to pipeline
• Lead aging
• Pipeline velocity
• Conversion metrics

Marketers may say, “What about impressions, clicks and opens?” The answer is that those metrics are good for measuring initial campaign effectiveness, but ultimate success (how campaigns generate revenue) is the metric on which both groups should focus. 

2. Unified Compensation

I remember working in one enterprise company where part of my quarterly bonus was tied to the number of press releases we issued.  (For the record, I am not diminishing the power and use of PR; I’m a big believer in it). The problem was that I was receiving a bonus for a tactic in which we had no means for measuring its effectiveness. Sales needed more leads, yet my attention was diverted so I could get some PR out the door and increase my paycheck. (Yes, ultimately even marketers are coin-operated.)

The goal of marketing-sales is revenue. So, both should have some level of compensation based on their attainment of the revenue goal.

In contrast to the press release focus I had in the company I mentioned earlier, another company I worked for provided commissions to marketing for each sale made. I bet you, as marketers, can guess where our focus was. Yep, you guessed it: quality leads delivered to the sales team, improving time to sale and sales enablement. Our common goals were netted out in a unified compensation plan.

3. A Collaborative Process

I keep reading posts and articles about how marketers need to include sales in defining what a lead is and that they need to help sales understand the lead-management process.  It’s as if sales is the new dorky kid at school, and marketing’s parents have instructed them “be nice to the new kids.”

Marketing doesn’t need to explain anything to Sales.  Sales knows what they want and what they need.  Both groups need to ask, listen, and get to work on the respective tasks that will generate revenue. Marketing-Sales is a joint value proposition whereby both have to roll-up their sleeves and jump in together. Developing a lead-management process is not a marketing function. It’s a corporate-wide process developed by ONE group made up of those with a marketing background and those with a sales background.

Buyers don’t care about the internal politics or alignment issues between marketing and sales.  They care about buying from an organization that knows them, engages them in meaningful dialogue, and addresses their challenges.  The only way organizations will consistently achieve this is by dropping the “and” and becoming “one.”

Your customers may be wondering what Roger Waters famously asked on the Pink Floyd classic album The Wall: “Is There Anybody Out There?”

The voice of the consumer has never been more powerful, or influential, and has potential to spread virally in an instant. Reacting quickly can often quell negative comments and amplify positive ones. And yet, more than 58% of tweeters who have tweeted about a bad experience have never received a response from the offending company.

In today’s competitive landscape, customer service is more important than ever, and a company’s reputation for satisfying clients has never been so vulnerable. Social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn enables businesses of all sizes to interact directly with customers.

Companies now have the option to not only take a phone call—but also take a Tweet or a Facebook post and drill down into it, see who wrote it, and respond accordingly. Of course, don’t expect social media to replace you customer service department, but instead look for it to increase your overall customer satisfaction.

Your customer service issues are likely to fall into one of three categories:

1. Customers experiencing difficulty with a product or service
2. Suggestions for product or service improvements customers would like to see
3. Better ways to market, sell, support, or communicate with customers

Be prepared to respond quickly and cordially. In some cases you may need to “kill them with kindness” in an effort to offer an experience that exceeds their expectations.

If a customer has a serious issue with no quick resolution, offer an email address in order to take the conversation offline. I would suggest a dedicated “unlisted” special email address (think “Batphone”) to specifically deal with these types of issues. Let the customer know that their message is important and that you are doing your best to rectify.  Your No. 1 goal is to turn a bad experience into a good one, save the customer relationship, and get positive word of mouth. After the issue is solved, following up with a quick personal message can encourage the customer to praise your responsiveness.

You can measure the success of your efforts by defining metrics which reflect your overall strategy (for example, saving money, service improvement, etc.). I would suggest starting with the following metrics:

• Responsiveness: How fast is your average response time?
• Complaints: Is the number decreasing?
• Praise: Is this number increasing?
• Quick resolutions: Are you able to eliminate calls to customer service?

Make it a priority to review the progress of your customer service strategy and make adjustments accordingly. Send out an online survey through your social channels asking how your company is doing in regards to customer service.

Solving these issues in real time through a company’s social channels shows your dedication, and transparency, to your customers. So the next time your customer tweets “Is there anybody out there?”, you can proudly respond with, “Yes! How can we help you?”

Do you use your social media channels to enhance your customer service efforts? Which tools do you find most useful? Do you have any success stories to share?

Jason Miller is a social media marketing manager at Zoomerang.

The vendor-client relationship is a dynamic one that if not maintained properly can lead to unsuccessful business endeavors by both sides. The client wants technology to drive results and report success, while the vendor wants to retain and keep clients happy.

So, how can the vendor-client relationship be strong and fruitful for both sides?

Tip 1. Be Open to Communication and Form a Concrete Partnership Through Listening

Vendor: Listen to your clients and/or partners’ suggestions.
Listening can exponentially help drive business to the next level when implemented properly. The clients and partners are using your technology, so though the vendor may be blind to the “areas for improvement,” the client will not be. They will provide you with honest feedback and thus help develop and take your software to the next level. Certain items that may seem like small fixes will help client retention and can lead to future selling points for your prospects.

Client: Alert the vendor to issues and opportunities for growth.
Don’t wait until an hour before the deadline to alert the vendor to an issue or quick fix. It is usually apparent hours before deadline that something is amiss or isn’t working. Alerting the vendor to issues isn’t a weakness, nor does it mean you do not understand the product. Sometimes, technology fails. Work with a vendor as a partner, and let them know of things you like what can improve the experience. This means asking the client for feedback when it comes to reports, results and the status of projects.

Tip 2. Have an End Goal in Mind and Know How To Build on the Foundation

Vendor: Stick to your strengths and develop them.
The tech industry is all about what’s next, but companies are often mislead to try and implement all the “bells and whistles” that are not at the core of their technology. Understanding what differentiators your clients see in your technology and continuing to strengthen those will not only continue to enhance your relationship, but also show an understanding of how your client is utilizing your technology.

Client: Don’t expect miracles right off the bat.
It’s easy to get caught up in a vendor presentation and case study examples. The best way to be prepared when entering a vendor agreement is to know what objectives the client has off the bat. This sets realistic expectations with all parties involved, including the end result of the client. Setting realistic expectations and understanding bandwidth is something agencies can struggle with if they aren’t smart about it.

Tip 3. Use All Aspects of the Thought Process

Vendor: Be accessible and provide industry knowledge.
You need to bend over backwards for the client, whether you like it or not. No matter what industry you are in, there is a competitor out there looking to steal your business. This means you need to have areas of your business dedicated to making your clients life easier, but this doesn’t mean that having a support team is simply enough.

Examples:

• Showcase what other clients are doing well when possible.
• Update them on new functionality via a newsletters and emails.
• Send articles of interest specifically catered to their needs and what interests them.
• Send webinars outside of your own that fall into industry specific or sector specific.

Client: Have thought leadership sessions with your client and vendor.
A great vendor will provide thought leadership and know your skill level. They will push you to think outside of set objectives and to make reporting better. If it’s a true partnership, bring in your vendor and have a few brainstorm sessions with the client. This isn’t to say an agency doesn’t get it, but that the agency, vendor, and client want to create the best end result for the task at hand. The client needs to have the education and understanding of the buy-in, not just take the agency at their word. The client can then provide insight from their side.

These are just a few ways that the client-vendor relationship can be formed into a true partnership. Would you add anything?

Yet there she was, and her check-ins at various spots wove the narrative of her days: that she was heading out to dinner on Friday night, ran some errands on Saturday, and managed to grab a coffee and make it to church on time on Sunday. More significantly to me, it was yet another signal that social location networking is starting to catch on.

It’s true that the population of people using these services is relatively small—even with my cousin on board! A Forrester report from six months ago showed fairly modest adoption rates. But more significantly, services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Yelp and so on attract the right kind of customer for marketers to entice with ads, mobile coupons, rewards, and other location-based campaigns. Why? Because they are more likely to be “Influentials,” and to share their opinion and spread the word about a business. They also encourage others to participate in social location networking, to boot.

Forrester found that 38% of social location networkers are more likely than others to have friends and family ask their opinions prior to purchase. They’re more likely to research a product or service before purchasing, and 14% to 23% more likely to use their phones for comparison shopping. (You can read the nitty-gritty on that here.)

The upshot? Social location networks are increasingly part of the marketer’s toolkit, says my pal Simon Salt, who just published a brand-new book on the topic, the straightforwardly (is that a word?) titled Social Location Marketing: Outshining Your Competitors on Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp & Other Location Sharing Sites (Pearson, 2011). What I like about Simon’s book is that he acknowledges right up front that networks like Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, and others are easily dismissed. (I love that the first chapter of the book is titled “Why Should I Bother?”)

But savvy marketers won’t dismiss these tools. Instead, they’ll make use of the growing trend among the social-media savvy of sharing their location and—more importantly—their opinion about those locations. He shows some businesses already are. But more importantly, he points to clear opportunities for those who are able to move quickly and fast. In other words, this is the book that can give you a vital head start to incorporate social local networks into your digital strategy.

Simon and I chatted recently about his book and why he wrote it.

So, let’s start at the beginning: How to do explain the concept of social location marketing to a non-believer? Or better yet—how might you explain it to your mom?

There is a new craze where people want to tell their friends where they are hanging out. They do this with their phones. They use an app to “check in,” and it sends a message to their friends.

Businesses want to interact with the people who are doing this. This is a perfect marketing opportunity. The question for businesses is what does that marketing look like and which app would be best.

I understand why businesses might want to participate in networks like Foursquare or Gowalla because they want to reach individuals checking in there. But what about individual consumers? Why should they bother?

As marketers start to understand the social consumer and their needs, rewards are becoming increasingly more attractive for individual consumers. Take, for example, the recent partnership between American Express and Foursquare. American Express cardholders can register their card with Foursquare, and when they check in at participating vendors, they receive discounts and credits toward their bill.

JetBlue offers additional air miles for its loyalty program for users who check in at any of its hub airports using Facebook Places. Many companies are now seeing the link between check-in and loyalty, and the fact that these systems can become an automated loyalty program. In fact, Topguest—a third-party check-in aggregator that partners with companies in the travel and tourism industry—is working to specifically tie in different social location sharing apps to loyalty reward programs.

What category or kinds of businesses are really kicking a— in social location marketing?

Retail and the Travel, Tourism & Hospitality industries have been the early beneficiaries of social location marketing. Given that they already had loyalty programs in place and understood the value of repeat business, it was a small step for them to grasp the potential offered by social location sharing apps.

That said, it is not limited to those industries, and we have seen it being successfully used by verticals as diverse as Fashion and FMCG. One example of a business that has used this to grow their business is A.J. Bombers in Milwaukee. The full case study is in my book; but in short, through the use of a one-day campaign,; they managed to grow their customer base by 110% year on year.

What about B2B companies? Where do you see opportunities for them?

B2B companies can most definitely take advantage of social location marketing. One Foursquare-based third-party app produces heat maps of check-ins. While this might seem little more than a pretty picture, when viewed by a company that makes deliveries or service calls in a particular geographical location, it can give them a visualization of their existing marketing efforts.

The areas where their field staff are not checking in is where they don’t have customers. That is a perfect target area for their marketing efforts.

At the Enterprise scale, Lotus used a Foursquare-based competition to select conference attendees to be a part of an evening cruise and receive additional face time with Lotus engineers.

What about virtual companies (like MarketingProfs!) What’s in it for us?

Like MarketingProfs, IncSlingers is a virtual company in that we don’t have offices that our clients come to—we tend to go to them. However, as anyone visiting Austin for SXSW and checking in at any of the coffee shops around the city this year will discover, they are part of something called the IncSlingers Coffee House Tour. Every time someone checks in at one of those locations on Gowalla, they will see a notification page that tells them that they just checked in at a location that is part of the IncSlingers Coffee House Tour—great brand awareness for our company at no cost. (It’s free to set up tours in Gowalla.)

Finally: Why did you want to write a book about social location, when things are changing so fast? Were you terrified it was going to be out of date as soon as it was printed?

Great question. I was concerned about the time-sensitive nature of the book because of the speed of change which is why only about one-third of the book is devoted to the actual apps. The rest of the book is devoted to the strategy and tactics behind good social marketing, principles that do not change because of the change in applications.

I’ve been in digital media for 12 years, and I’ve seen technology come and go, but at the core has always been good marketing communications principles. Those will always be relevant and will endure no matter what the next shiny new object is.

* * * * *

Want to win a copy of Simon’s new book, Social Location Marketing: Outshining Your Competitors on Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp & Other Location Sharing Sites? Leave a comment below and be sure to include your email address; I have three sparkling-new copies to give away.

Of course, the question didn’t pop into my head out of the blue. It was sparked by a comment Brian made regarding the Web. Specifically, he said that Internet-based businesses needed to “go big or go home” because the Internet is starting to look like a “winner take all” marketplace.

Conveniently, he could point to his new investors as two examples that proved his thesis: Salesforce dominates the CRM space, and Google is, well, Google. HubSpot would like to follow in their footsteps and become, as co-founder Darmesh Shah put it, “the single emergent platform provider” in the marketing automation space. When you are THE platform for a specific kind of service, essentially, you’ve won.

While understanding the ambition and appreciating its audacity, and even seeing how it might unfold in the case of HubSpot, I keep asking myself if the statement is really true that the Web, or at least the world of Software-as-a-Service, is really “winner take all.”

At first glance, I would say this is more or less true. Granted, the Web is a big place, and taking it “all” is a practical impossibility. However, within certain limits the Web definitely looks very “winner take most.” Are there other search engines? Yes. Do people use them? Yes, millions do. Are they Google? No.

The fact of the matter is that when you become the dominant service provider online (THe place for search, THE place for auctions, THE place for community, etc.), you will tend to stay dominant and even grow inexorably through sheer force of inertia. The more people use your service, the more valuable it becomes; the more valuable it becomes, the more people are attracted to it. It’s a virtuous circle.

But is such growth and dominance perpetual? We have in our memory once dominant (or, at least, very big) players who have shrunk or vanished. Netscape. AOL. MySpace. What is to prevent Facebook or Google from suffering their same fate?

A couple things, actually. On the one hand, Facebook, Google, eBay, LinkedIn, YouTube, Amazon, and Twitter have enjoyed a very different kind of success than that of those they vanquished. In other words, their fates have already diverged. On the other hand—or really the same hand—their sheer size and reach make it, with each passing day, more difficult for upstarts to dislodge them.

Still, Web consumption habits do change and fragment. Remember, the Web itself is continually growing as more nations and communities come online. Thus, even the success of the companies named above has to be relativized. Facebook may have 500 million active users (depending on how you define “active”), but with close to 2 billion people on the Web, that’s still leaves 75% of users off Facebook. To think about what that means consider this: There could be a “Facebook” out there with 1 billion users that you’ve never heard of. Seriously.

But here’s where I think Halligan has a point. Think back to the way Microsoft Office became the dominant “productivity” suite. It all started with the ubiquity of devices (PCs) running a certain operating system (Windows). Since “everyone” had these devices, everyone had Office. And if you wanted to work with or even communicate with a business, you had to have Office too, even if you were running Macs. The size of the user community drove more and more people  to join the community out of necessity. Even now, with numerous word-processing alternatives out there, the docs that people share with me are Word docs.

The Web is the new “ubiquitous device” and just like people only needed one word-processing program and one spreadsheet program, they only need one search engine, one social network, and one micro-blogging platform and, perhaps, one marketing automation suite. And the more people flock to one particular solution, the more that solution becomes the ONLY solution.

So, you can see the power and the allure of creating a platform, rather than a mere application. Indeed, it’s the same logic that drives Amazon, Apple, and others: Why be a shop when you can be the marketplace? Why limit yourself to making money off transactions that you alone conduct when you could get a cut from every transaction?

Yet, at the same time, the fact that others choose to build for your platform or sell via your marketplace points to the most significant way that the Web is not, after all, “winner take all.” Why not? Because every platform creates a new “all” with new opportunities for building apps, communities, ecosystems and even, if the word makes sense, “meta-platforms.” (Facebook, as a kind of alternative Web sitting on top of the traditional Web, is a perfect example of the latter.)

In other words, the Web may look like a zero-sum game from moment to moment—and there are undeniably winners and losers—but the Web’s very openness, and specifically the openness created by emergent platforms, means that the sum is perpetually growing and there is always more “all.”

What do you think?

If everyone is sourcing from China, it must be a worthwhile endeavor right? Author Paul Midler might disagree. In his tome, Poorly Made in China, Midler discusses Chinese business culture, manufacturer/importer relationships, counterfeiting, and more. Of particular interest, Midler provides a behind-the-scenes look at quality control in a typical factory, where he spots workers sticking their hands in product, problems with substandard and “wobbly” packaging, and the routine shipping of defective products. “Consumer and product safety (are) not large concerns,” he says.

And that’s why, despite initial cost advantages, some companies are finding that it is ultimately a better choice to bring production back home.

A March 2011, Wired Magazine article titled, “Made in the USA,” mentions a case study for Sleek Audio, a high-end maker of ear phones. Every few months, Mark Krywko, CEO of Sleek Audio, would make a trip to China’s factories to discuss quality challenges. And when Krywko visited his outsourced factories “his Chinese partners would assure him that everything was under control. These promises always proved empty.”

According to the article, in one instance, Sleek Audio had to discard an entire shipment of earphones (10,000 in quantity) because they were improperly welded—a mistake that cost the company millions of dollars. Another issue was continually missed production deadlines, which caused Sleek Audio lost profit opportunities.

Fed up with quality issues, Sleek Audio decided to bring production back to the United States. After exhaustive research, Sleek Audio contracted with a Florida company to produce the company’s earphones. Granted, the product cost 50% more to produce in the United States vs. China, but the benefits of increased product quality and faster time-to-market far outweighed an initial up-tick in costs.

And while this is just one case study, the Wired Magazine article notes that many companies are finding that once design considerations are taken into account—to remove as much manual labor as possible—manufacturing in the United States can actually be quite competitive.

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s be sure to recognize that there are many advantages to sourcing from China. China is still the manufacturer to the world—from shampoos and lotions to high-end technology. And without a doubt, according to a recent World Bank Report, there are few “low-cost” countries that have China’s infrastructure (transportation, electricity, telecommunications, water supply etc.) for making and transporting goods in an efficient manner.

However, as sources from this article recognize, an initial low cost is only part of the overall value equation. The entire supply chain must be considered in addition to the demand chain. It is for this reason then, marketing executives—with a pulse on customer needs and expectations—should be a crucial component of any product or service outsourcing discussion.

Questions:

• Paul Midler writes, “American consumers had once preferred to see the Made in USA tag, but somewhere along the line, Made in China began to sound like a bargain.” Do you see a sea change in consumer expectations, or does the mantra “as cheap as possible” still reign?
• Is “paying a little extra” a wise trade-off—not only for companies but customers too?

Wow! Way to go? Or wrong way to go? While consumers “tsk tsk” about oversized meals and beverages in restaurants and fast food joints, many get more than a little pleasure, albeit guilty, in over-indulging. Let’s be truthful here. So the question remains: Is this a major marketing faux pas or a stroke of genius?

Nutritionists are undoubtedly alarmed at the possibility of consumers adding up to 200 calories per day—depending on their beverage of choice. And 200 additional calories per day adds up to 2 more pounds per month. Yikes!

And what about the amount of caffeine in 31 ounce coffee concoctions? While our culture has become increasingly caffeinated on high-voltage energy drinks and larger and larger mugs of coffee, I wonder when the human body’s tolerance is maxed out!

What do you think of this move? Is Starbucks going to cash in on our more-is-better consumer craze? Or are they going the wrong way now that consumers have said “no” to excess in every way, shape, and form? Or does Starbucks know something we don’t know? Are consumers saying “no” while their actions say “yes” to supersized portions still?

I’d love to get your take on Starbucks’ latest marketing move, Daily Fix readers, whether you’ve indulged in the 31 ounce Trenta or not.

It was an interesting ride. I managed a team of editors and project managers, and was lucky enough to work with bloggers and social media managers across the organization and test-drive dozens of ideas. Given the challenges, I was surprised at how much progress we made.

But still, I came away with the same question that has nagged me for five years of working with companies like Cisco and Sprint on social media programs: Why is it so hard to drive change in these companies? Why do they struggle with social media?

Most big companies admit they’re still coming up short on using social media. Only 12% in one survey say they’re using it effectively; another 43% admit they’re using it ineffectively.

Another sign is that corporate blogs (particularly B2B) are still light years behind independent bloggers in quality of content, engagement, and every other measure. How much buzz do you see being generated by your favorite corporate blog?

So I began rethinking social media earlier this year. One idea eventually dawned on me. Maybe we’re trying to do too much at once (“boiling the ocean”). We still need to walk before we start running in most companies.

Changing the Corporate DNA

Real change—like “socializing” a company’s communications—takes enormous time and effort. As GigaOm’s Om Malik points out in a wonderful post, companies develop habits, processes, and work environments that eventually come to define the company. They are like deeply ingrained “instructions” or “corporate DNA.” Changing this is no easy feat.

Rather than delude yourself into thinking you’re going to change an entire company, be smart. Start with focused, achievable goals and programs. Think small.

You can practice “being small” in many ways:

1.) Identify one strong, motivated group or organization for a carefully planned pilot program (blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) rather than launching across an entire company. Assemble a focused team. Plan, strategize, execute. Document metrics, proof points, and best practices. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

2.) Don’t force everyone to blog. Most corporate employees don’t have the time or inclination, so don’t waste your time on massive education programs. The key is to identify a few motivated enthusiasts—and support them with targeted personalized editorial resources, such as market intelligence, editorial tips and strategies, story angles, and related subject blogs. Then get out of the way.

3.) Cultivate senior management support, one at a time. Even fewer senior execs  have time to blog, so you need to identify the one mostly likely to work with you and meet with their team, starting with their communications manager (if they have one). Support them with personalized research, story angles, messaging, and an outline or rough draft. Social media purists will scream about anything that smacks of ghosting, but it’s not that much different than any other executive communications support. (Do you really think Steve Jobs writes his own speeches?)  The CEO owns the final post. They may still resist, so start with one guest blog post on a friendly industry or partner site. Think small.

4.) Find a friend in sales. Social media and sales are uneasy bed partners. Most salespeople are skeptical that it helps beyond the awareness stage of the sales cycle, and they aren’t even sure about that. Don’t worry about converting all of sales into believers. Find one hip sales team or person, and develop a social media pilot that will help you map out social media across the entire sales cycle, while providing the ammunition (proof points, metrics, best practices) you need to prove it works and broaden your program.

No Easy Ride

Small steps will eventually pave the way for bigger, more ambitious programs, but don’t expect an easy ride. Resources and employees are stretched, the workload is brutal, and social media is still unproven (particularly in the B2B space).  Then there are the intangibles. So much of succeeding inside a corporation revolves around relationships, priorities, politics, and perceptions. Social media is no different.

I remember one of Cisco’s smaller partners challenging me during a training on the value of blogging:  “If I’m not selling, I’m losing money. The rest is just noise.”

But it’s that “noise” (channeled correctly) that represents the future; it’s your customers, investors, competitors, employees.

I still believe we’ll get to the Digital Promise Land, where social media practices are accepted as the norm across the organization. But that will be in a few years. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to dream big and focus on what I do best, while keeping my attention on the “little picture.”

You should too.

Tip #1: Use visibly defined rules.

Don’t use the About information field on a Facebook page to talk about your brand or to present your tagline. Use it first and foremost to direct fans and visitors to the rules of engagement for this space. Click on the Aeroplan screenshot below for a best-in-class example.

If we’ve learned anything about Facebook Pages, it’s that organizations need clearly visible and posted rules, so that when moderation needs to happen, the fan base is far less likely to get up in arms. It can also keep moderation from having to happen.

Tip #2: Open up your Wall!

The Aeroplan example is a good example on how to configure your Wall for maximizing engagement with your fans. They have configured their Wall to show their posts and the posts of their fans equally. Please note that this is not the default setting. The default only shows your official posts.

Many brands struggle with this. And if you have millions of fans, then I can potentially see the argument of a Wall that defaults to only showing the brand’s posts.

I think that the reason many brands struggle with this is because of how people from the brand interact with Facebook versus how our audiences use Facebook.

Every time that we, as representatives of the brand, log in to Facebook, we see the interactions on the Wall. And it’s only a matter of time until someone complains that all of our posts have been pushed down “below the fold” by these dang fans.  Where are our promotions? Call the agency! Circle the wagons!

First, you have to try and calm these people down. Then  we need to remember where and how our fans see our posts.

They do NOT see them on the brand’s Facebook page in the majority of scenarios.

They see fan page messages in their feed.

This is why I recommend using a tab to collate and collect special offers, so anyone looking to find them that does visit our Fan Page can still do so easily.

If the goal is to increase engagement and reach, then having a Wall where anyone can start a post will drastically increase the engagement and reach you get from your fans. And every time someone does visit your page and starts a conversation there, you gain increased reach from all of their friends’ feed views.

Tip #3: If you moderate, tell the group.

Don’t start with moderation unless the issue is severe.  With minor infractions, it’s always best to remind members of the Facebook page of the rules and purpose of the space and warn of moderation first.

Tip #4: Be upfront about deletions.

If you do have to moderate (delete a comment), be sure to leave a post or comment that notifies everyone that you did indeed moderate.

I’ve seen too many clients get into trouble because they tried to hide the fact that they deleted something.

Or worse, someone from Marketing deleted something because it didn’t look good.

Tip #5: Obey your own rules.

If you post the rules of the space (see Tip #1) you need to abide by them, to the letter.  You will be found out if you don’t.  Someone will still have it in their cache or on their screen, and it will come back sooner or later as a screenshot.

(Many thanks to Skitch for their Mac screenshot and annotation tool. Couldn’t have done this without it!)

Cobbling together some Internet sources, let’s define an information network as an exchange, platform, or process for communication. Communication in such a network may be broadcast or two-way, and the network could be formal (well-defined with rules and procedures) or informal. Such networks also have a transmission infrastructure (network, computer, person, mail delivery, or even Pony Express). Information networks are often designed to disseminate valuable information, yet also might include conversations that are commonplace or even trivial.

Today’s information networks transmit knowledge with blinding speed via computers, Internet, and telecommunications. Of course, such mechanisms didn’t exist in the 1800s. Even so, the ability to capture information and transmit it faster than competitors conferred significant advantage two hundred years ago, much as it does today. And there was no better information network in the 19th century than the system designed by the House of Rothschild.

According to economic historian Niall Ferguson, the Rothschild banking dynasty originally consisted of Mayer Amschel (father) and his five sons: Nathan, Amschel, James, Carl, and Solomon. Located in cities throughout the European continent, the Rothschilds started businesses in textiles and antiques, but quickly moved into supplying financial resources for kings (via personal loans) and countries. While more than a few characteristics made this family successful, one of their strongest advantages was use of a well-designed information network.

With brothers located in Frankfurt, London, France, Naples, and Vienna, the Rothschilds effectively acted with “unbreakable unity”—always coordinating and communicating as a single entity. While mail service existed at the time, the Rothschilds discovered it was more reliable to set up their own information network. This network consisted of carrier pigeons and couriers on ship or horse. Couriers were full-time associates employed by the Rothschilds and were solely dedicated to the transmission of information.

And the brothers used this information network to make obscene profits. Niall Ferguson explains: “Success of arbitrage and forward-exchange operations hinged on rapid communication. As far as possible, the brothers sought to keep one another abreast of news which might affect the exchange markets, the impending payment of a subsidy, further military action, imminent of the peace treaty being signed.”

In fact, the Rothschild information network was so well-constructed and rapid that statesmen used the Rothschild network instead of their own for exchanging diplomatic letters. With the Rothschild information network, letters that once took a week to travel the continent now traveled in a single day! And imagine the information flow exposed to the Rothschild family, when even kings trusted their correspondence to Rothschild couriers.

What was the profit advantage of the Rothschild information network? Niall Ferguson says that, “Major political events as well as confidential information could be relayed from one city to another well ahead of official channels.” Trading on information before it became public knowledge helped propel the Rothschild family to become the richest in Europe.

Alas, the speed of today’s technology has essentially removed information latency advantages. Five billion people now have mobile phones. And with sensors, RFID, GPS, and high-speed Internet accelerating data flows across the globe, the playing field is much more level than in the 1800s. That’s not to say, however, that there’s no longer profit advantage via information networks. Indeed, one needs to look no further than the formal and informal information networks used in the financial services community, particularly by investment banks which trade in information, sometimes a little too aggressively.

Change is accelerating rapidly. Information networks are a powerful tool to manage that change and make profitable decisions. But they’re not without costs of time, energy, and money to maintain them.

The Rothschilds made their fortune via an information network. How will you take advantage of today’s information networks to not only survive but thrive in the global marketplace?

• Is there still competitive advantage to be had in utilization of information networks?
• Niall Ferguson says that the Rothschilds spent a lot of time, energy, and money maintaining the best possible relations with the leading political figures of the day. What are you doing to cultivate your personal information network?

We hear marketers constantly discussing their need for nurturing, metrics, and getting more quality leads to sales. However, it’s interesting how marketers don’t seem to realize that marketing automation is no different from any other marketing initiative. Planning, detailed execution, and a thorough analysis are key to success. It’s not magic. You can’t just snap your fingers and “poof”—all your marketing campaigns and drip sequences have been put into place.

Now, we aren’t saying that you need to take months to map out every part of your marketing to sales process, but any new process (e.g., lead nurturing) takes some upfront thought and strategy before being implemented. This can be done in phases where you can get some value immediately.

But let’s be real and understand some resources have to be spent to do something new and of value. Technology is not magic, and you can’t put it in place and just turn it on. Technology doesn’t know your business, and technology doesn’t understand how to sell to your prospects or what makes a quality lead in your organization. However, I’m also not saying that you need to spend hours and hours just to get some benefit from marketing automation. We understand marketers are all resource-constrained today, and that technology is only one part of our solution. Applying the technology to your specific sales and marketing process is what will determine your success. Having the time and experience to do that quickly through augmented specialists can help you get a leg up on your marketing automation return.

You don’t need to take advantage of all the marketing automation features right at the beginning and develop a huge process map to get some benefits from lead management. You can start out small, improve on what you are doing today, and get immediate benefits. What we need to do is walk down a well-designed and realistic path of steps so you can start reaping the benefits of lead management while understanding how to grow with your lead management system and process over time. It’s time, particularly in marketing, to be pragmatic and figure out what levers you can move to maximize marketing impact on the business. However, we aren’t saying keep everything you are doing the same and just start sending out emails every seven days or so. If that’s all you are thinking about, then I suggest you save yourself the effort of getting started because that won’t make a difference in the number of qualified leads and revenue generated (which should be your ultimate goal with marketing automation).

There are ways to get started simply with marketing automation that will have impact on revenue without overwhelming your marketing department.

Assess your current lead to sales process. You can start with a basic process that’s tracked and change as you go, based on feedback and what you learn.  Remember, lead management means many different things based on your application to your business. You can get an immediate impact without changing your entire marketing to sales process or building hundreds of pieces of content.

Set realistic goals: short-term, mid-term and long-term. If nothing else put together some short-term goals that will help you measure short-term value received.

Get sales buy in. You need to make sure if you (marketing) hands off more qualified leads to sales that you both buy in to what defines a qualified lead.

Identify an initial campaign. This step is critical to driving near-term value and starting to understand the implementation of marketing automation. Where can a little tweak (e.g., better targeting, implementing nurturing basics, implementing scoring and prioritization, etc.) have an impact within 30 to 90 days? Make sure you do something with inbound leads, too—those coming off your website. These leads aren’t necessarily specific to an inbound campaign (maybe SEO), but these suspects should be cared for in some manner, as well.  Make sure when leads hit the “sales ready” definition agreed to by marketing and sales that you have a process for flowing them to sales and that you can see the progression of the leads through the pipeline. We so often hear about marketers that seem to be sending more qualified leads on to sales but don’t really know where they go from there.

So how can you ever decide if what you are doing is working or not? That takes us to analytics—make sure you can track basic analytics (not simply opens and clicks), so you can see what kind of impact you are having on revenue.

Implementing marketing automation is not magic—but it shouldn’t bring your marketing department to its knees, either. We’ve seen that the reality of where companies are today and where they can go can be a wide divide. And you can take small steps and get benefits, but you do need to do something more than sending emails to all prospects every seven days. It takes some thought and possibly some help from augmented sales and marketing specialists who’ve done it before over and over again.

Lisa Cramer is president and co-founder of LeadLife Solutions, a provider of on-demand lead management software with embedded best practices that generates, scores, and nurtures leads for B2B marketers.

Wall Street analysts and traders have long believed that stock prices jump on the release of positive and/or negative news. But the sheer number of news sources and volume makes comprehension a daunting task for individual traders. Adding insult to injury, most of the data in the world is unstructured, meaning that it is not in a database and may consist of text, JPEG images, flash videos, etc. So, interpreting the “meaning” of unstructured data often takes too much time.

Enter analytics. With the assumption that news flow is a good indicator of trading volume and stock price volatility, traders are using real-time data feeds, advanced algorithms, and computer power to digest and execute trades on “news” in sub-seconds. Machines are reading press releases, news stories, analyst reports, stock alerts, and more to gauge the sentiment, relevance, novelty, and volume of news. And trading firms are busy designing models to forecast stock prices based on historical news volumes.

Machines reading the news are scanning for two key criteria: sentiment and counts.

Let’s tackle sentiment first. Reading for sentiment, algorithms are scanning news looking for key phrases such as “better than expected” or other verbiage. They score news on how relevant a news item is to your particular company, whether the news is unique, the source of news (key analyst vs. small time shop), and what the specific headline says.

When examining counts, news algorithms seek how many times a key phrase shows up in the news, how often that key phrase is used over a time period (e.g., last 24 hours, past three days, and even how many articles were placed over a specified time frame to discern news volume.

This trend has significant implications for marketing and PR professionals. While we may not know the “weighting” system of what is most important to these algorithms (e.g., word counts might be more important than uniqueness), we should definitely bear in mind that in addition to human readers, we’ll now have to contend with machines.

At some point, most marketers have solely written, edited or approved a corporate press release. However, with machines starting to “read” the news items, your communication strategies might need more than a simple tweak. Ultimately, this means that press releases may need to be optimized for machine scanning. In addition, as these algorithms monitor news feeds from analysts, commentators, and other news professionals, one strategy might be doubling down on press and analyst relations to help shape content before the computers read it.

Machines are now reading the news and trading on what they discern. And news analytics isn’t just for large cap stocks! In fact, any company that trades on an exchange is fair game. Knowing this, your company’s stock price might go significantly up or down depending on your future marketing, social media and PR strategies. Fortunately news analytics is in the early adopter phase, but if there’s money to be made then surely this will be a growing trend.

Questions:

• Other than those listed above, what are the implications of machines reading the news?
• What might be some PR, marketing, and social media strategies to take advantage of this trend?

I think the real reason is that the misalignment between marketing and sales is not actually the real problem. It’s actually a symptom of deeper problems:

• Lack of process
• Aligning around the wrong things
• Mismanaged sales quota

Lack of Process

According to several recent studies, up to 80% of leads do not get the proper follow-up. So, not surprisingly, one of the biggest challenges facing marketers is delivering qualified leads.  But in most organizations, there are multiple definitions for “qualified leads,” depending on who you speak to. This inconsistency helps contribute to the misalignment.  This challenge faced by organizations is most often because marketing and sales do not share a set of common definitions for terms such as “lead,” “qualified,” “prospect,” etc.  Marketing and sales have not collaborated on defining a process framework that answers fundamental questions, such as “What is the definition of a ‘qualified lead’ for our company?”

Marketing and sales should work together to define a Lead Management Framework, including:

• data process
• lead planning process
• lead routing process
• lead qualification process
• lead nurturing process
• metrics process

Organizations that do so will benefit by having:

• A set of common definitions for managing leads
• SLAs and business rules for lead routing
• A lead scoring model that delivers quality leads to sales
• Lead nurturing communications for those not ready to buy
• A host of other benefits.

As one customer stated after developing their process,  “Marketing and sales used to pass in the halls and not even look at each other.  Now we pass and give high fives because we know we are a team.”

Aligning to the Wrong Thing

One of the obstacles that marketing and sales organizations face when looking to align is their own misunderstanding on what alignment should be based. They’re aligning around the wrong thing. For example, marketing may want sales to come their way and think about campaigns. Sales on the other hand, may ask marketing to start thinking about collateral support for helping to close deals. These examples are not alignment; they are just trying to get the other side to view the world their way. The truth is that the right thing around which marketing and sales teams should align are their buyers.

Today’s B2B buyer is looking to engage with their vendors and have a relevant 1-1 dialogue. They don’t care about the internal squabbles that may occur between marketing and sales teams. They want to feel attended to. So, marketing and sales need to collaborate on how to have the dialogue with the buyer.

There are three key areas on which this collaboration should focus. The first is identifying the ideal buyer profile.  Having this profile (or profiles—most companies will have multiple personas/profiles unique to each service or product offering) ensures that marketing and sales will be engaging with the same targeted buyer.

Secondly, it’s vital to create a map for each profile’s buying cycle. This is more than just time to sale. It’s a full understanding of the buying journey of each persona to whom your organization sells.  Understanding and defining the buyer’s journey will allow you to “walk in your customers’ shoes,” helping both marketing and sales to better understand what they need at each stage, and to engage them in meaningful dialogue.

The third area of focus, once you have identified the personas and mapped out the buyer journey, is to develop your offer and content maps. These maps are guides that will enable you to deliver the most relevant content to the buyer at every stage of the cycle. Communicating based on an offer/content map will improve the alignment with your buyer, enable 1-1 engagement and deliver a more qualified and educated prospect to sales.

Mismanaged Sales Quota

One of the biggest obstacles marketing and sales organizations face in trying to align is the issue of quota.

I remember a conversation I had with a sales VP at a company I used to work for where I ran one of the global marketing teams. It was about half-way through the quarter, and he was panicking because his team’s performance was not what he needed to attain quota. During the conversation he looked at me and said, “I know we agreed on a strategy at the beginning of the year, but right now I need revenue. I’m telling my team to ‘chase it and sign it’ or else I won’t be here to work the strategy for the second-half of the year.” What was I to say to that?  This guy and some members of his team were fighting for their jobs. At the very least, I appreciated his candor.

The quarterly quota pressure is felt in organizations every 90-days. But this pressure would be easy to alleviate if organizations would begin to align their sales compensation plans to the buying/sales cycle (see customer alignment above). In the scenario I mentioned above, we had statistics that showed that the average buying time was 180 days. Yet we were telling our sales folks they had to sell in 90 days.

This quota pressure was not only causing panic in my sales counterparts, but it kept us from alignment with them as well.  Sales had bypassed the agreed to strategy in exchange for demanding only hot leads.  With that pressure there was no talk of nurturing, dialogue, buyer journeys, etc. They wanted leads they could close today!

This issue is easy to resolve and it’s something most organizations should seek to address early in 2011. The simple fix is to align sales quota to the customer buying cycle. This could result in either lengthening or shortening the quota cycle: If you have a 30-day sales cycle, then adjust your quota accordingly; if it’s 180 days, do the same. By adjusting your sales compensation to reflect the buying patterns of your buyer, you will not only provide your sales people a less pressure-filled environment in which to sell, you will better align with marketing and more importantly your buyer and marketing will be able to develop a demand generation strategy based on the buying cycles.

As we begin a new year, let’s stop addressing the symptom of marketing and sales alignment and begin working on some of the fundamental problems that are causing the symptom. It would be great if at this time next year, we could write about success stories instead of repeating ourselves on how to solve the problem.

Why? You’ve got the wrong associations. The headset is what the old telephone operators used to wear. “One ringy dingy… two ringy dingy…,” said Lily Tomlin for those of us old enough to remember Laugh In. Wheeled luggage is what stewardesses used, not us burly alpha male road warriors. We lug our garment bags around the world and pay for our chiropractor visits when we return. Today, we don’t look twice when we see these products. We wheel our bags through the airport as we talk on our Bluetooth headsets, and we look just like everybody else.

Both products have made the leap, neither particularly quickly. Both went through considerable design and re-design processes to come up with the right user experience and the right design aesthetics. So how do we short circuit this process today so we can get to acceptance that much faster?

I had this conversation with Peter von Conta, the vice president of design and development at Vibram, the footwear brand that makes the oh-so-polarizing Five Fingers shoe. This product embodies the “barefoot running” movement, dovetailing in nicely with other societal forces, such as local organic food trends, smart consumerism and a general return to basics. But its defining feature is that it has five “fingers” for your toes. It doesn’t look like anything you’ve worn before. And that really scares a lot of people away.

In speaking to Peter about how a designer approaches making an outlandish product more palatable, he pointed to three key steps:

1. Focus on the “how”—not just the “what”—of your defining feature. Peter told me, “We try to maximize the potential of the product using whatever tools are available to us. If life gives you wheat, you make pasta, but you also have to choose the shape, or conversely, you can choose to make bread instead. We also know that in today’s product culture that cool looking is accompanied by great functionality, or you potentially lose your audience.”

Design isn’t just aesthetics. It’s product management, knowing what’s in, and what’s out. It’s user experience. It’s also having the forethought and creativity to take your defining feature into new and unexpected places.

2. Create meaningful associations that we can latch on to. “I believe in quantum leaps, but consumers are sometimes unprepared for the experience,” Peter continued. “My personal approach to design is about transforming the strange into the curious or recognizable, so that the consumer can meet the product through their own perceptions and expectations. Creating multiple perceptive pathways to the product can make it successful in its own right, even if the primary benefit is hidden or ignored at first glance. The goal is to make a great connection with your audience. People love connections, just look at Facebook.”

What are the associations that matter here? To athletes who are serious about cross training, who would be the sort of runners who would gravitate to non-traditional barefoot alternatives and others, creating an outdoors association would resonate. What if your design evoked feelings of SCUBA gear? What if your execution looked like those old sprinter’s spikes looked like back in high school? We’re not talking “toe shoes” anymore, are we?

3. Know when to stop talking and start listening. “You have to be willing to teach what you know, and to change what doesn’t work, so that your product is allowed to be the subject of a shared experience. Products ultimately take on a life of their own, occasionally outside the intention of their inventors, and so dealing with this movement is the real task. For instance, when people use Vibram FiveFingers shoes, they are not necessarily pondering the Vibram designers’ intent, but know inherently and instantly that they are receiving an interesting experience through their feet. It’s all about the connection.”

Your role as teacher and evangelist never stops. But at a certain point, they will start telling you what they see. For Vibram, pouring more barefoot alternative fuel on the fire is their mission. But where people take it is a community effort.

Peter’s thinking should provide hope and guidance to anyone working with a product, technology, or solution of any sort that “isn’t for me” at first glance. He reminds us to focus on how we choose to embody our defining feature and to make conscious choices here. He exhorts us to find the right associations and metaphors that connect us with the right feelings we want to evoke. And he reminds us to get out of the way and let your people tell you what they’re thinking.

Good rules for rule-breaking products!

In a nutshell, P&G is looking for more ways to save precious natural resources, energy and water. The company continues to work on cutting costs and carbon emissions in manufacturing and in transporting its products to market. Moreover, P&G is pushing for even more operational and manufacturing efficiency, so it can cut the 4% of waste from the manufacturing process to zero waste output. In order to get there, the company has been selling off product that doesn’t meet its standards to other industries for use in their products.

To add impetus to its ideas, P&G is working with its 75,000 suppliers on environmental sustainability initiatives. They’ve instituted a scorecard to help suppliers measure their environmental impact and openly encourage new ideas from them. P&G’s own internal staff is likewise encouraged to submit their ideas in this vein.

All of this is good. Corporate responsibility equals good corporate citizenship. As the world’s largest CPG company, Procter & Gamble reaches 4 billion consumers now and has ambitious plans to reach another billion within the next five years. It wants to do so in a responsible manner.

Sauers said many important things during his interview, including his company’s commitment to studying the life cycle of products and their impact on consumers as well as the environment. He noted that no claims about sustainability are made about any of the company’s products without sufficient documentation on file. That’s crucial given the loss of credibility incurred from rampant greenwashing these days.

Key is the breakdown of three distinctly different groups of consumers:

• 15% are very committed to the environment, and they’re willing to accept trade-offs to purchase more sustainable products.
• 15% of consumers are not engaged in sustainable issues in the least.
• A whopping 70% of consumers are concerned about the environment and want to purchase sustainable products. However, they will not accept trade-offs in the performance and price of products for the sake of sustainability.

P&G is committed to working to bring products to this 70% of consumers so that they can feel good about purchasing more environmentally responsible products without any trade-offs. Now that’s what I’m talking about!

Questions:

• Do you think P&G is taking a leadership role vis-à-vis corporate sustainability practices? Or are you more impressed by other companies? If so, which ones and why?
• Which companies do you commend for their environmentalism as well as for bringing efficacious products to market that you feel good about purchasing?
• Do you, as a consumer, prefer to buy more sustainable products or are you more concerned about performance and price first?

I’d love to hear from you.

by Lindy Dreyer

Maddie and I come from the association industry, where membership is at the core of our business model. You might think of the MarketingProfs membership model as an example, but actually the MarketingProfs model is just one example of a thousand different variations on the membership theme.  For many of us membership people, community is old hat. It’s what we do. It’s central to our work. And yet, for some reason (actually a lot of reasons), what we know about community isn’t always translating well to building community online.

Until very recently, associations “owned” their community. These tended to be very closed systems, where the association itself had a huge amount of power by controlling the ways in which members were able to communicate with one another. If you wanted to have access to other members, you joined and kept up with your dues. Some associations still operate quite successfully this way, at least for the moment.

And so, for a lot of association executives, the natural way to approach social media was to recreate their closed systems using new, shiny tools. But that’s not enough; paying dues is no longer the only way for me to interface with an association’s community. It’s a classic value problem, and no amount of marketing can fix that. The only fix is a new approach to online community for associations.

That’s why we wrote the book Open Community. Your Open Community is your people who are bonded by what the organization represents and care enough to talk to each other (hopefully about you!) online. The book covers concepts that are critical for connecting with your open community. This isn’t rocket science, but it challenges the association industry’s preconceived notions of membership, which is pretty scary when that’s the foundation of your business.

OK … I’ll quit jabbering and leave you with this excerpt, which I think is universal enough for every marketer—whether you’re working within a membership model or not.

You know your business, but do you know your community?

Building community online doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does take work. It also takes courage, knowing that you’re going to put your organization out there without knowing exactly how everything will unfold. You’re used to being able to predict the results of the work you do. You know your business—maybe too well. You may have a hard time seeing the possibilities created by online community. Or you may see so many possibilities that you can’t clearly see the easy wins and first steps.

It’s hard to step back, to see the big picture, when all you’re thinking is: How do we start harnessing all this conversation? How do we embrace the messiness of community in a way that makes strategic sense for the organization, in a way that is mission driven? We have unofficial Facebook Groups, we’re on LinkedIn, some of our staff are active on Twitter, maybe we should build our own homebase now. How do we make sense of it all? How do we give it direction?

And it’s easy to get caught up in the way you’ve always done business, closing yourself off from possibilities that may very well supplant those business processes. Moving toward a more social model of running an association stretches us. It tests our patience, and it’s crazy scary. But when you really get a handle on your community, when you really know who they are, what they need, where to find them, how to get them talking, how to get them acting collectively, you learn what you’re doing right and what you need to change, and you make more intelligent business decisions.

Does having members make building community online easier? No. Not when membership is more a business model than a declaration of true connectedness. What do you think? Are you leveraging online communities in your business? Are you having more success within a closed community model or an open community model? You see the hurdles that membership organizations are facing—are you having similar challenges?

I am a B2B marketer and, for some time, have felt compelled to write to all of you about the often discussed yet never solved marketing and sales alignment gap. In no way is the intent of my letter to cast aspersions upon you or point the finger for the gap that exists between us. This letter is meant to serve as an apology to all of you on behalf of all of us B2B marketers (and since I am writing on behalf of all B2B marketers, I will speak as the collective “we”).

We hope this letter is accepted with the sincerity in which it was written. We hope it can be the start of something transformational between marketing and sales. We truly believe that to adapt to the changing B2B buyer, we must work together in a collaborative fashion and that, in doing so, we will deliver incredible value to our customers and increase our companies’ revenue exponentially.

We know that we have a rocky past, but we are committed to a healthy future together. To get there, we vow that we will build our relationship in the future by doing the following:

We Will Listen

As marketers, we’re aware of our tendency to talk. We are full of good ideas, and we are aware of our ability to make things look pretty. We are also aware of our aptitude for pulling numbers and putting them in PowerPoint presentations to show how successful our marketing campaigns have been. However, we have also come to realize that we are really bad at listening. Sure, we know that every once in a while we send an email asking for sales input, but in reality, we haven’t given your responses  much consideration. Starting now, that will change. We will continually involve you in our work. We want to know what you need from marketing to be successful. We want to know what you mean when you use the word “lead” so that we can deliver quality ones to you. And not only will we listen, but we’ll translate that listening into action.

We Will Work With You to Deliver a Process-Based Lead-Management Approach

We know that in the past we have taken a very “top of the funnel” (i.e. lead generation) approach to our marketing. We know that when “leads” came into the funnel, all we did was dump them on you, so you could follow up and sell. We then went back to our PowerPoint presentations, so we could tell management about all the leads we generated.

But now, in listening to you, we have realized that what we generated were not really “leads.” They were more like “responses.” To correct this, we promise to develop, in collaboration with you, a lead-management approach so that you receive only the best quality leads. This process will ensure that all leads are managed through the buying process. By marketing this way, we hope to help you increase the conversion rates on the leads you will receive, which will ultimately increase your sales numbers.

In addition, as part of this process, we will work to ensure the integrity of our marketing and sales data. We will ask you to help us plan our quota (i.e. the amount of revenue for which marketing will be responsible, and the number of leads it will take to get there). We will ask you to help us build a lead-qualification framework. We will ask for your help in developing nurture strategies that help push deals through the pipeline in a more timely fashion. We need your help to build this lead-management framework effectively.

We Will Become Coin-Operated

We confess that when we are in our marketing meetings, we often talk about sales being “coin-operated” as if it’s some kind of disease.  We understand that coin-operated (i.e. having a revenue creation mindset) is a healthy way to look at our business. Please forgive us for the derision. Going forward, you can consider us coin-operated marketers. We will look at our marketing success in terms of the number of leads you accept from us and how many of those leads contribute to revenue. We will deliver reports that show the revenue we have helped create through our campaigns. We look forward to helping you create more revenue for our company. We will need your help in this area as we are not accustomed to working this way. As part of our commitment, we will make our marketers compensation tied to revenue, just like you. In doing so we will share the burden with you and be more aligned towards a common goal.

We Will Market by the Numbers

We will no longer market by activity-driven pressures. We will not attend events, send emails, buy online ads or run social campaigns simply because it is “what we have always done” or because “we have money in the budget to do so.” Instead, we will measure our campaigns based on their contribution to revenue. We will then continue to run those campaigns which contribute to revenue, and do away with those that do not. We will use business intelligence that we derive from both marketing and sales metrics to help us plan for the future. (We’ll need you to share your metrics with us.)

We Will Be Accountable and View You as Our Customer

We will no longer point the finger at sales, blaming you for “not getting it” or suggesting that more diligent follow up on leads by you will solve our problems. We will be open with you, sharing our failures. We will learn from them and seek to improve. We will also share our successes with you. Together, we’ll show management how we’ve created more revenue for our organizations. We won’t hide behind insignificant data such as “opens” and “clicks.” We’ll focus on numbers such as lead to sale conversions and marketing pipeline contribution.  Based on metrics from the past, we’ll commit to goals and objectives and do our best to meet them. You have a quota, and now, we’ll have one as well. We’ll ask you for continued feedback and input.

We hope you can see our earnestness in what we’ve written here, and that, together, we can begin anew. Our prospects and customers are tired of us bickering and pointing the finger at each other. They want us to deliver value, provide relevant content, and address their pressing needs. I’m confident we can do so together.

We look forward to a long lasting and fruitful relationship!

Sincerely,
B2B marketers everywhere

But I neared the barn, I suddenly realized I didn’t know how to stop.  The barn kept getting closer, and I kept getting  more concerned.  Desperately, I pressed the brake as hard as I could!  The tractor was still in gear. It lurched and choked then crashed into the side of the barn as it stopped.  I went from king to court jester in just minutes.

Rather than rely on a crash course and jump into action, I should have been more prepared. That would have prevented my crash. Likewise,  many companies leap into marketing automation without being completely ready.

If you are thinking of automating your marketing, here are 5 thing to know before buying marketing automation.  If you have already purchased it, don’t worry, it’s not too late. These 5 tips can help you too.

1.  Technology alone is not the answer.

Many companies have made or are looking to make the major investment into marketing automation because they believe that, once they get it implemented, their marketing issues and challenges will be solved. Nothing could be further from the truth, yet still many companies are buying into the “technology as savior” myth.  We all watched this same dynamic unfold in the 90s during the early stages of the CRM market.  Sales management believed that CRM would improve the performance of their sales teams.  What happened, however, was that sales teams failed to adopt the technology. They became frustrated, and instead of improvement, many sales teams experience a decline in their performance.

Though marketing automation can be a valuable asset to a marketing organization, the technology alone will not provide a cure-all to an organization’s ills.  Before making the purchase, make sure you have the right foundation in place for automation to be a success.

2. It’s so easy a caveman could do it.

While this may be true for some insurance companies, it’s one of many myths that several of the marketing automation vendors are claiming.  Promises of 5-day installations and even giving the software away as a way to show “ease of use” are all gimmicks that have arisen as of late.   If you are looking to simply use marketing automation as a place to house your database and fire off some emails, then I would agree that the “5-day, easy-to-install” message would apply.  However, automation is used for much more than just email.  Marketing automation helps to streamline data segmentation, dynamic content delivery, metrics, etc.  Rushing to set up those processes with a new software platform can actually be reckless.  There is a difference between doing it right and doing it right now.  Marketing automation done right will take time.  This is evidenced by the 75% of marketing automation owners who claim they are still not getting the full value from it.

3.  Process is key.

Along with the idea that the technology alone is not the answer, companies that have taken the time to develop a defined lead management process often get the most value from their automation investment.

Aberdeen concluded that process is key when it said, “Nothing is more important than process when it comes to building a best-in-class lead management engine.”  Notice Aberdeen did not state technology, but process.  Companies that adopt automation with no forethought to process will in all likelihood automate chaos.  To reverse this effect and get the most out of an automation investment, companies should develop a Lead Management Framework consisting of the following processes:

• Data
• Lead Planning
• Lead Routing
• Lead Qualification (includes Lead Scoring)
• Lead Nurturing
• Metrics

Once this framework is defined among marketing, sales and other key groups, the implementation of automation will be the next logical step.

4.  You need people.

Any kind of new technology requires people to run it.  Whether it’s your own internal team, or an outsourced team, you’ll need to have someone (or more than one person) responsible for the day-to-day management of the tool. I’m not just talking about a junior marketing coordinator, or simply training your interns on the speeds and feeds of the software.  To have marketing automation work, you need the right people, people who are process minded, who understand sales’ importance, and who measure effectiveness.  Without them, you won’t get the desired return from your automation investment.

5.  It’s all about the customer.

Often times when discussions turn to why marketing automation makes sense, the reasons are focused internally  . . . making marketing more efficient, doing more with less, automating the every day tasks.  While these certainly are all benefits that can be derived with automation, it should be noted that the drive behind marketing automation should be focused outwardly… to improve communications with your prospects and customers.  Specifically, the goal of automation should be to have an ongoing 1-1 dialogue with your buyers, allowing you to develop and grow a business relationship.  Automation allows you to deliver the right content at the right time, which can often be the difference between developing a relationship and losing a potential customer.  If automation isn’t being used to grow the customer base, then what’s the point?

Acquiring marketing automation without being prepared can have a profound negative effect for your organization.   However, if you take the time to prepare yourself and your company, then maybe you can avoid crashing the tractor into the barn.

A Financial Times article titled “Technology Let’s Buyers Unravel Ethics Behind the Label” cites that ethical spending has increased significantly in the past 20 years. As an example in the United Kingdom, “The amount of spending and investment influenced by ethical considerations almost doubled between 1999 and 2008 to reach £36 billion.” The FT article mentions the growth of fair trade and certified organic products as part of this growth trend. And fellow Daily Fix author Ted Mininni says, these types of goods “are increasingly being added to retail assortments”—and in growing numbers!

However, one of the major challenges for both retailers and manufacturers alike is authenticating ethically sourced products. There’s more to the process than taking the supplier’s word for it.

In the case of organic bananas, the FT article notes, “the food company Dole labels each of its organic bananas with a three-digit number that, when entered on its website, reveals details of the farm where that banana is grown.” Identifying where a banana is sourced, however,  is simple compared to such products as sweaters or t-shirts that pass through multiple suppliers and countries.

In “The Elephant and the Dragon,” author Robyn Meredith confirms that products often “zigzag” through the global supply chain from factory to factory. “A cheap toy may be assembled by parts from 12 different factories,” she says. And something as sophisticated as an automobile might contain five to seven thousand parts.

Fortunately for marketers, the challenge is not beyond the capabilities of today’s technologies. Some progressive companies are engaging in a purposeful effort to build effective policies (including auditing), technologies (supply chain analytics and infrastructure) and processes to track and monitor the extended supply chain.

Of course, implementing a data-driven supply chain infrastructure is only half the battle—supply chain managers, operations personnel and marketers must learn how to use it! Marketers, working alongside operations, will need training on the various tools and systems used to access data for reporting and query purposes. And marketers may also choose to make supply chain data available directly to consumers—similar to Dole’s web portal—thus enabling them to verify product origins for themselves!

Ethical sourcing, trade, manufacturing and retailing will continue to be a hot button for consumers. However, as seen from this article, jumping into this marketplace requires much more than just fancy signage and/or promotion. A real commitment to corporate responsibility and sustainable practices must be much more than lip service; it involves significant investment in people, processes, technology, and strategy. As seen from the complexity in supply chain traceability alone, it’s definitely not an effort a company should take lightly.

Questions:
• Does it matter to you how a product is made? Are you interested in the origins of the products and services you consume?
• The Financial Times article says that companies should make information about their supply chain public—or consumers will do it for them. Do you agree with this statement?

A great way to evaluate your ideas is by categorizing them into what Edward de Bono in his book Serious Creativity: Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Create New Ideas calls End Categories.

Understanding and using these categories will help you to focus, prioritize, take action, or reject the right ideas. The last quarter of your brainstorming agenda should be dedicated to categorizing ideas in these buckets.

1.) Directly Usable

These are your best ideas. You’ve determined they have value and could be used. These babies are worth exploring deeper and finding resources to support.

2.) Good Ideas, But Not For Us

These have value and support your objective, but are not a good fit. Maybe you lack skills or resources, but most often your brand filters eliminate these ideas. In a future round of thinking, you could explore these and ask,  “How could these be modified to be a good fit?” But more than likely, these ideas should be discarded.

3.) Good Idea, But Not for Now (Backburner)

These have value and are a good fit—but are not right at this time. Current resources, capacity, or priorities may not allow you to act on these. Put them on the backburner. Revisit them in a month or a quarter.

4.) Needs More Work

Ideas with potential, but are half-baked. With more work you can transform these into Directly Usable ideas. Get some folks working on these.

5.) Powerful, But Not Usable

These are usually great ideas blocked by some external force. Factors you can’t control that de Bono calls “regulations, environmental concerns, very high risk factors, cannibalizing existing products and so on.”

6.) Interesting, But Unusable

These are some of the most productive ideas. Not because they become usable, but because they spark other usable ideas. They often offer new ways about thinking of things. These are the ideas that start as “Hmmmm?” and spark “A-ha!”

7.) Weak Value

These ideas work and they fit your organization, but they lack value. The return on the effort invested in these may be disappointing. The danger with Weak Value ideas is that sometimes we accept and implement these just to “have something out there.” They support a “something is better than nothing” approach. Don’t fall into this trap. There may be ways to re-work these ideas so that way they work, are a fit, and become high contributors.

8.) Unworkable

These are fundamentally impossible. Not even if you worked hard on them.  They’re duds—and should be rejected. Period.

Finally …

Turn these ideas into action by assigning Action Steps to individual owners for each idea. This makes one person accountable for an idea.

• Begin exploring the Directly Usable ideas.
• Take a final look at the Good Idea, Not For Now before putting those into short-term storage.
• Get folks cracking on Needs More Work ideas.
• Tinker with your Interesting, But Unusable to see what other ideas they could spark.
• And make everyone promise not to monkey with the Weak Value or Unworkable ideas.

“This sentence has five words.” That’s an Eigen Value. A self-defining entity, something unarguable. A truism.

When you say something like, “This sentence has lots and lots of words and syllables,” that’s not an Eigen Value. We could debate whether this is true or false and it really depends on your personal opinion.

This difference matters a lot for a simple reason: When we create Eigen Values, we’re creating things our customers immediately identify with us.

Every touch point with a prospective customer becomes a moment of power where we can remind them why we’re relevant. This is more than just garden variety consistency. It requires we systematically look at things from our perspective as well as from theirs and constantly adjust and refine.

Look at Method, competing in the detergent space against giants, such as P&G and Clorox. Method’s hiring practices focus on group interviews where you present a tactical idea, a strategic idea and a way to “keep Method weird.” They’re a San Francisco brand that looks more like an ad agency than a soap manufacturer, but there’s more to it than that. Method needs to be “weird”—it needs to keep itself on the edge to ensure it doesn’t fall into staid and conservative thinking. Look at its competition. Method’s HR practices are Eigen Values.

Look at Vibram and its incredible Five Fingers running shoe. Five “fingers” for your toes means you’re essentially running the way you would if you were barefoot. No more heel striking—and no more repetitive knee injuries, either. Vibram is a shoe sole company. Who else could possibly launch a shoe like the Five Fingers? Vibram’s product development is an Eigen Value.

Look at JetBlue and its “All You Can Jet Pass.” Here’s a company so confident in its customer experience that, according to CMO Marty St. George, its best marketing vehicle is an empty seat. JetBlue uses promotional pricing in a quirky, off-beat way to ensure people say, “That could only come from Jet Blue.” It knows that once a customer flies with it, the customer will fly with JetBlue again. Jet Blue’s pricing strategy is an Eigen Value.

When you look at everything your brand does through this Eigen Value lens, it changes how you do things. No more “check the box” activities. No more “the rest will take care of itself” attitudes. No more “your call is important to us” customer communications. Everything counts because everything is a truism—it’s identical to your core brand attributes.

Why is all of this important?

1. You have limited resources. Time and money are tighter than they were a while ago, if you’re like most people. We need every dollar to count. Ensuring that every possible touch point is working for you and not being wasted is critical.
2. Your customers are busy. They have bigger worries than figuring out whether you matter to them. Make it easy on them. They’ll appreciate it.
3. Brand equity equals brand valuation. Every point of incremental brand equity you build is correllated to the incremental value of your company. It’s good business.

What do you do now?

1. Your branding work comes first. Identify who and what you are—and decide who you’re not. Make choices.
2. Bring your partners in to share your vision. Ask the head of customer service, your vice president of Sales, your technical support team and others to see themselves through this new set of eyes.
3. Start making changes today.
4. Ask your customers if they see the changes you think you’re implementing. If they do, keep going. If they don’t, ask where and refine.
5. Keep going. It’s a journey, not a destination.

Does this make sense to you? Can you see yourself applying this Eigen Value lens to your brand? Can you think of other brands that are Eigen Values? Add your comments and case studies, because I’d like to hear them – and they’ll help others, too.

Would you like to share this idea with others? Change This thinks this is a worthy manifesto and I’d like to publish an expanded version of this idea up there.

If you agree and want to help me share this idea, visit The Eigen Value “Change This” Manifesto Link.

Thanks!

Regards.

Porsche drivers flash their lights at each other while MINI drivers tend to wave. Volkswagen just wants us to punch each other in the arm.

Stella Artois is doing its best to get us to “behead” our beers while Corona is satisfied to have us plunk a slice of lime in the necks of our bottles.

Rituals matter to us as a species and play an increasingly important role for us as stewards of our brands.

Rituals define our groups and create a sense of community and exclusivity. Those of us who perform this ritual are different from all the others here and this uniqueness is the heart of the group identity. High-performing teams have rituals. They may be subtle, but they very often have cultural nuances and group behaviors that set them apart on purpose. This forges a sense of exclusivity within our peer groups—all important elements in the psychology of group influence.

Rituals spread ideas through source similarity. We see people like us doing something that intrigues us and we copy their behaviors. In a world where we define an ignoramus as someone who doesn’t know what we learned five minutes ago, rituals are powerful compliance techniques. Monkey see, monkey do.

On a personal level, rituals serve as centering touchstones, reminding us of the importance of those behaviors they bring to the fore. We don’t just tap our tennis shoes with our rackets to shake the imaginary dirt from them; we do it to remind ourselves to move our feet on the court. The haka doesn’t just give us a little frolic before a match; it reminds us of our warrior spirit (not to mention the side note that it scares the hell out of our opponents).

In a group setting, rituals create a means to affect culture change by forging symbolic rewards systems. When we create rituals within our teams, we are creating systems within which we are rewarding people for the right behaviors. We do things in a certain way that may appear stylized, but s masks their underlying meaning. Sweeping the proverbial temple steps, in other words, often masks the attention to detail, the meditation––and the upper body strength conditioning—eeded to master the martial arts.

So, have a conversation with me for a moment on this idea.

• Think of a behavior that you need to instill within your team, organization–or just yourself. Make a short list.
• Think of a ritual that you could create–an act that you perform or a process you go through–that would make this behavioral change more visible, easier to remember or more palatable to your group.
• What do you come up with? How can we surface the idea of creating rituals on purpose to affect change and what can this do for us?

I’ve got some other thoughts on brand rituals and a few personal case studies at my blog, StephenDenny.com, so please drop by and share your experiences!

What’s new about the iPhone 4? It offers a slimmer design. High-resolution screen. HD video-recording/editing. 5 megapixel camera with 5x digital zoom and LED flash. Bing and Google search capability. Folders for a mind-boggling 225,000 apps. And more.

But why talk about a laundry list of features in an ad campaign when consumers can be engaged on an emotional level? Don’t we already expect updated Apple products to offer sophisticated new features? Do we want to know what they are? Sure we do. But first things first.

What’s the most important aspect of purchasing the iPhone? Staying connected with family, friends, business associates and clients. And what’s more important than taking a few moments from our frenetic lives to reconnect with those who matter most to us?

In view of this, filmmaker Sam Mendes’ new “Face Time” iPhone 4 ad spot is simply brilliant.
• What’s more enjoyable to dads than being able to watch video of their kids and share a two-way experience with his family when out of town on business?
• What’s better than out-of-town grandparents being able to share a granddaughter’s graduation happiness?
• What’s more poignant than a serviceman overseas sharing his wife’s ultrasound?
• What’s more fun than a friend sharing her “found the perfect pair of boots” joy with another friend?
• What’s more touching than a loving couple signing to each other via the Face Time capability of the new iPhone?

The emotive aspects of the spot grab our attention immediately and rivet us. They touch the heart. They evince a very human response. The implication is  these are life’s everyday moments that couldn’t be shared when miles separate people—without Face Time.

Does Apple have a winner here? And what wins more: the product or the message? You decide. I’d love to have your insights on this question.