While I am in the mood to look at trends [see post: 6 factors that make a marketing leader successful made yesterday], this article on VentureBeat does a good job of highlighting the trends in Online Advertising; in particular the Content vs Community debate, which continues to surface, re-surface (and yet never go away).
Raw Stylus
Chris Hoskin's perspective on marketing, social, commerce and disruptive technologies in B2B
Posted in January 2008 …
6 factors that make a marketing leader successful
Forrester‘s Marketing department do a great job, and they have cut me a very personal email called the Marketing Leadership home page, which has 6 Success Imperatives – the 6 factors that make a marketing leader successful.
Needless to say each imperative leads to a report that I can’t share, but I can share the imperatives themselves! They are;
1. Harness emerging customer trends. Find the results of global Consumer studies which expose how consumers change their interaction with brands, media, and each other.
2. Thrive on market and technology change. Markets and technologies change rapidly, and effect how your firm manages consumers, content, processes, and business partners. This imperative will help you set priorities and select the right tools and markets to stay ahead of your competitors.
3. Differentiate the brand experience. Brand loyalty continues to drop as product cycles shorten and consumers turn away from advertising. To differentiate your brand from the pack, and justify high margins, find the latest research on brand and loyalty management.
4. Optimise the marketing and media mix. “Half of the marketing budget is wasted; we just don’t know which half” no longer holds true. With new marketing and media planning tools and methods, you can raise the return on every marketing dollar and develop effective multichannel campaigns.
5. Build influence across the company. The role of the CMO is evolving from “market communications” to corporate business strategy, putting the customer first in everything the firm does.
6. Create and nurture high-performance teams and partnerships. The changing role of marketing forces leaders to review their organisation, skills, and partners.
Sound advise as usual from Forrester, who I have to say have always been my favourite analyst co.
Tales from the Inside: Niklas Zennström, founder Skype, Joost & Atomico Investments
Here is an opportunity for all you technology marketers to rub shoulders and ask questions of two technology heavyweights.
Second Chance Tuesday are chatting to the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones and Niklas Zennström, the latter who was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the year in 2006 and is one of Europe’s most successful technology, media and telecoms entrepreneurs.
When: 19 February 2008, 6.30pm to 9.30pm
Where: The Royal College of Physicians, 11 St Andrews Place, London NW1 4LE
Cost: £45, with a discount to £25 for entrepreneurs and is payable in advance.
For those of you who have been asleep for 5 years, Niklas Zenntröm is an Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Atomico investments, Joost, Skype and Kazaa among other companies. Through Atomico, Niklas serves as a Board Member for several start-up companies, such as FON.
In his career to date, Niklas has won a series of industry awards including ‘Business Leader of the Year 2006’ (European Voice), ‘Innovation in Computing and Communications 2006’ (Economist Innovation Awards) and the ‘Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award for Technology Change Agent of the Year 2006. Niklas has also been named ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ (European Business Leaders Awards 2006).
Rory Cellan-Jones is a journalist for BBC News. Starting out as a presenter at BBC Wales, he transferred to London and became the business and economics correspondent. After the dot com crash of 2000, he wrote the book Dot.bomb. Since January 2007, Cellan-Jones has been the BBC’s Technology Correspondent with the job of expanding the BBC’s coverage of new media and telecoms, and the cultural impact of the Internet.
Update 20/02/08: BBC take on Zennstrom and the TV revolution here
If you are a networking freek, previous guests have included have attended from organisations like: 7Digital, ASOS, B3ta, Babble.net, Bebo, Betfair, BT, Buildersite.co.uk, The Cloud, Cominded, Crowdstorm, eBay, DTi, Endemol Gaming, Figleaves, Firebox, Freshminds, The Friday Project, Friends Reunited, Friends Abroad, Gala Coral, Glasses Direct, GNR, Google, Gumtree, Hitwise, Houses of Parliament, Imagini, Joost, iSporty, Ladbrokes eGaming, Last.fm, Lulu.com, Play.com, Match.com, MoveMe.com, Million Dollar Homepage, Microsoft, Ministry of Sound, Mofo Games, MOO, Monumental Games, Moreover, MTV, Mydeo, Myspace, News International, Nexagent, Oracle, Orderwork, Oxygen Games, Quikker, Paypal, Play.com, Reuters, Shopping.com, Shop Qwik, Skinkers, Skype, Snipperoo, Sony, Technovate, The Universal Music Group, Toptable, Yahoo!, The Young Foundation, Weeworld, Zopa, Zoomf, Zubka.
Typical investors have included : 3i, Atlas Ventures, Accel Partners, Advent Ventures, Atomico Investments, Benchmark, Battery Ventures, Close Ventures, Creative Capital Fund, Deutsche Bank, DFJ Esprit, Doughty Hanson Technology Investors, Episode 1, Fleming Private Equity, Goldman Sachs, IBIS Media, Index Ventures, Ingenious Ventures, London Seed Capital, London Technology Fund, Liberty Global Investors, Morgan Stanley, Nesta, New Media Spark, Mathematical Capital, Oxford Capital Partners, Seraphim Capital Fund
And of course the press has included: Angelnews, BBC TV and Radio, Business Week, Channel 4, City am, The Daily Express, The Evening Standard, The Financial Times, Fortune, The Guardian, ITN, Netimperative, New Media Age, The Observer, Sharp Edge, Silicon.com, Techcrunch, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Spectator.
I can’t make it, so I would really like to hear from anyone who attends.
Buzz word bingo
Regular readers will know I find buzz words and their overuse fascinating, hilarious – but essentially pretty pathetic.
The latest in UK office jargon has been revealed today, and I find it massively disconcerting that phrases like, “Time to throw in a thought grenade“, or “Little ‘r’ me” (Request for a private answer to an e-mail) are entering business vocabulary.
Is this really true? Surely not?
Come on! Please readers can you open up the kimono on the buzz words you hear? Not interested in buzz words? Feel free to raise the anchor and let this one drift.
Bonus Update 18/06/08: BBC’s 50 office-speak phrases you love to hate
Bonus Update 11/02/08: Seen this?
Branding….illustrated
A lighthearted look at the relationships among marketing roles by Marty Neumeier, author of ZAG, and The Brand Gap which I discussed here and here respectively.
Zag your way to brand differentiation
It’s not new. But I am reading Zag which is all about the notion that radical differentiation is the #1 discipline of high-performance brands (and I really want to shout about it!)
If you have read it. Apologies.
BUT if you haven’t, part 1 of the Zag workshop explains why differentiation is key:
Bonus. New to Marty Neumeier? This is just as awesome.
The Meatball Sundae Webinar: A review
WOW. What a great way to spend an hour! With 2000 people on the call Seth Godin’s seminar about ‘Meatball Sundae’ was well worth the investment in time.
I thought I’d quickly highlight what was said in the seminar, and how I interpreted this, for those who could not attend and haven’t read the book.
———————
This is a revolution that changes everything. Just like the Industrial Revolution, and revolutions of the past (brand, transportation, assembly line, mass marketing and TV) the current Internet Revolution is just as big. Probably bigger.
It’s time to take a deep breathe and think…….”what do I need to do today, what can I change today that I will be glad about in 10 years time?”
Josiah Wedgwood is perhaps the best marketer that ever lived. He fundamentally understood that you need to ‘shift’ what you do each day. (Edit: read up about Wedgwood, his approach to increasing pottery sales was an example of great strategic (marketing) thinking)
Marketers too often think about the ‘pretty’ stuff on the top (cherry and cream) when really they should be thinking about the foundation of the product or the service (the meatballs).
Make people want to talk about you.
These are the 14 (Mega) trends Seth pointed out:
1) Direct Communication. Get your right. Major disintermediation is happening. Don’t get caught out, or up.
2) The amplification of consumers needs to be leveraged. Think conversation.
3) Tell authentic Stories. People don’t buy from specs, reports or checklist. Your brand story has to hold up, from every angle. Above all – be the brand you say you are.
4) Speed. You have all probably heard it a million times before, but it is getting more important. Fundamentally change the way your company deals with speed. Fast businesses thrive. Slow ones die.
5) The long Tail – The Billboard Top40 is irrelevant. Own a segment of the long tail curve – not a tiny niche; and understand the implications of personalisation and involvement to own a segment.
6) Outsourcing. This is not about pennies. Outsourcing helps you understand costs, BUT changes the business you are in. This means there is a death of the ‘factory’ model going on where you no longer need to do (build, buy, sell, market) everything.
7) “The dicing of everything“ (I need to readup about this!!!, I will blog about this in due course)
8) Infinite choice and Infinite Channels. In a world with 80M blogs PR is now different. There are channels for everything. Make your own channel. But beware being louder and offering variety is not the way to capture attention. Additionally yelling is not sufficient any longer.
9) Consumer to Consumer. ‘Connections’ are intimate, fast, and person to person. And connections are everything – just look at ebay, paypal, facebook.
10) The concept of ‘Scarce’ v ‘Abundant’ is a key theory to understand. ‘Disposable’ products are becoming less attractive as land becomes scarce. Equally in the past having lots of information = power. Now everyone has access to information so information is less the ‘key’ area: ‘access’ to information is. Offer something that is scarce or go for mass adoption. Don’t be in the middle.
11) Big Ideas. Advertising and big ideas are dead. The ‘Big Idea’ should is the product itself.
12) Permission. Anticipated, personal, relevant wins. Still.
13) The New Rich are a lot like you and me. They drive pickup trucks, buy comics, drink in Starbucks…….this has a dramatic impact on the way to court the rich.
14) There are new Gatekeepers. Traditional gatekeepers are not as important as they used to be…..Today ‘Leaders’ are more important than gatekeepers.
Bonus Trend – There is a ‘reverse bell curve’ (”The Seinfeld Curve”), and it highlights their are two ways to make money…. 1) be ubiquitous. 2) be scarce.
What I learnt
Oh man. Loads!
- You need to be organised to thrive around the long tail and this new economy, world and revolution.
- Take a deep breathe start things small, gain traction, gain attention.
- Search matters. Every Google search is comparable to a TV ad, or a magazine of yesteryear. But Organic Search is the CRITICAL. The product itself should be ‘optimised’. Clever meta tagging is simply part of the story…..what people say about your product is really the most important thing.
- Find out how friendship and engagement relate to your business. This lasts months or years, and that is why community is so important, why social media is so important. Find your tribe and show humility.
- Make products that people want to talk about. ( be remarkable)
- Everyone is a marketer now. In 1920 the head of Manufacturing ruled the roost. The Manufacturer was in charge. That’s why Ford choose black paint – it dried quicker…..Today the marketer is in charge. Don’t blow it!
- Google and Wikipedia are ‘choice machines’
- As opposed to sitting in an empty room thinking of, looking for the ‘big idea’, marketers should sit with people inside their organisation to refine what is done, delivered, created, made or sold.
Finally, this is a very decent table comparing the old world (left) with the new world (right):
Lazysphere. An Idea spreading fast
I really didn’t know whether to write this. But ho-hum. Here goes….
On his blog Micro Persuasion, Steve Rubel explores technology and its impact on marketing communications. One of his posts The Lazysphere and the Decline of Deep Blogging has really struck a cord with bloggers, journalists and online observers. And me.
The essence of his original post is that the lazysphere is a group of bloggers who, “rather than create new ideas or pen thoughtful essays, simply glom on to the latest news with another “me too” blog post.”
Shortly after his post was made on the 8th January, there were just 10 Google search results.
Today, 13 days later there are 10700.
10700 bloggers, journalists onlookers “regurgitating the story over and over again” at various levels and with varying intellectual input.
Amazing stuff.
It just goes to show how a new phrase, and a new idea can grow exponentially. But, and it’s a big ‘but’, according to Rubel there has to be “value add”.
I’ll leave that up to you to think about. Frankly I am amazed that lazysphere.co.uk and .com remain available at the time of writing, and if I’ve passed the thought onto someone new that is enough for me!
Bedtime alert
Can, or reschedule that late conference call, and don’t surf on your phone late at night.
Using a mobile phone before going to bed could stop you getting a decent night’s sleep, research suggests.
Typical.
It would explain my feelings of confusion at bedtime though.
WordPress for a corporate site?
Does anyone out there have good examples of WordPress being used for a B2B Corporate website?
This is not related to my job – but a family member asked the question, and I hadn’t considered it before.
Any tips, examples or feedback appreciated!
Make it sound more….
I used to often hear the words….
“Make it sound more salesy“
“Make it sound bigger“
“Make it sound better“
“Make it sound easier“
“Make it sound cooler“
As opposed to making something ‘sound’ more….., marketers should spend their time actually ‘making’ it more…..
Next time we hear someone say, “Make it more….”, as marketers we should recognise that there is a marketing problem that desperately needs fixing.
Social Networks and a Golden Ratio
It’s bugged me for a while, and low and behold Seth Godin sums it up again. First. And that’s two posts in a row from me, with a Godin influence! Damn it that guy is good.
Anyway, Seth says “One of the mantras of networking (and the many social networking sites that people are flocking to) is that it matters who you know. The goal of having a thousand or more friends online is that you’re well known. Connected. A click away. I wonder if there’s a more useful measure: who trusts you?”
I really think that Godin is spot on. The plethora of social network sites will each raise the bar in 2008, particularly those supporting business professionals. Those that do a remarkable job will win and those that don’t will be bought – ironically for their members.
You see the way I see it, is that all the social networking sites want today is users, more users, more eyeballs, and more traffic. Their offerings are geared around this fact…….it’s an ethos based around getting users to create as many new users as possible.
That is why they create stuff like this:
And as a result, members of these sites are caught up in a fake narrative, “the larger the quantity of friends or contacts or watch lists you have – the more influence or connected you are.” Offcourse this can be right. But it’s not a rule. And it’s not the whole truth. I think continuous improvement of Social Networks will bear fruit.
It is pretty obvious Trust would be a great dimension for social networks to embrace. So would Influence or Buzz (or both). And when elements like this are developed I believe Social Networks will be onto something very significant indeed.
I hope when this concept is implemented however, it is more scientific (for example) than LinkedIn’s current ‘recommendations’, which is just a partial attempt to add intrinsic value; and is actually pretty valueless.
No, I am thinking Social Networks need some kind of ‘Golden Ratio’ that is both complex (like the actual Golden Ratio) that can be translated into something very simple and easily understood for network or community members. For instance if you park the equation elements of the Golden Ratio to one side for a moment, some very simple manifestations occur: like the distance from outstretched fingertip to fingertip equalling your height, or the length of your forearm equalling your foot size.
Suddenly it would be much easier to understand the value of connections, visualise them, interpret them and apply them appropriately. I’d really love some kind of ’sphere of Influence’ or Trust ‘rating’ to be applied to Social Networks.
Suddenly Digg, Technorati, Open Social and LinkedIn and Facebook bring on whole new dimensions – particularly for business users.
How would you like Social Networking sites to unfold or mature?
