Final Thoughts for 2008

I sit here today with great hope for 2009 and thankful that 2008 will soon be behind us all. It’s been a challenge these past few months to stay focused on anything, but producing results of today. In fact, I think that’s the one thing about this past fall that has been a change for me. I am so used to being able to balance strategic longer term goals and the needs of sales and leads of today. But, that has not been the case since the summer...

My 2009 marketing budget has a different make up then in years past. Typically, I set aside 20% of my budget for innovation and ad hoc program spending. This year’s budget has virtually no ad hoc spending set aside. I have allocated 10% toward creating a greater presence online. Not exactly sure of the results, but that’s all I can afford for innovation spending in 2009...until we all have greater market visibility.

I saw that Chris Brogan forecast a painful market consolidation of the online community software players, which is really needed to create stronger companies and stronger products. My concern is that marketers will sit on the sidelines the first half of 2009 waiting for the strong to be truly identified. Visibility to sufficient funding is surely going to be hard to achieve for virtually all in 2009. It’s hard for anyone to build a profitable business model to compete with Ning, which is virtually free, or KickApps, which has such a low start-up cost.

I think 2009 will be a struggle for any marketer not having a product in the “must have” category or a product that does not have an immediate and quantifiable cost savings. And I’m not talking about “soft savings”. I’m talking hard savings that will have an operational ROI. If you are a “nice to have”, expect your project not to make it past the CFO...

Have a safe new year’s celebration.

Late Marketing Planning for 2009

The final touches for my 2009 marketing plan are being completed. I do not recall a period where I have been making such changes this late in the planning process. I bet I’m not alone...

I normally start aggressively working on my next year’s plans right after Labor Day. While everyone is focused on delivering a strong Q3, I’m communicating with others to learn about their aspirations and plans for the upcoming year. I’m also trying to get into the heads of senior management about their expectations. From this information, I head into October with a pretty good sense of what the specific needs and expectations are. It has helped me head into the official planning sessions with a pretty good sense of my resources requirements- be that people or marketing spend.

This year though has been different. In November, we decided to revisit each and every element of our marketing plan to make sure we were prepared to make “changes” rapidly in 2009. This thinking has made us juggle some of our spending commitments in a manner that delays certain funding. I wonder if we are alone in this approach.

One thing we decided to do was to not exhibit at any trade shows this upcoming year. I mean zero. I saw a dramatic drop off in attendance at events starting in October... I bet it continues into 09, until people have greater visibility.

The one area that we have greatly increased our spending and efforts is around online engagement. We are planning to focus a lot of our efforts on our partners and customers.

2009 for me is about creating stronger customer engagements via the internet. What about you?

Making Lemonade from Lemons

These are not days of laughter. Many are losing their jobs and many more will not be surprised when they are personally expected. So much a season of holiday cheer. But, I think the bleak situation will provide an excellent opportunity for many to reinvent their situation and make lemonade from lemons.

If you know me, I’m no Pollyanna, but I do look at the world with a positive outlook and try to see the best of a situation. Only once you deal with the reality, can your begin to maximize the opportunity. Which brings me back to the world of social marketing. Marketers that look to make a positive situation out a bleak 2009 sales plan will help their companies gain market share and stay relevant over the next 12 months. Staying relevant and engaged to your most loyal customers and prospects will help ensure that when budgets to begin to thaw... you will be in a superb situation to win the business.

We’ve been talking about one-one-marketing for years thanks to Don Peppers (great speaker by the way... caught him at the recent Chris Brogan event at Gillette Stadium...). Social marketing is a tool that will help each marketer to make it happen. And you can do it without risk. Social marketing is one of the most pragmatic investments and commitments we all can make in 2009.

Happy holidays and stay safe.

Innovate or Perish

In this economy, innovation is imperative for corporate survival and individual success. But, you’re not sure how to best use innovation to help your company succeed and grow during with flat or reduced marketing spend. Fortunately, you do have the tools available to respond to your CEO’s demands to get creative and make it happen. By using a slightly different mindset and some technology, you can make it happen...

I know, you are feeling quite risk-adverse these days. But, it’s our responsibility as marketing professionals to think differently and offer up to management ways to grow the business, without betting the farm or spending exorbitant amounts of capital. I know it is not easy, you are afraid to offer up programs that may fail. You and the team know that in order to gain market share during slow growth times, you need to in fact have the confidence and support of your management to dip your toes into trying innovative projects. Now is the time that you will be able to get those few extra market share points from your competitors who are contracting their marketing. And you can achieve your results for less today then it will when the market really comes back strong...

So think about making sure that 15% of your marketing spend is around innovation. Think how you can use technology to increase the rapport and relationship with your best and most profitable customers and markets. That’s how you as a marketer will make your business stronger and more profitable.

Oh, and ya, a social marketing project in 2009 is just one potential project to think about. Sorry about that shameless industry plug...

Phinally from Philly.

What a week for baseball fans rooting for the Phillies. The curse I am happy to report is over... The Phillies are the 2008 World Champions. Hurray!

It makes me think about how many things have changed in my marketing career... and makes me so thankful to be a part of technology marketing today.

Successful technology marketing today requires a simplification of message, so people can quickly understand what your product offerings are all about. No different than a baseball manager using his players in situations they can relate to. Comfort and appreciation enable us all to execute at high levels of performance.

Successful technology marketing today requires that the basics are executed properly. The basic 4 P’s of marketing still exist. It’s important to always remember that we are responsible for creating an environment to help drive sales success and increase our brand awareness. This Is no different from a manager preparing his team to execute the basics of the game. In baseball many manage by “the book”, while using their intuition. More on that topic next week...

What are ways you can think about the parallels between baseball and technology marketing.

My Day with Chris Brogan and the 1%ers

I’m sitting at the airport in beautiful Providence, RI heading back to Philly after attending the two-day New Marketing Summit Conference run by Chris Brogan and Paul Gillin. There were lots of industry luminaries here. The audience was probably the most informed group of professionals on the subject you can find anywhere. After listening to day one presentations, my frustrations began to build. What world was I living in? Or should I say, what world had I crossed over to? I knew I was at Gillette Stadium, but did I go through a future time warp? Nope, it was still October 2008. I just happened to be attending a well run, well organized event of believers... I call them the “1%ers”... you know the industry visionaries and thought leaders. These are the people that can connect the dots...before there are enough dots to connect.

Well the world I live in and the businesses we serve are not the 1%ers. In live in a pragmatic world. The world I live in had businesses have budget constraints. They cannot afford to spend $100,000+ on an online community. They are pragmatic in their marketing strategies and love to be innovative, while limiting the downside risk opportunity to their investments. They have a management team and a sales team that have strong relationships with their customers and partners and are concerned about protecting that existing mode of communication. Oh, and they are mostly 30 and older... we don’t target those in their 20’s. And most of our market doesn’t use Facebook or Twitter (if they even have heard of Twitter).

I participated on a panel today with industry leaders Mzinga, Socialtext and Lithium and the panel was moderated by Chris Brogan. I sat and listened to the first three presenters and quite honestly did not agree with much of their thoughts. Me? Well, I challenged the audience about what I had heard throughout the conference. I tried to express my opinion for the small and medium business or brand. Not every business or brand can spend $100,000+ on their community. Shame on us for making it so expensive. Shame on us for requiring so much consulting services to make a community happen. After 8 years, we couldn’t have figured out how to engineer out the complexity? The industry (and that includes their agencies) have made this so complex. We should be trying to turn the Voodoo into Main Street. It’s as if no one ever read about the Long Tail. Well, we have... we live it every day.

It was a great event for the informed.

It’s Time to Start Connecting the Dots

I had an interesting morning yesterday. A prospect came to the office to determine if we are able to address his business needs. He had a fascinating perspective since over the past two to three weeks be has met about ten companies with online community building solutions. Here was a company that has been researching available software solutions and his take on what he’s learned so far, “it’s so hard for a business person to figure out the marketing value in an online community. All the vendors do is talk about technology and features. I think I know the value and it’s ability to support my goals, but you guys are making me connect the dots”. He said that it reminded him of the pre-2000 era of selling software, where the people selling the product had little sense of communicating the business value. But, it was cool and new.

I think he is dead on. The social media software market has done a poor job at talking business value. You hear analysts and leading industry bloggers talking about companies “testing and experimenting”. This is a clear sign that businesses are struggling to “connect the dots”. You have to wonder why we make this so hard for marketers. Marketers love to buy things and we hide the good reasons for them to buy.

This is really a very simple value proposition. Here’s a question for you marketers out there... would you spend a dollar a year to improve your engagement and communications to some of your best customers? Remember the 80/20 rule? Isn’t it worth a dollar a year for you to have a stronger, more educated relationship with the top 20% of your customers? Customer engagement is about an ongoing relationship. Relationships are not campaigns. And that is the sad state of how many are being “advised”. Wrong. Agencies love campaigns because that means greater client spend. A campaign approach overly complicates the value proposition. And more importantly, prevents the business case to get started with minimal risk. Ha, be pragmatic. Please stop over complicating the effort. This stuff really is simple.

Social media marketing needs to start connecting the dots of business benefit- for both you and your customers. Adding social media marketing to your mix has a simple value proposition. Start by focusing your online marketing spend around the high-value customers you want to retain and the high-potential customers you want to grow. This is about micro segmented marketing. And in today’s economy, target marketing is a requirement, not just a good thing to do.

Social Media and Online Communities in Slow Growing Economies

I had dinner this week with a senior marketing executive for a consumer goods company and of course the economy was a big part of our conversation. How can’t you but talk about what’s happening in the financial world these days. He was telling me how over the summer months their executive team had already made the decision to “protect and grow” the business for the balance of 2008 and expected the same strategic approach to continue throughout 2009. Their strategy was to focus more of their marketing spent on the two core groups of customers who can most directly influence revenue:

— High-value customers you want to retain.

— High-potential customers you want to grow.

For high-value, loyal customers that they wanted to retain, they would need to do a better job at tilting the hard-soft benefit equation toward the soft side with special benefits and access unavailable to the general population. For the high-potential customers that they wanted to grow, they planned to increase service/product quality and personal customer experiences instead. They also planned to shift marketing spend to initiatives that identify best customers, collect actionable intelligence on them and then leverage that data to influence profitable customer choices.

What was interesting was when we talked about “product price”. The option of slashing prices was not even an option for them due to their increases in energy costs and their higher component costs. They are absolutely focused on increasing service/product quality and personal customer experiences instead.

Thus, the reason for our dinner... he was interested in learning more about how an online community could be quickly added to his marketing mix, without turning the effort into a project. I recently read in Advertising Age, that an Epsilon CMO Survey revealed that nearly two-thirds of chief marketing officers said their interactive/digital marketing budgets have increased in the past year, while 60% have seen their traditional advertising budgets go south. Here was a first-hand statistical proof point to that survey.

The conversation was about how a social media online community could be leveraged to “target” high-value and high-potential customers. I’ll leave the details of that conversation for another day, but it was clear to each of us that during a slow growth economy, the traditional marketing mix could not continue without change. Creative marketers were looking for pragmatic ways to engage and influence, without having to spend large chucks of a reduced marketing budget.

So, what changes are you making to your marketing mix?

There is no such thing as social media. There is only real life.

I attended the PRSA T3 event in New York this week on Sept 11^th... a day of sad memories. I’m surprised that the event was scheduled on such an important day for New York and for those of us who have been so personally affected from the terrorist attack on New York and our country. And this decision from a group of public relations professionals...

OK, I did really enjoy the event. The folks who organized the event should take a bow. It was first class in every way. It was stacked with excellent content and superb speakers. The day started off with Paul Gillin, the author of “The New Influencers” and was quickly followed up with Peter Shankman of Help a Reporter Out (HARO). Talk about world-class and a wonderful user presentation from George Wright of Blendtec (www.willitblend.com) on how to use viral marketing to spread the word with no budget using out of the box thinking.

I thought Peter did an excellent job at putting social media in its correct context. He said that “there is no such thing as social media. There is life”. Social media is but an extension of life. If you would not do something in real life, then why would you do it online? For example, I doubt you would “poke” your partners or customers. So, why do it online?

This perspective brings to the surface one of the biggest objections I often hear about. It directly raises the issue of the seriousness of social media a tool for marketers. The first mainstream phase of social media solutions that have received the greatest market awareness (MySpace and Facebook) have shown the possibilities of “fun”, but never have connected to businesses and marketers, except for the most horizontal business products such as Coke and Pepsi. It all validates Peter Shankman’s perspective that there really is no such thing as social media. There is only life.

There is life though for marketers, who are able to learn from MySpace and Facebook and make it better resemble life. I think of these products as a second generation match.com. That by the way is the origin of Facebook... looking to meet girls at Harvard. It certainly was not a world where a vertically oriented marketer could find comfort. It still isn’t.

By the way, if you a marketer with PR responsibilities make sure you look at Help a Reporter Out (www.haro.com). It is a great resource for locating authors looking for sources to complete their stories. And it’s all free.

Going from 1.0 to 2.0

You aren’t alone if you’re trying to figure out where to begin when it comes to doing more — or doing at least something — in social media in your organization. At a recent Social Media Club meet up in Boston, the group surfaced some great tips for getting started. Here are some of the groups ideas for taking the plunge or expanding what you’ve started:

1. Embrace experimentation as a way of life.
   By it’s very nature, social media is participation-driven and enabled by technology — which means it’s always changing and the variables are pretty much infinite. “Your executives have to understand the need to take action. They have to be willing to try things and see what sticks.”
2. Start small. Think evolution, not revolution.
   You might even be “doing social media” already. Next time you’ve got big news, something as simple as creating a companion podcast/video interview makes your news more engaging and shareable. As a number of PR folks in the room advised, just post it to YouTube, on your website and share the links via email to customers, prospects and bloggers who follow your industry. You’ll see that it doesn’t hurt and nobody dies. So make it a series. See what kind of downloading action you get, and ask for feedback wherever you post it.
3. Monitor what’s going on (and make new insights easy to appreciate)
4. Start inside. Lots of companies launch blogs internally first, often within the corporate intranet. It’s a safe place to surface those with the natural talent and inclination to sustain blog posting. It’s also a great way to get employees used to a new style of communicating.
5. Have trust in your people (or get some people you can trust)
   The new realities of social media — always on, everyone has a voice, sharing is paramount — bring with it much less control, more immediacy and unpredictability. Which means you and your boss and your team mates have to trust each other to use their best judgment; micro-managing is not an option. If you don’t have that kind of trust, consider making a change. In your team or your choice of employer.
6. Involve the legal team at the beginning (especially if you’re a public company) It sounds counter-intuitive but the best thing you can do is proactively engage your legal folks. Much better than having them send up red flags when you’re about to launch something. Offer a social media 101 session, show the impact of social media on the business, how other companies are navigating these new waters, and encourage their collaboration on ways to overcome any concerns they may have.
7. Evangelize, and train everyone
   If you’re the social media champion, unleash your beliefs and savvy on as many groups across the company as you can. Go to corporate communications and help them see how to shift from message control to two way conversations, create a social media 101 workshop or e-learning event and resources, and work with HR or whomever to get it shared throughout the company.

The take away? Get started. Learn small. Built internal expertise.

Scott

Getting to the Moment of Wow

The number one question I get when I talk to marketing people about social media and online communities is “what’s in it for me?” My response? You should care because soon it will be a standard component in your marketing mix. And it won’t be an option for you. Think of it as the next generation website. The key difference is that your next generation website will help you drive sales and create deeper customer loyalty and increased prospect stickiness. The era of brochureware is coming to an end. That’s what’s in it for you.

As soon as you help a marketer start to put a business context around social media and online communities, you begin to see the creative juices start to flow. It’s almost magical to see the transition to wow. The moment of wow is when the marketing possibilities around social media and online communities begin. It’s the moment they begin to appreciate how they can use the medium for building stronger business relationships.

Turning the moment of wow into marketing objectives and creating quantifiable business value begins by defining what you want to achieve. This is no different from any other part of your marketing mix.

Some of the objectives in a business to business marketing program might be:

• Create a trusted environment that fosters conversation and engagement. This is not a time for brochure copy.
• Create a way for our trusted members to help and share with each other.
• Offer content on a continuous basis that helps drive independent conversation.
• Create content that helps you learn how people use your product(s).
• Create a learning opportunity to learn what people want to do with your products and services.
• Create sticky value that provides a competitive advantage.
• Create micro-segmented communications opportunities to expand marketing foot print.

These aspirations will help you drive increased “relationships” to your brand and company. Robert Van Arlen thinks of this as a way to have your clients sing about you. Effectively, you are able to transfer the value of the “Wow” to customers and prospects at all levels.

The fastest growing segment of the social media market is around providing trusted business to business engagement. Social media is thriving because people have always engaged with each other. It’s a natural part of human communications. We naturally engage each and every day with our spouse, children, family, friends, neighbors, golfing friends and business associates. Although Facebook and MySpace get the coverage, they generally are not trusted by adults, unless of course you are looking for a date, want to check out your favorite band or have time to surf. For the majority of adults, they are not willing to “expose” themselves to everyone. I think that people like LinkedIn because they only share their resume or CV with the world.

Unfortunately, we as adults have many sides of our life. And you want to be in control. Businesses are always looking for ways to extend their capabilities and engage their customers and prospects in ways that result in higher retention, lower risk, increased ROI, and greater operational capacity.

Social media and online communities will be standard parts of your next generation marketing mix. Off the shelf products are now available to help you get started and learn. It will not cost you an arm and leg to experiment. You’ll find that this is a world that you will be operational in weeks.

When will you have your moment of wow?