TV is Dead. Long Live TV.

A great post by Brian Halligan at HubSpot, on a dinner he had with a group of Madison Avenue folks, got me thinking about some possible futures for Television. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, I don't think that Television is about to suffer the same fate as newspapers as information becomes free.

Here's why - we're lazy.

I recently watched some Olympics coverage, and was impressed with the seamless flow back and forth from the events that were being shown to a physiologist talking about the effect on the human body of the snowboard half-pipe, to a profile of one of the upcoming short track speedskaters, to an in depth look at how moguls are judged, to an interview with a hockey coach. It was this careful orchestration of content that made the experience enjoyable, and all I had to do was sit back and take it in. For that, I watched a few ads.

Could I have found all of that content online? Probably. But the point is I couldn't be bothered.

In a similar manner, iTunes beats out online downloading of music for many people. I don't subscribe to the idea that we download via iTunes because of a profound respect for copyright law (see Larry Lessig at TED on that topic). I strongly believe that many of us use iTunes just because it is easier. It's just plain easier to find, download, and be assured of quality. For that, 99c is worth it.

Television fits this iTunes model.

Television, generally, does a great job of orchestrating, curating, and sequencing the content. This has a value that needs to be appreciated by anyone predicting the downfall of television. I suspect that we, as viewers, will demonstrate a willingness to "pay" for that value through advertising.

Newspapers, while also providing content, don't cater to the same level of passively experiencing the content. One needs to leaf through a newspaper, pick an article, and read it. Far more active of an experience - and not much different than finding the same article online.

Of course, the question of what happens to the classic "30 second spot" is up in the air. Exactly how we "pay" for television with our attention is a bit unclear, but economics will find a way. Whether it is through deeper integration of product placements, integrated story-telling, or better targeting or quality of 30 second ads that make us want to watch, the model can be found.

What do you think? Is there a future for Television? Read More...

Four Reasons for an Information Concierge

There is a role in modern sales and marketing that is just starting to form. I call it the “Information Concierge”, but I suspect a similar role is called many things in many different organizations. This role bridges the gap between potential buyers and the information we have that is of value to them.

In many ways, this is what many of us are doing in social media, discovering conversations that relate to the topics of interest to us, and helping the people in those conversations through sharing data, perspective, anecdotes, and frameworks.

This, in essence, is the role of a concierge – helping to connect those seeking information with the information itself. But, it’s not purely an altruistic pursuit, we do it in order to ensure that our data, our perspectives, our anecdotes, and our frameworks make their way into the conversation. We do this in a non-salesy way, but we do it in a way that works to guide prospects our way slowly over time.

So why not search?

We’re all aware of the power of Google and Bing to find information, and the trends in the market towards deeper searches with more words. It is the main driver of website traffic for many businesses, and many of us have put great effort into being found by the search engines, so it may seem a little counter-intuitive to need an “information concierge” role. After all, it seems like it is an inefficient, human-based way to solve a challenge that the search engines solve so much more efficiently.

The Need for an Information Concierge

I believe though, that there are four reasons that the information concierge role is necessary, and will continue to grow, even as search engines continue to improve:

Clarity: As buyers look for deeper and deeper content, the clarity with which they must craft their search query increases. If you are looking for “measuring email deliverability rates for dedicated sending IPs”, you may or may not find an article that discusses “monitoring email sender reputations and non-delivered email counts by sender address”, even though it may be precisely what you are looking for. The information concierge role, however, can put these two together easily, and guide a person who asks that question in a discussion to the right discussion.

Priority: We all know that the first page of results on Google, and only the first few results there, are what generates nearly all the clicks. If a great article does not find its way to that top list, it will not be discovered by searchers in most cases. The information concierge can prioritize differently, and ensure that the best article, or perspective, for the question at hand is the one that is presented.

Ease: Let’s be honest, it can be difficult to find the information you need sometimes, and just asking a question in an active forum can result in a very quick set of detailed and valuable responses. As we move away from attempting to sell to buyers and towards facilitating their buying processes, the easier we can make it on them, the better.

Perspective: Perhaps the most important reason is the occasional need to change a buyer’s perspective. If they are not aware of your solution category, are thinking about the problem in an outdated way, or are attaching too much weight to the wrong decision criteria, only an information concierge can detect this, and provide them with a carefully crafted and well presented case for changing that perspective.

Search is an incredibly powerful and highly relevant way in which buyers obtain their information, but it remains only one part of the picture. As we move forward, I would suspect we’ll see a much clearer formalization of the “Information Concierge” role.

Does anyone in your organization currently perform this role? What department are they part of? Read More...

Twitter, Evolution and the Cambrian Explosion

I’ve always been a fan of the history of early evolution. Seeing the way that life adapts to drastic changes in its environment is fascinating. Often a significant change in the environment can trigger a wave of adaptations and a wave of extinctions, and the resulting effect is an ecosystem that is substantially transformed from what it had been previously.

So what on earth does that have to do with Twitter? Bear with me for a second.

I recently read a book called “In the Blink of an Eye” by Andrew Parker that talks about light, sight, and the Cambrian explosion of biodiversity. The Cambrian explosion is the term for the rapid appearance of most complex animals in the fossil record about 530 million years ago. Whereas there had been mainly simple organisms prior, there was a sudden appearance of most major groups of complex organisms in this period. The theory proposed in the book was that this diversity corresponded with the advent of the ability to see, albeit in very basic form.

Once organisms were able to see, a back and forth cycle of predation, defense, and consumption mechanisms exploded through the animal and plant kingdoms:

Predation: Organisms that were better able to see and better able to capitalize on that site through becoming predators did extremely well in the defenseless environment of the time

Defense: Organisms that were able to defend themselves through shells, or through rapid escape (again aided by sight) survived, and those that were not so lucky perished

Consumption: Organisms who used their sight to identify resources (water, shelter, food) were at an advantage over organism who felt for these same resources blindly.

The development of teeth and shells in this explosion of diversity also meant that there was something to fossilize, and lead to the sudden appearance of a broad fossil record.

This one simple capability - sight - resulted in the most significant acceleration of evolution ever seen.

Twitter, and social media in general, may result in an equally similar acceleration in the evolution of how we all do business.

It’s that simple. With Twitter and social media, you can now see conversations happening among customers, prospects, influencers, and your competitor’s customers. In the same way that the advent of eyesight enabled a broad range of new evolutionary strategies, social media enables a broad range of customer engagement strategies. In the same way that species unable to adapt to the new environment did not survive past the Cambrian era, businesses who do not adapt to this reality will be challenged over the next decade.

Similarly, this new vision can be used for today’s business equivalents of predation, defense, or consumption:

Predation: Okay, it's a harsher word than we'd like to use, but companies are able to see your customers conversations. If your customers are dissatisfied, you can be sure that your competition will not hesitate in connecting with them.

Defense: Companies are actively putting the processes in place to defend their customer base by ensuring maximum satisfaction. Unsatisfied customers are now visible, and without the processes to quickly rectify this situation, your biggest asset is left defenseless against aggressive competitors

Consumption: Companies are listening, understanding, and seeing where prospect gather, what they are looking for, and how they acquire their information. This insight makes them significantly wiser as they work to acquire new business. Organizations who are not listening to the conversations are like those organisms still feeling blindly for resources – likely to be outmaneuvered at every step.

Social media, and tools like Twitter have made a drastic change in our business environment. Where business evolves to in the next 5 or 10 years is anybody’s guess, but the only safe bet is that it won’t be the same as it is today and that following a script is more dangerous than improvising. Now is our chance to recognize the changes in the environment and consciously and quickly adapt to them. If we don’t we may share a similar fate to the pre-Cambrian organisms who saw the early versions of eyesight as “just a neat little toy that teenagers play with”.

Read More...

How much is too much? Frequency management and control

One conversation I end up in a lot with clients is the "how many times can I email a person per month?" conversation. Unfortunately, there is not a magic number, and attempting to govern around one can be damaging.

The reason that there's not a magic number is that email is only useful in the context of building a relationship, and in a relationship communication frequency changes dramatically depending on the type of relationship and where that relationship is at the moment. Think of this question in terms of your communications with your friends and family - how many times per month do you communicate with your spouse? kids? Aunt Hilda? Neighbors? Old friends from school days? The answer is that it depends on the relationship.

It's the same thing in B2B marketing. If you are actively engaging with a prospect, and they are highly interested in what you are offering, they will want, and appreciate, frequent communications. However, if you're only lightly engaged with someone, and they have only displayed minimal interest, you will turn them off with more than a communication per month in many cases.

The answer is that you have to manage this from the bottom up, rather than the top down.

There is not a top-down X emails per month number that you can manage to. Instead, you need to understand your audience in terms of how much you have communicated to them and, more importantly, how engaged they are with you, and use that to guide communication frequency.

Use your understanding of your audience's response to your marketing (their Digital Body Language) to segment them into groups. Use communication frequency and response frequency(email opens, clicks, form submits, web visits, etc) to define three segments:

• High Engagement: you have sent them many communications, and they have shown great inbound interest


• Moderate Engagement: you have sent them some communications, but their inbound activity remains occasional


• Low Engagement: you have communicated with them, but they show little to no inbound activity
  

From here, you can then use these segments to build a bottom-up frequency management structure. Look at your communications and define what category they fall into. If they are a "required" or "all recipients" category, you may not suppress against any of the groups (eg, registration confirmation for events the recipient just registered for, or the quarterly thought leadership newsletter). If the messages are in an "active interest" category, you may suppress Low and Moderate Engagement segments from receiving them (up to the minute news, detailed product information, etc), and if the messages are in a "moderate interest" category you may only suppress the Low Engagement segment.

This gives you a good bottoms up model for structuring your communications strategy to avoid over-communicating with some of your recipients (causing Emotional Unsubscribes: http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/emotional-unsubscribes.html) without preventing the formation of deeper relationships with those who are showing great interest.

I look forward to your comments or experiences with managing communication frequency.

Read More...

Proactive Service, Twitter, and Brand

I said that yesterday's was my last post, but the folks at TripIt gave me a reason to write another one. There's a lot of debate going on with regards to how social media can be used in B2B, and here's one example of a great way.

TripIt is a service that organizes your travel - you forward your itinerary to an email address, it parses it, organizes it, gives you maps, directions, etc. It even tells you when people you know are in the area. I travel a lot and it's a great service.

But I don't like their calendar synch. It's not that it's broken, it just does things in a way that I don't like. I would never actually call into their support desk because it's not a big enough deal to bother. I did a tiny bit of looking around to see if I could make it work the way I wanted to, and I couldn't - I wasn't sure whether it was me or the service, and I will admit, I didn't really put that much effort into it. I just went about my day as a mildly grumbly TripIt user.

And then I Twittered about it, part happy, part grumbly.

Within a short period of time, I got a tweet back from Kristin at TripIt, asking me to connect with her offline.

I did, and it turns out that I wasn't missing anything in the calendar synch, but they know about the issue I was complaining about and are working on it.

So now I'm a happier TripIt user. Interestingly, the problem I had did not change. I still don't like their calendar synch, but the proactive nature of their service made me significantly more happy.

A few points from this experience for any companies who are not on Twitter yet:

1. Get out there and listen. You'll be amazed what you hear that you wouldn't hear from any other channel (in this case they knew it already, but in many cases, you may not).
2. Don't fool yourself into thinking that if you have a great support desk, you don't have to listen on Twitter, there are a LOT of issues with any product, service, or company, that are annoying enough to stop someone referring you, but not significant enough (or the type of issue) that one would pick up the phone to call a support desk about.
3. Proactive service, even if the problem isn't resolved, is very helpful for customer satisfaction. In this case, I at least now know (a) my problem is not currently solvable, and (b) the folks at TripIt know about it and are working on a solution. That makes me feel a lot better.

If you're not actively listening on Twitter, on blogs, on all forms of social media, you should be.

Here's my prediction:

In a few years, we'll all be laughing at service organizations that "wait for
unsatisfied users to actually pick up the phone to reach out to THEM."

Merry Christmas to all, have a great holiday season. Read More...

High noon at the web form

Quickest draw wins... well not quite, but speed is more important than many B2B marketers realize (or at least act upon). Fine tuning your response to inbound inquiries can have a significant impact on your success without requiring much of an investment.

Leigh Anne Wallace at Reachforce had a blog entry recently that was a good reminder for all of us of the studies that show the real benefits to responding quickly to inbound inquiries: http://blog.reachforce.com/sales-and-marketing-tips/what-is-your-web-lead-response-time-b2b-marketing-and-sales-tip-177/. From the original report:

"The speed of first attempt (time to first dial) to a newly generated web lead
correlated with a significant increase in the number of qualified leads. For
each tier of delayed response in the survey question (for instance, responding in 30 minutes rather than 10 minutes) the percent of leads qualified dropped 4.3% and close rates fell nearly 2%."

It's more difficult than it seems as you need to put three basic processes in place to have it make sense, unless your flow of inquiries is small enough that you really can follow up with every inquiry. You need:

1. a basic call/no-call qualification process
2. the basics of routing to the right rep
3. a quick notification process
   

For the lead qualification process, I'd hesitate to call it lead scoring just yet, because you many want to lower the bar a little bit and follow up with most inquiries, even those that would not pass as A leads. There is a strong argument in favour of automating most of this process because it's all too easy to come up with an "I didn't call because..." reason after the fact if you leave it to the individual callers. You'll likely need to manage and measure follow-up speed in a hands-on way, and if it's open to loose interpretation, that process might fall apart quickly.

For lead routing, again, simple is best. The best I've seen had a very small dedicated person/team on it, rather than distributing more broadly. It's likely that your first call outcome goals are relatively simple in nature (more details, setting a meeting, etc) and can be managed by someone who is not that territory's sales rep.

For notification, once you know you're going to call them, and you know the right rep to make the call, email is usually quickest and easiest. Its main drawback is that it's more difficult to close the loop and monitor response times, but to get a process up and running quickly it is the easiest bet.

It doesn't take long to get a feel for what your actual response times to inbound marketing inquiries are, and if it's not what you'd hoped, there may be an easy way for you to improve your team's performance. A quick "mystery shopper" inquiry or two can give you a good idea of how you're really performing. In fact, I might try that with the Eloqua team right now... Read More...

Interesting Times in The Demand Generation Space

I spent a bit of time this weekend reading (okay, more like skimming, I admit) a report on our recent SAS-70 audit. I would be lying to call it an interesting read; detailed descriptions of our process controls, policies, and operations as a software company. But, it did get me thinking about the ongoing evolution of the Demand Generation space.


It's an interesting space, and it has been evolving very rapidly. When we started Eloqua back at the end of 1999, Google was still 10 months away from launching adwords, blogs only existed in primitive form as frequently updated web pages, and most B2B websites were barely more than brochure-ware.


Now, 9 years later, finishing a SAS-70 audit is one of those moments that makes one take a moment to reflect on the space, where it came from, and where it's going (I guess it's a bit like that first grey hair; a sign of age and wisdom, they say, but also a moment to reflect on times past). After a few years in which us early Demand Generation vendors stumbled around unsure of our own identities, the space has taken on a somewhat clear identity (*nowhere near as clear as the identity of spaces like CRM, but Demand Gen is a lot newer of a space than CRM).


Demand Generation essentially entails, at its core, the use of web analytics to understand prospect behaviour and intent (what we call Digital Body Language). Based on that understanding, marketers then:

• Personalize the targeting, timing, and content of messages to prospects based on their interest area and interest level


• Determine which leads are ready for sales through lead scoring and lead routing, while nurturing the leads that are not


• Analyze the success of their campaigns based on how they facilitate prospects' buying processes


• Continue to grow their understanding of each prospect's Digital Body Language through management and enhancing of their marketing data

So, that leads to a fairly defined set of functionality; email, web analytics, search tracking, landing pages, form capture, lead scoring, marketing automation, lead routing, CRM integration, basic data management, and analytics. As we close out 2008, that's where the core capabilities are in the space.

As we've had the good fortune to work with a wide variety of clients over the years, the directions in which they are hoping to see the space evolve are not always identical, and the SAS-70 audit process made that point quite clear. This is an audit that larger organizations (especially public companies) are seeking, whereas smaller organizations often do not have the same requirements.

The next few years will show an interesting evolution in the Demand Generation space as this is just one aspect of its continuing evolution. Here's what we're seeing if I use a way-too-broad brush to show the trends:


Larger organizations: as they shift their marketing efforts more towards demand generation and inbound marketing and away from outbound marketing, they are looking for ways to manage 100s of marketers, 1000s of campaigns, and 10s of 1000s of marketing assets around the world. Campaign planning, calendaring, and approvals are of interest. Similarly, the need to communicate with millions of contacts and score leads across multiple geographies and product lines makes data management a key area of focus for them.


Smaller organizations: often more nimble and innovative in their approach, and more aggressively adopting social media tools for demand generation, such as search engine optimization, blogs, Twitter, etc. This drives an increased need for cross-media integration, embedding of RSS content, and social media awareness.


So, we're at an interesting cross-roads as an industry, because although I have bucketed each of these needs by size of company, both groups benefit from each other's investment. It's an excellent benefit of the SaaS model. Even things like the work that was done in preparation for our SAS-70 audit, although not required by the smaller organizations we work with, will benefit them in terms of process management and organization, in the same way that the investments we have been making over the past while in simplicity and usability are also benefiting our larger clients.


It will be interesting to see how the Demand Generation industry evolves over the next 5 - 10 years. Will it evolve into very different and distinct solutions for small organizations and large, as we see in the difference between accounting and ERP software? Or will small and large organizations use shared aspects of a common platform as is the model with SaaS CRM?


Looking forward to the next few years, and I'm very interested in your comments. Read More...

6 Really Simple Marketing Metrics for your Execs

We've all seen a similar cycle.... if you ask a marketing exec in a B2B company what metrics they'd want, it ends up in a complex description of ROI, funnel velocity, or influence measurement. Great goals, for sure, but not exactly quick wins. So, the reports aren't created for them and they end up with nothing. Let's start from the other direction, and look at 6 very simple measurements that you can provide them that they give them some simple insight into what's actually going on in marketing.


If you already provide this, fantastic, but I suspect there might be more than a few execs who don't have this data about marketing, and who would truly appreciate it. I get the pleasure of chatting with lots of present and future Eloqua clients, and from them I commonly hear that even high level data like this is very much appreciated.


-Contact database growth over time; gives a good sense of new name acquisition, unsubscribes, and overall size of list.


- Web traffic (new and returning visitors); this is where you're driving most people to if you're successful, it never hurts to have execs know about traffic levels. Knowing that x-thousand people are viewing your site on a daily basis never hurts in ensuring budget for the site redesign doesn't get cut, either.

-Raw Inquiries (form submits); I'm a huge proponent of lead scoring, but if you're not at the point where you can provide an executive dashboard of leads, properly scored and tallied, at least put out a list of raw inquiry counts to show inbound interest


-Total Campaigns; How many unique campaigns have been sent in the last month. This shows the level of activity of your marketing team in creating and promoting content, events, and webinars

-Communication Frequency; How often are you communicating with your database, are you under/over communicating


-Top Search Terms; How are people finding you? What are they most interested in, and is it more awareness, discovery, or validation?

So why these metrics? Well, for one, they're easy to do. Not much work with data or business processes involved, and you can have execs looking at them quickly. But, the more important reason is that they begin to focus attention on the right issues. It's only a beginning, but the direction is the right one.


As the world moves from outbound marketing and promotion to inbound marketing and demand generation, you need your execs to be asking things like: How do people find us? How many people are we educating? How frequently do they come to us for more information? Are they only passively reading that information or willing to provide their information in order to get it?


The more that execs ask this type of question, the more they will be bought in to the concepts of inbound marketing and demand generation. They will push for better nurturing of leads, more investment in social media to generate market awareness, more lead scoring, and better coordination with sales on which leads to hand off, and when. Those are the right directions for them to push, and if you can provide them with some of the right data at the start, you'll inspire more of those questions.


If you're already an Eloqua client and just want to build this out, there's some info on dashboarding on Eloqua Artisan - the user blog: http://eloqua.blogspot.com/2008/12/quick-win-whats-going-on-in-my-database.html. Enjoy - I'd love to hear some of your best dashboards that people can get started with quickly and easily. Read More...