Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
Monday, May 12th, 2008 |
Since there are a considerably more readers these days, I thought I would piece together a thanks for stopping by piece, but got distracted with this email. I got a slideshare notification on someone putting a pitch in a group, so I thought I would I’ll look at the preso again. Glad I did - not only did I get to reminisce on the salad days when I had more time. I also got to find out I have a spelling error.
So now I have a topic of sorts - bad spelling and slides. At the end of the day - I haven’t been able to fix the error so it will live on the interweb forever. While I will admit an error, I’m not going to let you know exactly where the error is. C’mon - transparency can only go so far. (Hint: I before E, except in words like neighbor or their.)
On a technology note, I think slideshare is one of the more interesting widgets available for blogs. It offers something more visual for my blog and it is within my skill set.
So can look for the error or look at some other folks slides on slideshare.net if you haven’t used slideshare before.
More Recent Slides
Experimental Slides
So there are probably spelling errors in a couple. 
Posted in Focus, Geeky, Marketing | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 |
SOBCON08 - definitely a good event on all fronts - hotel, venue, food, people and content. There are plenty of great re-caps online about what took place at SOBCon from a content perspective, lessons learned, visuals and a even musical spins, but not a whole lot on the sponsors of the event which definitely help make the event a success. Several key sponsors participated throughout the Jim Beam, Utterz, Buzz Logic and Network Solutions, which I’ve labeled “platinum sponsors” based on my ability to remember mainly. There were a couple of bronze and tin sponsors thrown in, but since no of the other stuck in my head, I’m focusing on the platinum sponsors.
With a focused group of bloggers north of 100, each of the sponsors below innately improve the impression of their brand with the group and create awareness for their offerings and brand.
Jim Beam
They brought the brand manager and his pitch seemed completely honest, if just a little bit unstructured. Even a little humorous with his public declaration of “what is blogger casual”? I didn’t know either, so my laughter was for a different reason. Brand guy spent 3-5 minutes doing a recap of their nascent social media strategy while acknowledging this was all a new thing for them and they came to learn. Thanks to his rambling confession of lack of knowledge, every Sicilian Kiss I order going forward will be with Jim Beam.
What is a Sicilian Kiss? A Sicilian Kiss is a drink which is 1/2 Whiskey, 1/2 Amaretto and a splash of orange juice chilled (shaken over ice) and served as a shot.
Utterz
The bald guy was there - he pimped a Bessie or two, did some demos and did the video ad thing which Jen won. The selection process Sim engineered was very egalitarian and represented the voice of the people. The process also offered another opportunity to meet folks and share ideas.
Overall the Utterz participation was a cool thing all around. I just seem to like this company just a little more after their sponsorship and am wondering when I will just make the call and shave my head. What was your tipping point Sim?
Buzz Logic
A company I had previously not heard of which apparently does influence visibility, ok I have see folks post on them like Jeremiah, but didn’t spend any time figuring out what they did. Know that I know, there are just a bunch of uses for this for businesses and bloggers alike. Uses from companies range I suspect from competitive intelligence, brand influencing and as strategic planning tool for social media. It could also be used potentially for demand shaping. Buzz Logic invested throughout the event starting on boat night. Great music and a reasonable liquor thanks to their willingness to throw down some hard earned VC cash.
Buzz Logic not only was nice enough to sponsor, but they sent two hotties as the demo team, Valerie and the other one. Both provided real-time product demos on topics of interest for each person they engaged - personalized demos WORK! Good stuff for everyone which got the opportunity to work with both of them over the conference.
Network Solutions
Active participants throughout the event. Provided web site analysis for the participants which I personally didn’t benefit much from, but I may not of asked the right questions or something which impacted the value. They even had a guy who was now going to blog after his attendance based his newly found understanding of blogging. Dude, let us know the the URL when you’re “online”, as I would like to see what you do. Your name would be cool tool.
A Humanized Brand
After re-reading my post so far, I’ve noticed a common theme - humanization. By deciding to engage people and not crowds with their sponsorship each company developed relationships with users/buyers/influencers/evangelists. While I may not remember all the components of everyone’s solution, stories or names - I do remember the effort. By sponsoring this event these folks have done more than an Ad, blog post or “coordinated” social media campaign could.
At the end of the day, that’s what SOBCon was about - meeting people, learning thier stories and trying to improve. There was very little personality driven discussion or focus it was more about process - trust me as the short guy with that cool chick Emily.
PLEASE NOTE: I authorized the use of the term hottie prior to posting with both Valerie and the other one, Sandra Ponce de Leon.
Posted in Brand, Marketing, Social Media, tools | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 |
That’s right - honesty is the best policy. So in full disclose this is Just a traffic update, yesterday was the worst traffic this blog has had since I’ve been paying attention! (Nov. 07). That’s right, celebrate the little things, because it appears y’all are transitioning to rss readers. Thanks team!
Maybe it is that no one is searching of relevant terms for what I’m writing about, so let’s highlight the top 10 search items, since we have analytics.
- bob’s ichthyosaur - A Great book and apparently the top search term.
- what is scientific management - High school students everywhere are googling.
- twing - Very cool, cool people
- mbifm - A made up acronynm, which apparently means Member of the British Institute of Facilities Management.
- calculating gross margin
- danielle pribbernow - Chick on the Check out blog, wonder if it’s just her searching on herself? Way too much traffic for a Wal-Mart employee. No I mean WAY TOO MUCH.
- dijouri - I made up this name for my second son, 12 years old. I think this IS my son searching on himself or people trying to figure out if I made up his name or people looking for movie made in 2003.
- things i am thankful - This is encouraging.
- afro - Right on.
- giggly quotes - Who searches on giggly quotes?
So if you don’t find anything interesting above interesting, perhaps one of the top 10 “trafficked” pieces, mainly produced via keywords - which you will notice via the relationships between keywords above and titles below. That being said,I REALLY am partial to the Stuck in the Middle series — and — I like the Mosaic piece the most, mainly because it plays well in my head. Yup, I’ve sucked you into a replay post, but a replay of posts everyone else seemed to like too, or at least this is 10 most visited posts here.
- Lessons Learned: What is scientific management
- 100 Things I am thankful for… – A thanksgiving post
- Spatially Relative: A community’s place… - A piece about a book I read
- About – Self-explanatory
- 5 Ways YOU can launch a Twitter stream remediation program – geeky thing I wrote and scoble called it geeky, that scoble effect is a real thing.
- Lessons Learned: How to calculate Gross Margin
- 10 Themes and concepts for YOU to blog on
- 10 Tips for dealing with the fact that you will never leave your Job
- WANTED: Social Media Antagonist
- The Death of Marketing? Mix it up.
Hopefully the new folks that have added me to your reader find some of these interesting. Cheers!
Posted in Geeky, Leadership, Life, Marketing, Social Media, tools | 2 Comments »
Saturday, April 12th, 2008 |
Hugh’s recent I quit Twitter initiative took me back to his blog again. Hugh’s renewed focus on writing and creativity is refreshing to hear about. While browsing I again ran into the image below, which reminds me of the importance packaging a software product for the a given market segment and within the then current economic context. As I talk to product managers and technology marketers there is considerable churn and angst about managing their businesses into a tight spend cycle. Packaging up into value and down into customer acquisition with planned out year up sells are two themes I’ve been seeing in the marketplace.
Are you simplifying, enriching or repricing your solutions?
From my limited experience, economic states and packaging are temporary, price maybe not. Thanks for the reminder Hugh!
Posted in Marketing | No Comments »
Friday, April 11th, 2008 |
Remember the title….
1. Manufactured Market?
There is so much noise about the market opportunity and the necessity to fund community initiatives for enterprises but little has materialize in respect to direct revenue and meaningful metrics. This is a challenge for traditional marketers on many levels and the type of topics I suspect are being at the Forrester Marketing conference. There is a after the show workshop that asserts the following which might be close to revenue:
Experiments with rich media, blogging, RSS, and social networks show how dynamic marketing techniques can touch on buyers’ emotions, educate and persuade them, measure interactions more effectively, and generate additional business.
2. Perpetual Social Markets
Shel’s interviews of Jeremiah Owang and the Sea World folks are both emblematic of the challenges of linking social media investments to a return. How can you effectively measure and manage social media as a growth engine? Examples exist where a specific event or a series of inferences can be leveraged to assume the impact of social media, as evidenced in the description of Sea World video at Fast Company:
Measuring social media is one of the pain spots for the enterprise. As Kami Huyse, says in this clip of her client SeaWorld San Antonio. “It all depends on what you measure.” …
What to measure indeed - hits, downloads….. Ultimately most businesses measure revenue from Marketers, so perhaps Sea World is an anomaly and most businesses know how to convert the social media marketing budget to revenue and understand how to successfully deploy/develop a community. Let’s see if this is the case from Shel’s interview of Jeremiah, you probably only need to listen for say, the whole thing:
3. Social Media as Infrastructure
With the metric challenges and elusiveness of revenue is social media a function of retention more so than demand? If marketers are unable to deliver/verify incremental new revenues base on investment, should the metric hunt move to revenue retention and customer satisfaction?
Cool technology should never be relegated to the “post-transactional” budget fight…..
4. Platforms as Markets
Is Twitter a market? Facebook? Myspace? With increasing platforms for exchange more and more opportunity appears to emerge as populations flock to platforms. Where people gather transactions happen right? There are many example of this in the physical space - Burning Man, dead shows and in the parking lots of panic shows. So if people are gathering, there has to be transactions to be had - right?
Information as currency and messaging as a service continues to be the key commodities being exchanged on social media platforms….
5. Community as a Commoditizer
The transactional efficiencies of social computing by it’s very nature puts downward cost pressure on goods. Ease of comparison, ease of purchase and ease of access to other consumers/product customers. Ease of discovery. Product differentiation through a cost center represents…
Maybe the title should have been 5 Incoherent Thoughts…
~cheers!
Posted in Focus, Marketing, Social Media, tools | No Comments »
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 |
I haven’t spent much time doing pure play product management posting in a while, so I thought I would today. I’ve been doing a bunch of leisure surfing and looking at a bunch of great stuff online and challenged myself to think about what it takes to transition a technology into a product. While I didn’t come to a great deal of conclusions, I think I’ve come up with some reasonable litmus tests for consideration:
- Does your product have more defects than enhancement requests?
- Can the users manage their own product experience?
- Does everyone tell the same story about the product inside your organization?
- Do customer users out number the support staff?
- Can your product be contracted the same from sale to sale?
- Are your training materials for the organization more lengthy than the prospect presentation?
- Do you use the words scripting and framework more than configurable?
- Does a product error message require research from development or is it in the knowledge base?
- Are there more sales tools for the product than product managers?
What questions do you ask about your product?
Posted in Basics, Geeky, Marketing | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 |
Our stories as marketers continues to be a theme of late, whether it’s understanding how YOUR history and biases impact your stories and now from Seth, how your EXECUTION is central to the story/brand experience. Below is an excerpt which asserts lack of a story can impact consistency of the brand:
But what if you haven’t figured out a story yet?
Then the work is random. Then the story is confused or bland or indifferent and it doesn’t spread.
On the other hand, if you decide what the story is, you can do work that matches the story. Your decisions will match the story. The story will become true because you’re living it.
Does Starbucks tell a different story from McDonald’s? Of course they do. But look how the work they do matches those stories… from the benefits they offer employees to the decisions they make about packaging or locations.
The pithy piece from Seth opines about what comes first, the story or the work. Not sure that this is the best way to manage the story or the execution, since they are more or less ONE thing - the Brand. These are two interactive and evolving components which can’t be untethered. Customers, employees and transactional interactions move the story and change the story over time, evidence the $1 coffee from Starbucks or the 3 hour re-training event which was intended to boost the barista-ness of the the customer experience.
This example from Starbucks is a great use case for how to align execution to the story and the market. So if the story is linked to execution/the work, then speaking to the market is only part of the story to be told.
As brand managers/creators, marketers need to continuously deliver messaging not just for the market, but for the larger organization in partnership with human resources and the leadership. What are the types of activities and processes required to consistently deliver on a brand story/uphold the integrity of a brand? The realities is it varies. This will vary from industry to industry and market segment to market segment, but 3 key areas for consideration regardless of industry:
- Establish a Unified Tribal Understanding
- Open Channels for Feedback
- Consistently Reward and Publicize Contribution
Tribal Understanding
You can’t tell the same story, unless you KNOW what the story is, so what have YOU done as a marketer to make this happen?
This is the concept of making sure the whole organization understands what a product is supposed to do and what the value drivers are for the consumer. In technology for example, the larger organization needs to understand the solutions being delivered, the relative importance of the solution for the consumer and overall strategic direction of the company.
With this baseline folks can understand and how this relates to what customers/the market need for a given technology provider. Without common tribal understanding, you get inconsistent execution which can greatly change the market version of the story/the stories your customers tell.
Tip: The easiest way to figure out if you need to develop a plan for this is fairly simple, walk around the business. Walk around and ask say 10 folks across the organization from a functional perspective and seniority perspective and see if they tell the same story about your product or your brand. If you get 6 different answers, you probably need to do something.
Channels for Feedback
As consumers habits change and market requirements evolve, it is important that every organizational story teller cannot only understand the brand story, but also that they can contribute to the evolution of the story. Whether it’s collections, professional services or customer service, all of these stakeholders interact with the market daily and should have easy access to provide input from the business. This can be as simple as email or a suggestion box on the intranet and is imperative to keep a pulse on the market and to understand how your product is perceived on the front lines.
Tip: See if you have a clear path from communication to the marketing team, product management and leadership of YOUR organization, if not perhaps you should roll out a formal plan, remind folks of how to contribute and develop a formal plan to manage input for improvement.
Reward and Publicize Contribution
This seems a little obvious, but telling the story for the market, requires awareness for the larger organization of how a single person can leverage their tribal knowledge and exceed the promises of the brand. While the type of recognition will vary by company size and budget, marketers need to equally tell the story internally and leveraging an open channel for feedback and ensuring the full understanding of the story makes it simple. Don’t underestimate a Starbucks gift card and an “all employee” email.
Tip: Recognition isn’t about burying an accomplishment on the intranet for a specific functional group - it needs to be shared. Don’t fall for the corporate newsletter trap here - you can mention it in the newsletter, but take the time to highlight individual successes outside of the normal communications channels for the whole organization.
While this clearly is not the alpha and omega of brand based story creation and modication, it’s a good place to start. Do YOU have any ideas on how to improve the stories told in the village? Leave a comment and let us know.
Posted in Brand, Leadership, Marketing | 1 Comment »
Thursday, March 27th, 2008 |
Most marketers apply their personal biases to initiatives. These biases are created through experiences - personal and professional. Whether a bias is earned from lessons learned or a personal “style” element - it often manifests in the types of channels used, the tactics used and which of the 4 P’s is central to the brand. With that as a baseline, I found this interesting pitch entitled - “Writing Customer Stories”. I wanted to know more about customer stories. The pitch is below that has no real content to drive the talk track, although it has one. I clearly had a personal talk track on it prior to listening and good thing, click through first WITHOUT AUDIO. Think about the story you have - then listen LISTEN to the audio. (I know this post has a bad email forward feel)
So do you think this person’s bias is radio? It’s was so much cooler in my head. I think I might could even pitch those slides and potentially it would even work, without a single edit, but I’m confident my story/pitch would deviate in key themes and messages based on my preferential biases and after listening - I KNOW THAT. Oh the stories we conjure as marketers.
Posted in Brand, Marketing | 2 Comments »
