Stealing from Peter to Pay Paul

April 28, 2008 By joezuc Leave a Comment

The Marketing Consigliere had a slow week because he has been the Chair of the 2008 Mid-Atlantic Business Plan Competition. It was a great event and if you have a collegiate business plan competition near you, he encourages you to support it however you can.

Many thanks to the amazing student teams, the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, the MIT Enterprise Forum of Washington-Baltimore, the judges, and sponsors.

Now The Marketing Consigliere has the time to try to figure out why his blog is having graphics problems…

Blog to you soon….

Filed Under: Leadership, Marketing Tagged With: ,

EMM….UMM….HMM….

April 21, 2008 By joezuc Leave a Comment

Conducting his Monday morning ritual of reviewing “Network Updates” from the weekend for my Linkedin connections, The Marketing Consigliere noticed the “Answers” section posted a question in the topic “Internet Marketing, Enterprise Software” reading “Has anyone tried OpenEMM? What is your experience?”

He thought, “Marrone! an Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) platform I haven’t heard of!  How embarassing for a supposedly thought leader/technology marketing consultant!  Will this be a fly in the ointment for the likes of Unica, Aprimo, Oracle, SAP, et.al.?”  Will an open source EMM platform allow more organizations and even SMBs entry into the EMM Club?

Maybe he was just dreaming and needed to wake up and have more coffee. Well, he did and my morning drowsiness that turned into excited panic quickly subsided.

OpenEMM

OpenEMM is an open source based E-mail Marketing Management tool. Just E-Mail, Ma’am. And from the looks of it, we already have a selection of economical, robust, sufficent email marketing management tools such as ExactTarget, CheetahMail, or ConstantContact. He can’t say he was impressed with OpenEMM’s feature set; nothing out of the ordinary popped out at him.  Addtionally, If you read the product roadmap on their website, you can’t see much happening, although they claim a plug-in for SugarCRM is “under development”

Not what he was hoping it would be, but maybe he will be surprised in the future…

Filed Under: CRM, EMM, SMB Marketing Tagged With: ,

Il Sottovoce – The Whisper – VII

April 19, 2008 By joezuc Leave a Comment

The Marketing Consigliere

Val più la pratica della grammatica.

Experience is more important than theory.

Filed Under: Il Sottovoce - The Whisper, Leadership, Marketing Tagged With:

There’s No "I" in Social Media!

April 17, 2008 By joezuc Leave a Comment

OK, there are actually two “i”s in “Social Media,” but The Marketing Consigliere’s point is based on the real popular phrase he lifted this blog’s title from: “There’s no “I” in “Team.” Social media obviously implies groups of individuals communicating or collaborating. And in a Marketing group, there’s no difference. Leadership must learn that Social Media, in order to be successful, must be a team effort.

This week, Advertising Age asked “Does Your Company Need a Chief Blogger?” Beth Snyder Bulik interviewed three leading Social Media experts, one of whom The Marketing Consigliere has the privilege to know.  Geoff Livingston of Livingston Communications and the Buzz Bin blog had solid insight about “looking before you leap” into Social Media. You need to read this.

The previous week, Paul Gillin of Gillin Communications, who he doesn’t know, wrote “Are Social Media Jobs Just a Dodge?” in BtoB Magazine.  He could not agree with Paul more, especially on this one quote near the end of the article: “In short, every communication coming out of a company in the future will need to be aligned with a mechanism for seeking out and accomodating customer feedback.” THAT is C4ISR Marketing!  He will take this quote and run with it.

Social Media, “Web 2.0,” and “blogging” are not one-off “experiments” that can be assigned to and funded for one particular person only to be pulled if that person stumbles while finding their way. Organizations need to really invest in these new tools and include the enterprise in determining objectives and how to implement, share the burdens and reap the rewards of this aspect of Net-Centric Marketing .

Filed Under: Blogging, Leadership, Marketing, Net-Centric Marketing, Social Networking, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , ,

FOSE Followup Folly

April 14, 2008 By joezuc Leave a Comment

First allow The Marketing Consigliere to apologize.  He migrated to WordPress 2.5 this weekend and found out there’s a major bug that doesn’t allow you to upload images.  He will keep his text brief so your eyes don’t glaze over!

A week after FOSE and his blog about it, he  received an email that caught his attention, but not for the reason that the Marketer who sent it wanted. Apparently CompuSystems‘ service, BuyerConnect, is telling him that it has a record of all the exhibitors he allowed to scan my tradeshow badge. And that “Compliments of show management, you can access the contact information for these exhibitors – FREE OF CHARGE – when you visit the BuyerConnect website.” All I have to do is go to a link they provide in the email and type in the ID and password they’ve provided.

Hallelujah! The Marketing Consigliere never knew he could get vendor contact information “FREE OF CHARGE!”  In a Network-Centric Marketing world, at that!  He guesses the free program from the show listing all vendor contact information doesn’t count.

He hopes that their Marketers have some back office intelligence that would measure his behavior if he went to their site; it would be of particular value to the exhibitors if there were some data from a lead scoring engine that could be shared with them.

However, the back office intelligence would be the only intelligence present. The email copy lacked intelligence. What Marketing muttonhead thought that The Marketing Consigliere would be like Pavlov’s Dog, rushing to connect with the vendors he spoke less than two minutes with?  Why not provide him with a feedback mechanism that allowed him to rate the booth aesthetics, competence of the booth staff, or measure his recall of the exhibitor and its products or services?

In a B2B world with an increasing reliance on critical CRM tools, BuyerConnect and their customers are blowing a C4ISR Marketing opportunity. So much more could be done with the technology they are leveraging, and they could have done a much better job with their messaging.

Filed Under: B2B Marketing, C4ISR Marketing, CRM, Net-Centric Marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Il Sottovoce – The Whisper – VI

April 12, 2008 By joezuc Leave a Comment

The Marketing Consigliere

Tanti galli a cantar non fa mai giorno.

Many roosters don’t make the morning come earlier.

Filed Under: Il Sottovoce - The Whisper, Leadership, Marketing Tagged With:
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