The Marketing Consigliere has let an article from AdWeek ping around his head a little while before he passed judgement on it.
OMS Whistle Stop Tour – Don’t Miss the Train!
April 21, 2009 By Leave a Comment
The Online Marketing Summit is back and bigger than ever. This year, they’re calling it the “Whistle Stop Tour” because the producers of the OMS actually are traveling city to city by train.
Intelligence 2.0 – Much Smarter Than You Think
February 17, 2009 By Leave a Comment
The Marketing Consigliere likes to take examples from our nation’s honored warriors and apply them to business and marketing problems. He also wants to recognize things which can be publicized from the impressive United States Intelligence Community that are relevant to Network-Centric Marketers.
Yesterday, the Adobe Intelligence Community Executive Forum, sponsored by Adobe and Carahsoft Technology Corporation, a Washington, DC based government IT solutions provider, was held with a gathering of over one hundred professionals from Federal agencies and contractors. Bob Gourley, CTO of Crucial Point LLC, a well-respected security technology consulting and program management firm, served as a panel moderator for some very good talks on what Federal agencies were doing with regard to collaboration, information sharing, and Web 2.0.
The Keynote Speaker, John E. Hale of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Intelligence Community Enterprise Services (ICES), enlightened the audience with ODNI’s embracing of technologies that help his internal customers accomplish their missions. He and his team help enable the Intelligence Community by giving them many of the capabilities that the private sector is trying to give its people, albeit in an extremely secure computing environment.
They have a wiki for user generated content known as Intellipedia, which in less than three years has grown into “the” repository of information that allows authorized intelligence employeess to create, edit, and have dialogue on content in a way that was previously impossible due to physical and logical silos of data. Datawarehousing and security remain top priorities, but within the confines of their closed networks. They allow IMs, del.icio.us type bookmarking, self-service hosting, and blogging, using WordPress MU. There is also the capabilities for mashups, tagging, and user profiles stating interests. Of course, there is document sharing including terabytes worth of documents, images, and video.
All this and more to be better able to “connect the dots” for the safety of all Americans. Let’s hope more leaders in the private sector take a cue from the Intelligence Community and empower their employees to internally use social network technologies to better gather, store, analyze, share, and act upon data.
Cloud Computing & Strategic Information for CMOs
January 15, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Bob Gourley, whose blog CTOVision is geared towards CTOs, CIOs, and Federalistas, has shared a great whitepaper draft that I encourage CMOs to read and think about. In “Cloud Computing and Net Centric Operations,” he sets the tone for where the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration (ASD NII) need to enable the best available technologies for mission critical tasks. Like the C4ISR or Net-Centric warfare planners in the Pentagon, Marketers need to “deliver the power of information, and accelerate “net-centric transformation, using information as a strategic asset,” and ensure “a good return on investment” for their Marketing department and Sales department customers.
Cloud computing is part of this effort and companies like Salesforce.com and VMware are making it possible for both public and private sector. As a Marketing Executive, you need to know about these trends – don’t assume the CTO or CIO can do this without your input – the data you gather and use is the lifeblood of your enterprise and drives all the other data that is used or created down the line.
Bob is looking for input on this document, and more industry perspective may help. Once again, you are encouraged to read it. From a Marketer’s eyes, it may be a bit dry and it may seem like a leap of faith to associate defense with Marketing, but the Marketing Consigliere urges you to remember: while your organizational objectives may not have lives at stake as does the DoD, there are certainly livelihoods at stake – that of your shareholders, employees and partners who depend on you to efficiently and securely move the information they need to make decisions.
10 Predictions for 2009
January 1, 2009 By 2 Comments
Prediction 1: Robert Scoble will become marginalized as a new “Twitterer to follow” emerges that is less condescending and opinionated.
The Marketing Consigliere actually likes Scoble, has met him twice, but understands that like all “celebrities,” a new one will probably come along that the huddled marketing masses will want to anoint as their new savior. He will never be relegated as the “Lindsay Lohan” of the social network scene, but rather more as a William Shatner-like figure.
Ok, that got the blogosphere’s attention. Now for the Marketing Consigliere’s real predictions:
Prediction 2: More brands will use Twitter and some people will tolerate push communication.
Just as the original commercial Internet “pioneers” were eclipsed by corporate suits in regard to the continued development and exploitation of the Internet, brands will become a more dominant player in this tool. While the Innovators and Early Adopters who embraced Twitter may feel their “find” has been violated, this is just another stage in the product life cycle as the Early Majority and Late Majority get on board. Many of these later adopters will be complacent with one-way messaging, just as they have been while using other media.
Prediction 3: More B2B companies will embrace microblogging for their direct customers.
Like in Prediction 2, see more corporate activity in social networking, specifically in communicating by B2B in addtion to B2C. As B2B buyers become less reluctant to use “consumer” apps in their daily work routine, they will accept this relatively new form of blogging as the primary means of communication with their vendors.
Prediction 4: More local and state legislatures will pass “anti-sms and cell phone use while driving” bills.
The Marketing Consigliere has personally been at risk due to the muttonheads out there who refuse to use headsets or keep both hands on the wheel of their 2 ton gas-guzzling SUVs. He sincerely hopes that this safety issue will be recognized by government leaders. Currently only a handful of states have enacted laws. We can still communicate on the go without endangering the life and property of others, but it will take the law to influence this foolish behavior.
Prediction 5: Broadband companies will increase competition by offering more local marketing services for small businesses.
As print newspapers and yellow pages hemorrage money, broadband companies will recognize that to keep SMBs hooked up to their copper, cable or fiber, they will have to provide assistance to drive traffic to the customer. Just like a shopping mall markets itself to drive traffic to its doors and helps its tenants, telecommunications service providers will have to assist its “tenants” by driving visitors to the small and medium size businesses that use their connectivity or hosting services. This especially will affect the local search (SEO/SEM) and campaign management of SMBs.
Prediction 6: Businesses will continue to gravitate towards opensource CMS.
With more stakeholders involved in collaborative use of internal and external enterprise content, there will have to be easier ways to administer and control the use of the content. Companies will be looking at solutions such as Acquia supported Drupal that allow them to quickly get up sites for relevant users.
Prediction 7: The Federal Government will take more of a leadership role in developing web based technologies.
Yes, the Feds have always been behind some of the greatest technologies enjoyed by the private sector. Look forward to seeing more emphasis by the Obama Administration on the development of applications that bring more efficiency to the organization, including the tech transfer of C4ISR tools from the military/intelligence sphere into the commercial sphere.
Prediction 8: There will be a major IT security breach of a Fortune 500 company and/or a significant cyber attack on a major social network.
The Marketing Consigliere risks being a Cassandra and makes the above prediction. We are accustomed to hearing about laptops gone missing, customer lists being compromised and other events that make the news. However, there are negative, malicious forces which will eventually find a vulnerability in a significant corporate place or social network that takes us all by surprise – remember, corporate resources are thin and that includes in the IT department, so redundancy will count. So will the ability of net-centric marketers, especially public relations professionals, to communicate the truth to mitigate distrust and damage to their brand.
Prediction 9: Net-Centric Innovation will increase despite the macroeconomic situation.
Most VCs and investment bankers aren’t any smarter than the rest of us. For the most part they have to manage their risk the way they can to minimize the wrath of their investors. So while many people decry the lack of investment out there, entrepreneurship will play a tremendous role in keeping innovation going. A confident entrepreneur who can exhibit the leadership to get people to help execute his or her visoin will make a huge difference. Luckily, across the globe, there will be a critical number of these hearty individuals to help keep enthusiasm at a high level.
Prediction 10: Despite controversy, marketers will try more forms of analytics – behavioral, video, voice, text, etc.
As more people depend on mobile computing for their daily lives, it will behoove marketers to test tools that help them better gather, store, analyze, share, and act upon data to drive revenue. Despite the cry from civil libertarians, the Marketing Consigliere is certain that the data derived from a person’s online actions, their physical behavior in a retail surveillance environment, what they type, event their tone and speed of speech, can and will be used in positive ways that can benefit them by marketers. It will take a lot of time and investment to execute this effectively, however.
Thank you for being part of the Marketing Consigliere’s far-flung audience; he plans to continue blogging about network-centric marketing and will endeavor to post relevant, thought-provoking content for marketing professionals and business executives. May you and your organization have successful, net-centric marketing in 2009!
4-Point Strategy: How Not to Get "Whacked"
November 17, 2008 By Leave a Comment
You’re FIRED!
The scary thing about these two words is that most Marketing leaders reading this blog know another Exec who has recently been fired (as the Marketing Consigliere likes to say, “got whacked.”) or is worrying about getting whacked themselves. We all know the stat – the average CMO tenure is less than two years, perhaps give or take a few months. And for companies too small to have a CMO, nevertheless someone there will have an itchy finger pointed at them also. Downsizing just isn’t fun.
This is no ordinary economic downturn; the macro events occurring are omens of fundamental institutional transformations yet to come. There are several things you can do to mitigate the risk of losing your Marketing position; likewise you can do some of these things in parallel to keep your career advancing elsewhere.
I. Embrace SaaS-Based CRM Tools
Sales is driven by Marketing which is driven by Data. And SaaS based CRM tools are the best place to house that data. If you don’t have CRM implemented yet, do it. If you already have it, embrace it more. Make sure it is truly adopted by the Enterprise, not just the sales people – you’re paying too much to let it be a glorified SFA tool. Many of the leading CRM tools out there like Salesforce, NetSuite, and SugarCRM have ecosystems of third party applications that increase the ROI out of the platform. Take a look at Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Oracle on Demand, in addition to some of the CRM tools out there that are vertical-specific. Make sure that your involvement in controlling the data is not relinquished to some IT minion who does not prioritize the needs of Marketing.
If you’re looking for work or a solo or small business marketer, you may want to take a look at Zoho. It has the look and feel like the big boy CRM tools but the first 3 licenses are free. So if you’ve been used to Salesforce and suddenly get whacked, unlike the gentlemen in the picture above, you can dust yourself off, launch Zoho, and start keeping track of prospects, whether they be potential employers or customers.
II. Leverage Additional Net-Centric Demand Generation Tools and Techniques.
If you are not using email tools like ExactTarget or VerticalResponse, or even more advanced lead scoring tools like Eloqua, your organization is probably behind the eight ball on its ability to move data in from and out to customers. In this day and age there are so many datapoints to consider regarding customer behavior that you need to automate. It’s only going to get more complicated given the increasing amount of things that are being tracked on systems.
For smaller organizations, I’ve heard Pardot referred to as a “Poor Man’s Eloqua” that performs very satisfactorily; and for individuals on their own, vendors like iContact and Constant Contact can help make you look like a bigger company than just one person.
To complete your CRM & campaign tools, you’ll need a landing page solution (which some of these tools include) that can be optimized to increase the probability of conversion and integrates back into the CRM tool. Make sure that you have extensive knowledge of all the “moving parts” to a campaign and are in control of the entire process because it is the lifeblood of your firm.
III. Adopt Social Network Tools to Have Conversation with Your Audience
If Sales is driven by Marketing which is driven by Data, then what drives Data? Conversation. An ongoing dialogue with your prospects and customers will build trust and educate your team over time. While most organizations may be backing off from getting on the Ning bandwagon and creating their own social network, you can still participate in the many “open” social networks that are out there like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
Needless to say, as an individual, you should probably be on all of these if not already. And if you don’t understand Twitter, give it a try anyway. Just be careful what you say; everything you post in all these networks contributes to the definition of your “brand.”
IV. Stay Calm
Many of us have worked for those rush-to-judgment “Type A’s” out there whose erratic behavior and unrealistic expectations are projections of their insecurities. No matter what pressure they’re putting on you, the laws of physics and marketing are still applicable in your organization. You have to sleep, you have to plan and execute marketing campaigns wisely and consistently, and you have to keep an even keel while doing so. You need to communicate matter-of-factly and not sugarcoat the situation. Professionals are defined by their ability to objectively approach work and weather all storms. Don’t let the toxicity get to you and by no means let any of that toxicity go with you when you eventually leave. And most importantly, feel confident in your mastery of the above.
The Marketing Consigliere regrets seeing anyone whacked that could have avoided it; while its usually “just business,” it does have a sting. Being indispensible to the organization is the key and the ability to be more efficient and grow revenue with the new net-centric Marketing tools out there will keep you that way. And understand you will have think “entrepreneurship” to survive on your own in a Web 2.0 way until these uncertain times clear.
