Reputation to Revenue

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.

Blog as hub, site as spoke

David Berkowitz (@dberkowitz) from the digital marketing agency 360i had a nice article today about building your brand with social media

He used the example of launching the agency's new Social Marketing Playbook earlier this month (which is well worth a look). The launch was a success (10,000 downloads in the first few days), and David stresses the essential back story--the hard work of the last few years building the agency's social presence through blogging, Facebook, Twitter, SlideShare, Scribd, LinkedIn, Flickr, and so on. 

It's a good story, and a great reminder that social media marketing is about ongoing and integrated presence, not individual campaigns or discrete tool-based initiatives.

But a single line--and phrase--stuck with me most: 

There was also a clear architecture for it [our social media efforts], with the blog as a hub, and all of the spokes, including our corporate site, relating coherently to the hub and to each other.

"With the blog as a hub..."

For readers at small companies or consulting on their own, the idea of the blog as hub is nothing special. You want to demonstrate expertise, regularly refresh content to drive better search performance, and minimize site maintenance workload. A blog makes perfect sense.

What about larger companies? The logic certainly remains the same. Larger companies also want to demonstrate expertise, maximize search, and minimize needless site maintenance. But big companies are too complicated to boil it all down to a blog, right? What about all those offerings, success stories, executive bios, and the rest of the content that fills endless pages on large corporate sites?

Well, maybe. But does "needing" a more traditional site to serve as a corporate archive mean it has sit at the center of marketing?

Most of the people you're trying to connect with care a lot more about your latest thinking than they do about your carefully crafted but static product, service, and solution pages. So why not push the corporate site off to the side and put the blog front and center? 

It's a radical notion for a large company, but perhaps it's just the sort of thinking that larger companies need to make a more serious commitment not just to social media, but also to the broader ideas of marketing as education, marketing as service, and marketing as community (three of my current mantras). 

Web sites can certainly support all of these ideas, and companies are livening up their sites with blogs, video feeds, and community portals, I wonder, though, if the more radical step is still necessary to make the transformation real, to fully jettison the old ideas of marketing as broadcast, promotion, and persuasion. 

What do you think?

Photo credit: poppofatticus

Learning from Gen Y

MediaPost, one of my favorite sources. launched a new blog recently, Engage: Gen Y, and the first few posts are already capturing my attention. Today's post suggested five simple rules for "snagging consumer 2.0" and they are well worth pondering even in the rarified air of high-end B2B solutions, where Gen Yers are still mostly consigned to support roles outside the orbits of purchase decision makers. 

The rules are these:

• Authenticity Trumps Celebrity
• Niche is the New Norm
• Bite-Size Communications Dominate
• Personal Utility Drives Adoption
• Consumers Own Brands

As the title says, this is consumer-oriented, but the application to B2B and solutions marketing should be clear immediately, and not just in thinking about Gen Yers. Consider the perspective of the buyers you're trying to reach in B2B:

• Authenticity: Let me speak with and learn from real experts, and get the real story. No hype allowed.
• Niche: Know my industry and my business; don't bother with your generic pitches and solutions. 
• Bite-Sized Communications: Don't waste my time! I will eventually dig into the details, but you've got to pique my interest pretty damm quick.
• Personal Utility: What's in it for me? You've got to pay attention to my personal-professional agenda as well as my company's.
• Brands: Personal and peer experience is what matters; I could care less about your carefully crafted messages and materials.

Maybe us boomers and Xers are not so different from the next generation after all. 

What do you think?

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?

Social media reality check: Predictions for 2009

Amid the inevitable and generally useless flood of predictions for 2009, Peter Kim published a useful e-book today on Social Media Predictions 2009 (pdf). Based on the contributions of 14 other experts, the document covers a wide range of issues, from metrics and mobile to budget and B2B.

What I found most interesting, however, was the relatively sober tone of many of the contributors after the last several years of incredible social media hype. 

Partly this is just economic reality. Even as the advocates expect a greater push toward social media as potentially cheaper than other marketing programs, several also expect a shakeout of Web 2.0 firms as the reality of questionable (or no) business models finally catches up to them. As Chris Brogan noted, "Doors are going to close all over the social web. Why? Because the money didn't come the way people thought it would." 

And from the marketing side, as Jeremiah Owyang states,"The recession will force revenue results out of social technologies--marketing must prove its worth to actually changing the bottom line."

More important, from the large company perspective, is the growing recognition that social media is hard! The contributors themselves are all social media stars, of course, (and mostly consultants ready and able to help), but their success doesn't translate so easily at the enterprise level.

As David Armano explains:

In 2008 we saw many organizations taking Web 2.0 very seriously moving from 'why' to 'how' they should implement these new strategies and tactics. In 2009, reality will set in--big time...

Organizations will come to terms with the reality that although it is now 'cheaper' to launch an initiative leveraging Web 2.0 technology--it requires qualified and passionate people to make them successful. This will not be easy for many businesses/brands as it brings up a host of issues ranging from empowering employees & agencies to have direct contact with customers, to staffing up projects differently.

Meanwhile, as both Pete Blackshaw and Charlene Li argue, the rush to quantity (more, more, more connections on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) may shift the other way. For Blackshaw:

Many of us are going to wake up in 2009 wondering 'what did we eat?' -- everything from hastily assembled friends list to Twitter followers to groups, apps, and widgets that we 'impulse adopted' (usually while shadowing others) yet rarely revisited. Some of us will join the Social Media equivalent of Weight Watchers, eager to trim the excess and rediscover a modicum of 'don't follow everything' discipline.

More people backing away from "following everything" means we marketers will have to work that much harder to get them to follow us.

Todd Defren thinks that many more B2B companies will join the party in 2009. I certainly hope so, but if they do, they'll probably need to follow two other trends:

• Companies Increasingly Crafting Content. For Ann Handley, the important news is that "organizations are increasingly focusing on producing kick-ass content to attract and retain customers, rather than randomly grabbing folks off the street." Moreover, Handley notes, the sad news of a new wave of unemployed journalists and editors might have a silver lining if companies look in their direction for help in creating more compelling content.  
• Velvet Rope Social Networks. For Chris Brogan, "the real interest will be in making targeted networks that aren't 'come one, come all.' Companies instead will focus on narrower networks for specific industry verticals and interest groups. 

All in all, I remain bullish on social media marketing for B2B next year, but it's certainly helpful to have a more realistic attitude about the challenges of doing it well. Huge kudos to Peter Kim for pulling together such a useful guide.

Media "vs" social media: Forrester's corporate blogging debate

I've been following a great debate this week on Twitter and in the blogosphere about new Forrester data which suggest corporate blogs are one of the least trusted media channels. According to Forrester, only 16 percent of people trust corporate blogs, far fewer than trust traditional media sources like newspapers, radio, and TV. 

Forrester's lead author, Josh Bernoff, blogged about the findings on Tuesday; his colleague Jeremiah Owyang posted on it several times Tuesday and yesterday; folks started hashing it out on Twitter; and a great discussion ensued. Check out the comments on Josh's and Jeremiah's postings for a flavor of the discussion; see also Max Kalehoff's strong critique (and subsequent comments).

The folks from Forrester made no suggestion that companies should forget about blogs as a result of their data. Instead, they provided a number of useful recommendations about how to make sure your corporate blog is well produced, interesting, not overly promotional, and, ultimately, trustworthy and useful to customers.

It's an important question for B2B marketers, and the discussion over the last few days has been both enlightening and a great example of the power of blogs and social media generally. A respected researcher puts out a provocative post, people jump all over it, it flies around the Net almost immediately, and everyone wins.

Personally, I don't believe the data are too significant. Even leaving aside research methodology questions that some commenters raised, It's not surprising that third party media channels would rank higher than those created by companies themselves. "Email from people you know" actually ranked highest, which again seems obvious. If corporate blogs ranked a bit lower than other corporate marketing channels, I guess that might be a little interesting, but I'd chalk it up to the still relative newness of the form and lots of bad press -- along with the reality that lots of corporate blogs are poorly written and overly promotional, and provide little reason for trust.  

Meanwhile, I was struck again by the potential power of blogs and social media when I saw a MediaPost article this morning on the Forrester findings. The article provides a perfectly nice summary of Bernoff's original post, but the rest of the story with all the richness of the follow-on debate is missing! It's a great example of the struggle that traditional media continue to have in an increasingly social environment. 

Don't get me wrong; I'm a big fan of MediaPost. I get several of their newsletters every day and almost always read at least few of their stories, which is more than I can say for most of the stuff in my in-box or reader. It's an important source for me on media and marketing issues, and they do a great job covering an incredibly diverse and fast-moving industry. And they want people to comment on their stories and get into debates, as most media organizations do at this point. But the dialogue and debate coming from social media seem far more substantial. By the time MediaPost covered the Forrester story, I had already read the equivalent of a dozen other articles, discovered a number of great new blogs, and added a batch more people to my Following list on Twitter.

For many marketers, it's a bit of a paradox. We need credible reach, which still comes from more traditional media. But the real connections and conversation are coming from social media. Integrating the two is obviously the way forward, but that's still easier said than done. Debates like the one Forrester sparked this week are a good step forward.

Widget time for B2B?

Bob Garfield has a great long piece in AdAge today asking why more marketers aren't using widgets. Since Garfield is one of the more thoughtful commentators on the state of advertising today, I usually wade through his long pieces, and this one is well worth it. (Meanwhile, if you haven't read them, Garfield also penned seminal pieces back in 2005 on the "Chaos Scenario" facing the marketing industry, and the rise of "Listenomics.") 

Widgets are mini-software applications that sit on your computer, smart phone, home page, or social networking site and provide a simple news feed, video player, interactive game, or simulation. They are typically designed to bring the user back to a full website and often designed to go viral. Apple, among others, helped bring them to life with the Dashboard on OSX and the wildly popular apps and App Store on the iPhone. Facebook and MySpace have also done a great job popularizing the approach, and a number of agencies now specialize in developing widgets for advertising campaigns.

The basic idea is to give people a bit of your brand in the form of digital information or entertainment, and they've begun to catch on big time in the B2C world. For example, Southwest Airlines' "Ding" widget alerts users to special fares, Backcountry.com's Steep and Cheap highlights great new deals, and InStyle's Hollywood Hair Makeover lets users put celebrity do's on their own photos for fun and to help with copycat styling. Garfield, in a memorable turn of phrase, suggests that "branded widgets are the refrigerator magnets of the Brave New World."

But what about B2B? Can widgets work in the more sober world of high-value solutions? I'd say absolutely yes, and Garfield himself suggests a few possible directions. UPS already has a widget to help users schedule and track shipments. Nike has a widget to help users keep up with their running and connect more easily to Nike Plus. Why not borrow the same concept for business users by providing simple, ongoing access to technical support, professional advice, or industry news?

Widgets are just another tool, of course, in a marketing environment overloaded with new tools. Viewed in a B2B context, though, they offer a number of potential advantages as marketers adapt their strategies to the demands of time-starved, buyer-driven markets:

• Enables you to go where the users already spend time, rather than relying on them to come to your site
• Emphasis on providing value to the user, otherwise they'll pay no attention
• Simple and inexpensive to produce and track -- and thus to experiment with
• Potential for ongoing engagement with the user  
• Natural tie-in with other value-providing tactics, including live and online events and publications  

Content, as always, is king in B2B marketing, so any widget promotion should come only as support for a clear and compelling content strategy. That said, however, why not give it a try?

Stop experimenting online? I don't think so.

Today's Wall Street Journal suggests (subscription required) that the financial crisis will likely slow down marketing experimentation with new online approaches:

In recent years, marketers have set aside a portion of their ad budgets to experiment with digital technologies such as Web video, mobile phones, gaming and virtual worlds. But with broader economic turmoil reaching Madison Avenue, these "experimental" budgets are among the first to hit the cutting-room floor.

It's not surprising. Marketing typically gets hit first in a downturn, and cutting new and relatively unproven techniques is a natural reaction. As Peter Kim from the agency Dachis tells the Journal, "When we get into the need to drive results, you can't spend money on experiments and hope to keep your job and get your sales goals."

It's not surprising, but I also think it's dead wrong. I'm not advocating tossing money around randomly on flavor of the month tools or techniques. But the implication of stopping experimentation is that the old methods work best. We know that's not true. We know that many traditional approaches don't work at all anymore, or are decreasingly effective. And we can  be pretty sure that some  of the old ways will be even less effective as the economy goes south. Think about live events, for example. Attendance levels, already under stress from event overload, will only get worse as travel budgets freeze up.

In fact, experimentation is the lifeblood of marketing. Websites and email were experimental in the mid-1990s (or later, in many companies), and considered of marginal value at best. Now they are the center of most companies' marketing programs. Blogging was laughed at just a few years ago; now it has entered the business marketing mainstream.

Consider HP's recent stunning success with its 31 Days of the Dragon campaign to promote a new high-end laptop oriented to users focused on entertainment and gaming (see MarketingProfs' great case study for details). Although the  Dragon laptop received good reviews when it first came out last year, sales were disappointing. Rather than just bump up traditional advertising and other promotional efforts, HP instead tried something very different. HP reached out to 31 bloggers with great influence in the target audience, and offered them a deal: We'll give you a full Dragon package, including all sorts of add-ons, software, games, and video -- valued at over $5,000 -- if you organize and promote a giveaway to your readers. The only strings attached were that the bloggers had to give away the package to a reader, and they had to promote all 31 of the contests, not just their own.

The results were tremendous. Left to their own devices, the bloggers all created interesting and different campaigns (which of course helped their own cause), and generated enormous audience participation:

• More than 50 million impressions across 123 countries, including translations into 40+ languages
• More than 25,000 entries, including more than 10,000 videos posted on YouTube and elsewhere
• Massive traffic increases on the participating blogs
• and, ta da...
• 84% increase in sales of the Dragon

All this for an investment of about $250,000, and zero new marketing materials, advertising, or media buys.

Experimentation won't always generate such great results. That's a given. But you'll never know unless you try.

In thinking about a sober approach to online marketing experimentation, especially for B2B services and solutions, here are a few questions to consider:

• Set time and budget. What about setting aside 5 or 10 percent for experimentation, regardless of what happens to the overall budget? That will ensure you can mostly rely on approaches in which you have most confidence, but still have the discipline to regularly try new approaches that may end up paying off substantially.
• Getting closer to customers. Does the new approach help you get closer to your existing customers and uncover useful insight, develop stronger relationships, and/or identify new opportunities?
• Demonstrating expertise. Are there new ways to demonstrate thought leadership and expertise on critical issues in your market?
  
• Providing value. Does the new approach directly help customer and other influencers with useful content or relationships? Does it provide a new way to test our your service or solution?
  
• Measurement. Can you measure results in useful ways? Can you learn something important, even if immediate sales results don't come through?
• Morale. Are there people on your team or in the organization really excited about the new approach? Especially in a downturn, morale matters! 

Of course, these are pretty important questions to ask about any marketing program or technique, not just the experimental ones. You may just find that it's easier to provide good answers with the new approaches than it is with some of the old.

Marketing leaders desperate for digital know-how

A new survey from Sapient shows that CMOs and other senior marketers are looking anxiously for help from their marketing and advertising agencies with almost all things digital. (Thanks to Marketing Charts for the pointer.)

The survey asked more than 200 marketing execs what they want from their agencies over the next year, and "greater knowledge of the digital space" topped the wish list. Just as important, the top ten on the wish list was rife with digital concerns, including leveraging online communities, more savvy in social media, and, interestingly, evidence that the agencies themselves are using the social media (Facebook, Flickr, etc.) that they recommend to their clients.

Here's the whole list:

1. Greater knowledge of the digital space
2. More use of "pull interactions"
3. Leverage virtual communities
4. Agency executives using the technology they are recommending
5. Chief Digital Officers make agencies more appealing
6. Web 2.0 and social media savvy
7. Agencies that understand consumer behavior
8. Demonstrate strategic thinking
9. Branding and creative capabilities
10. Ability to measure success

For now, according to Sapient, many marketers are looking to change agencies. This is great news if you're an agency with legitimate skills at the cutting edge -- although the frustration marketing leaders have with current agencies suggests this is easier said than proved.

It's not just a question of the agencies, though. Marketing leaders need to find more skilled in-house staff as well. And they need to get more up to speed themselves, if only to make sure they're choosing  the right agency and managing them effectively.

Ultimately, we all need to find even more time to keep up with the accelerating pace of change in digital tools and tactics. That's not easy when we're already stretched to the max. But I can't see another way. Can you?

Can advertising help buyers make the right decisions?

In a buyers market, helping buyers make the right decisions should be a winning strategy, especially when it comes to high-stakes purchases. Buyers have endless choices, and often want and need sound advice to help sort through all their options. Much of today's thought leadership marketing is based on just this approach.

But can advertising alone provide sound advice? The insurance company Mass Mutual just launched a new ad campaign around the idea of helping its customers make the right decisions in the complex world of personal finance and insurance. The campaign came from consumer research suggesting that people wanted more assurance they were making the right decisions, a MassMutual exec told Marketing Daily yesterday. "It's an evolution of our core positioning," said Vic Lippman. "We're still about the central notion of helping people navigate the complexities of the financial environment."

The real issue, of course, is are they actually helping? Ads alone can do little beyond driving traffic to additional material or inspiring other calls to action. MassMutual's website does have all sorts of documents and self-help tools, but the experience is not very intuitive or user-friendly. And while the flash banner ad on the top of the home page promises that "We'll help get you there" with links for individuals, parents, business owners, and so on, a series of clicks through the various pathways ultimately just brings you to a page that prompts you to contact one of their representatives.

Advertising that you can help people make sound decisions in this day and age may have its place in the overall marketing mix, but creating the materials and programs to truly provide the help is much more important