June 20, 2013

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Enterprise Software Chronicles: A synthesis of the rapidly evolving customer technology landscape

June 5, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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Over the past several weeks, I’ve had the privilege to have hundreds of conversations with technology vendor executives, resellers and system integrators, consultants and companies of all sizes (enterprise, mid-sized, and SMBs) across a variety of industries; high tech, professional services, retail, manufacturing, financial services, biotech, etc.

The common thread is that organizations of all sizes are building and evolving in order to adapt for the next era of commerce. Smaller technology vendors are racing to build point technology solutions that are easily consumable, deployable, and integratable, while major enterprise vendors are racing to add capabilities to provide a one stop shop for business applications.

Salesforce buys ExactTarget (not Marketo)

Yesterday, Salesforce.com shared that it intends to purchase ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion. It took about 18 months longer than expected, but Salesforce finally filled a hole in its marketing cloud with marketing automation capabilities. I didn’t necessarily see ExactTarget coming as Marketo was the obvious choice to fill the hole, especially since Oracle scooped up Eloqua last December.

ExactTarget brings with it a long history in email management, and the marketing automation capabilities of Pardot, which will need to be retrenched to enable its capabilities to be leveraged by enterprise customers, following the up-market path that Salesforce has already been on for the last several years.

With ExactTarget, Salesforce picks up a company with a large install base with at least twice the revenue of Marketo and for likely less than twice the multiple of trailing twelve months revenue. In short, it was simply a better deal.

The ExactTarget install base also likely leads to more new business opportunities as their customer mix is more diversified from a CRM perspective than Marketo is. A disproportionally large percentage of Marketo customers are also Salesforce customers. Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez wrote this response to the announced ExactTarget acquisition today.

The messaging from Marketo at its recent Marketo Summit seemed to be well positioned to make a run as an independent software vendor as they began to expand their messaging from being just a marketing automation vendor towards a complete marketing platform. They now own mindshare as the leading independent marketing automation vendor, and there is certainly market opportunity to create a more robust and integrated platform for marketers to manage their activities, especially if the forecasts that the CMO will control more technology budget than CIOs actually comes true in coming years. It will be interesting to see how Marketo competes with the larger vendors and more integrated platforms.

For more on the acquisition, Craig Rosenberg has collected some great input from the community over on the funnelholic blog.

Speaking of Oracle…

In late April, I spent some time with Oracle at Oracle Analyst World and heard and observed how they are working towards integrating their entire stack of offerings. It’s a herculean effort, and they are making progress across a number of fronts.

Oracle is very uniquely positioned. They have nearly 4,000 software products and introduced more than 270 new ones during the last 4 quarters alone. They’re breadth of coverage and depth across the entire technology stack is impressive and mind blowing. Their market cap is in excess of $160 Billion.

Oracle_Stack_2013

This creates a number of challenges: The technology challenge is a large enough one. Messaging internally and to the marketplace is still clearly a work in process, and held hostage to an identity that is simultaneous beholden to a large install base of enterprise customers that are 10 years behind and cloud innovators that require agile and hyperspeed change. A massive sales force who has predominantly sold “On Premise” software is having to be retrenched to speak the language of the cloud, and product domain expertise is still undergoing a large transformation, and is likely in the midst of a multi-year effort.

As deep as Oracle’s coverage is, they’ve been on a heavy acquisition spree in emerging spaces where they want to rapidly fill emerging capabilities holes. The following applications have been acquired in recent years to fill the functional requirements in a rapidly evolving business landscape that places a higher focus on data & analytics, social, and customer experience, respectively:

  • RightNow – Customer Service
  • Taleo – Recruiting and Learning Mgmt
  • Eloqua – Marketing Automation
  • Collective Intellect, Involver, and Vitrue – Social (trying to position the collective capabilities of each of these products as the only end to end digital marketing platform. Salesforce sort of just blew that up a bit.)
  • InQuira and Endeca – Knowledge Management, Big Data & Analytics

Often, as these emerging technology companies get acquired into the massive technology behemoth, talent from the acquired organizations quickly leaves. We’ve seen this with the recent departures of former RightNow CEO, Greg Gianforte, Eloqua’s CEO Joe Payne. Several folks from Endeca have also left post-acquisition. Oracle also recently lost Anthony Lye, a polished leader who was leading Oracle’s positioning as a customer experience leader. The hole left is apparent. However, conversations with folks from Involver earlier in the year indicated that the opportunity to leverage the talents and expertise of Oracle, and the opportunity to sell in to the massive and well respected client base was a dream come true.

Oracle also continues to make slow but steady progress with their Fusion applications deployments, primarily in the world of CRM and HCM, acquiring over 100 new customers last quarter, the vast majority opting for SaaS deployments.

Lithium

While Oracle races to develop and integrate an entire portfolio of offerings, other players race to develop core competencies in emergent white spaces. Lithium is one such company. At their Linc conference, Lithium highlighted customer stories of the emerging digital peer to peer economy. Lithium recently positioned themselves as leading providers of social software that powers the social customer experience. Essentially, what this means is that they help power customer community platforms that enable brands to provide savings in customer support, crowd powered innovations, digital word of mouth marketing, and in some cases, even enable new business models to be pioneered. At Linc, Lithium did a great job of highlighting customer stories like Barclay’s Ring Credit Card and Australia’s Commonwealth Bankfinancial services innovation products, as well as customer support innovations from organizations like Time Warner Cable. They also announced forthcoming innovations in data analytics and insights that enable organizations to sense, respond, and share with greater effectiveness. While Lithium executives shared that they intend to go IPO in the near future, they appear to be a good acquisition target for a certain German enterprise giant who is also racing to fill in holes in its offering.

Speaking of analytics

SAS Institute held their Global Forum in San Francisco. SAS Institute has an impressive resume. They are repeatedly mentioned as one of the top places in the world to work. They have increased their revenue for 37 consecutive years. They have a dominant market position when it comes to analytics and a customer base that would be enviable to anyone. SAS highlighted their continued foray into predictive analytics, and the capabilities they have to process huge amounts of data in record speed. By the way, they also hold top notch events. As great as SAS is, while I don’t have any hard data that I can present here, I get a sense that SAS can be disrupted by analytics vendors who can provide a cleaner, more user friendly interface that is quickly deployable.

SAP also filling in Holes

SAP announced today their intent to acquire e-commerce player Hybris, further adding to their commercial offering. SAP has a ton of innovative initiatives at present and is betting big on HANA in memory database as a unifying layer to speed transactions and access to information. SAP’s answer to the social collaboration question is SAP Jam, which is making steady progress and is being positioned not as a standalone product, but as a communication layer that intersects more common functional systems. SAP is touting 360 customer, but still has a ways to go in creating clear differentiation to the markets of which products or mix of products fits for certain use cases and scenarios.

SAP is a constant competitive target for Oracle, and has been for a long time, but I was surprised at the frequency and depth of attacks that SAP received at SuiteWorld in San Jose just a few weeks ago.

NetSuite

Rising from the Mid-Market is NetSuite, who continues its desired ascent into the enterprise. NetSuite founder Evan Goldberg left Oracle about the same time as Marc Benioff, with a fundamental belief that organizations should run their entire infrastructure in the cloud, not just their sales organization. As Salesforce continues to build their platform to meet the needs of CMOs and customer facing personnel, NetSuite continues to build an integrated platform to meet the needs of fast growing organizations.

NetSuite has a deep history working with small to mid sized enterprises and they’ve carved out a niche without many competitors. Evident at SuiteWorld 2013 was their attempt to continue to move upstream as multi-billion dollar global customers Qualcomm and Williams-Sonoma talked about how they had leveraged NetSuite to rapidly evolve their businesses in the cloud.

New partnerships with AutoDesk and CapGemini also help to add validity to their Enterprise capabilities.

The addition of greater e-commerce capabilities, improved customization and development tools, discreet manufacturing capabilities, and deeper vertical offerings will continue to make them a viable contender for both fast growing SMBs and divisions of large global enterprises.

As an 8 year NetSuite customer told me yesterday, however, “NetSuite is not necessarily best of breed at any one function. However, they are best of breed as an integrated platform to run your business on.” That’s a compelling value proposition for many organizations and is a clue why NetSuite continues to grow at a healthy pace.

In Summary

While the technology vendors were highlighted in this post, companies in all industries are trying to adapt to a new speed of business and are looking for answers on how to prepare their organizations to compete and win in an environment that is increasingly digital.

Trials and experiments are slowly paving the way for emerging best practices, but the paths to a common destination are still being defined in a race towards relevance and market leadership.

To discuss the right strategies for your organization moving forward, please drop me a note.

Disclosure: My travel expenses and conference registrations were paid for by Oracle, Marketo, NetSuite, Lithium, and SAS, respectfully. I have received no request or remuneration for this post and these are my candid views based on my research, observations, and personal experience.

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Location Revisited: Marketing’s cornerstone takes on a new paradigm

May 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment
foursquare_map

Location, location, location.

The concept immediately brings back to mind college marketing classes and textbooks; clear lessons from industrial age distribution models. The focus has slowly faded away, however, over the past couple of decades with the invention and growth of a digitally connected, flat economy in which we can buy anything… from anyone… from anywhere.

Except… for most of us, where we are is actually a huge driver of what we do. Mitch Lieberman, has recently been placing more emphasis on context. For a few years now, I’ve heard and seen statements floating by my activity streams like “Content is king, but context is queen”. Robert Scoble and Shel Israel are in the process of writing about the “Age of Context”.

They’ve all picked up on the fact that we’re moving from an era of BIG, CRUDE, AND MANUAL TO SMALL, MEASURED, AND AUTOMATIC.

All of us, in our personal and professional lives, are desiring requiring more relevance, more alignment, and more accurate filters to help us navigate the bombardment of information we encounter in our daily lives.

Relevance. Context. All of a sudden, location matters again. Though, it’s contribution to customer behavior is manifesting itself in a different manner.

Even with the dramatic rise of e-commerce, most consumers still purchase from brick and mortar stores. According to a 2012 study:

Though consumers are using their mobile devices more than ever to find deals and research products, they still love their brick-and-mortar stores, a new study shows. Despite the proliferation of devices, shopping applications and growing consumer comfort with the mobile channel, the vast majority (90 percent) of both online and offline shoppers involve a store visit in many of their purchases.

Until recently, e-commerce and brick and mortar business models have been largely detached. Even for many major retailers, stock, pricing, returns were not connected. That era is giving way to a connected experience where consumers interact with brands across channels (brick and mortar, 3rd party retail, e-commerce, social), with the increased expectation of a unified experience across them all.

If I’m at the beach, please don’t send me an offer about printer cartridges. If I’m out to dinner, an offer about a local gelateria is much more likely to get opened than an email about gardening services.

A growing sea of online technology companies allow our location patterns and habits to be tracked (and hopefully used for mutually beneficial purposes).

Companies like Facebook, Foursquare, and Yelp allow users to check in, sharing with their network where they are. At the same time, they’re also sharing their information with a growing cadre of location based advertisers. By knowing which areas consumers frequent, more relevant ads can arguably be served. In addition to understanding the sum total of checkins and locations, patterns can be detected, and psychographic, sociographic, and demographic profiles can arguably be constructed to recommend offers that are relevant based on previous behavior.

foursquare_map

Some consumers can’t be bothered with checking in, however. It takes time, effort, and giving away information to “big brother in the sky” isn’t all that appealing to most people, especially when there’s limited value in return.

Other emerging startups like PlaceMe, Banjo, Sonar, Friday, and Highlight automatically tracks your whereabouts and the whereabouts of others near you, offering serendipitous and/or more targeted “people discovery” opportunities.

But, without opting in or participating in any of the above, those little smartphones in our pockets are already tracking and providing plenty of information to the mobile platform vendors and application providers.

This controversial 2010 Wall Street Journal article highlighting an interview with Google’s Eric Schmidt provides clues related to role location plays in the future of context, commerce, and marketing.

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he elaborates. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, “we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there’s a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you’ve been reading about took place on the next block.

Merging location data with transaction data

Until now, the emerging benefit and value of location data has struggled to find it’s legs in a meaningful way. However, when I was offered a discount on a purchase from American Express last year if I connected my AMEX account to my foursquare account, I immediately saw the benefit for AMEX. They already know what I spend money on. If they also know where I go, they can find all sorts of things out about me.

  • What % of my spending do I put on my AMEX card?
  • By merging transaction, demographic, and geogrpahic behavior patterns, they can begin to construct a psycho-graphic and/or deeper socio-graphic profile of me
  • By understanding who I am connected to and/or communicating with, they can potentially begin to understand purchasing behaviors within my network
  • Finally: the unknown. Like many emerging big data initiatives, finding unforeseen patterns in data models can provide new unforeseen opportunities.

Even without real time location data, merging data collected from the digital realm with other data sets presents new opportunities for contextual marketing. From AllThingsD:

Ticketmaster is doing all the normal stuff you’d expect to help users share with each other when they buy tickets to events. But it’s also the only partner that I saw mashing up multiple Open Graph applications.
If you listen to music on an Open Graph application like Spotify, Ticketmaster automatically detects (with your permission) and tells you when those artists are next playing in your town. Usually these apps depend on which artists you “Like” or explicitly follow. It seems smart to use real, dynamic listening data to figure this out.

VinTank is working on a technology that indexes preferences and buying behavior of premium wine lovers, sends alerts to wineries in Napa Valley when a potential fit for their products are nearby, allowing them to send a message or offer that should offer high appeal for that person.

However, Jack Dorsey’s Square, which is in the process of disrupting the world’s commerce payment systems, is approaching location based marketing from the opposite end of the spectrum, and thinks they’ll actually be able to make location more useful. While many first generation location apps vendors know where you are and perhaps what you’ve done, they typically don’t have any data on what you purchased. It’s the merging of location, transaction, and social data that some might describe as the next holy grail. Creating a recommendation engine based on financial transactions, and using location as a contextual filter for commercial transactions holds significant promise.

Deeper customer understanding at the center

At the center of customer focused innovation is understanding your customers better.Understanding where people go, and what they buy when they’re there will be a significant input for next generation commerce.

The data being collected by the payment gateways (Mastercard, Visa, American Express, Square, PayPal, GoPayment) is arguably more valuable than the transaction fees they are collecting. More intelligence is being built in to the purchase and sales cycles, respectively, and at the center of both sides are recommendation engines. Consumers are coming to expect Amazon.com-like suggestions that make their life easier and shorten the investment of discovery and analysis.

Understanding transactional and behavioral patterns and merging them together will arguably allow marketers to offer more precise offers and interactions based on a deeper understanding of their customer’s current context.

  • How is your organization leveraging location data?
  • What are the primary barriers you see?
  • How will privacy issues come in to play as technology advances?
This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.



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How to write copy that goes viral: Advice from Seth Godin

May 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Seth Godin does a phenomenal job of providing insights. Below is something he wrote that I wish I did, but I’ll be saving this and committing it to memory. In many ways, it’s marketing 101, but the clarity with which it’s presented is something every marketer can benefit from

From Seth’s Blog:

The best approach is to not try to write things that will go viral.

No, the best approach is to write for just one person. Make an impact on just one person. Even better, make it so they can’t sleep that night unless they choose to make a difference for just one other person by sharing your message with them.

The rest will take care of itself.

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Everybody’s talking about Customer Experience. Customers still not getting what they need.

January 31, 2013 by 1 Comment
Performance_Gap

Lots of executives, marketers, customer service folks say they work for a customer focused organization. They say they care about the customer experience. According to a myriad of research reports, blogs, tweets, podcasts, and whitepapers, I see an increased focused on customer focus, customer experience, customer engagement, customer intimacy, etc. etc.

This is undoubtedly the right direction, and frankly the only direction for corporate survival and growth, in my opinion. A key and often underrepresented component of developing meaningful and profitable customer relationships is TRUST. I’ve written more about that here.

So how are we collectively doing being customer focused? Do “what we say” and “what we do” actually line up?

According to the latest edition of the Edelman Trust Barometer, the Top 5 Trust Building Attributes between companies and customers are:

1. Offers high quality products and services
2. Listens to customer needs and feedback
3. Treats employees well
4. Places customers ahead of profits
5. Takes responsible actions to address an issue or a crisis.

In the latest CEO Survey by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 82% of the CEOs in the survey said they were going to spend time changing their customer strategies in 2013.

That’s good, because below is a chart from the Edelman Trust Barometer showing that the drivers of trust and the perceived performance of businesses to achieve that trust are miles apart.

Performance_Gap

Imagine that you walked into your individual performance review and you got 3s 4s, and 5s on a 10 point scale across the board. That’s essentially what we collectively just received from our customers.

Are you shocked? Surprised? Upset? Ready to take action? Perhaps you’re saying that “that doesn’t apply to us”.

Many of you are probably moving into action as you read this. “We’ve got to do better. We’ve got to ask our customers what we can do better!” Great. But before you build and send out that next customer survey, please consider reading the following from a recent article in the Harvard Business Review (emphasis added is mine):

The great majority of the decisions we make in our information-overloaded, distraction-heavy lives are made outside our conscious awareness, driven more by contexts than cognitions. As a result, asking someone to pinpoint what will influence them in the future is a bit like saying, “tell me how you will behave in the future when you are not thinking about what I have just asked you about?”

Behavioural scientists Wes Schultz and Robert Cialdini provide compelling evidence of why asking people to predict what will influence their future decisions and behaviors is so often ineffective. In one set of studies, they asked several hundred homeowners in California to predict which of four messages would be most successful at persuading them to take steps to conserve energy and reduce their overall consumption. The four messages were 1) conserving energy helps the environment; 2) conserving energy protects future societies; 3) conserving energy saves you money; 4) many of your neighbors are already conserving energy.

Those shown the message about what their neighbors were doing rated it as the least likely to influence their behaviours. Yet when meter readings were taken, the researchers discovered that this was the most effective message when it came to changing behavior even though this same message was rejected by most as having any sway. Even though most will deny its effect, our desire to keep up with the Joneses is both universal and automatic. For example, recent studies have shown that compared to the usual approach of threatening those who fail to pay their taxes on time with fines, it is far more effective to inform them that the majority of people in their neighborhood already have paid. By doing so, governments can realize many more millions in revenues.

Not only are we pretty poor at recognizing what will influence our future behavior, we’re not that great at recognizing what persuaded us after the event either. In one well-known study conducted at a busy New York City subway station, after counting the percentage of commuters who donated to a street musician as they walked past him, researchers made one small change to the situation: Immediately before an approaching commuter reached the musician, another person (who was in on the act) would drop a few coins into the musician’s hat. The result? An eight-fold increase in donations. When interviewed afterwards, those who donated universally failed to attribute their actions to the fact they had seen someone else give money first, preferring instead to provide alternate (and incorrect) justification for their actions. “I liked the song he was playing”; “I’m a generous person”; and “I felt sorry for the guy.”

Aside from showing the tremendous power of social proof, the above also provides a solid argument that understanding what will resonate most with a customer may often not be provided by the customer. There’s a great dialogue about this on Wim Rampen’s outstanding and thoughtful blog post titled “The Customer is Always Wrong”.

Cracking the code on your customer’s jobs to be done, their (intrinsic and extrinsic) motivations, their behaviors and habits have the potential to provide the real clues that we need to develop ongoing relationships of increasing value exchange.

So, how will we get better at serving our customers more effectively and building more trust?

The detailed answers to this are highly contextual and we don’t quite have time or room in today’s post. Many of us are indeed overwhelmed by the inertia of our own embedded behaviors, assumptions, and drivers, which by the way is one reason I would propose that we see such a significant disconnect in the chart above. But one often overlooked consideration I’d like to offer is to include the core motivators of all humans when considering what products and services to offer, and more importantly how we communicate with them.

Referencing the research done and presented by Australian psychologist, social researcher and novelist, Hugh Mackay, Naomi Simson offers the following as the core motivators for our (customer’s) decision making:

The desire to be taken seriously. We need to know we exist, that we’re valued, that we’re being listened to. This desire is why good listeners are so valued in the workplace. And why when you feel so bad when you realise someone is looking over your shoulder when you’re talking to them, rather than listening to what you have to say.

The desire for ‘my place’. We all need places that feel like ours, places that symbolise who we are. This is why, for some people, hot desks and open plan offices create a certain amount of disconnect and dissatisfaction at work.



The desire for something to believe in. We all desire a framework of values in our lives, values we can live by. If the organisation we work for has integrity, it can form an important part of our value set.

The desire to connect. Not only do we feel connected to people around us at work through everyday interactions, we also use work to connect deeper to ourselves. For some people their work is an expression of their self. 


The desire to feel useful. The one thing we least want to hear ourselves described as is ‘useless’. Wanting to be useful is fundamental to being part of society. This is the reason that people pull together in times of disaster to help complete strangers… to feel they are doing something useful.

The desire to belong. According to Hugh, we are both ‘herd animals’, and ‘tribal creatures’. We like to feel part of a group, as well as part of something bigger. The best workplace contains rich gratification through both a small herd (work group) and the sense of being a part of the company, the tribe.

The desire for control. Hugh believes this desire is the one most likely to get us into trouble. Humans are by nature uncontrollable. The only person we can control is ourselves.

Three Questions until next time

  • Are you REALLY investing in the customer experience, or does this just seem to be the next best wave to get what you want from customers?
  • How are you aligning your products, services, and customer communications with these core human motivators?
  • How are you weaving offerings and communication into the customer journey that help meet these desires?

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A year in review: Top 12 Posts of 2012

December 31, 2012 by 1 Comment
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Happy New Year! Thanks for taking the time to visit, read, comment on, and share some of my thoughts from the last year.

2012 was a great year and I look forward to building on it 2013. Below are the Top 12 posts from 2012, measured by direct traffic to this blog (not counting syndicated links and traffic).

I look forward to continuing to learn and share with each of you in the next 12 months.


(1) Toothpaste, toilet paper, white matter, and jam: Clues for better decision making

(2) Six Things Customers Want

(3) Trust: It Matters (More than you Think)

(4) The Digitization of Everything: From Long Tail to Mass Disruption

(5) Which CRM Software Is Best?

(6) How Social Technologies contribute to a Better Customer Experience

(7) Creating Measurable Business Value through Social Collaboration

(8) Optimizing the Full Spectrum Of Customer Interactions

(9) Leveraging Social Business Gamification for Organizational Flow

(10) Movements, Mashups, and Metamorphosis: The Rewiring of Institutions

(11) Exploring new frontiers of real time customer feedback

(12) Global CEOs chart the course into unchartered waters for the Next Generation Enterprise

What’s your favorite or most popular post from this past year (from this blog or anywhere)? What would you like to see more of in 2013?

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The Digitization of Human Interactions: From Long Tail to Mass Disruption

February 13, 2012 by 21 Comments
Photo Credit: Ceibs.edu

Photo Credit: ceibs.edu

“Because the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer, the business enterprise has two, and only two, basic functions: Marketing and Innovation.” – Peter Drucker

Last week I had the pleasure of spending some time at Online Marketing Summit at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel.

Aaron Kahlow founded the conference several years ago and it has seen tremendous growth in just a few years. In fact, it was acquired just a few months ago, and added to the growing list of brands at UBM TechWeb.

We are in the midst of a sizable evolution. That’s no surprise or epiphany to most of us. But peeling a layer or two off of the onion reveals deeper insights about what’s really happening, and more importantly, where senior marketers, should be allocating their money and time.

Marketing’s longtail (online, digital, seo) first became a fringe disruptor of marketing strategies (where we’ve been over the last 15 years or so), and has moved its way steadily towards securing its place as a core component of marketing practice (a few years into this journey now). In some organizations, it leads the way and sets the primary agenda related to an organization’s customer acquisition and retention strategies. For others, that change is quickly coming. Moving forward, “digital” not only will rule marketing, but has the potential to re-define entire business models (think what’s happened to books, music, media).

This once small sliver of the marketing universe is slowly and steadily charging its way to the label enabler of mass disruption.

Considering this phenomenon in 2006, specifically assessing Threadless’ new innovative crowdsourced manufacturing business model, Tim O’Reilly asked “How far off is a future in which the creative economy overflows the thin boundary that separates ‘information’ from ‘stuff’?”

If we consider for a moment the growth of gaming, augmented reality, digital and social network engagement, coupled with the rapidly expanding worlds of mobile and cloud computing, the very fabric of human interactions is being rewired. This clearly has significant implications on one core societal function: commerce, and with it of course, marketing.

Below are 5 key takeaways solidified during my time at #OMS12.

CONTENT STILL REIGNS

The content marketing drum has continued to get louder over the last decade. According to a 2012 study by the Content Marketing Institute;

  • 90% of B2B marketers do some kind of content marketing whether they realize it or not, and
  • 60% of B2B marketers intend to spend more on content marketing in the next 12 months.

It was a central theme at the conference, highlighted at 3 sessions I attended:

“The difference between good and great content marketing,” by Joe Pulizzi
“From Content to Customer” by Joe Chernov
“Integrating Social, SEO & Content” by Lee Odden

(You can find my raw session notes by clicking on the links above. There are plenty of good nuggets in there.)

Despite content marketing’s strong growth, 41% of the marketers in the CMI study said that their greatest challenge was creating content that engages prospects and customers.

I suspect that is because we are witnessing a changing of the guard. Brochureware, product feature catalogues, and brand messages just don’t resonate in a world where attention is the greatest and scarcest of resources.

Experienced marketers are having to unlearn what they know and relearn new tools and methodologies. Many new marketers don’t have the framework and business savvy that comes with experience to put all the pieces together.

Joe Pulluzi and Joe Chernov, respectively, reinforced the idea of creating something of extreme value and then giving it away for free. Social networks allow word of mouth referrals to take place with unprecedented speed and reach, and studies have shown that people are much less likely to share a heavily branded or gated piece of content. In their own words, they underscored the importance of establishing a position of expertise, providing something that is worth their attention, and talking about yourself as little as possible.

Advertisers have long used the concept of product placement for branding purposes within a context that is usually devoid of ads. This philosophy can now be applied across a wide range of mediums and content forms. Subtly branded communities (Proctor & Gamble has several), whitepapers, blogs, eBooks and infographics (HubSpot and Eloqua have done some really good things here) are all ways to fill the top of the funnel.

If you haven’t seen it, DC shoes shows how an experience can be created within a piece of content that resonates with a target audience. It’s a prime example of marketing innovation that has garnered more than 15,000,000 views to date.

Facebook is betting the farm on these principles with their announcement and foray into the world of “Sponsored Stories”, where sponsored content will be embedded within the context of “friends” digital interactions across the web.

While the manifestation of B2C vs. B2B content marketing may ultimately look significantly different, the underlying principles remain the same.

ANALYTICS PLAYING A BIGGER ROLE EVERYWHERE

Ironically, the exponentially increasing amount of digital content and digital interactions is creating overwhelmingly large sets of content, information, and data. Known to many as the issue of “Big Data”, appropriate filters and tools are increasingly important to help decision makers convert massive data sets into meaningful insights, which should ultimately contribute to critical decision making.

Asterdata, acquired last year by TeraData is using its technology to help marketers make sense of unstructured data from varying data sources to better understand the pulse of their marketplace.

The increasingly crowded Social Media Monitoring space was represented at the conference by Radian6, Marketwire Sysomos, and a relatively new entrant to the party named Metavana.

Metavana is particularly interesting for 2 reasons:

1. They claim that their sentiment analysis engine is 90% accurate, which quite frankly is hard to believe, as that practically would far exceed industry norms.
2. In partnership with Satmetrix, they are the exclusive provider of Social NPS – a “Net Promoter Score (NPS) derived from the expressions of sentiment on the social web.”

Claim number 2 is a HUGE (and hard to believe) claim that a previously structured classification (NPS survey response) can now be gleaned from unstructured social signals. These two points alone deserves some time, but this post is already bordering on eBook length, so we’ll save that for another day.

That said, Metavana has an impressive leadership team, and are ones to watch in the space.

DIGITAL FOOTPRINTS PROVIDE DEEPER INSIGHT INTO THE BUYER’S PURCHASING CYCLE

Because more and more of our lives are taking place in the context of a digital medium, digital footprints are being left across the web for marketers to examine. One of the major themes at the conference was the concept of “attribution”, or assigning the proper weight to multiple interactions that may have ultimately contributed to a purchase (or conversion). Up until recently, the “lead source” was typically attributed to the last conversion point, ignoring whether a prospect had had several interactions with an organization across multiple channels prior to that. New technology aims to properly identify, understand and weight each interaction for the amount that it contributed to a purchase or conversion, properly attributing impact of various touches on purchasing related actions during the buying cycle.

Amanda Kahlow, new VP of Consumer Intelligence for Business Online, highlighted how she had developed a program for Cisco, and other organizations, to understand customer and prospect digital signals to ultimately predict purchase behavior. In an interesting narrative about sifting through millions of data points and trying to find patters in the data, their algorithm was ultimately able to predict which prospects and customers were most ready to buy, and what size their order might be. This type of understanding and insight allowed Cisco to:

  • Do better targeted marketing
  • Alert sales, partners, resellers with the right leads and opportunities
  • Measure marketing effectiveness
  • Allow lead scoring to be data driven instead of using arbitrary numbers.

In the end, it’s a story of properly aligning resources with greatest marketplace opportunities in real time to maximize returns for the organization. As more and more buyers interact with digital content, it paves the way for new opportunities for organizations to listen and respond.

FROM BIG, CRUDE, AND MANUAL TO SMALL, MEASURED, AND AUTOMATIC

As a society, we continue to journey down a path from Big, Crude, and Manual to Small, Measured, and Automatic. In the marketing context, that means that we’ve transitioned from broadcast messages with an ask to buy to strategic analysis of buyer’s purchasing journeys and finely articulated responses to each of their actions, with an understanding that there is a detailed set of psychological drivers and interests at each stage of their journey,

It’s the job of marketing (and sales) to understand and align with that journey. The growth of marketing automation, revenue performance management, or whatever the vendors are calling themselves this month, is about automating interactions in the right way, at the right time, on the right channel, in response to prospects signals during the course of their purchasing journeys. Armed with continuous feedback (structured and unstructured, explicit and implicit), marketers increasingly have the opportunity to sense and respond to customer and prospect needs in real time.

WHAT IT ALL MEANS

What’s interesting to me is that the ubiquitousness of digital connection, and increasingly pervasive social network interactions has created a bifurcation in marketing’s focus. The social web has created a seeming “renaissance of transparency”. Being human and real is an often stated mantra for agencies and organizations to follow. The crowd demands it, and is now louder the companies ability to brand themselves. However, more so than ever before, marketing has become data driven, with marketers often moving deeper into the sales cycle, and being held to higher levels of accountability. There is a risk of the left brain taking over too much of the spotlight.

The greatest challenge for marketers today is precisely blending the art of storytelling with the science of analytics for maximum impact in their marketplace.

IN SUMMARY


The conference was great. Many attendees told me they had TOO MUCH to take back and work on. It was nice to catch up with some old friends, meet new ones, and get to know some folks a little better. While we are undergoing a dramatic shift, the old fundamentals of understanding your customer, and responding in a way that resonates is still firmly in place. Technology is changing how our customers behave, communicate, and expect organizations to respond. Organization who do this best will thrive. If these things aren’t yet on your radar, or you’ve shoved social media, content marketing, and/or marketing automation off into a figurative little dark corner within your organization, it may make sense to provide them with a cubicle or office space. Used properly, it holds potential for significant impact. Ignoring these over the long term may relegate your entire organization into that dark insignificant corner.

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Trust: It matters (more than you think)

January 25, 2012 by 44 Comments
Build Trust

“Organizations are no longer built on force, but on trust” – Peter Drucker

“Technique and technology are important, but adding trust is the issue of the decade” – Tom Peters

“Mistrust doubles the cost of doing business” – Professor John Whitney, Columbia Business School

“As you go to work, your top responsibility should be to build trust” – Robert Eckert, CEO, Mattel

“Transcendant values like trust and integrity literally translate into revenue, profits and prosperity” – Patricia Aburdene, Author of Megatrends 2010

————————————————————-

The quotes above were pulled from the book “The Speed of Trust: The One thing that changes everything”.

In the book, Steven M.R. Covey makes the argument with significant validation that establishing trust is the quickest path to success.

The economics of trust are simple

“Trust always affects two outcomes – speed and cost. When trust goes down, speed will also go down and costs will go up. When trust goes up, speed will also go up and costs will go down.”

Ponder that for a minute. In any relationship, personal or business, progress ultimately hinges on this one simple thing. When the presentation is over, when the proposal is offered, when all the due diligence and negotiations have been performed, doesn’t it ultimately rest on whether each side trusts each other to honor their stated obligations?

One could make a strong argument that the maturing customer revolt; the change in customer behavior that is driving the emergence and growth of Social CRM and Social Business has been birthed out of a general distrust of organizations, and institutions in general, for that matter.

Who the world trusts

Since the customer has lost trust in what marketers and sales people say, and since they can’t trust customer service to actually help them in a meaningful and timely way, they have moved instead to solicit 3rd party opinions about the organizations that may have a solution for them. They look to industry experts and peers for opinions, insights, and answers they can trust. This trend is expanding quickly. According to a study from Shopper Sciences, in association with Google “the average shopper used 10.4 sources of information to make a (purchasing) decision, up from just 5.3 sources in 2010.”

Edelman, one of the world’s largest and well recognized global PR firms has produced something called the “Edelman Trust Barometer” for the last several years.

In the 2012 edition, released this week, we see who the general population views as credible spokespeople – people they can trust. We see that ‘Academic or Expert’, ‘Technical expert in the company’, and ‘A person like yourself’ are bunched together in the Top 3. You’ll notice that CEOs and government officials absorbed significant hits to their collective reputation this year.

Another key finding is that social media grew significantly as a trusted information source, gaining ground on traditional media sources.

And in general, customer expectations are woefully short of being met. You’ll see in the graphic below a huge gap between what customers consider as important and how companies are performing in areas like:

  • Listens to Customer Needs and Feedback
  • Offers High Quality Products or Services
  • Places Customers ahead of Profits
  • Takes Responsible Actions to Address an Issue or Crisis

Where do we go from here?

The quick take is that TRUST MATTERS. It matters more than we think. As executives, as marketers, as sales people, as customer experience architects, and as customer service personnel, at the core of our job to create trust. Trust is the lubricant that speeds relationships and success, with people, and with organizations.

The key observations are:

- There is a significant trust void between customers and organizations
- People primarily trust experts and people like them
- People solicit lots of different opinions and tap lots of different sources when considering vendors

In the graphic below, survey participants have given us clues on how we can continue to build and deepen trust with our prospects and customers.

How do we do this?

The good folks at 1to1 Media summed it up with this tweet yesterday.

Is it just that simple?

There are a myriad of ways that organizations can respond to create trust. Content marketing, coupled with listening to and engaging customers through social channels are certainly a start. Organizations who do a great job of positioning themselves (and their employees) as experts in their field, and deeply embedding themselves within their respective communities and consistently adding value stand a great chance to do well in this shifting market.

Hiring the right folks, while establishing and nurturing a customer focused culture, and evolving internal and external communication channels and structures are all part of the equation.

The widening customer expectation gap and the pervasiveness of distrust presents a GREAT opportunity for those organizations who are able to respond in a way that resonates with their audience, as they will truly standout.

More resources

(1) Here’s a recent article by Don Peppers titled “The Only Lasting Competitive Advantage is Extreme Trust”

(2) Embedded below is the full 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer Slide Deck

2012 Edelman Trust Barometer: Global Deck
View more presentations from Edelman Insights

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Customer Relationship Innovation for the Emergent Social Business

December 2, 2011 by 19 Comments
The Social Customer Profile

Speaking at an event hosted by SugarCRM and IBM Social Business this week, I informally polled the audience.

“How many of you are NOT on facebook?” No hands were raised.
“How many of you have a twitter account?” Most of the room raised their hands.
“LinkedIn?” Most of the room again raised their hands.

I repeated the same questions, referencing the people in the room’s businesses, and a slightly smaller number of folks raised their hands, but more than half still did.

I then asked – “How many of you know what to do with them?” Giggles. Laughter. Very few hands.

This is where we collectively find ourselves. It’s representative of a number of organizations that I have the opportunity to work with and speak to.

I didn’t even think of asking if any organizations in the room had created a tactical plan to listen and engage with customers and create a seamless (and amazing) experience across multiple channels and domains. Most companies are still trying to get the fundamentals right (as Filiberto Selvas pointed out here)

It’s easy to join a social network. It’s harder to engage. What should I say? What will they think? Do I have permission?

It’s even harder to engage with a coordinated strategy and accurately measure the results of your efforts. Blend activities on the social web with what’s happening in the rest of the organization…across departments…across silos?

If we’re not even on the same page internally, how can we communicate a unified message to the world that hasn’t been careful crafted by our marketing team and the agencies that they work with?

My anecdotal observation is that many companies get here and then acknowledge that it’s just too big of a challenge to tackle…at least for now.

“If you’ve got to start somewhere, why not here? If you got to start sometime, why not now?” – Toby Mac

New landscape.
New customer.
New roles.
New communication mediums.
New expectations.
New corporate culture.
New Focus.
New Critical Success Factors.

It’s quite a bit to digest when people are trying to keep their jobs and help keep the company profitable, when they’ve already just absorbed the jobs of 1-2 people who were laid off over the past few years. However, only focusing simply on the here and now is the path to extinction.

Those who understand how these new changes are affecting their marketplace (which in most cases is larger, more complicated, and more diverse than it was just a few years ago) will be hyper-rewarded. Those who fail to admit, understand, and adjust to these rapidly evolving new realities will be destroyed, or more likely die a long, slow, painful death.

Below are a few highlights from the presentation.

B2B Buyers

FOUR THINGS TO FOCUS ON NOW

While there’s no notes or audio to the full deck, I’ve provided it below. Hopefully it provides value, and helps to stimulate some interesting conversations on the social web and for you in your respective organization(s). Interestingly, Mike Fauscette touched on many of the same themes in his blog post “Customer Service – the new Marketing in the era of the Social Customer”. It’s definitely worth a read.

Customer Relationship Innovation for the Emergent Social Business

One other final fascinating tidbit from the event was that I met and had a good chat with a Director of Marketing from a Silicon Valley startup. I meet and talk with plenty of Directors of Marketing. What was interesting about this one was that she said that she was actually a social anthropologist. My ears perked up. Seems like someone is paying attention. While the roles of social anthropologist and Director of Marketing may seem to be world’s apart, they’re not. Here’s a link to an article I wrote highlighting why it might be the perfect fit.

It’s fun to be part of the greatest transformation since the industrial revolution? Are you in?

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Headlines

November 8, 2011 by 2 Comments

When I mention headlines, you likely think of newspaper or magazine articles, but in a fast paced moving world, where we are constantly inundated with people, messages, signs, and interruptions competing for your attention, the headline is all we have time for. It determines whether we’ll pay attention or not.

Everything is a headline. An email subject line. A tweet. The title of a blog post. Even the response when someone asks “What do you do?”

Focus on your headlines and open more doors to deeper engagement.

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Networks, Signals, Reputation and Delight

April 20, 2011 by 1 Comment
Networks, Signals, Reputation, and Delight

The era of mass marketing, sales driven information gathering and sharing, and being “just good enough to win” is being shattered by the rapid emergence of a smart, networked, and increasingly demanding generation of empowered customers. In the fragmented and fast moving world of concepts, buzzwords, technologies, and applications, most executives are looking for looking for answers to a few basic questions:

- What matters?
- What’s different?
- How can I and or my organization benefit?
- Where is the opportunity?
- What should I do now?

As I survey the evolving landscape, there are four primary things that stand out as emerging keys to sales and marketing success in an always on, attention scarce, information rich world.

  • Growing your network
  • Sending signals that are valuable
  • Building a glowing reputation
  • Focusing on delighting your customers

None of these are new tactics. They’ve all stood the test of time and have been employed by folks over the last several hundred years. However, the speed and access to people and information has made each of them exponentially more important. Take a look at the stats in the image below.

*** TAKEAWAY ***: When buyers want something, they’ll turn to search and their network to look for answers. Make sure you are there.

Why reputation and ranking is important

A great “human digitization” is taking place. Hordes of people and content are flooding into the web. Search engines and other content and people filters have to come up with a scoring mechanism to make results meaningful. Google, Bing, Facebook, and others are merging “people rank” with “page rank”. Search results are now being presented taking into account the “influence” and “reputation” of the messengers who are sharing it.

*** TAKEAWAY ***: Position yourself and your organization as a voice that matters (among those who know you, AND those who have yet to discover you)

Messenger as Important as the Message

*** How do you do this? ***

  • Build your network(s).
  • Send valuable signals – these could be blog posts, tweets, white papers, videos, comments, etc.
  • Focus on delighting your customers, prospects, partners, employees, suppliers, etc. It matters. It stands out. It breeds enthusiasm, loyalty, and word of mouth.
  • As your networks and signals expand their reach with positive sentiment, your reputation will increase.
  • As your reach and reputation grows, it provides an even greater platform to create moments of “delight”
  • Congratulations! An exponential and continuous feedback loop has been created.

Networks, Signals, Reputation, and Delight

For more on the concept(s), feel free to download/view the entire presentation below, or simply contact me directly.

[slideshare id=7541190&doc=networkssignalsreputationanddelight-110406175312-phpapp01]

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