New Marketing Expertise and a Special Discount Price

Posted on September 29, 2008 by Paul

If you’re anywhere near the New England area, I hope you’ll join me, David Meerman Scott, Chris Brogan, Don Peppers and a host of other new-media marketing practitioners for a two-day forum that’s jam-packed with advice from experts in the latest online disciplines. And here’s a bonus: you get to see the inside of the Gillette Stadium’s fabulous conference facilities overlooking the football field where the New England Patriots play!

The event is the New Marketing Summit, and if you sign up with code PAULVIP, you get a $200 discount off the $795 registration. Beginning today, you can also use that code to shave $50 off the fee for the Monday evening exhibits reception: That means for a mere $45, you can spend two hours on Oct. 14 perusing the latest new-media marketing tools and enjoying some fine drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Compare to an evening out in Boston; you can barely park for that amount :-).

David, Chris and I have worked closely with the experts at CrossTech Media to craft a program that we think represents the best of new marketing practices. A few highlights:

There are dozens of speakers, many of them successful practitioners who will tell what’s working for them and how you can benefit from their experience.

I’ll be opening day two of the conference on Oct. 15, speaking on the topic of Profiting from Engagement: Why Content is the New Currency of Marketing. This represents my latest research and thinking on the market changes that are being brought about by a new breed of empowered customers who use their blogs, Facebook groups, recommendation engines and social shopping sites to define the terms of marketing engagement. Customers now largely control the brand and image of the companies they do business with. Don’t you think you should know all you can about those dynamics?

Please click the button above or the image below to register. That’s the venue for the event. Look me up when you arrive!

Gillette Stadium conference facility

Help Us Eat Our Own Dog Food

Posted on August 2, 2008 by Paul

Many years ago in the days BI (before Internet), I worked at a publisher that was installing a new client/server-based publishing production system. Since the publication was all about information technology, we got the great idea to write about our own experiences moving to the new software. The first couple of published articles went well, but then problems began to occur.

It turned out that the reference customers the software vendor had give us weren’t actual customers but rather test sites. We were, in fact, the only live customer. The software was riddled with bugs and the interface to our previous production system was atrocious. For months, reporters and editors worked with both a terminal and a PC on their desks because the new system was so unreliable. The project, which was originally scheduled to last six months, dragged on more than three times that long.

This presented an interesting problem for our little experiment in transparency. The project was a disaster and the vendor, which had initially been enthusiastic about the idea, was now pleading with us not to document the problems we were experiencing. We continued with the diary, but as internal political pressures mounted, we toned down our coverage considerably. The extent of the disaster was never fully revealed.

This time, we don’t have that option.

Announcing Project Dogfood, an experiment in community website development. This is an innovative idea from a fast-moving company named CrossTech Media, which produces a new conference called New Marketing Summit. I’ll be co-anchoring this event Oct. 14 and 15 at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, MA along with bestselling author David Meerman Scott and social media superstar Chris Brogan.

The event’s website is currently standard brochureware, but CrossTech isn’t the kind of company to stick with the basic. The company got its start building conference registration systems and the technology-driven team had a brainstorm. Let’s transform a series of flat HTML pages into a vibrant social media foundry. And let’s ask the community for help.

Project Dogfood’s name is a nod to that venerable tech industry phrase, “Eating our own dog food.” It means companies should run themselves on the software they build for customers. As the site develops with input from the community, it will become the foundation for future New Marketing Summits. People who register for the events will be able to continue their conversations and relationships long after the curtain has rung down on the last speaker.

So go register! Tell us which topics you’d like to see and features you’d like us to include. And sign up for the New Marketing Summit while you’re at it.

Unlike my previous experiment in transparency, this one doesn’t have the option of backing out. You’ll see a social network take shape before your eyes. And if we fall on our faces a couple of times, you’ll see that, too. This is Web 2.0, after all!

Lessons From the Campaign Trail

Posted on July 2, 2008 by Paul

From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe using the sign-up box to the right.

Businessweek’s Catherine Holahan writes this week about the big lead Barack Obama has built against John McCain in online visibility. While I’m not going to declare a preference for either candidate, I do think it’s worth noting the lessons marketers can learn from the Obama campaign’s success.

Political campaigns have long been about the 30-second television spot. Candidates staked their reputations and their success on a series of carefully crafted (and very expensive) image ads that ran in key markets. The high cost of this approach forced campaigns to bet everything on strategic media buys.

The Obama campaign has challenged this conventional wisdom. While the 30-second spot still has its place, it isn’t with the emerging population of young voters. When young people do watch TV, it’s rarely in prime time and they are usually fast-forwarding through the commercials. Perhaps one reason this group has become so politically disenfranchised in recent elections is that no one is reaching them on their terms.

The Obama campaign, however, has figured it out. Its innovation has been in understanding that mainstream media is no longer the bottleneck of communication. When candidates — or marketers — use all the media channels available, they can create significant impact without relying on traditional media or advertising at all.

The numbers cited by BusinessWeek are impressive. The Obama campaign decided at the outset to leverage every possible channel to reach its audience and to take every possible opportunity to drive home its message. The candidate is essentially broadcasting every waking minute. When Obama gives a speech, a staffer videotapes it and uploads it to YouTube. When the candidate is in the car, aides are delivering messages on Twitter. Between campaign stops, the candidate conducts chats on MySpace or distributes position papers on his own social network.

The cost of these activities is next to nothing and the young audience they reach has been almost completely ignored by other campaigns. Perhaps more importantly, the Obama strategy has centered on frequent repetition, which is a classic marketing best practice. Instead of waiting for the media gods to bestow attention upon the candidate, the candidate chooses to become the media.

What can marketers learn from this? For one thing, you are no longer a prisoner of the media. You can become the media. Secondly, if you choose a strategic combination of channels and then deliver messages consistently and frequently, you can get better results than by renting a half minute on TV once a week.

Finally, the Obama campaign has demonstrated the beauty of small markets. When you aggregate the candidate’s 43,000 Twitter followers, 60,000 YouTube subscribers, 1.1 million Facebook friends, 21,000 MySpace friends and 850,000 members of MyBarackObama.com, you’re quickly over 2 million followers, each of whom has volunteered for that status. If you can convince each one of those people to spread the word to three others, well, you do the math.

Four years ago, the Howard Dean campaign tried to leverage the Internet to run a grass-roots campaign and fell short. There were several reasons for that, but lack of tools was one of them. Today, the problem is how to choose from the bounty of tools that are available. The Obama campaign demonstrates that word-of-mouth campaigns can open a whole new world of possibilities.

Lessons From the Campaign Trail

Posted on July 1, 2008 by Paul

From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe using the sign-up box to the right.

Not Optimizing For Search? Shame On You!

Posted on April 22, 2008 by Paul

From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe using the sign-up box to the right.

I meet with corporate marketers and their agencies these days, I’m frequently surprised to learn how little they think about search engine optimization. This is despite the fact that Google alone processes an estimated 750 million queries daily, and that IT professionals are some of the most active and advanced users of search engines.

One reason for this, I suspect, is that marketers are trained to be good at “push” marketing. Their craft has traditionally involved intercepting customers with messages that grab their attention and inspire action. Customers, however, are becoming more resistant to these tactics. Increasingly, they engage with companies and products on their terms when they’re ready to make a buying decision. That’s a much better time to reach them. The trick is to show up on their radar when they’re in this “pull” mode.

Google is now the universal homepage. Look at your traffic logs and you’ll probably see that search engines vastly outperform any other referral source. Yet many marketers devote lots of time and money to creating beautiful homepage designs that are rich in animation and graphics. Not only are these pages rarely seen by today’s web site visitors, but images and Flash animations are almost useless at attracting search engine traffic.

Successful IT marketers are learning to reverse the push model. They know that buyers start the research process in a search query box and that the sites that make the first page of results get 10 times the click-throughs of anything else.

The Great Equalizer
You might think search engines favor the big brands, but that’s not the case. Try this: Type “router” into Google and look at the results. Note that only four of the top 25 results are vendor sites. Now type “PC.” Note that the only vendor in the top 10 results — Apple — doesn’t even market its products as PCs! In fact, neither of the top two PC makers in the US market even makes the top 100 results on Google.

Now look at what dominates search results for both terms: sites that provide definitions and helpful how-to advice. This should tell you something. Your search engine performance will be greatest when you deliver content that helps customers make good decisions through practical, impartial guidance from knowledgeable sources.

Search is the great equalizer. The leading engines’ proprietary algorithms are designed to screen out material that their developers consider uninteresting. Your challenge is to match your content to their preferences.

Start by choosing the search terms that really matter. Be specific. Get general agreement that these are the terms you want to dominate in search performance. Marshall all of your internal web site contributors to reinforce those terms every time they write.

Discard terms like “industry-leading” and “innovative.” No one searches for those words. Start a blog or discussion forum. Both are search engine magnets. Pick up a copy of Search Engine Marketing, Inc. by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt. It’ll tell you a lot of the ins and outs. Make SEO a basic consideration in every marketing campaign. Then let those buyers reel you in.

This article originally appeared in Network World’s ITiki newsletter.

Bloggers Get Social April 4-6

Posted on March 11, 2008 by Paul

Now here’s a classic Web 2.0-style event! Come and meet other marketing bloggers in NYC for a weekend of fun and socializing April 4-6. In the organizers’ words: “Neither summit nor seminar, Blogger Social is “a first-ever, one-of-a-kind event held by the online marketing community for the marketing community, completely funded and coordinated by community members. Neither summit nor seminar, nowhere near a trade show or conference, the intent is a social event…[It’s] founded upon the idea of time together to better get to know one another.” And no blogging all weekend, they say. You do enough of that, for goodness sake!

It’s co-organized by Christina Kerley, an early social media marketing adopter who gets it as well as any marketer I’ve met. I have to be on the west coast at that time and can’t attend, but for $350 (this is New York City, remember!) it looks well worth the cost.

‘Infuencer Marketing’ challenges assumptions

Posted on March 6, 2008 by Paul

When my copy of Duncan Brown’s and Nick Hayes’ Influencer Marketing arrived in the mail, I looked at it a little bit like a trip to the dentist at the Asecra dentist clinic and I received an excellent care.. I knew it was going to be good for me, but I didn’t expect to enjoy it.

What a pleasure, then, to find that this engaging and provocative book not only challenged many of my assumptions about markets and influence, but did so in a readable and persuasive manner.

The authors are co-managers of Influencer50, a consulting firm that specializes in helping companies identify the key influencers in their markets. Like many authors of their kind, they think a lot of marketing today is badly broken. Unlike many authors, though, they have concrete advice on how to fix it.

The central premise of this book is that the people who influence markets are largely unknown to most marketers. In fact, the authors’ firm offer clients a 50% discount if they can name even 20 of the top 50 influencers in their sphere. They’ve never had to pay up. Most marketers, they assert, consider influencers to be mainly press and analysts. In fact, they suggest that the list is far larger and more diverse than that, encompassing more than 20 categories ranging from channel players to venture capitalist to government agencies and systems integrators. They argue that many of these influencers are far more important than the media because they speak directly to a company’s customers. They pay particular attention, for example to second-tier consultancies, systems integrators and buyers groups. These people are whispering in the year of customers every day, yet most marketers aren’t even aware that they’re talking, the authors assert.

This book defends its case pretty well, using logic and ample case studies. It’s also written in a disarmingly down-to-earth and at times tongue-in-cheek style. Hayes and Brown aren’t stingy with their opinions. Bloggers, for example, get far more attention than they deserve, they suggest, and many bloggers are simply people who are awkward in social situations. Referencing Twitter, they say simply, “How anyone can maintain a proper job and use Twitter is beyond us.” You may not agree with their opinions, but you have to respect them for the directness with which they are stated.

They hate awards programs, believing them to be valuable only to the organizations bestowing the awards. Partnerships are meaningless in most cases because companies have far too many partners to manage effectively. They believe that brand equity is overstated and that celebrity endorsers play mostly to the egos of the marketers who recruit them. That’s just a sampling of the often counterintuitive assertions in his book.

I did have some nits to pick with Influencer Marketing. The case studies lack much in the way of hard ROI and are limited mostly to Influencer50 clients. I thought the rather critical chapter on bloggers underestimated the influence that those influencers have on mainstream media. The authors are also big fans of using consultants to identify influencers, a position that obviously favors their company.

Nevertheless, if the greatest value of a business book is to challenge assumptions, as I believe it is, then Influencer Marketing succeeds admirably. It’s one of the best marketing books I’ve read in a long time. For a commitment of five or six hours, it is well worth the time spent reading it.

Marketing in the sky: Another reason I hate US Airways

Posted on March 1, 2008 by Paul

So there I am, squashed into the middle seat of a packed US Airways flight from San Francisco to Charlotte. I wasn’t supposed to be on that flight, but my scheduled flight had been delayed past my connection time, so that’s that.

I hate long flights and I hate middle seats even more, so I try to tune out and focus on my laptop, book or Sudoku puzzle, whatever suits the moment. I’m in my “zone” when the plane’s PA system springs to life with…an advertisement!

That’s right, US Airways, of which I am a customer paying good cash money, has decided that it will take advantage of my captivity to sell me on the merits of the US Airways Mastercard. I have no choice in the matter. The ad isn’t broadcast over the in-flight movie system, where I can choose not to listen, but over the PA system. The same one that’ s used to tell us that our seats can be used as a flotation device. There is no getting away from it. For two minutes, I listen to the flight attendant read ad copy in a monotone while another smiling crew member walks down the aisle, waving brochures.

The US airline industry has quite possibly the worst customer relations of any major business category and US Airways is at the bottom of the barrel, for my money. I didn’t think it could get any worse until it came up with this stunt. Sure, it was only two minutes of my time, but it’s the principle that bothers me.

Airlines are one of the few businesses that have a legal right to physically confine their customers. To take advantage of that confinement for the purpose of delivering an advertisement is just wrong. US Airways, you suck.

Nothing ivy-covered about these students

Posted on February 19, 2008 by Paul

This morning, I had the chance to speak to a group of students in Susan Dobscha’s class at Bentley College. All I can say is: marketers, you’d better get ready for some big changes.

These students don’t have to be taught concepts like conversation marketing, customer engagement and the value of social media. They live it every day. They throw around words like “transparency” as easily as their predecessors used “CPM.” They understand intuitively that marketing is about relationships and what they termed “deep branding.” That means embedding a brand on a customer’s mind through a long-term series of interactions that stress value for both parties.

The topic turned to Facebook for a while, and it’s clear that the students regard it as a tool to facilitate relationships. They maintain very large networks of casual acquaintances — one student described them as the people you say “hi” to in the hallway but don’t stop to talk to — and social networks are a means to accomplish this. I asked a class of about 25 students if any of them had formed meaningful relationships online and only one hand went up. Despite what the older generation may think, these kids value personal relationships as much as anybody else, it’s just that they expect to maintain friends networks that are five or six times as large as those of their parents. Imagine how business will be done differently when millions of these people hit the workforce.

One innovative project that this class is pursuing is maintaining a blog. Each student is required to follow a single blogger and to comment upon his or her writings during the course of the semester. These real-time observations are incorporated into the curriculum, making the classroom conversation about as current as any I have ever seen. The instructor told me that this is Bentley’s first social media marketing course and that enrollment filled up in 20 minutes. You can see why: these kids understand where the future lies and they’re not weighted down by assumptions about how marketing should be done. Beginning next year, some of them will be working for you. I would advise you to listen carefully to what they have to say. And Bentley should take those enrollment numbers as a message.

I had lunch with a small group of Bentley marketing faculty, several of whom specialize in marketing analytics. One professor asked me, somewhat ruefully, if marketers have wasted the last 20 years perfecting their analytical skills. I’m afraid I only gave half an answer. I said that the focus on analytics was a function of the limitations of media at the time. In other words, it was impossible to have meaningful conversations with customers until a few years ago, so marketers focused on measuring the limited contact they had.

What I should have said was that analytics will be even more important in the coming era. The Internet is the most measurable medium ever invented, and the challenge for marketers will be to develop useful metrics from a vast menu of options. The marketing analytics discipline should only grow in importance as people sort through all the choices. While it’s true that relationship marketing demands different skills that analytical marketing, that doesn’t make analytical skills any less important. Quite the contrary.

paulgillin.com

Social Media and the Open Enterprise

Category Archives: marketing

Help Us Eat Our Own Dog Food

Not Optimizing For Search? Shame On You!

Bloggers Get Social April 4-6

‘Infuencer Marketing’ challenges assumptions

Marketing in the sky: Another reason I hate US Airways