Virgin America tackles cross-identity marketing

I just took a flight on Virgin America from San Francisco to Toronto. With the holidays, Google Chrome and Virgin America have teamed up to provide inflight WiFi for free, so I was more productive on the flight than any flight I have taken before. I’ve become a big fan of Virgin America as they seem to be innovating quite a bit on the inflight experience. At the same time, an interesting thing happened that caught my attention and made me wonder about their innovations in the marketing realm also. While it might have been a coincidence, I suspect that it was not and they are pushing the frontiers of cross-identity marketing.

I purchased a meal on the flight (seat-back TV with touch-screen food ordering, nice.), and as part of that I asked for a receipt, and typed in my email address. I’m always a fan of seeing what various companies do with their marketing, so I provided permission to include me in their marketing database. Sure enough, within 30 minutes, Twitter notified me that Virgin America was following me. As I had just engaged with them, this was not something I saw as intrusive, so I of course followed back. Now they have opened up a new channel of interaction with me.



Technologically, I’m guessing this was fully automated. Their follow notification says they use Sprinklr, which may offer this capability, I’m not sure. Regardless of the exact technology used by Virgin America in this case, the concept is simple. All that is needed is to recognize the match between different identities (my email address and my Twitter handle), and then follow.

The point, however, is interesting. People today exist, and communicate across many different identities. The role of marketing is essentially one of communicating based on understanding of a person and their identity. If you, as a marketer, in B2B or B2C are not doing your best to jump on opportunities to identify different identities, and then take the needed steps to engage, you may be missing a significant opportunity to broaden your engagement with your buyers throughout the overall revenue engine.

Are you, as a B2B marketer, exploring techniques similar to this? Do you identify and engage with your buyers across a broader set of identities than you did before? Is it working for you? Read More...

Cartoon: Who is creating content for your company?

Today's my first attempt at cartooning (okay, not really, all the hard work was done by gifted cartoonist Brady Bonus). I hope you enjoy it!

First posted this morning on It's All About Revenue:
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Marketing Dashboard: Passive Discovery

We spoke recently about various ways of looking at marketing benchmarks and how to better dashboard and analyze the entire revenue performance management process. This thinking needs to be applied to all areas of the revenue engine, and each has its own unique challenges.

At the earliest stages of the funnel, where buyers first begin to become aware of your company and its solutions is perhaps the most challenging. One of the main ways in which people discover your message, of course, is coming across your messages "passively", through ads, content, and social media sharing.

Building an understanding of how your messages are being passively discovered is an interesting challenge. Many of the paid techniques of passive discovery, such as banner advertising, are inherently trackable. However, great content that allows an organization to earn passive discovery is often much less trackable. However, a clear understanding of this element of the revenue process is key to determining where to make important investments.

An important metric to start with is an understanding of paid vs earned awareness. This dashboard metric gives you a clear sense of whether prospective buyers in the early stages of their education process are learning about you through paid efforts, such as advertisements, or through your efforts to earn their attention, such as through content marketing. To create this view, chart the traffic to your website by its originating source. Those that arrive from content sites, or without the tracking codes that you place in your online advertisements are most likely earned discovery through your content marketing efforts. Those that arrive with the tracking codes of your online advertising efforts are paid discovery efforts bearing fruit.

In charting these two sources of awareness, all active discovery, such as referrals from search sites such as Google and Bing, and all natural traffic (visitors who just typed in your website’s address, and were not referred to it), must first be removed. Other sources of traffic, such as from a customer community, or online help portal should also be excluded, as these are individuals who are already aware of who you are and what your solutions are. With these categories of traffic removed, this leaves just the visitors who discover your content, and hence become aware of your solutions, through either paid or earned awareness efforts.

This view is instructive in two ways. First, a direct comparison of your paid and earned efforts provides insights into whether opportunities might exist that are not being maximally exploited. If you notice that prospects discovery of your solutions is mainly from paid sources, there is an opportunity to assess whether content marketing efforts may provide a more economically efficient way to drive awareness. If, however, all of your discovery traffic is coming from earned sources, there may be a chance to either re-evaluate whether your current paid awareness efforts could be better targeted, or, if there is an opportunity to increase your paid awareness efforts in order to generate awareness in areas of the market in which you are not currently driving as much awareness as you could be.

The second area of value you get from creating and maintaining this view of your revenue engine is that you can understand how your efforts are resulting in more awareness over time. This is most crucial for earned media, as this follows a “fly-wheel” dynamic for growth. Effort this is invested in creating and promoting great content results in a slow and steady growth in awareness. This dynamic is much different than the “lightning strike” dynamic of most paid media efforts where an investment results in a near real-time effect.

Calculations of the total audience to which your messages are presented in a way that allows them to be passively discovered is similarly simple for paid audiences, but challenging for earned audiences. For paid audiences, the total coverage of your advertisements (number of “eyeballs”) forms a good audience proxy. However, to calculate the total audience for earned awareness (mostly in the form of content sites that mention your company or solutions), it may be simpler to do this by assuming a known conversion rate and using that to calculate what the overall audience must be, based on traffic.

While this technique obviously prevents any insights that might have been gained by understanding and analyzing traffic conversion rates, in earned passive awareness, this is often not something that can be easily optimized as there is very limited control over how and where you are mentioned, so the best action is often simply to drive audience sizes higher through garnering more share of the conversation.

Analyzing Paid Discovery – Advertising and Audience Definitions

In building a dashboard to show the effectiveness of advertising efforts, the focus is on understanding how to target audiences that will effectively convert into interested buyers. This area of the industry is evolving rapidly, and an important development is in how audiences are defined. Historically, an audience was defined mainly by the content itself, with a thin layer of demographics on top.

For example, an industry new site focused on printing technologies in the publishing sector could be assumed to have an audience of people involved in that discipline. Within this audience, advertisers could often target by title or organization fit based on declared demographics, but not much more.

In today’s online world, this is rapidly changing. The major content networks are beginning to provide the ability to target audiences based on historical activity. For example, those who visit certain pages on your site, or meet certain qualification criteria could be defined as a specific audience, regardless of where they are on the Internet, for having specific ads presented to them.

In analyzing advertising campaigns, this analysis of audience becomes critical. While remarketing audiences are likely to have substantially smaller sizes than their mainstream counterparts, they may offer opportunities to convert prospective buyers to MQLs at a much higher rate or present more precise information that is relevant to later stage investigation and validation only.




Inbound Links – Earning the Potential to be Discovered

Traffic to your web properties is the most tangible metric to dashboard when looking at passive discovery. However, when it comes to the efforts to earn this discovery, it is a difficult metric to use in order to guide decisions as it is an aggregate measure of all the content that is linked to. Efforts to build great content and share it with influencers lead to a more measurable metric of inbound links.

An inbound link is a link from another site on the web to a page of content on your website. Creating interesting, useful, and valuable content leads to more links, and each link increases the chances that your content will be discovered by those reading about the market space. Obviously, links from higher traffic and more credible sites increase this potential more than links from less relevant sites.

To gain an understanding of the success of your content marketing strategy, and areas for improvement, a dashboard of inbound links can be very useful. For each major area of your web properties, such as your main site, blogs, and campaign-specific sites, dashboard the total number of inbound links, the average quality for each inbound link (based on the traffic and credibility of the page the link resides on), and the number of visits generated by that link in the recent time period.



This dashboard view provides insights into the successes and challenges of efforts to create exceptional content that inspires others to link to it. If top level analysis of passive discovery shows levels of performance that are less than expected, an inbound link analysis can identify where the issues might be occurring.

Social Engagement and Passive Discovery

As social networks grow in importance as a medium through which information is shared, so too do they grow in importance as a place where prospective buyers happen upon information of interest to them and in doing so begin to learn about new solutions and new approaches. Each conversation or engagement that happens in the public domain, whether a discussion on LinkedIn or an interaction on Twitter creates an opportunity for another viewer to see the discussion and engage with the content being talked about.

While measurement in this area is evolving quickly, even a simple view of which social networks are seeing a large number of links to your content being shared, the total traffic to your content that is driven by each of these networks, and whether this traffic is successfully turning into inquiries.



Thinking about Passive Discovery

Whether paid (advertising) or unpaid (content, social), this top end of the funnel is crucial for driving new business. Without great dashboards, it is hard to optimize and grow it.

How do you think about, measure, and analyze the ways by which people "come across" your content? Read More...

Who and What Do We Trust?

As the role of the relationship-based sales person shifts, with buyers collecting more of their information online, both prior to, and during conversations with sales people, we need to pay close attention to the most crucial aspect of a sale. Trust. It is trust that every relationship has as its foundation. However, with the changing dynamic of how the conversation happens, there is also a changing dynamic of how trust is developed.

In classic relationship-based sales, the buyer grew to trust the individual salesperson. Conversations were typically face to face, and the relationship incorporated many “social” elements such as dinner, drinks, golf outings, or sports events. Over time, this built up a level of trust between the buyer and the seller and allowed the deal to move through its challenging parts.

Now, with significantly less face-to-face time being spent, the dynamics of this trust building are changing. Trust now manifests itself in a variety of ways, which together either contribute to, or detract from, a sales opportunity. Replacing, enhancing, or complementing the trust we historically had in the direct sales rep is the trust we place in the following sources:

Peers:
The most powerful and immediate trusted source, of course, are our peers. People we know, have existing relationships with, and respect are the most powerful influencers of our decision making. Both because of shared experiences, and a perception of them being free of bias, we are far more likely to trust recommendations from our peer group.

Online Communities:
In a similar vein, we tend to trust the recommendations of online communities, where individuals may not be known to us, but we share a common thread such as the use of a particular solution, a professional discipline, or a love of travel.

Online Personas:
Within these communities, active individuals often stand out. Through creating great content, intelligent commentary, and frequent presence, they build familiarity in the same way that repeated light encounters with a neighbour or office co-worker begin to build our familiarity with them. As this familiarity builds, a sense of trust builds with it.

Personal Brands:
Taken further, many individuals have become so well known individually within a given space that their views are given significant credence. As buyers, there may be significant trust placed in the views, opinions, and perspectives of these strong individual brands within a space.

Company Online Brands:
The overall reputation and brand of a company is greatly influenced by the transparency of social media. Numerous examples exist of companies who attempted to maintain a difference between what they wanted their reputation to be, and what the reality of their product or service was. Social media has collapsed this difference, and in doing so may have an overall positive effect on buyer trust. If a company brand becomes, through community discussion and reputation, a realistic impression of what that company truly is, it becomes something that can more easily be trusted.

As trust shifts from being mainly in the purview of face to face sales reps, and towards a variety of other sources, marketing organizations need to ensure that buyers trust what is being offered. However, with trust itself being a virtually unmeasurable concept, and the source of trust being even more difficult, this provides marketers with a significant challenge.

Are you measuring how and why prospective buyers build their trust in you? Read More...

Measuring the Unmeasurable: Influencers

One of the most important ways to "get the word out" and have your message discovered is to have good relationships with key market influencers. However, while this is important, it can be notoriously difficult to measure.

We need a new way of measuring how engaged we are with each influencer in the market. Whereas historically, there may have been only a few influencers (the major analysts and media outlets), and maintaining relationships with them was the purview of the PR and AR groups, now there are a broader set of influencers and maintaining those relationships is the purview of everyone on the team. Measuring this effort, however, can prove challenging. The following framework is a starting point for assessing your ability to influence the market influencers.

1) Value of a Publication

The first step is to assess the publishers and publications you would like to influence. I use the term “publication” and “publisher” very loosely to refer to any writers, bloggers, thought leaders, and content contributors online. These are the individuals and outlets where influence is useful and interesting. Each publication that is of interest should be assessed (subjectively) and given a rating of one to three stars. This is based on their readership, reputation, presence, and whether they appear in the search results for key terms your buying audience is looking for.


2) Relationship Activity

With this step complete, and knowing which publications you are hoping to influence, you next need to track how active you are in maintaining those relationships. As most, if not all, of these individuals are online writers, this activity can be tracked very objectively. Each blog comment, each Twitter conversation, each LinkedIn discussion that someone on your team has with an influencer is a relationship activity. Each is an opportunity to build awareness, convey messages, introduce new perspectives, or develop a deeper level of trust. Tracking this activity, across your entire team including subject matter experts, gives you a clear metric on whether those relationships are being actively maintained.


3) Relationship Strength

For each relationship, it’s important to also assess whether you feel that the relationship is a strong one. This is a subjective measurement, and can only be done by the people involved in each relationship. Use a similar scale of one to three stars to show your assessment of the strength of each relationship.


4) Mentions

Now, with these relationships understood and assessed, you can look at whether this effort is bearing fruit in terms of mentions of your company, your solutions, and your views on the market. This metric is only useful when viewed as a trend over time, as different publications with different niche focuses will naturally mention company and product names in a wide range of frequencies. An upwards trend in mentions is generally a good thing and shows a positive influence.


5) Sentiment

However, mentions are usually only good if they are neutral or positive mentions – that highlight your strengths, key aspects of your reputation, and your views on the market. Although there is some good progress happening in the realm of technology solutions for sentiment analysis, this is often quicker and easier to do in a B2B environment using a subjective assessment.



With each of these dimensions analyzed, you can begin to gather a picture of how your overall team is influencing the key influencers in your market. Over time, these relationships will develop and grow, and can become an extremely effective way that your message reaches your intended audience.

It's not perfect, by a long stretch, but this framework at least provides a way to look at the challenge of measuring influencers and efforts to work with them. How are you approaching this challenge? Any different measurement frameworks you use? Read More...

Brand Choice: “vision of perfection” or “perfect visibility”

A "Goof-up" can be a great social media marketing opportunity.

The transparency required of us in a social-media led world causes a number of fairly wrenching paradoxes. One of the clearest of these is the difference between marketing’s goal of being a “vision of perfection” and social media transparency’s goal of “perfect visibility”.

The reality is, none of our organizations, our products, or our services, are perfect. However, it was historically very possible to present a “we are perfect” aura to the outside world, through tightly controlled marketing communications, and careful hiding of any issues. That is no longer possible, as social media ensures that anything noteworthy can be highlighted by communications outside of your control.

But is the goal the opposite – one of “perfect visibility” and total transparency. That is equally unachievable, as there are so many things happening within any organization that it would be impractical to present them all to the outside world.

What is the Goal of Transparency?

So what are we as businesses trying to achieve with transparency efforts? I would suggest that transparency efforts are really company branding efforts. By being a transparent organization, and becoming known as such, we build the following 3 key brand messages in the market:

- No Denial: We’re human, we will make mistakes. Every organization does. However, we will not waste anyone’s efforts in denying those mistakes, we will put all our effort into fixing them.

- No Stalling: We recognize that you rely on our products or services, are happy to shine a light on anything that you, the customer, believe needs to be improved and fixed. It will be in the public eye from the first moment, so you don’t have to worry about delay tactics, misdirections, and stalling. It’s in our best interest to quickly and clearly give an answer (even if the answer is not the one you’re hoping for).

- No Surprises: Rather than being surprised, after the sale, as to what the realities (both good and bad) of the solution are, those things will be communicated upfront.

Most buyers, when looking at providers, would ideally find a provider who doesn’t deny problems, doesn’t stall on solutions, and doesn’t surprise them with disappointments after the sale. Having those perceptions as part of your company brand can be a very good thing.

So how are Goof-ups a good thing?

We all make mistakes – those little errors that are painfully embarrassing, but generally don’t cause significant damage. Things like inviting people to an event that took place a month ago, or is on another continent. When we do this, we often cringe, and want to hide from the world. However, this is a great opportunity to display the transparency we want our customers to see and in doing so build our brand and reputation.

When a mistake happens, be the first to publicize it proactively and apologize – on a company blog, in your community, or via a follow-up email to those affected – whatever is appropriate given the mistake. There’s no need to add extra drama to the situation, but describe what happened, how broad the effects were, where people can find more information (if relevant), and what you’re doing to ensure it doesn’t happen again (even if that is just having an extra coffee in the morning). Over time, your audience’s trust in you will grow as they realize that you are truly running an accountable, transparent organization.

Not only will your audience appreciate the transparency, but your own internal organization will realize that shining a light on the topic wasn’t as bad as feared. Developing this culture of transparency takes time, but is immeasurably valuable in a time of crisis. Don’t let the opportunity pass when a small issue takes place.

Here’s an example from a recent goof-up that we made (Jim suggested I write this post to talk about the topic), where we (as experienced as we are in all things email marketing) left a hard-coded email signature personalization in a communication. Sure enough, there were no major negative effects as a result of this...

Do you have any interesting stories of well-handled goof-ups? Read More...

Text “WhoCares?” to 66863

Is Text Messaging Relevant for B2B Marketers?

(this post first appeared on Destination CRM)

There is a lot of discussion about whether text messaging is relevant in a B2B marketing environment. We’ve all seen the stats on the use of text messaging within younger generations, and there is a sense that this will lead to an inevitable rise of the relevance of text messaging for B2B marketers. I would, however, contend that the opposite may be true, and that text messaging may never become relevant in a B2B environment.

Why Text Message?

First, let’s look at why text messaging is popular. It is a simple, quick form of communication that is readily available on any device, and usually is very economical. It does a tremendous job of being both real-time (you can get a message right away) and also asynchronous (but you don’t have to respond right away). This, combined with the desire to constantly communicate, has made text messaging a dominant communication mode for teenagers and twenty-somethings everywhere.

Does this Translate to B2B Marketing?

The question though, is whether this form of communication translates to B2B marketing well enough to be relevant. It helps to look at three main differences.

1) Devices: your average executive or manager in a business does not use the same devices as a person in Generation Y. Often, they will be using a Blackberry, an iPhone, or another smartphone. These devices are enabled with many forms of communication, including email and the web, as well as often being full-featured application platforms in themselves. On this application platform, a variety of other communication mechanisms, like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare continue to evolve.

2) Communication Style: in a B2B marketing context, the communication is significantly different from the personal communications of Gen Y on their mobile phones. First, in the vast majority of cases, the individual is interacting with an automated system developed by the marketing organization, rather than a person. Second, the communication is usually about requesting information or entering a contest – a point in time interaction – rather than the back-and-forth of teenagers planning an outing or gossiping on the day’s events.

3) Content Richness: with this style of communication, we also see a richer style of content being used. When a business buyer is compelled to enter a short code, it is often to receive an interesting and valuable piece of content. It is very rare that an offer of sufficient value only requires a few hundred characters of text.


Each of these differences removes a major reason to use text messaging in a B2B marketing environment. The audience can, in today’s environment, usually be expected to have a mobile device that is capable of significantly more communication capabilities than just text messaging. Likewise, the point-in-time interaction with an automated system, combined with the richer content experience desired, further push us to leverage the richer capabilities of our audiences Blackberrys, iPhones, and iPads.

Mobile Thinking vs. Mobile Devices

This is not to say that mobile marketing is not relevant, it very much is. However, a separation needs to be made between “mobile thinking” and “mobile devices”. Mobile marketing is about having a compelling offer that can be presented to a business person where they are at that moment – at a tradeshow, an event, or just passing by a billboard – and compel them to take an action. This is both challenging and highly relevant in today’s marketing world. However, nothing requires the marketing thinking in that mobile campaign to use specific device technology such as text messaging and short codes. In today’s environment, there are much better ways to accomplish all the required goals with the modern devices we all carry.

But what about the Teenagers?

Each generation who enters the work force brings with them new ways of interacting, new norms, and new approaches. This generation will be no different. However, much of the change that impacts the business world is in a way of thinking, rather than a specific technology. MySpace demonstrated a new cultural norm in how we communicate and keep in touch with friends, but the underlying technology quickly lost ground to Facebook. A similar trend is to be expected with mobile. A cultural norm of always being connected, and interacting with the world through a mobile device is clearly part of the current generation, but exactly what devices and what technologies can be expected to change quickly.

Rather than associating mobile marketing with text messaging and short codes – its current incarnation – better to put effort into mobile thinking. In all likelihood, the best and most effective technology a person will used to respond to the offer will be a shortened URL, Facebook fan page, or a technology yet to be popularized. Read More...

Trust, Reputation, and Inside Sales

There is a significant shift underway in how we establish and build trust. Craig Newmark (of Craigslist fame) discussed this transition in quite some detail in an article on GigaOm that's worth a read.

The shifting of how trust is built has numerous profound implication for society in general, but more specifically, it is causing significant shifts in the way that people buy. While the general evolution of buyers is causing some challenges for field sales teams, the evolution of trust is opening up new opportunities for inside sales teams.

As the emphasis on face-to-face interaction as a way to build trust decreases in lieu of other ways of building trust, the need to be “in the field” also decreases. It is unlikely that field sales as a discipline will disappear any time soon, the economic bar at which a face-to-face interaction is “necessary” is in the middle of a dramatic shift.

Trust and Economics

The amount of trust we put into a vendor has a strong relationship with the size of a deal we are willing to sign. The economic value must of course be there, but without the element of trust, the deal is unlikely to close. This trust shift therefore has major implications on the size of deals that are likely to be closable through an inside (over the phone/web) sales model.

Whereas historically, inside sales teams would generally close deals with an average selling price (ASP) of below $20,000, these teams are now able to close deals at much larger ASPs. Some organizations are seeing effective use of inside sales up to $100,000 in ASP. This shift towards an inside sales model reduces both the cost and complexity of the sales process, and in doing so opens up a significant economic opportunity.

David Skok of Matrix Partners wrote an excellent piece that looked at sales cycle complexity as a driver of the economics of a business that explores this concept in great detail. His article is well worth a read, but the short story is that any reduction in sales cycle complexity (such as moving from a field sales model to an inside sales model) can remove an order of magnitude from your overall costs (and hence required price points).


Trust and Reputation

Inside sales teams are able to develop the level of effectiveness that is being seen in recent times by building trusted relationships through online interactions and presence in communities, and understanding key players in the buying committee through LinkedIn and other online tools.

These teams also relying on their company's reputation to a large amount. That company reputation, if built on a foundation of corporate openness and transparency, can contribute greatly to the amount of trust prospective buyers are willing to give to the salesperson they are dealing with.

Although face-to-face interactions remain immensely valuable in building trust, and will remain necessary for very large transactions, the efficiencies of the inside sales model give it a significant advantage in smaller transactions. This efficiency win, combined with the new ability to build trust through means other than eye contact, are moving inside sales in many organizations from small transactions to much larger transactions. This trend is likely to continue as the communication tools and trust-building approaches continue to tip the balance in favour of the inside sales model. Read More...

6 Ways For Marketing to Help with Social Media

I can almost hear the comments already - shouldn't Marketing be "doing" social media, not "helping" with social media?

Yes.

Sort of.

But there's more to it than that.

The problem is that in many marketing teams, there's "marketing" and then there's "social media". The "marketing" group believes strongly in social media, and agree that it's crucial, but what they "do" is run events, launch promotions, spend ad budgets, and optimize keywords. The "social media" person manages the Twitter handle, the Facebook page, and the blog.

I might be oversimplifying, but this problem is one I've seen often enough to generalize.

The reason is that most B2B marketing teams are not set up to truly invest in social media. Most are organized more around "lightning strike" rather than "flywheel" investment patterns, and often marketing teams do not contain the real subject matter experts needed as content creators for great social media efforts.

This means that the "marketing" folks generally work with two major levers:

- A Budget for campaign spend (ads, search keywords, event promotions, show attendance)
- A Marketing Database of interested or potentially interested prospects

Because they don't fit into these two major levers, the "social media" person's efforts often feel a bit disconnected from the major promotions being run.

So what can be done?

6 Ways Marketing Can Invest in Social Media

Smart marketing teams are applying these two major levers to turbocharge their social media efforts in 6 ways:

1) Content as Advertisement: Instead of spending ad budgets to promote high level branding ad spots, smart marketers are spending ad budgets to share the rich content their team is creating with a much broader audience of potential viewers.

2) Social Content as Nurturing: Rather than creating separate content for each nurture campaign or newsletter, leveraging the best content that the team has created (measured by the number of tweets, for example) gives you a sure win in terms of audience engagement, and lets your content be discoverable by the broader audience in your marketing database.

3) Hiring for Content Creators: If the subject matter experts in your organization are not creating a steady stream of rich content, hire a journalist to facilitate the process (credit for this idea goes to David Meerman Scott). A daily stream of interesting and inspiring content should be no problem for a professional.

4) Sourcing Data for Insight: If the ideas for what to write about are running dry among your content creation team, fund a survey to provide data and insights on topic areas that they suggest. Most organizations surprise themselves with how much mileage they can get out of unique and interesting survey data.

5) Fanning the Flames of Engagement: When your subject matter experts do write content, the marketing team can fan the flames of engagement. Sharing and promoting each new piece of content in the networks it's relevant to (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Delicious, etc) helps build awareness, and motivates your subject matter experts to continue creating more great content.

6) Leveraging Search to Showcase Content: Rather than use your search marketing budget to drive traffic from the same set of terms to the same set of landing pages, leverage your search budget to help each blog post, video, or eBook "get found". The content on each post is very likely long-tail or niche oriented, so the traffic volumes for each one will not be large, but the relevance will be very high.


Done well, the marketing team facilitates the growth of a healthy and vibrant community that is aware of and engaged with the rich, relevant content your subject matter experts and social media team are creating.

While the flywheel vs lightning strike dynamic is a real challenge, these investment options allow marketing teams to work in a coordinated fashion towards true social media success.

What have you done to get the "marketing" and "social media" people on your marketing team to operate in a more coordinated way? Read More...

Friends, Avatars, Countrymen, lend me your ears

David Meerman Scott had a great post the other day on “I do not friend logos”. Very well put, and I agree with him.

As you know we’ve been doing a lot of experimentation with the best way to apply social media in the B2B marketing realm, and David’s post hit on one of the biggest challenges we’re all facing – what to do about Facebook as B2B marketers. The numbers are undeniable, the active population on Facebook is huge. However, the challenge we’ve all faced, as DM Scott puts so well, is that companies are not really “friendable”.

So, how about a personality… in our next B2B marketing experiment, we’re exploring the idea of a corporate “personality” in the social space. For anyone who is part of the Eloqua community, you may already have met Drake. He now has a Facebook page, a growing bunch of friends, and a personality.

Having a personality is a good start, but how can one translate that into real market traction? For one, a personality opens up more avenues for having fun than a corporate logo does. As the first example, Drake has launched his first contest – take a photo with him, and you might win an iPad. Not something that would fly with a corporate logo.

Is this taking the idea of “personas” a bit too far? Will this crack the code on B2B marketing on Facebook? We’re not sure, but you’ll be the first to know. Well, maybe not the “first”; that honor might go to David Meerman Scott – he is, after all, friends with Drake on Facebook. Read More...

LinkedIn as Facebook for the Business World

(note, this post was cross-posted on It's All About Revenue last week)

I've long been a bit skeptical about the use of Facebook for sharing business content. It is a great medium for personal sharing, and works well when businesses hit on the rare, but brilliant creative campaigns that go viral because they are cute, funny, or whimsical. However, for content like whitepapers, it just does not work.

I'm currently running an experiment to see if B2B content is "likeable" on Facebook, and while I have not compiled the data yet, the answers are looking bleak.

However, interesting developments continue at LinkedIn, with their recent promotion of a sharing bookmarklet. The technology is really simple:

1) Drag the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar:


2) Click it to share any page you are on:

3) Your status is updated with that link:


But the implications are more interesting. By doubling their investment in the status update as a communication metaphor that Twitter and Facebook have leveraged with great success, LinkedIn seems to be attempting to become a similar communications hub for the business world.

Whether they will be successful in becoming "Facebook for the business world" is unclear, but there are a few factors in their favour, and a few against worth considering:

3 Factors working in LinkedIn's favour:
- their presence as the defacto network of business connections gets them over the hurdle of network adoption quickly

- their deeper knowledge of business profiles means that they can (theoretically) do a much better job of understanding influence networks than alternatives

- the gulf between our social selves and our business selves is probably implanted deep in the brain stem, and may be impossible for Facebook to overcome as an inherently "social" ecosystem


3 Factors working against them:
- they are late to the party when it comes to building a robust developer ecosystem to extend and innovate on the core

- their application usage scenario feels a lot more like a CRM system (looking up contact and company details) than a communication platform like Twitter or Facebook. Making this shift will be difficult

- Each network has an implied "hurdle" of becoming connected (Twitter is very low, for example). LinkedIn has historically been a relatively "high" hurdle, which doesn't lead to broad sharing of ideas through many loose connections


What's your bet? Will LinkedIn succeed with this initiative and become Facebook for the business world? Read More...

Discoverable Messages and Direct Marketing

As marketers, we often think of there being a fundamental difference between the two ends of the media spectrum; on one end, direct, where an individual’s contact information is known and a message can be delivered directly, and on the other end mass media, where a broad audience is targeted based on demographics or audience characteristics. This has been an acceptable framework for a long time, as the difference in approach, goals, and outcomes has always been very significant.

This mental framework, however, disguises the fact that it is truly a spectrum. With recent advances in technology, and transitions in buyers, we are seeing a trend from both ends of the spectrum to progress towards the center. This means that the approach, goals, and outcomes of each media approach is becoming more similar, and the way in which we use them is also converging.

Mass Media and Precise Targeting

Mass media, historically, was extremely broadly targeted, based on high level demographics or audience profiles, and relied on your message being “discovered” by a small percentage of the viewing audience. Now, with online media, targeting of a message is growing ever more targeted. Ads can be targeted based on behavior, demographics, or firmographics, almost to the level of individuals, while search advertisements are targeted to the level of the query the individual is searching on.

No longer are these purely mass audiences. While they are not truly "direct" marketing in the sense that an individual's contact information is known, the precision with which the messages are delivered to specific segments makes them almost as precise.

Direct Marketing and the Challenge of Attention

On the other end of the spectrum, with the exponential growth in all forms of direct communications, especially online forms such as email, the challenge is no longer the delivery of the content. Now, the challenge is having the message within it “discovered” by the recipient, rather than ignored, thrown away, or deleted.

An email or direct mail piece may arrive (assuming things like good email deliverability, of course), as intended, at the recipient, but unless the recipient either trusts that the message will be of interest based on knowing the sender, or finds the subject line or teaser copy interesting, the message will be ignored. This is not unlike a television commercial or online banner ad that fails to attract the interest of the viewer.

Shared Challenges

The challenge that marketers now share, whether approaching this from the perspective of mass media or direct marketing, is that content must be both precisely targeted and highly relevant. The exact demographics, and most importantly psychographics, of who a buyer is and where she is in her buying process must be understood so that content, when presented, is "discovered". In the direct world, this can be measured by the rates of content interaction vs emotional unsubscribes while in the advertising world, it is measured by clickthrough rates on ads.

The more well targeted a message is in either approach, and the more relevant the content, the better a message is "discovered". It is only through having a message "discovered" and read that we as marketers are able to change the perceptions of our buyers.

How are you thinking about your messages? Are you seeing the difference between "direct" and "mass" media decrease?

Read More...

Is B2B Content "Likeable"?

With all the discussion about Facebook's new "Like" (or "Recommend") button for the web, I thought it would be worthwhile running a small experiment to answer the following question:

Do the readers of B2B content share more on Twitter or Facebook?

I will admit that I have certain biases, and I don't think that the human brain is very well adapted to truly merging business and social relationships as I wrote previously. However, in the interest of science, I thought the experiment was worthwhile.

I have reduced the automatic "sharing" options on each post to two - one that shares on Facebook, and one that shares on Twitter. I have historically been sharing content only on Twitter, so it has a bit of an advantage, so in order to somewhat compensate for that, I have added the Facebook sharing bar to the top of the post.

I could be proven wrong, but I suspect that, when I tally the counts a month or so from now, we'll see very little activity on Facebook in comparison to Twitter.

What have you seen for B2B content? Does it become shareable on Facebook? Read More...

The Flywheel and the Lightning Strike

There seems to be a bit of schizophrenia in B2B marketing these days. The excitement and interest in social media, and all it can do, is palpable. However, the number of companies that are making significant hard dollar investments in social media as a marketing initiative is not as large as one might expect. By “significant” I mean investments on the level of the other major marketing programs such as search or event marketing, with teams creating great content, engaging with audiences and finding creative ways to add value to potential buyers.

Most B2B marketing teams appear to be experimenting, rather than heavily investing. Sure, they have a Twitter account, and may have put up a blog and even a Facebook fan page, but the level of investment falls far shy of the amounts we invest in Google search campaigns, trade shows or sponsorships. Why is this?

Investment Dynamics: The Flywheel and the Lightning Strike

The most significant challenge in making comparable investments is in the way that investments are made and pay off. With most typical marketing investments, a “lightning strike” pattern is what is seen. A big investment is made, and a big payoff is realized. We run a large campaign, attend a major show or increase our investment in search ad spending, and we see the results immediately.

However, with social media, investments follow a “flywheel” pattern. Over time a steady pattern of investments builds more of a “presence” in social media, a community of interested participants and relationships with key influencers. The building of this “asset” takes significant time and effort – often years – but once it is built it pays off tremendously in terms of awareness, interest and lead flow.

Budgets and Planning

The challenge is that we, as marketing organizations, do not plan this way. Our planning and budgeting cycles are driven by an underlying assumption of a “lightning strike” pattern. Thus, when looking at which investments will drive leads and revenue this quarter or next quarter, a significant investment in social media does not generally make the top of the list.

Other departments have found ways to model, value, and plan for investments that pay off in the long run, but not in a short-term budget. Today’s CMOs must tackle this budgeting and planning challenge if they are to correctly prioritize the marketing investments we must make between those with short-term, “lightning strike” patterns of investment and long-term, “flywheel” patterns such as social media.

(this article first appeared as a guest post on ZoomInfo's "Follow the Lead" blog) Read More...

Event Marketing and the Information Concierge Concept

I was down at IMS in Atlanta recently, spending time with a lot of very interesting and creative marketers. The interesting thing about marketing events for the marketing field is that you see many interesting new ideas experimented with.

One of the techniques that caught my eye this time came from Jamie Turner and the team at BKV Digital. Rather than share the usual “promotional” content that we all see at these events, BKV took a different approach. Similar to the Information Concierge concept we discussed a few weeks back, they dropped topic-specific mini-cards on the tables. Each mini-card was essentially the title of a catchy blog post, and guided people to a specific landing page on the BKV website.



The audience at most events are in the early stages of awareness and education. They are looking for insights, ideas, and great content. The best marketing content should find a way to be relevant to audiences at this stage of their buying process, and buy focusing on mini-cards, rather than sales pitches, BKV allowed their audience to passively discover the content that they would find interesting.

It’s a simple technique, but very much inline with how buyers buy. Worth keeping in your back-pocket as you think about how to drive engagement at events you attend. Read More...

The Flywheel Effect

I'm back to blogging after a rather spontaneous, two-week hiatus. My wife were expecting our daughter to arrive at the end of April, but were surprised and thrilled to welcome a happy and healthy Sejal Anya Woods, to the world on April 2nd, a full four weeks early.

As I return to the world of work, now two weeks later, I realized that Sejal's surprising arrival gave me an accidental test-bed for one of the interesting aspects of social media, the fly-wheel effect. Normally, I've been very consistently active in social media, contributing two posts a week to the Digital Body Language blog, tweeting about each post, joining discussions on LinkedIn, and in general working to build awareness for the blog and its topics.

This is "pushing the flywheel" in order to get more traffic to the blog, and as everyone involved in social media knows, you push a lot before you begin to see real results in terms of awareness, traffic, and interest. After almost 18 months, I'm happy to report that the Digital Body Language blog is doing very well, but that leads to an interesting question:

What happens if you stop pushing the flywheel for a while?

Unlike typical marketing campaigns that really only generate results when they are "active", social media investments have a momentum that lasts for a long time as the articles are read, shared, discovered, searched for, and linked to.

I looked at the analysis of blog traffic for the two weeks that I was inactive, I saw an interesting result. (Eloqua users, here's how to track your own blogs this way). The chart shows blog traffic over the past few months, and you can see fairly steady numbers in terms of total, new, and existing visitors. I've eyeballed a red line at the top of the graph to give you a rough, non-scientific trend for total visitors, and a purple line for new visitors.

In the last two weeks, with no new posts, no tweets (by me), no discussions, on forums or on LinkedIn, you can see a drop in traffic - but only by a little bit. Interestingly, while the total traffic drops off by about 30%, the new visitors traffic only drops off by 10%, showing that the awareness, links, and search rankings that the blog has built up over time are just as effective at driving new visitors.

Investments in social media tend to have this "flywheel effect" where each effort gets things spinning just a little faster, but a well spinning flywheel can keep going on its own momentum for quite some time. Read More...

The Next Transition in Communication

Over time, the way in which communication happens has gone through some very interesting transitions. Each of them resulted in profound changes in information flow, and with that, significant changes in the discipline of marketing. We’re about to see the evolution of a fifth form of communication, and it will have an equally interesting effect on our lives.

1. One-to-One

The oldest form of communication is the one-to-one model. Face to face interactions and conversations were the main way in which messages were communicated. While very interactive, this was not a very scalable model at all. However, because it was the only way of conveying messages, it found an audience that was not overwhelmed with communication, and was likely much more receptive to new information.

2. Broadcast

The modern marketing industry was born with the advent of mass broadcast communications. Radio, print, or television enabled messages to be mass communicated to broad audiences. This was a highly scalable, but entirely non-interactive, as it was a one-way communication and allowed no way for the listener to engage with the communicator. Also, as broadcast grew, it reduced the attention span of audiences by overwhelming them with too many communications.

3. Email

The next interesting evolution in communication was with the advent of email. I’m not talking about email marketing, however, as that is much more similar to a broadcast model. Interpersonal email, however, added a very interesting element with the “Reply All” function. Now, the audience members in a communication group could easily respond to a discussion, and do so in a way that created ad hoc, topical group discussions. However, these discussions were closed to outsiders. A person who was not in the discussion would not see the discussion happening and could not join the discussion without explicitly being included by an insider.

4. Social Media

Solving this discovery problem, of course, was social media. Now, with the discussions happening in an open format, anyone can detect, read, or join existing discussions. The speed with which these communications happen has been well documented, and discussions on a particular topic can quickly grow to involve and influence hundreds of thousands of people. However, social media creates huge volumes of communications, most of which are not of interest. Filtering through this noise is a daunting challenge, and whereas most social media can be filtered by keywords or brand names, this still tends to result in an overwhelming volume of content.

5. Conversation Discovery

So what's next? As the major search engines apply their computing and analysis horsepower to understanding who is talking to whom about what, we may be on the verge of a fifth major shift in how information is communicated. Passive conversation discovery, guided by the algorithms of Google and Bing and their analysis of vast amounts of social media data, may be the way we discover what conversations are happening that may be of interest. Much like Amazon’s book recommendation systems which looks at “people like us” and sees what they are interested in, Google and Bing may soon be able to accurately detect and show specific conversations that are most likely to be of interest to each person. This finally allows the interactivity and openness of social media while not having the overwhelming volume of unfiltered social


Each of these evolutions in communication has changed how we interact with each other, how we learn, and how we market. This coming fifth transition promises to be as disruptive as any before it.

What are you doing to be ready?



(this article first appeared as a guest post on SavvyB2B) Read More...

The Rise of the "Fanmium" Products

Social media has led to a wealth of new ways of thinking about business. One of the most interesting, and most discussed, is the ceding of control of the market message to our audiences. While we as marketers may want to get out there and promote the value of our products and services, the most effective way by far is to have our audience do it for us.

This leads to an interesting paradox. We as marketing teams have energy and resources that we want to devote to making noise about our products and services, there is no longer an easy path to spending those resources in order to get the desired results. Covert tactics to pay people to write nice things about you are usually discovered quickly and backfire badly.

The "Fanmium" Strategy

However, there is one technique that I think is interesting and has merit; the “fanmium” strategy. This is a twist on the “freemium” product strategy, but involves giving away licenses of your product (or an equivalent) to those who provide coverage. Coverage could be anything from blog posts, becoming a fan on Facebook, or joining an online community.

I have seen this strategy being used from time to time, but most recently came across this strategy being used by a company called Cerebrata, which offers a product called Cloud Storage Studio. In various discussions on Windows Azure forums, I had seen mentions of the use of Cloud Storage Studio, probably coming across references to it 6 or 7 times. Finally, I had a problem that I had seen them mentioned as providing a solution to, and I downloaded a free trial.

What caught my eye though, was the way they structured their licensing:

- A trial version, feature complete, time limited (30 days)
- A development version, feature limited
- A professional version ($49,99)
- And most interestingly, a “Fanmium” offering


To be more precise, here is what they say:



(full disclosure, I bought a full license to Cloud Storage Studio, and am doing this post only because I found the “Fanmium” concept very interesting).

In looking back on what had caused me to find Cloud Storage Studio in the first place, all of the reviews and mentions were very accurate, and none had been overstated. The product is an excellent product, and well worth the price tag (it saved me about 5 hours of work the first time I used it), and without that the strategy would not work.

The key to this strategy, I believe, is looking for honest exposure, rather than trying to buy favorable reviews. Cerebrata is very clear on their desire for honest reviews. They are, luckily, able to achieve favorable reviews on the merits of the product alone.

Looked at from all perspectives, this appears to be a very good strategy:

Cerebrata:
o $49.99 for each bit of exposure is a very reasonable price to pay
o Investing in product, rather than advertising, makes this strategy viable

Bloggers:
o Providing an honest opinion on a product in exchange for a free license is a good deal
o $49.99 of value is not enough of an economic motivator to risk alienating the audience you have grown by providing an inaccurate review or false praise

Buyers:
o Finding the uses for Cloud Storage Studio in context of discussions of the problems they solve was much more helpful than high level advertising
o Free trial version allows independent assessment of product quality, regardless of reviews

What are your thoughts? Have you considered a “fanmium” offering? What do you think the constraints are on when it would/wouldn’t work in a B2B environment? Read More...

Is Foursquare Relevant for B2B Marketers?

Recently, I’ve been playing around with foursquare to get a better understanding of it, and think about how it might have a significant impact on B2B marketers. Whereas I’m far from a power user, I have unlocked a few badges (sadly, one of my first was the “Jetsetter” badge that is given for checking in at 5 airports), and I’m in strong contention for the Mayorship of Eloqua.

With South by Southwest happening recently, the number of foursquare announcements on Twitter, of people “checking in” made #SXSW a top Trending Topic. Considering that foursquare only launched a year ago at SXSW 2009, this is clearly a phenomenon worth looking at.

Lots of businesses, especially those selling to consumers, are experimenting with special offers via foursquare in order to motivate those in the area to drop in, make a purchase, or accept an offer. However, it’s not clear that there is any relevant parallel of this in the business to business environment. Business buyers for any given organization are much fewer in numbers, do not generally make purchases based on their current location, and are unlikely to be motivated by the style of offers (come in now, save $10) that are viable using location-based advertising.

Certainly, at tradeshows and events, many B2B organizations are experimenting with foursquare, setting up transient “locations” at their booth and offering prizes to people who check in. I suspect, however, that this way of using foursquare in a B2B marketing environment is temporary at best, and will quickly pass.

I was tempted to conclude that foursquare might, therefore, have limited relevance to B2B marketers, but as I looked into what businesses had been tagged in places as disparate as Toronto, Zurich, Brussels, Antwerp, and London, I began to realize that, very quickly, vast numbers of business venues are being tagged. Almost every venue I visited had already been entered into the foursquare database.

The motivation to do this is startlingly small. Users are able to unlock “badges” with colorful icons and creative names like “Far, Far, Away” and “Playa Please”. Whereas it may seem too small of a motivator to incite behavior, the badges are displayed to the world, and it clearly is driving 100s of Millions of venues around the world to be tagged. I will even admit, it’s a bit addictive, and I found myself looking into the meaning of the badges to see how I might “unlock” the next one.

And that’s where the true opportunity of foursquare gets revealed.

The badges are unlocked for all sorts of very specific behaviours, such as checking in at 25 pizza restaurants. In order to be seen as having done these specific behaviours, of course, the venues you visit must be tagged as such. Because of this, there is a motivation on the part of every user to correctly (and with great detail) tag each venue with its correct type. Foursquare uses up to three levels of increasing detail to tag each venue – a very detailed categorization.

As a B2B marketer, especially one selling to very small businesses that are owner-run and not adopters of technology, this (theoretically) makes available a highly targeted data set. Want to know how many ship’s chandlers are in the port of Zanzibar? (an example that came up in a recent conversation I had with ShipServ’s John Watton). Foursquare may soon have the best data set. Currently, they don’t collect contact information for those businesses, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to apply the same model to acquire that data.

This proves a challenging problem for the classic providers of data who employ research teams to keep their data up to date. The more remote and small the businesses are, the worse the economics are in keeping this data accurate and current. Obviously, Google has been working on this problem too, from a different angle, by allowing business owners to update their own information on Google Maps. However, the dynamic is very different. In foursquare’s model, high-tech enthusiasts with iPhones and Blackberries update the data on multiple locations based on the motivations of a game, while in Google’s model, individual small business owners update their own information on Google based on their own business motivations.

Looked at side-by-side, the data provider models are very different:

Classic: Data provider employs researchers to update data on businesses

Google: Data provider allows business owners to update their own data

Foursquare: Data provider motivates population of enthusiasts to update data on local businesses

It’s not clear which one of these models will be able to collect the most up to date, accurate, and deep data on smaller businesses. It’s equally unclear whether foursquare will be able to leverage this data set to enable B2B marketers who target these micro-segments. However, as I think about what effect foursquare will have on B2B marketing, it is this effect that seems most promising.

Models that leverage the network effects of millions of people can be immensely powerful, and it appears that foursquare has hit on one of these models for gathering deep, location-based information on businesses around the world, that may be extremely valuable to B2B marketers who need this data set.

I would love to hear comments from other data providers, or anyone familiar with the data space, on how they see this model evolving. Read More...

Information Will Find Me

As the way that we find information becomes increasingly driven by social influence, it’s interesting to look at where this trend goes in the longer term. The logical extension of this trend is that the consumers of information – our prospective buyers – will expect that the information they should be interested in will find them, rather than them finding information. Much as in the consumer world, songs, books, and movies are recommended to us based on collaborative filtering techniques, information in the business world may soon find us.

A combination of our own unique social graph, and that social graph’s interests and reading history, may soon make the dominant trend of information discovery one of passive recommendation, rather than active discovery (such as via search). As each individual’s interest areas, business role, and social influence graph becomes more and more known by search engines and content portals, the information being presented will cater itself more deeply to what is likely to be of interest.

Analytics across extremely broad populations and vast amounts of data on what was actually clicked or viewed will allow this process to become startlingly precise and highly accurate, further increasing its effectiveness, adoption, and relevance to marketers.

The question for marketers, of course, is how to have relevant content discovered by appropriately interested buyers in this way. The two key points are relevance and interest. As marketers, we need to focus on creating interesting content that is of relevance to each type of buyer we are likely to encounter. This content, whether it is eBooks, webinars, live events, or interesting data, can then be introduced to the discussion through well targeted nurture marketing approaches.

In a world driven by passive information recommendation, there is nothing more important than having your information be found interesting by people who are "like" the people you want to target.

When your information is found, and deemed interesting by an influencer population, it will find its way to a much broader population. Vice versa, if it is not found, or not deemed interesting, it will not find its way to a broader population.

In a world driven by passive information recommendation, there is nothing more important than having your information be found interesting by people who are "like" the people you want to target. The more relevant, interesting, and targeted the content is, the more likely each potential influencer is to read, recommend, or share it, which then guides whether audiences beyond your own will have that content recommended to them based on their unique interests and social graph.

Read More...