Ribbit – the Coolest App in the Pond

June 14, 2008 By Leave a Comment

The past few weeks have been so hectic the Marketing Consigliere has let his blogging slip but he is still able to keep his personal goal of blogging about marketing and technology every month for an entire year .

His latest absence from the blogosphere is this: He is working with a turnaround management team at a VC-backed startup in the space that he has been blogging about, so he is extremely happy but busy.

OnDialog is in the SaaS space and offers Marketers the ability to create custom landing pages, microsites, and personalized URLs (PURLs) that increase probability of conversion and customer loyalty.

Integrated with Salesforce and SugarCRM, the OnDialog “LP” product is a tool for Net-Centric Marketing that should be in every Marketer’s toolkit, but perhaps the Marketing Consigliere is a bit biased.

He had the pleasure to travel to the west coast to go on sales calls with one of their reps. Since the company is a member of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, he was totally psyched when he visited their Bay Area incubator. Being the Friday afternoon of the Memorial Day weekend, it was quite empty, but one stalwart soul was still working and all he can say is that the app is so cool he can see why.

Ribbit

Greg Goldfarb of Ribbit demonstrated his baby – an AppExchange tool that takes phone call voice messages and routes them into Salesforce. These audio and voice-to-text files can then be assigned to contacts in the application

It is an extremely helpful tool that takes “offline” data and includes in a network centric marketing world. Greg, keep on building this great C4ISR Marketing app for Sales pros!

Filed Under: B2B Marketing, C4ISR Marketing, Data Mining, Leadership, Marketing, Net-Centric Marketing, Sales Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Future of InfoTech = The Future of Marketing

April 3, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Bob Gourley, the CTO and Founder of Crucial Point LLC, is a former CTO for the Defense Intelligence Agency.  If anyone knows C4ISR, it is him.  The Marketing Consiglire encourages CEOs and CMOs to read his April 2, 2008 entry in his blog, CTO Vision – “What’s Next in Enterprise IT.”  There are clear implications for Net-Centric Marketing.

Bob Gourley’s Future of InfoTech

Of particular note is a downloadable PowerPoint presentation of his personal predictions of change in IT to help leadership “noodle through the impact of some key technologies on our future.”  So don’t be a wet noodle – check it out and think about it with a C4ISR Marketing perspective.

Filed Under: C4ISR Marketing, Leadership, Marketing, Net-Centric Marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Marketing to the Feds at FOSE

April 2, 2008 By 2 Comments

FOSE

The FOSE show this year as a whole was not anything to write home about; many from the circles that The Marketing Consigliere knows avoided it this year. Nevertheless he wanted to see if any net-centric marketing products or services were being “Fed-peddled.” It seemed like every fifth booth either was some sort of document imaging and management platform or a device for shredding hard drives.

But in this decent B2B (or rather B2G) show, there was a glimmer of net-centricity.  There was still a military marketing presence, but the C4ISR The Marketing Consigliere means is the marketing type of course, not the military. Of particular note:

Turning Point Device

Turning Technologies, LLC featured a great enhancement for Microsoft PowerPoint – their TurningPoint audience response system integrates within the PowerPoint application and allows audiences to participate in presentations by submitting real-time responses to questions using a credit-card sized keypad. The keypad transmits the answer to a USB device which plugs into the presenter’s laptop or desktop. The data can be saved and plotted for later or shown to the crowd. Barry Gromada, one of their Account Executives, was gracious enough to give me a quick demonstration. It seems it could be a great tool for gathering data in a network-centric way.

Vovici Logo

Vovici, whose advertisements have prolifereated the major marketing trade publications, was at FOSE touting their “Enterprise Feedback Management” capabilities. Their online survey capabilities have come a long way from when I dealt with them as a company called WebSurveyor. The robustness and ease of use has improved. The Marketing Consigliere loves the application, but hates (after all, he’s a Consigliere) how they mangle up the pronunciation of their name (they say “vo-vee-see,” not the “vo-vee-chee” that Italians and Latin enthusiasts would naturally think – how much did they pay a branding consultancy for that fiasco? – not pronounced “fee-as-so!”). But don’t worry, Vovicisti (vo-vee-chee-stee), The Marketing Consigliere will try to leverage your application in the future and recommend others to do the same…

MURV-100Physical Optics Corporation gave him his “Aha!” moment when he spoke to Jim Apple, the Director of BizDev (Homeland Security). They have a camera and lighting mounted on a briefcase-sized robotic platform that can used to inspect the underside of motor vehicles for explosives. The image quality of the video was quite impressive. (Note: The Marketing Consigliere couldn’t find a graphic on their website and has substituted a similar robot for illustrative purposes)

Why not use this platform at stadium or mall parking lots and conduct “courtesy inspections” of visitors’ automobiles? Working with the customer, a Jiffy Lube or Meineke or even an independent could make a digital video of underneath a customer’s car or truck, make a quick diagnosis to see if there are transmission or oil pan leaks, etc., and then wirelessly schedule an appointment. Or if the customer is not around, leave a little card with a unique URL in the windshield for them to go to later to see the video for themselves. It could be a great publicity stunt and possibly generate business for the company that has the wherewithal to execute.

Is there anyone out there who could monetize on this C4ISR Marketing idea?

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

Sounds Like REALLY Targeted Advertising to Me

March 26, 2008 By Leave a Comment

In the April 2008 Wired in “It’s All in Your Head,” Clive Thompson recently wrote about technology beaming to our heads and the inevitable civil rights battle over the act of doing so. While it is reminiscent of my February blog entitled “EmSense – Common Sense or Nonsense?,” it’s not about mind reading but about mind influencing – through advertising.

The interesting technology, ultrasound, creates sounds whose wavelengths in the millimeter range, and therefore can be projected in a very narrow, relatively straight beam – think laser, but not necessarily “pinpoint.” It’s actually been around for a number of years but hasn’t been heard about much (no pun intended). But with price points dropping and range of depth increasing, you probably will hear more about it (again, no pun intended).

AudioSpotAmerican Technology Corporation

I quickly found two North American based companies that appear to be leaders in this field: Holosonic Research Labs of Watertown, Massachusetts, and American Technology Corporation of San Diego, California.

Influence Media of Langley, British Columbia, is an American Technology Corporation reseller and has a very interesting platform in its EyeBox2/EyeAnalytics product. With it, you can “see” who is looking at your billboard/hi-def screen, prop, or whatever, and deliver a “private” message to that individual that only he or she can hear.

I believe the concept is both interesting and feasible, and it will likely be successful for the early adopters. While there may be some suspicion at first by privacy rights groups and some consumers, the real problem will be when this type of advertising proliferates.

Advertising Delivery using Eye Analytics and Ultrasound

The Scream, by Edvard Munch (1863-1944), National Gallery, Oslo

Once price points allow a large scale of it, there could be an almost spam-like deluge of it in our streets, malls, arenas and other public places where sometimes we just want to think. Can you imagine those speakers on buildings everywhere like cell antennae, pointing down every which way? Will municipal governments have to draft new regulations for this technology to keep parks, beaches, hospital zones, schools, libraries, etc. free from such marketing? Would taggers spray paint sidewalks so people could know where to walk without getting “assaulted?”

Would there be other “backlash” that some enthusiastic Net-Centric Marketers did not anticipate? Hmm. I better find a quiet place to think about it…

Filed Under: Advertising, B2B Marketing, B2C Marketing, C4ISR Marketing, Net-Centric Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

From An Endless Stack of Trade Rags to Read

March 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Here are a couple of excerpts from articles that The Marketing Consigliere read over the holiday weekend.

Marketing Management Magazine

“Marketing as a whole must get smarter – not only search. Mass marketing has long fallen from favor, yet we are inundated no less than ever with masses of irrelevant marketing. Personal empowerment can be built only with tools that deliver offers and information of high personal relevance. It’s not the amount but the relevance of what we know that drives success – so marketing, search especially, must smarten up.”

J. Walker Smith, President, Yankelovich Monitor

From “Smart Search – Marketing needs to smarten up,”Marketing Management, March/April 2008, p. 52

Yes and thank you, Mr. Smith, for pointing out what needs to be POUNDED into the heads of corporate leadership. We are now on entering an era of true Network Centric Marketing and there are companies that have to be dragged kicking and screaming into it.

Marketers can get smarter, but like most solid education, it takes money. CEOs, make the investment in your marketing IT infrastructure, not only in keywords. Give your CMOs and VPs the money they need to align with sales and produce key, measurable results. And don’t pull the plug on marketing when the going gets tough. Unless marketing hasn’t smarted up…

Advertisiing Age Logo

“The basic point about the web is that it is not an advertising medium. The web is not a selling medium. It is user controlled, so the user controls, the user experiences.”

Jakob Nielsen, Web Designer, The Art Bin

From “Think different: The web’s not a place to stick your ads” Advertising Age, March 17, 2008 p. 3

No, no, Jakob. You were quoted saying that ten years ago and someone foolishly thought to exhume that statement again.

The web is a medium for information processing – and it is a two-way medium. And marketers have every right to use the web as part of a Network Centric strategy that allows them to gather, clean, store, share and act upon data through that medium. The web is not user-controlled in the absolute sense…thank heaven. That is so because one can say that the web is “marketing influenced.” Think about it.

Filed Under: Leadership, Marketing, Net-Centric Marketing Tagged With:

The Lighter/Darker Side of Net-Centric Marketing

March 10, 2008 By Leave a Comment

American Civil Liberties Union

Back in December, The Marketing Consigliere blogged about the “Do Not Track” movement and how it was not good for B2C business (Do Not Resuscitate “Do Not Track” Part I & Part II). While he was critical of the privacy interest groups, he does have a sense of humor and admires their depiction of privacy intrusion in a Flash video he stumbled on the at the ACLU website. It portrays the CRM GUI of an order taker at a place called “Pizza Palace.”

Pizza Palace

With tongue-in-cheek irony, they illustrate the intrusive nickel and diming that a customer may suffer should marketers be allowed to collect business intelligence and perform over-the-top data mining and predictive analysis. He admits he laughed at the scenario.

His thoughts: While it’s technically feasible, it’s further off than they’re trying to make us fear.  The integration of those disparate data points are probably not in even the most enthusiastic of Net-Centric Marketers’ heads. While many would like to have a EMM platform of that capability, the everyday worries of marketing tools such as advertising to even get a single customer still weigh heavily on a marketer’s mind.

While C4ISR Marketing may sound scary when portrayed by the privacy advocates, it is a tool that can be used for the good of both the Marketer and the Customer. Ultimately, the Internet and net-centric world empowers customers too, and as far as I know, in the future there will be still be plenty of pizza joints to choose from….

To underscore his point, he asks you this – would you buy from Pizza Palace after being treated that way?

Filed Under: Advertising, B2C Marketing, Business Intelligence, C4ISR Marketing, CRM, Data Mining, EMM, Net-Centric Marketing, Predictive Analysis Tagged With: , , , , ,