Reputation to Revenue

Strengthening thought leadership marketing: Five steps to excellence

I've just had the privilege of helping judge ITSMA's Marketing Excellence Awards, and was impressed in particular with the submissions in the Thought Leadership Marketing category. 

As recently as five years ago, thought leadership marketing was mainly the province of the top consulting firms. Few other B2B firms took it seriously. Boy, has that changed! The submissions in this year's awards program reflect a substantial increase not only in spending but, more important, in the programmatic discipline that is necessary to make a serious impact with customers and market influencers.

I can't name names yet because ITSMA is still selecting finalists and then the ultimate winners. It's clear from the submissions, however, along with working with many of these companies over the years, that there are five important ways in which the best of the best stand apart from the crowd:

1. Focus and depth: Lots of companies practice "random acts of content," dashing off periodic white papers, articles, videos, blog posts, and the like with little focus or depth. But when you're dealing with high level customers facing serious business challenges), the scattershot approach provides little value. Indeed, according to a major study of business technology buyers last year by ITSMA and Pierre Audoin Consulting, only 16% of these buyers believe that their solution providers are very helpful in showing them the possibilities to solve their business challenges. If you're going to join the ranks of the "very helpful," you need to pick one or a few issues, stick with it, and go deep.
2. Do the research: A lot of so-called thought leadership is really just opinion, perhaps based on a project or two. Our customers want evidence, and evidence usually requires research. The best thought leadership programs are built around serious research, including analysis of existing literature, new customer surveys, and in-depth case studies. One of the main reasons that the industry analyst firms remain so influential with buyers is that they are constantly cranking out new research. (Yes, marketers sometimes question the quality of that research, but it is generally miles ahead of the "thought leadership" content that vendors themselves produce.) To help make "thought leadership" worthy of the term, start from the beginning and don't skimp on the research.
3. Engage and empower internally. Too often, marketers publish thought leadership content but forget to tell anyone else in the organization. At best, this can mean losing the opportunity to have more colleagues representing that good thinking in the marketplace. At worst, customers start asking your people questions on an issue about which they have no idea. Especially as you begin to integrate social media across the business, you want more people engaging directly with customers, prospects, and other stakeholders. Engaging and empowering your customer-facing employees with thought leadership gives them something valuable to talk about, and can quickly become an essential multiplier for overall program impact.
4. Leverage your best content. Market engagement today is about pervasive presence and ongoing conversation, not just traditional publishing and speaking. Customers want to chew over and debate your ideas, often without you in the [virtual] room. To help make this happen, you need to leverage your best thought leadership content by publishing compelling bits and bytes in appropriate formats across the networks and channels where your customers congregate. If you're working on a white paper, for example, you want to think: Is there a short video we can produce? Where can we blog about this? What articles can we publish? Where are there opportunities to brief our best customers on our new thinking? Is there a debate I can set up?
5. Invest in expertise. Ultimately, great thought leadership programs are built around experts -- experts in the subjects at hand, of course, but also experts in research, analysis, publication, social media, and collaboration. The most successful programs invest in their people in at least three ways: Funding full time staff positions, recruiting for necessary skills and helping existing staff develop the right skills, and investing in partnerships for complementary capabilities (including brand recognition, as with prestigious academics, universities, and/or outside media and research organizations).

Building a successful thought leadership marketing program is a long-term process. The companies that are best, such as McKinsey, Accenture, IBM, Deloitte, and others, have spent years doing the research, building market presence, and refining what works. They pick key customer issues and stick with them. They go deep. And they invest in their people and programs. 

What's missing from my list? What works best for you?

The four engines of B2B marketing success

A friend recently had the good fortune not only to take over marketing for a successful B2B firm, but to do so with a mandate to build a new strategy that ensures a much greater impact on the business.

He's a bit like a kid in a candy store: he's got budget to spend, executive support for a more ambitious marketing program, and a relatively clean slate upon which to draw the new strategy. 

The existing program has been pretty traditional, focusing mostly on collateral, events, advertising, and direct support for the sales team. He knows that's not enough, and is definitely interested in doing more with thought leadership and social media, but how best to reshape the overall strategy is not entirely clear.

Asked for some advice, I agreed with a stronger emphasis on thought leadership and social media (which I think are appropriate for all B2B  firms), and I questioned the value of putting so much energy into advertising and collateral. 

More generally, though, I suggested that the strategy focus on the four marketing engines that I think all B2B firms need to have running smoothly to ensure business success.

Four Engines for B2B Marketing Success 

Content Engine:

As the need for more and better content continues to grow, marketing leaders have realized that they need an integrated "content engine" that consistently produces compelling content for every stage of the buying cycle. This includes thought leadership content to help build reputation and interest, educational content to support lead generation and nurturing, solutions and customer success content to support sales conversations, and, of course, social media content to support ongoing connections with customers and others.

Relationship Engine:

B2B marketing rises and falls on the strength of the company's relationships with customers, prospects, partners, and market influencers. For many marketing organizations, though, the objective of building, strengthening, and sustaining key relationships has no clear owner or strategy. A "relationship engine" may sound awkward but the idea is to ensure a comprehensive, consistent, and focused approach to strengthening critical stakeholder connections to increase sales, loyalty, and market insight. This should work across such areas as events, customer councils, account management, references, and social media.

Lead Development Engine:

The increasingly long and convoluted purchase processes that B2B marketers face puts a premium on well organized systems for lead nurturing and management. No longer can we focus on just the early stages of generating leads and then throw them over the wall to sales. More and more, we need to stay in the game with longer term programs to develop and sustain opportunities in close coordination with sales. Content and relationship programs contribute substantially to this effort but someone also needs to own the overall system for lead development, including qualification, scoring, nurturing, and assessment.

Solutions Development Engine:

Like many B2B companies, my friend's firm has a long history of successful products, satisfied customers, and productive partners. At the same time, also like many B2B companies, his firm is feeling the heat from increasing competition, margin squeeze on products, and buying decisions moving higher up in their customers' organizations. The result is a need for higher value solutions that respond more specifically to individual customer needs. Doing this efficiently and effectively means moving past the one-off approach based solely in the field. Instead, marketing needs to guide and support the field in determining top priorities for new offer development, crafting the right value propositions, and routinizing the process with the right stage gates and metrics.

The four engines don't cover every last aspect of B2B marketing, but they come pretty close and they provide a clear framework for building a comprehensive strategy that balances short- and longer-term success. Get each of the engines humming smoothly and results are sure to follow.

What do you think? Am I missing something important? Are all of your engines in good working order?

Photo credit: Imnop88a

Editorial strategy: Why do B2B customers need your information?

 

A new report from the always excellent Project for Excellence in Journalism got me thinking a bit differently about thought leadership and content marketing and marketing as media.

We all know that social media is increasingly central to how we get our news and information. The main finding in this new report is that Americans use different media for different types of information.

Analyzing a year of data on the top news stories discussed, linked to, and viewed on blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media, the Project found that, "the stories and issues that gain traction in social media differ substantially from those that lead in the mainstream press. But they also differ greatly from each other."

Topically, for example, there is much greater focus on technology-related news with social media. Further, Twitter has emerged as a key source for breaking news. YouTube is more about serendipitous surfing for randomly interesting content. Blogs tend toward more emotional stories and stronger partisan orientations (on all sides).

So what's the B2B marketing connection?

Several months ago, I wrote about Marketing as media: Are you in the top five? My suggestion then was that given the incredible time constraints under which our customers and prospects operate, we need to think about being a "top five" information source. They don't have time to pay attention to much more than that. So you're really competing for attention with sources like The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek along with leading trade publications, blogs, and social networks, regardless of what particular market niche we're in.

I still think this is true, but today's research makes me think more about how you carve out the right position in the broader business media landscape. 

Of course you need to focus on the issues where you have expertise and the markets you serve. Of course you need to provide useful and interesting information. Those are table stakes. But beyond that, where do you fit more specifically for your customers? What do they expect from you? Most important, why do they need your information?

This is not a question about using different media channels for different types of information, although that's indeed important. And it's not about which format is best (white papers vs. videos vs. blog posts, etc.). It's really a question of editorial strategy.

• Are you a source for breaking news? Possibly, but you better be really good at it! 
• Are you a "fun" source for diversionary moments, like YouTube? Doubtful, but certainly possible if you think it's worthwhile.
• Are you the emotion-laden source for partisans on one side of some big industry debate? Maybe, especially if you're in a relatively new or fast-changing market, but you need to accept that you're turning off all the partisans on the other side.
• Are you an aggregator of everyone else's best content? That's a great service, but does your own thinking and expertise get lost in the process?

I'm not suggesting that it's all or nothing, that you have to pick one thing. But trying to be all things to all customers is not likely a good route to success. Thinking more about the "why us?" question can only help in developing a more effective editorial strategy. 

What do you think? What's your editorial strategy?

Photo credit: stevenharris

Marketing lessons from the Grateful Dead

Crazy week last week, but it was hard to resist the HubSpot webinar, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead -- at least for me and 800+ other Dead-loving marketers.

Along with loving the music and concerts, I've always thought the Dead's freewheeling, performance-oriented approach represented a great example of American entrepreneurship.

Indeed, long after the vast majority of hit-focused, corporate rock bands had faded from view, the Dead kept on trucking to become one of the top grossing bands of all time despite a distinct lack of mass appeal. No less than the Atlantic magazine recently published an ode to the Dead's business acumen, Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead.

For marketers, the HubSpot webinar, led by certified Deadheads Brian Halligan of HubSpot (100+ shows) and social media writer David Meerman Scott (42 shows), was filled with great examples of how the Dead's success foreshadowed so much of what we're just now taking seriously with the shift to social media. 

For me, here are four key takeaways (leavened by my own experience at 20+ shows over the years):

1. Build an authentic experience, and never mind the critics. The Dead always went their own way with hours-long shows, little attention to rock band or radio format convention, and minimal effort to create hits. Lots of people never liked them, and that was fine. The lesson here is do what feels right, focus on your fans, and forget about trying to be all things to all people. 
2. Give away great content and make it easy to share. The Dead were notorious for actually encouraging their fans to tape their concerts and spread the music around. Far from obsessing over intellectual property, the Dead understood that the more their music spread, the more they could build a fan base and sell tickets to their shows. Once the Web arrived in the mid-90s, they jumped on board to post and broadcast as many shows as possible. The lesson here, of course, is to open up the organization, encourage your experts to connect freely with customers and others, and tear down the registration walls that require detailed business information in exchange for simply downloading a white paper or subscribing to a newsletter. 
3. Embrace new technologies and experiment aggressively. The Dead were also famous for pouring a huge amount of their early money into an enormous, state-of-the-art Wall of Sound that they trucked around the country rather than relying, as did most bands, on whatever sound system was in the venues they played. They constantly tested new sounds, new musical styles, and new media. The lesson here, as social media pundits opine constantly, is push the envelope, accept the inevitability of experiments that fail, and move on to the next.
4. Put your best customers first. Early on, the Dead realized the value of giving extra attention to their top fans with early and special access to tour information, tickets, and recordings. Rather than offer special deals to new prospects, the lesson here is to provide preferential treatment to your best existing customers. Keep them happy with customer councils and forums, executive access, and early warning of new products and services, and they're much more likely to remain loyal, provide useful insight, and spread the word on your behalf. 

Last year, I saw the Dead play in Worcester, MA (my hometown), 14 years after the death of spiritual leader Jerry Garcia. The experience was invigorating, the music was great, and the ethos remained true more than four decades from creation. Inspiring, to say the least.

TL in 4D: Four dimensions for thought leadership success

B2B marketers know that thought leadership is essential, especially when selling high-value solutions. Business buyers tune out most traditional marketing, but they are always looking for new ideas. If we can produce interesting and useful content, and use social media and other platforms to spread the good word, we at least have a chance of getting into the conversations that our customers and prospects actually want to have. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, thought leadership topped the list when ITSMA recently asked marketing leaders at big tech and IT services firms which tactics will be more important in 2010. According to ITSMA, 77% of respondents cited thought leadership development as a priority, beating out references and testimonials, senior executive programs, and social media. 

For most B2B firms, however, thought leadership is getting a great deal more lip service than investment. Other than top consulting and professional service firms like McKinsey, Deloitte, and Accenture, few B2B firms have yet created a focused and well-organized thought leadership marketing program. My own recent review of 72 corporate members of the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, for example, found that only 24 of these manufacturing, industrial, and technology companies even had a link to thought leadership content on their home page.

All too often, thought leadership in B2B is thinly funded (if at all), episodic, and superficial. 

• There is no dedicated staff, no editorial calendar for content production, and a heavy reliance on subject matter experts "volunteering" their nights and weekends to bang out a few white papers, articles, and blog posts. 
• Content tends to overemphasize company promotion and underemphasize customer and market evidence. 
• Publications typically are one-off productions with little coordinated effort to leverage new thinking into multiple formats, networks, and channels.  

To make a real impact with customers and create real distinction in the market, thought leadership needs focus, depth, and continuity.

Consider, for example Accenture's years-long in-depth research on high performing companies. They focus on strategic challenges facing each industry the company serves, orient primary research and publications to different executive roles among their client base, and deliver insights across a wide range of online, face-to-face, and social media platforms.

Not every company has Accenture's deep pockets, to be sure, but the lessons are clear. And it's not just a matter of blogging more and getting more content onto Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube -- although social media clearly IS critical for thought leadership dissemination and engagement. 

At a more fundamental level, companies looking for greater impact with thought leadership need to consider four essential dimensions of program development:

1. Points of View: Effective thought leadership is rooted in compelling, differentiated, and evidence-based points of view on important business challenges -- not product features or quick opinions or the experience of a single client engagement. Companies need to invest the time, research budgets, and analytic expertise it takes to create points of view that really matter. You've got to take a stand, but in ways that are not simply provocative but rooted in primary research and real world experience. (For a guide to developing effective points of view, check out Solutions Insights' Point of View Development Template.)
2. Internal Education: Especially with the rise of social media, you're relying more and more on a great many employees to tell your story, not just a few executives or subject matter experts. Investing in internal education around your points of view is critical to equipping marketing, sales, and other customer-facing employees (which could be anyone online) to engage constructively on the issues that matter in ways that demonstrate real expertise. It's also a great way to generate more insight and tap more internal experience to feed into Point of View development.
3. Market Engagement: Publishing and disseminating content is what most people think of when they consider thought leadership marketing. But the traditional reliance on white paper publishing, conference speaking, and pushing for mainstream media coverage is far too limited in today's always-on, socially networked world. Market engagement today is about pervasive presence and ongoing conversation; publishing is just the beginning of the process. And the development of more substantial points of view makes it much easier to produce steadier streams of useful content across multiple platforms.
4. Program Operations: Making this all work requires dedicated staff, disciplined processes, and clear metrics and accountability. This doesn't have to mean huge staffs or budgets, but it does mean accepting that the "volunteer" work on nights and weekends is unlikely to have a serious impact or create distinction against competitors with a more organized and funded approach. Rather, you need to bring together people, processes and tools that can do the research and analysis, generate compelling points of view, and sustain the internal and market engagement required to reap the benefits effective thought leadership can provide.

Based on our own research and experience working with thought leadership programs across the IT and professional services sectors, Solutions Insights has developed a four stage roadmap for thought leadership program development, as you can see below. It's a simple model that necessarily abstracts a great deal of nuanced reality, but it should be useful in evaluating your own programmatic maturity and considering next steps for improvement. We'd love to know what you think of the roadmap -- and please weigh in with comments on your own approach and experience. We're still learning, too.

 
 

More evidence that give-to-get is the key to success

It's pretty much a cliche to say that marketing today is all about give-to-get. You provide customers and prospects with new ideas, new experiences, and new connections in order to earn their attention. You keep at it until they open up to a conversation that, over time, can lead toward an actual sales opportunity.

In B2B, though, I'm constantly surprised at how often marketers pay little more than lip service to this essential idea. 

You see it in companies that persist in spending more on promotion and pitch than on interaction and collaboration. 

You see it in the cutbacks to customer research and insight (how can you "give" something of value to customers if you don't even pay attention to what they're facing?). 

And you see it when marketers hand off the first hint of a "lead" (e.g., a name from a trade show or white paper download) to the inside or outsourced sales team to begin "qualifying" opportunities.

A new survey from B2B agency Doremus and the Financial Times provides yet more evidence that the old ways are of little use. As noted by Doremus president Howard Sherman:

Recently, Doremus and the Financial Times collaborated on a survey called Decision Dynamics in which 470 worldwide senior level executives were asked: Which supplier is most likely to get work from you in tough times as compared to prosperous times?

Interestingly the top answer was not the cheapest or the supplier with the best/longest relationship, or even the one who could prove ROI. The answer was the supplier most proactive in helping you [emphasis in original].

Sherman goes on to list some types of help that marketing agencies in particular might be able to provide, including being more nimble, strengthening internal relationships, and rebuilding trust with investors and customers.

For me, the key point here is that give-to-get is more important than ever. The executives in the survey are saying "help me." 

Your customers need help, they want it from you (so long as you have something valuable to offer), but they're typically so stressed out by the daily grind that they barely have time to ask. And they certainly have little tolerance for promotional marketing. As such, the idea of "proactive help" should be front and center.

Practically speaking, this means:

• Investing more in understanding your customer's businesses and challenges; you can never have too much customer insight
• Putting more energy into developing real thought leadership in the market that demonstrates truly news ways to help customers solve problems
• Reaching out to your best customers with offers to provide legitimately useful briefings and demos (i.e., not sales pitches)
• Investing in social media skills, tools, and initiatives to help share the wealth of knowledge and experience that lies throughout your organization.

The concept seems easy. Is the execution so hard?

Photo: sekimura

The hard questions about social media for B2B solutions providers

The skepticism about social media for B2B is pretty much gone by now. It's still pretty new for a great many companies, but the combination of legitimate success stories, overwhelming hype, and the desperate search for new ways to reach customers when the old ways work less and less has convinced all but the most recalcitrant among us that social media is at least worth a try.

But how to proceed is far from clear, especially for companies selling high-value solutions that typically require very long sales cycles with multiple influencers and decision makers in every transaction. Even for companies with a fair amount of social media experience, figuring out specifically where and how to invest in social media is a huge challenge. 

It's all well and good to dabble in blogging, Twitter, and YouTube, but creating a strategic, focused, and sustainable social media program requires answering some pretty tough questions, such as:

• Who are we really trying to reach? Do we have a clear sense of which customers, prospects, influencers, and/or other stakeholders are active in social networks, or could be -- and why it's important to reach them this way?
• How do we get their attention? Attention is the scarcest commodity, especially at the executive level where many solutions marketers are determined to engage. Do we really understand what social programs or activities or applications are most likely to succeed with the people we are trying to reach?
• Do we have the skills? Lots of people talk the social media talk, but can they really deliver? Executing with social media requires a diverse set of skills, including content development, recruitment, conversation, facilitation, analysis, and, most of all, LISTENING. Who in the organization is going to do the heavy lifting?
• How should we organize our efforts? Who should "own" social media is a big conversation topic these days, with claims coming from varying departments and types of agencies. Some suggest that the very idea of ownership goes against the democratic philosophy of social media. Do we have a solid strategy for planning, budgeting, and managing our efforts in a coordinated way? Are we confident that we're not taking too narrow or broad a view of how this might work best?
• Can we sustain the effort? Social media is generally a long term proposition; initiatives may take 6-12 months or more to gain real momentum even if they are well designed and managed. Do we have the staying power to stick with it month after month after month even if the early returns are slight?
• How do we capture real value and return on investment? How will we measure success? Do we have clearly defined and realistic objectives and metrics? How will we make sure the benefits reach across the organization?
• How can we minimize risk? Among the first question many executives ask about social media are: What if people say negative things about our company? What if one of our employees shares something proprietary or just stupid or embarrassing about our company? The reality is that social media does bring risk, but the risk is there whether we engage actively or not. How can we manage and support our activities in ways that lessen the risk and increase the reward?
• Are we culturally ready? A question that some companies don't ask is "are we really ready to open the doors and join the conversation?" The biggest challenge with social media is literally being social. It's having the mindset and the culture and the confidence to engage in open conversation, trust your colleagues and staff to do the same, accept criticism publicly, and give up the old notions of controlling the message and marketing to an audience.  

A great danger today is that, in their haste to "catch up," many companies are all of a sudden taking the social media plunge without addressing many of these essential questions. In my own recent discussions with clients and prospects, I've had a lot of questions about tools and tactics (e.g., "What should we be doing with Twitter or Facebook or online video), but less about strategy, objectives, organization, and culture.

Experimentation is fine, and even necessary given the constant innovation in social tools and channels, but taking social media requires a well-developed strategy. This seems almost too obvious to state; unfortunately, though, the hype around social media appears to have caused a lot of otherwise smart marketers to temporarily forget the basics of Marketing 101. Social media may well revolutionize the practice of marketing, but the will core objectives remain the same: serving customers, finding avenues for growth, building reputation, and supporting sales.

I'm not sure it's possible to define "best practice" for solutions marketing in such a new and fast-changing arena as social media, but answering the hard questions above will certainly go a long way toward developing a strategy with a good chance of success.

To help answer some of the hard questions, my partners and I at Solutions Insights have just published a short report, Socializing Solutions: Tapping Social Media for Solutions Success (PDF). The report includes a set of guidelines on where to focus your efforts and a basic, four-phase approach to building an integrated, sustainable program. Please check it out and pass it along. I'd love to know what you think.

Photo credit: OCLS

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?

The new, new marketing: Health tech coalition may point the way

The buzz in marketing is all about social media, with Twitter as the flavor of the month and maybe even a tipping point in getting laggard companies to finally take the promise of social media seriously. 

I'm all for it, of course. Certainly the hype can get tiresome, and there are huge strategy and organizational questions that companies have to face with social media, but I think we're well past the stage of wondering whether there's real gold in those hills.

But social media was "new" in marketing five years ago. Back then, when I talked with clients about the promise of blogs and communities and the like for "serious" B2B marketing, I got a lot of blank stares and "really?" responses. Those days are long gone, even if many companies are just now dipping their toes into the water.

The new, new marketing incorporates social media values and tactics, but it's much more than that. It's mission-oriented, educational, and problem-solving, while also being conversational and transparent. 

In fact, I've been thinking about yet another acronym to capture the idea: Marketing that MATTERS. it's definitely on the long side, and maybe too cute, but I think the direction is right.

M - Mission-oriented, focused on a larger purpose than just selling stuff
A - Authentic, with personal and organizational integrity, and real people speaking like real people
T - Thought-provoking, with a serious purpose and making people think
T - Transparent (of course), opening the curtain and letting people see inside
E - Educational, helping people learn and solve problems vs. distracting or "just" entertaining them
R - Relationship-oriented, looking for long-term partnership, not just the the one-time sale
S - Story-driven, since that's what we remember and what makes it real

IBM's Smarter Planet campaign (which is becoming more a way of doing business than just a campaign) is a great example of this approach, and the kudos IBM is receiving are well-deserved.

GE's new Healthymagination is another move in the same direction, as was GE's earlier start with its Ecomagination initiative.

Yes these are self-serving marketing programs. Hey, it's capitalism and these are mega-corporations trying to make a buck. But there is a strong element of enlightened self-interest here. They're tackling real social issues; they're raising awareness; they're thought-provoking; they're providing at least some education, and so on. I'm not sure they''d get all A's on a Marketing that MATTERS report card, but I'm choosing to look on the bright side.

Meanwhile, we don't all have the deep pockets of IBM and GE, and have to think a bit smaller in scale.  

A new health tech coalition, the EHR Stimulus Tour, captured my eye in this regard. Motivated by the chance to capture government funding for helping doctors convert to electronic health records (EHR), an alliance of large and smaller tech firms, including Cisco, Dell, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, Nuance, Allscripts, and Citrix is organizing an educational campaign for doctors on the Stimulus legislation and the opportunities and benefits of EHR.

It's not a huge effort, and probably not one that will last for years. Tactically, though, the campaign covers a lot of useful ground in a well-designed and integrated way: a focused audience, an educational approach, a combination of live road show events and a resource microsite, a presence n Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, a set of webcasts, etc. And the alliance approach itself is a nice change from the normal solo or traditional channel approach; it adds to the "we're all pitching in to solve the problem" idea.

The program and the EHR push in general are not without controversy (see, for example, here). In looking at the bright side, though, I see enormous potential for business-society win-win with this kind of marketing approach. I wouldn't give these guys all A's either, but the Mission-orientation is a good start and the campaign provides a useful model to consider.

What do you think? And what about "Marketing that MATTERS" idea? Does that make sense, or is it just another dumb acronym?

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.