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!
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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 »
Monday, March 31st, 2008
Relevant links for March 31st:
Sunday, March 9th, 2008
What is social media? A better question is what isn’t. It’s not big, it’s not broad and it’s not for sale for the most part. That’s a HUGE problem for traditional marketers. To keep it simple - you know social media when you see it. The Social Media Club provides this definition/framework:
Social (from Merriam Webster)
“1 : involving allies or confederates
2 a : marked by or passed in pleasant companionship with one’s friends or associates social life b: SOCIABLE c: of, relating to, or designed for sociability
3 : of or relating to human society , the interaction of the individual and the group, or the welfare of human beings as members of society < social institutions>“
Media (from Merriam Webster)
” 1 : a medium of cultivation, conveyance, or expression;”
Wikipedia defines Social Media as “the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs.”
By this definition social media is essentially a set of infomediary channels. These conversational channels are equally available to individuals and corporations which makes “controlling the message” or positioning the brand a little more dynamic. The dynamic and egalitarian realities are requiring organizations to add corporate bloggers, community managers and SEO folks to the payrolls to shape the discussion. This latest corporate internet frenzy does have a little bit of the “we got to be there” feel of the early internet which spawned the explosion of webmaster roles in IT which transitioned to more creative roles in marketing many organizations. Technology has a way of developing new disciplines and requiring new skills and investment in people - social media is no different. Social media may actually be organizational development writ large - a new model for organizations, Social Management.
With the new roles on the org chart comes a new worker, a connected conversationalist, where work and life are a balanced set of commingled actions which are agnostic to both place and time. I’m not saying everyone is going beduin, but personal is becoming professional and where and when work happens is different. Markets are becoming social, professionals are becoming personal and brands, at social media’s most atomic level, are their tags.
Social media is changing relationships within a business and how everyone at a company contributes to the success in the marketplace and how customers are re-defining old brands and showcasing new brands. The change will be bigger than it appears on the surface.
Yes - looks are deceiving and that’s a fairly sweeping statement, but the new roles in organizations and the proliferation of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter ARE the leading indicators of change, it also loosely ties into my recent theme on corporate gardening, which I see as a good thing. (The other challenge is there is not a whole bunch of empirical data, so you take what you have and create a plausible relationship and hiring practices for social media roles is a fairly compelling data set.) Social media is on the edge of mainstream for corporations the graphic from Indeed below shows the historical growth of social media roles in the marketplace:
The initial focus of change in many companies is within the marketing group, but support and development jobs are also carrying the social media tag. For now, social media is changing marketing more so than any functional group. When will it be a requirement to show your social portfolio as part of the interview process? How long until there are generally accepted new media launch toolkits and methodologies in the marketplace which start showing up on monster profiles and ads?
Understanding/Overstating/Underestimating the Impact
Social media is not so much about direct influence of revenue, but more of a market optimizer - which DOES impact revenue. Current revenue streams AND future opportunities. Essentially social media aids in making markets more efficient with pervasive communication, connectivity and real-time transaction capabilities. It’s a fundamental change in market mechanics.
Think about it - People buy from people right? Social media is about people. Not huge logic jump that times they are a changin. The change in the mechanics can be seen in the rise of social media platforms as preferred places for interaction and research for many consumers/individuals/employees. The emergence of the social customer isn’t just the re-tooling of word of mouth marketing, it is a change in influential scale - a single customer’s opinion can now influence 1000’s of prospects, not just a handful at the barbershop.
Social media is essentially just starting to prime the market pump - removing the air from traditional “brand out” messaging and requiring more substance for “brand flow”. It will clearly take some more time to have all the “plumbing” in place and air out of the line, but we can see that folks removing the air from the buying process, such as Cushman’s Toyota Yaris experiment. Don’t like the pump metaphor - another way to look at it is as a market lubricant which reduces transactional friction caused by the legacy market mechanics.
A Frictionless Market
Markets traditionally are made less efficient due to brokers, intermediaries, traditional marketing, limited access, price variability and the inherent transactional costs of the exchanging goods of value. The fundamental mechanics of communication, value creation and brand management has been diffused into a community of infomediaries - customers, former customers, competitor customers, employees and former employees. For good or ill access to people, information and influence impacts loyalty, awareness and product placement. There is a downside - the risk of commoditization exists with the reduction of transactional friction in the market. Easier to compare, easier to shop - essentially accelerated discovery and understanding.
The Back End Brand
Discovery and access is changing the messaging imperative from who can shout the loudest to the biggest poplution to be considerably narrower engagement - a conversation. Reviews, diggs and micro-content will essentially piece together a brand mosaic which is the brand identity. Today marketers spend time, energy and money on developing mass awareness and cultivating a sense of value before the commercial transaction. Social media is allowing the customer to do this now in parallel.
Essentially the front end brand investment seen today, will need to shift product focus on service and the ability to influence the conversation in a segment. Brand management has moved from perpetuating a mass market myth to influencing post transactional conversations and community lore. Ultimately social media transitions the definition of brand and value to the service chain.
If this is the case - should customer care/support be part of marketing? Or should support be a standalone product with a product manager? Is this the new portfolio manager? This is going to be an exciting time and good market change. So as a marketer, manager or contributors what can you learn and unlearn to leverage this change in the mechanics of the market? I don’t know what the future holds, but I thank Jeremiah and for getting me thinking about it based on the Tweet below:
@oracletechnet says community managers (before social media) used to be called ‘editors’. I’d say they were called Support or Account team
Not sure I made a point, but sometimes you just have to press publish and move on…..
Posted in Brand, Marketing, Social Media | 2 Comments »
Saturday, March 8th, 2008
If brand management is increasingly about customer input, feedback and how they share their experiences, does that mean more investment in “after the transaction” is required to differentiate?
Posted in Brand, Geeky, Marketing, Nugget | 2 Comments »
Thursday, February 28th, 2008
So I was browsing around at Pragmatic and found an interesting piece by Barbara Nelson on Agile and politics. Here is the somewhat interesting open:
The Politics of Agile
In the world of agile software development, it seems like Marketing and Development are in a race for control of “the product.” Who will win? The flakes in Marketing or the geeks in Development?
I’ve never thought of it as who wins, rather what the revenue, the competitiveness of a solution and do customers like it. Nelson then sets up the piece with the following 3 career alternatives, albeit slightly weighted options:
While developers sprint through development cycles, one of three things happens to product managers. 1) They are ignored. 2) They are dragged deep into the development cycle. 3) They lead the team to build products people want to buy. The first two situations are lethal to a product manager’s career. The third alternative can lead to successful products and successful careers.
Oh the age old politics of PM…. ? Hurray! A new set of methodology based scapegoating techniques for the marketplace. Clearly talking to people helps with the process and the goal is for the customer to win. Faster, Better - more effective… “NASA development” regimens, while rigorous and needed for space travel are not necessarily needed for software.
I’ve always thought effective product management was politics-like - engage the people, earn trust and deliver on what is promise. I know the later is theoretical in politics, but product managers are effectively diplomats trading favors. Agile methodologies help drive personal interaction and tightens relationships throughout the team by partnering on delivery. I’ve always seen agile methodologies as a way to “formalize” the dev process in context of the customer. Pragmatic is a strong revenue “front end” for agile development, since it is market focused and innately iterative from the customer perspective. If the customer doesn’t win, no one wins - there is this whole revenue thing which drives future builds and development.
Wouldn’t index cards be perfect for customer meetings?
“Just a second Mr. Customer…. so what’s that you need again? …I needed to get a index card from by briefcase to bring it back for the ‘board’…”
Posted in Leadership, Marketing | No Comments »
