Reputation to Revenue

What kind of blogger are you? Typealyzer nails me in a nanosecond

 

You like to think you're complicated, hard to pin down right away, filled with at least a bit of mystery. Being reduced in seconds to a stereotype is annoying, to say the least. 

Fans of Annie Hall (and this certainly dates me) might remember the classic scene where Woody Allen reduces poor Carol Kane to a cultural stereotype ("New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West." etc.) within seconds of meeting her at a party. I certainly laughed, but it's a bit painful.

Well guess what? If you're an active blogger, the new Typealyzer does this in a nanosecond. Type in your URL and instantly get a Myers-Briggs assessment that, at least in my own case, is dead-on (more below).

BusinessWeek ran the story over the weekend: 

Typealyzer is a research project that looks at how language reflects a person's psychological type and his or her motivations and interests. The site was created by Mattias Ostmar of PRfekt, a Swedish research and development company focused on media analysis.

For the past two years, Ostmar has been collecting sample texts from blogs, based on research about personality type and writing style. The site uses a tool to run a statistical analysis of the text to come up with a word frequency algorithm for different personality types. After the blog is scanned, Typealyzer comes up with personality types derived from the Myers-Briggs model for looking at how people perceive the world and make decisions.

So what am I? INTJ, of course - The Scientist (although more of of the "liberal, intellectual" type than an actual biological or physical science type, I'll admit). Typealyzer got me instantly, strengths and weaknesses alike:

The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking at almost anything and figuring out a way of improving it - often with a highly creative and imaginative touch. They are intellectually curious and daring, but might be physically hesitant to try new things. 

The Scientists enjoy theoretical work that allows them to use their strong minds and bold creativity. Since they tend to be so abstract and theoretical in their communication they often have a problem communicating their visions to other people and need to learn patience and use concrete examples. Since they are extremely good at concentrating they often have no trouble working alone.

What type are you?

Phone companies racing to the top in sustainability

Tom Schueneman of the indispensable TriplePundit blog on corporate social responsibility has a great review today of AT&T's holistic approach to sustainability. The lede is the phone giant's new $500 million commitment to put 15,000 alternative fuel vehicles on the road in the next decade. It's a great example of how big companies can aim to do good and do well at the same time. The program should save the company money in the long run while winning useful public plaudits, and, as important, make a real impact in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, provide clean energy jobs, and support the expansion of the alternative fuel infrastructure.

The clean car initiative represents a big splash in sustainability, but it also reflects a much broader and more comprehensive approach at AT&T. Schueneman's interview with Beth Shiroshi, AT&T's assistant vice president for Citizenship and Corporate Responsibility, tells the larger story, and it provides some useful lessons for any company looking to strengthen its sustainability approach:

• Look comprehensively across the company: Even thought AT&T had a long history of environmental and corporate social responsibility initiatives, the company brought in an outside agency, the nonprofit Business for Social Responsibility, to conduct a systematic review of the issues most important to employees and stakeholders.
• Demonstrate commitment at the executive level: Following the new review, AT&T elevated oversight and management of sustainability efforts to the officer level. 
• Balance strategic focus with multiple entry points: AT&T now highlights six priority initiatives while allowing a great deal of flexibility for divisions, local offices, and employees to contribute in different ways. You can see details of the initiatives and program examples in AT&T's recent report, Connecting for a Sustainable Future.

"AT&T isn't in the business of sustainability," as Schueneman notes, "but to the degree that they and other corporate 'giants' make it a part of their (triple) bottom line, the business of sustainability fights the natural resistance to change, moves forward, and creates ripples of transformation." Not to mention positive movement on the reputation needle, stronger employee interest and loyalty, and important new business opportunities.

 
Nokia, meanwhile, is similarly making sustainability waves, most recently at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona last month. As Lucas Daniel recounted in Sustainable Life Media the other day, Nokia is now embedding a set of applications and services in some of its mobile phones to bring users green tools, community, and information. 

Working with several large environmental organizations, Nokia is rolling out:

• we:offset: an online tool that helps travelers calculate their carbon emissions on the road and buy offsets right from the phone
• Green Explorer: a web-enabled widget that highlights green travel options, including restaurants and hotels, with room for users to provide their own recommendations  
• Eco Zone: a phone app that provides information and video from WWF
• Mobiledu: a mobile app available in China that promotes environmental awareness and education  

As with AT&T, Nokia's recent splash is just part of a larger sustainability story. As Daniel explains, Nokia's larger environmental effort, "the power of we," includes efforts to build mobile devices with healthier materials and packaging, a push for new sources of energy, support for recycling old phones, and partnerships with groups like WWF.

It's a smart strategy, and Nokia's comprehensive approach to greening its products, supply chain, communications, and customer experience provides another useful template for companies looking toward sustainability as an opportunity to strengthen the entire reputation-to-revenue cycle. 

What do you think?

It's all about lead gen now...or is it?

 

Rich Vancil, head of IDC's CMO Advisory Service, provided a great state of the tech marketing union this week at the IDC DIrections conference in Boston. It's not great, of course, with IDC projecting 10% marketing budget cuts for 2009 -- which pretty much validates what I've been hearing anecdotally from clients and other friends across the industry.

More important, as Rich pointed out, is the reshaping of marketing budgets in response to the downturn. Cuts are not coming across the board in most companies; they're focused especially on the top of the funnel. The deepest cuts, according to IDC, are coming in branding, advertising, sponsorships, and "big tent" events (conferences and trade shows). 

The other area of real cuts (although not as deep), is what Rich called "the brains of the operation" -- marketing strategy and operations, PR and AR, marketing and customer intelligence, and product, industry, and solutions marketing.

Further down the funnel, spending is either flat or even increasing. The closer you get to sales, not surprisingly, the better the budget picture looks. IDC sees modest increases this year in lead management, sales enablement, and, of course, actual selling.

Writ large, it's a shift from marketing operations and building awareness to generating demand and directly supporting sales. In better times, Rich noted, the balance is typically 50-50; it's now skewed heavily toward generating demand and enabling sales.

Again, nothing shocking here; pretty much every marketer I talk to says it's all about lead gen right now. If you can't point to a direct, near-term impact on revenue, don't bother bringing it up.

Personally, I think a lot of marketing groups are going overboard in shifting priorities. Iunderstand the pressure to move the needle on sales. I just don't agree that cutting into the brains of the organization is the best way forward.

As such, I was heartened to hear Eric Andrews, head of worldwide demand generation for IBM, take a different tack. During a marketing executive panel the same day, Andrews stated that IBM's biggest marketing initiative right now is "driving brand and differentiation across all audiences." 

Building on its new Smarter Planet theme, IBM is investing heavily in advertising, content development, and, perhaps most important, customer conversation about the broad business issues under the Smarter Planet umbrella: energy, water, transportation, health care, and so on. 

The effort is certainly aligned with sales, and, in fact, the company is pushing additional marketing resources into the field to get closer to sales. But the important point is that IBM is leading with brainpower, with ideas, with thought leadership, and with brand. In an environment where buyers are tuning out every type of sales pitch, and looking for every reason NOT to buy, it is only by engaging them with new thinking and new ideas that you really have a chance to get into the conversation in the first place. And without that conversation, forget about the sale.

In the end, it's too easy to just say "we need more leads." Of course we all need more business. But what really matters, and what will make or break our results, is how we go about it.

What do you think?

Photo credit: dierk schaefer

Stress test for thought leadership: Are you ready?

Consider the following scenario: After a few weeks of back and forth with a prominent business journal, your PR person gets the go-ahead to submit a 400 word contribution to an ongoing forum on a critical issue for the senior executives in your target market. 

For example, Sloan Management Review is currently running an Executive Roundtable on "Capturing the Green Advantage," with short pieces by top executives from Interface, Boston Consulting Group, Intel, EMC, and others.

You think sustainability is a big opportunity, and you'd love the chance to show off your vision and work in this area to such a great audience. Sloan Management Review is going to reach a lot more C-level executives than your own publications ever could.

Are you ready? Would you know what to say?

No doubt you can dash off something interesting in 400 words. But would it reflect your firm's point of view? Would it stand out as interesting, different, engaging, credible? Would it advance your firm's reputation and suggest that you really do have the expertise to help clients address the issue at hand?

Lots of firms are trying to present themselves as thought leaders in their markets. Too often, however, they produce a disconnected set of white papers, articles, presentations, and perhaps blogs, podcasts, and videos that are, to be blunt, neither very thoughtful nor really leading anything. Faced with an opportunity like the one above, they have to scramble to figure out what angle to take, and it won't necessarily line up with most of the other materials sitting on their site.

On the other hand, firms with a well developed point of view on strategic issues like sustainability (or whatever your customers' priorities may be) would have little trouble with the opportunity above -- they have a solid foundation upon which to build. It probably took them longer to build that foundation than it took others to just crank out a set of disconnected white papers, but the hardest work is up front. Once the point of view is in place, it's much easier to produce a steady stream of articles, reports, blog posts, videos, presentations, briefings, and external commentaries that reflect and reinforce that core perspective. 

Developing a strong and differentiated point of view on core issues for your clients is hard work, and easy to forgo, especially in today's economy when short term lead and revenue generation dominate all marketing conversation. For high value services and solutions, though, it's awfully hard to generate leads and revenue without standing out from the crowd.

What do you think? 

Photo credit: House of Sims

Wal-Mart seizes the moment with e-health care solution...and lessons are many

Love 'em, or hate 'em, Wal-Mart is clearly among the most innovative and successful companies on the planet over the last half-century. Critics typically point to the company's sheer size and relentless cost cutting as the pillars of Wal-Mart's success, but constant innovation in business model, use of technology, are supply chain management are at least as important. The company also has a finely-tuned understanding of its markets and a willingness to make intelligent bets on the future (witness the current substantial push toward sustainability).

Today's New York Times article on Wal-Mart's new initiative to sell a digital medical records solution to small doctor's office is a perfect example -- and one with any number of lessons to other companies trying to sell high-value packaged solutions.

The initiative is interesting enough: Wal-Mart is partnering with Dell and a small software company, eClinicalWorks, to offer an integrated package to small medical practices at a much lower cost than competitive offers. It's a big opportunity. Few small medical offices today have computerized records, according to The Times, but more than three-quarters of all U.S. physicians work in offices of ten doctors or fewer. Wal-Mart's offering will come through its Sam's Club division, which already counts some 200,000 doctors within its membership.

From a marketing and solutions perspective, though, the initiative suggests a number of lessons that are more widely applicable:

• Think Different. Wal-Mart is clearly not a technology or medical solutions provider, but if the opportunity is big enough and the company has the potential to respond in an innovative way, why not take a look? As Marcus Osborne, senior director for health care business development at Wal-Mart, told The Times, "We're a high-volume, low-cost company. And I would argue that mentality is sorely lacking in the health care industry."
• Think Solutions. Lots of company offer products and services to support digital health records, but, especially for small doctor's offices, the convenience of a packaged solution that includes equipment, software, installation, and ongoing support can be a much more attractive offer. Importantly, in this case, eClinicalWorks provides its software as a service (SaaS), making ongoing support easier and less costly than with traditional installed systems.  
• Think Partners. The new offer is potentially a big win-win-win for all three partners. Wal-Mart gets the expertise and credibility of working with leaders in a market in which it has little experience; Dell and eClinicalWorks get the enormous visibility and channel power of Wal-Mart. None of them could go it alone with anywhere near the impact.
• Think Timing. The new initiative is perfectly timed. Not only is digital health care prominent on the political agenda in Washington, but Obama's stimulus package includes substantial financial incentives for physician's offices to go digital.
• Think Mission. Along with great timing, the initiative has the benefit of serving a larger social mission, improving health care for all. As citizens increasingly look to corporate America to help solve problems and not just make money, tying to a larger mission can only help.
• Think Proof. The initiative has credibility not only because Dell is a leader in small office computers and eClinicalWorks is already providing its service to some 25,000 physicians. As important, Wal-Mart itself has tested and used the system in its own, in-store health clinics over the last two and a half years.

"If Wal-Mart is successful, this could be a game-changer," Dr. David J. Brailer, former national coordinator for health information technology in the Bush administration told The Times. 

For me, it's also a wonderful lesson in solutions marketing. Do you agree?

*For an interview about the initiative with Girish Kuman, CEO of eClinicalWorks, click here. 

Photo credit: D'Arcy Norman