Reputation to Revenue

Reengineering the white paper, part 1

Several months ago, I began talking with colleagues Bob Buday and Tim Parker about "reengineering the white paper." Our basic idea was that, although white papers have flooded the Web for years, and more and more companies are investing in them to help demonstrate expertise and thought leadership, the reality is that most of them are pretty bad. They're unoriginal, boring, and overly promotional, which pretty much rules out having the intended impact of generating interest and leads.

Despite their common failings, however, we're still firm believers that white papers can be one of the most effective tools in the marketing toolbox...if they are developed and marketed the right way.

Having worked on and marketed countless white papers ourselves, we think we know the right way. 

The first part of our three-part series, "Developing a Point of View," explores the aspect of white paper production that is most often lacking: the creation of a powerful, credible, and novel argument about how to address an important business challenge. Subsequent parts will focus on marketing white papers and overcoming the typical organizational obstacles in creating and marketing them effectively.

The first and biggest mistake companies make, we argue, is treating white papers primarily as writing assignments. Instead, they should be viewed as projects to create strong and distinct points of view -- which subsequently can be written up in a white paper. Good writing is obviously important, but the bulk of the work in building an argument, gathering evidence, creating new frameworks and so on should precede the writing.

I don't want to repeat the whole article here, but I do hope you'll give it a look and let me know what you think. Given the amount of time and money spent on white papers these days, the impact of a more effective way to produce them can be substantial indeed. 

Photo by kevindooley. 

Marketing as service: Samsung and Best Buy put customers first

I love this new effort from Samsung to generate helpful user questions and answers on the BestBuy.com. As explained today in Clickz, the "Brand Answers" feature (based on technology from Bazaarvoice) has just finished a five-month trial and almost doubled views of Samsung products on the Best Buy site:

When visitors click a button on the brand's products details pages, a pop-up FAQ feature that's called "Mr. Samsung" appears. Then, visitors can read pages of questions and answers that were previously supplied by other viewers. They can also search the feature to find the content they need or something close to it.

Additionally, users can type in their own questions, which the feature says in a message will be answered within a 16-hour window. The most popular question during the test was, "Can I hang this TV on the wall?"

I love this for three reasons:

• It's all about helping customers make better purchase decisions
• It taps the wisdom of the crowd to generate more, faster, and often better answers than could easily (and affordably) be provided by Samsung employees
• It demonstrates the confidence that both partners share in testing new ideas and opening their doors to put customers first

It's obviously a consumer-focused initiative, but the principals hold true for B2B, don't you think? 

Rite Aid impresses with active customer service

Little things really do add up.

Like many people, I have several prescriptions with Rite Aid Pharmacy. Refills are easy; you just call the number on the bottle a few days before a prescription runs out, tap your way through the automated voice prompts, and pick it up the next day. Nothing earth-shattering, but it's convenient and a good, simple use of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology.

Today, though, I caught the next wave. Coming home and finding a voicemail on my home phone, I listened to an automated message from Rite Aid asking me to call an 800 number about my prescription. When I did, it took me through a several minute IVR session which proceeded by reminding me that my prescription was about to run out, asking me if I wanted to refill it, and then asking if I wanted to sign up for a free service that would automatically refill my prescriptions every month and let me know when they were ready for pickup. No more effort on my part, and I get to save an extra few minutes every month. 

Again, it's nothing earth-shattering. The technology has been around for a while. But how many companies are reaching out and touching their customers in a a true service-oriented fashion, not to sell new products or services but simply to improve the customer experience?  

Yes, the better companies bend over backwards to respond to problems (although most companies still don't). And yes, it's obvious that Rite Aid is trying to sell me more stuff, prescriptions and otherwise. Most likely they will, too. So it's definitely good marketing. 

What's different here is the basic approach: Service matters as much or more than the products themselves, promotion is less important than service delivery, and good things come to those who continually improve the customer experience.

What free services are you adding or changing to improve customer experience and build customer loyalty?

Photo credit: Seattle Municipal Archives

The power of video: Outsourcing reality show illuminates the buying process

About a month ago, the good folks at the Outsourcing Institute asked me to contribute some  "lessons" for services marketers based on their web-based reality show, The Transaction. No cash involved, but it sounded like an quick PR hit for me while helping out a great organization. 

When I checked out the series, however, I realized this was a much bigger deal. Endless "experts" (including, at times, me!) pontificate about what companies need to do to market and sell high-stakes services. Some of the advice is even good. But capturing the real feel for such a complex process is extremely difficult.

The Transaction documents on video the real-life effort of a buyer team from Kodak in its effort to find and hire an outside firm to handle all of Kodak's recruitment, hiring, and on-boarding of new employees. A marketing and sales reality show, no less.

The brainchild of Outsourcing Institute CEO Frank Casale, the video series (each episode is under 15 minutes) documents critical moments throughout the buying process, from initial conception to signing the deal. 

Kodak begins with a list of some 50 providers to consider, narrows the list through research and due diligence, creates a finalist pool, and moves to a final decision (spoiler alert: although the final episode is not yet posted, the actual deal went down last year when Kodak signed a three-year contract with HR outsourcer Pinstripe). 

Episode 7, the one for which I provided some lessons learned, shows the team debriefing its recent site visits to two finalist candidates. 

Overall, it's a wonderful way to provide real insight into the buying process, something that all marketers struggle to understand -- and that the vast majority of case studies, white papers, conference presentations and the like do little to illuminate. 

And make no mistake, it's a buying process, not a sales process. The Kodak team is anxious to decide (the whole process in this case was less than two months), but they are firmly in control. Marketers (and sales people) would do well to keep this basic reality at the forefront of their thinking.

So kudos to the Outsourcing Institute for creating the series and to Kodak for being brave enough to allow their buying team to work on camera. A definite thumbs up from this satisfied viewer.

The joy of tweets: Twittering Rocks on Bloomsday

Normally I write about B2B marketing, thought leadership, sustainability, solutions, and other allegedly useful and important things. 

But sometimes you just have to stop and revel in the joy of sheer creativity. 

Today, June 16, is Bloomsday, the fabled day in James Joyce's pathbreaking novel Ulysses. For decades, Joyce-lovers in Dublin and worldwide have commemorated the day with all manner of readings, dramatizations, and celebrations. 

Today, befitting the Twitter-mania that has swept the planet, two devotees have merged one of the most creative bursts of the early 20th century, Ulysses, with the who-knows-where-this-is-going explosion of the early 21st, Twitter. As reported by the Associated Press:

Two devotees of "Ulysses" have adapted its 10th chapter to Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters per post. Called "Wandering Rocks," the chapter is especially well-suited to Twitter because it follows 19 Dubliners going about their daily business.

For three years now, Ian Bogost, a Georgia Tech professor, and friend Ian McCarthy, a product manager at LinkedIn, have commemorated "Bloomsday" on Twitter on June 16. That date in 1904 is when the entirety of "Ulysses" takes place, chronicling the experiences of a man named Leopold Bloom.

Bogost says using Twitter "for literary performance art might help shift perspectives on the service" and get people to use it for more than self-centered musings. "Perhaps in so doing, we can shift people's interest in social media technologies from egomania and immediacy toward deliberation and cultural reflection," Bogost wrote in an e-mail from Australia.

Bogost and McCarthy have dubbed their performance "Twittering Rocks," a play on the chapter's title that could also mean Twittering is awesome. They have registered 54 of the novel's key characters as Twitter users, and Bogost built a software program that tweets their first-person utterances at the correct moments in the chapter.

"The result is a complex web of timed interactions between many characters," he said, "precisely the effect Joyce was aiming for in the novel." 

I was blown away when I read this, but I guess this type of thing is inevitable. Or, as Ulysses character StephenDedalus noted a few hours ago in one of his last Bloomsday tweets, "Show no surprise. Quite natural."

James Joyce Textorized image by maxf.

YouTube as corporate home page?

BooneOakley, a North-Carolina based agency, has gotten a lot of attention in the last few days by essentially shifting its corporate site to YouTube. Click on Booneoakley.com and you get to a "this is our agency" video on YouTube, complete with story of a struggling marketing director going down in flames (actually, a bloody ax) because he chose some other boring conglomerate firm instead of the oh-so-creative BooneOakley.

Embedded links in the main video connect viewers to additional company information, including a cute video thanking the Obama family for naming its new dog Bo after the company's initials.

The main video has received more than 220,000 views in its first 10 days, quite impressive for a small local firm.

It's not the first agency effort to throw out the traditional web page in favor of a more social look. Modernista! made a splash a few months back by directing visitors to its entries and feeds on various social media sites, including Wikepedia, Facebook, Delicious, and NetVibes. And any number of small firms use their blog as their main site.

The point here is not to surrender your traditional Website--although that may well be worth considering. It is rather to take more seriously the new possibilities of social media, to think differently about what matters, and to get past the inertia of last year's plan and the types of activities you've "always" done.

BtoB came out with a new marketing survey on the 2010 outlook yesterday. It was nice to see that a majority of B2B marketers expect to increase their budgets next year, but the more stunning finding to me was that majorities of marketers expect to "stay the same" in many budget categories, including print, broadcast, television, radio, telemarketing, and outdoor. Just a shade under 50 percent of the almost 500 respondents also expect to keep spending on events and direct mail the same. Surely the world has changed more than that! 

What do you think?

Permission marketing turns ten

Seth Godin today marked the tenth anniversary of his hugely influential book, Permission Marketing. Along with Cluetrain Manifesto, Godin's first book captured perfectly the seismic shift in marketing that was just then (1999) beginning to be understood: markets are conversations, interruption marketing is dying, buyers are in control, marketers abuse customer trust at their own peril, the Web opens up everything. And this was all years before anyone ever heard of blogging, YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter.

Thanks Seth!

P.S. You can still get the first four chapters free at permission.com.

Carrotmobs make my night

Triple Pundit almost always brings a smile to my face, and for that reason is one of my favorite blogs by far. The group blog highlights the three "p's" of sustainable business -- people, planet, and profits -- and highlights a steady stream of optimism-inducing stories about both creative startups and long-established corporations doing well by doing good.

Tonight's read inspired an extra-big smile: the story of Virgance, "a venture-funded startup that calls itself a platform supporting Activism 2.0" What this means, in essence, is that Virgance is integrating social media tools and a save the world mentality into some really creative business opportunities. Jujst a year old, the company has already launched two interesting social power ventures:

• 1 Block Off the Grid (1BOG) brings neighbors together to purchase and install solar panels collectively, negotiating hefty discounts and keeping a share of the savings
• SunRun, another solar purchasing program, installs solar panels but retains ownership and lets homeowners pay a reduced rate for power

Several Facebook-centered initiatives are in the works as well, including one to help companies distribute social responsibility funds by encouraging Facebook members to choose the recipients.

My clear favorite, though, is Carrotmob, which actually predated and inspired the formation of Virgance. Triple Pundit calls it an "anti-boycott," and the idea is to convince people to shop at a certain store if that store agrees to invest some of the proceeds to improve energy efficiency.

Powered by Facebook and other social media outreach efforts, the first Carrotmob in San Francisco brought hundreds of people to a small market in the Mission neighborhood, and brought the market almost $10,000 in purchases which yielded almost $2,000 in green upgrades.

 

But the more important result, as Triple Pundit notes, "was the buzz this Carrotmob generated. Consumers are drawn to the notion that they can influence a business to become more sustainable, and not by boycotting it but by patronizing it--essentially giving it the funds to make sustainability improvements."

Along with San Francisco, Carrotmobs are now active in New York, Chicago, Kansas City, London, Helsinki, Bristol, England, and more.

I'm usually skeptical when people talk about "shopping for change," but Carrotmob brings a lot more to the table. And it sounds really fun!

What do you think?

Smarter marketing at IBM: Big Blue's latest green consulting launch

Pardon me for talking about IBM yet again, but the company continues to impress me with its ability to ride the green wave with intelligent and high-potential offerings. The latest example is last week's announcement of a new Sustainable Procurement consulting offer. 

According to IBM, the offer is designed to help companies set cost, efficiency, and sustainability goals and metrics for their entire set of procurement activities, including "all supplies, materials, ingredients, components, finished goods and services they purchase to run their operations and to develop, manufacture and deliver their own products or services." 

The potential scale of this is enormous, covering just about every aspect of the world's supply chain. And IBM is certainly thinking big, outlining coverage of six main Corporate Social Responsibility aspects of supply chain management:

• Environment -- reducing energy and water usage, minimizing waste and the use of potentially hazardous chemicals and materials, increasing recycling and recyclability, and improving efficiency;
• Community -- ensuring suppliers support and contribute to the communities they operate in;
• Health and safety -- promoting safe workplace practices as well as ensuring safety in products and services;
• Ethics and financial accountability -- ensuring suppliers practice appropriate business ethics and adhere to applicable standards for financial accounting and transparency;
• Diversity -- encouraging diversity and inclusiveness throughout the supply chain;
• Labor practices -- ensuring suppliers adhere to local, national and internationals laws, rules and standards for labor practices.

To back up the offer, IBM points to its own efforts developing Supplier Conduct Principles for its own supply chain, which includes some 30,000 supplier locations in 60 countries. 

If the practice grows, and I'm certainly hoping it does, the benefits for companies, communities, workers, and the environment can be enormous.

Marketing Lessons

At the same time, the initiative points to a powerful reminder for B2B marketers in today's challenging economy. At a time when so many companies and marketers are obsessing over which tactics are most likely to deliver short-term revenue, broader strategy remains absolutely essential. My own takeaways from the IBM launch including the following:

• Now is the time to identify new sources of revenue that leverage existing capabilities and assets
• Tap into the green wave; it's big and getting bigger
• Always reinforce the larger corporate brand and story
• Always back up the offer with credible proof points

In these ways, IBM's new offering reflects the best of strategic marketing -- focused on how to drive growth for the company in responsible and intelligent ways, with great potential for short- and longer term success. I'll be curious to follow the tactical side of the initiative, as well as the results, of course, but this is already another good example of how "big M" Marketing can and should the foundation for corporate direction.

Do you agree?

 

*For more on IBM's new offering, check out these resources:

• IBM podcast on the new offering
• IBM consulting and thought leadership resources on green and Corporate Social Responsibility
• The Challenges and Opportunities of Sustainable Procurement 
• Heather Clancy at ZDNet

Dell joins the health care discussion

About four years ago, "Dell Hell" entered the lexicon as both shorthand for the firestorm that blogger Jeff Jarvis whipped out by trashing Dell's customer service publicly, and metaphor for big corporations that didn't "get" the new power of social media.

Since then, Dell has made an enormous effort to take social media seriously, and has launched all manner of initiatives to listen to customers online, make the company more transparent, and take a more human and collaborative approach to doing business. Jarvis summarizes Dell's transformation nicely in his new book, What Would Google Do? (a great and provocative read, by the way, if you haven't yet picked it up).

Today's announcement that Dell is launching a new IdeaStorm specifically for health care and life sciences is a perfect example of why the company is so effective now in the social economy.

"As Dell participates in HIMSS this week, one of the largest global healthcare events, we are well aware that there are specific technology needs in the heathcare industry. IdeaStorm for Healthcare and Life Sciences has been created to start the conversation on what Dell can do to address those technology needs and simplify the healthcare IT solutions...Through collaboration, we can all determine the best ways to reduce complexity, save time and reduce costs." 

Self-serving? Of course. Healthcare IT is a huge market and Dell wants as big a piece of it as possible.

But it's enlightened self-interest in a participatory world, and that's what makes it worth comment.

• It's about a big issue affecting millions (billions) of people
• It's a hard issue: how IT can contribute to health care solutions
• It's humble: Dell does not pretend to have all the answers
• It's about facilitating conversation and being open to ideas from any direction
• It's credible, given the background of Dell's substantial efforts to create a more open and collaborative organization 

So kudos to Dell for another strong step forward. For companies looking to move ahead with social media and innovation, Dell has shown again why it's one of the leaders worth studying. 

What do you think?