Properly used, you get bigger and stronger.
 
Most likely your marketing and sales organizations are using a combination of SaaS and software applications that promise to meet your objective of bigger and better demand generation.
 
Never before has marketing and sales been presented with such an array of productivity-enhancing opportunities. The side effect of all of this capability is that we are often unprepared to tap into the potential of our marketing systems. We get locked into a few features here and there. Whether due to lack of vision, lack of manpower, or lack of training, the result is a weak and lackluster program. Many begin to question the overall effectiveness of their marketing systems, wondering: Are they generating the ROI that is expected or desired? How many of these types of systems are in use and are they effectively working together to meet objectives?

So how do you get the most out of your current systems when you may be using a combination of marketing systems, including:

• Social media monitoring tools (e.g. Radian6, Visible Technologies)
• Website analytics (e.g. Omniture, Coremetrics)
• CRM/SFA (e.g. Salesforce, Siebel)
• Marketing automation (e.g. Eloqua, Marketo)
• Social CRM (e.g. Lithium, Helpstream)
• Enterprise Marketing Management (e.g. Aprimo, Unica)
• Partner Portals (usually built internally)
• Other

By analyzing the number of systems and their interconnection, we often find a variety of challenges that allow us to identify opportunities for improvement:

• Issues of properly set expectations and objectives - Do you really know what you want to do and are you able to measure it using your systems?
• Ownership of results - Who really needs the info and are they getting it?
• Right people in place to implement - Is your staffing at an adequate level to truly make the systems shine?
• Training - Are the people administrating the systems expert in their implementation?

What is the next step? Pull a team together with the purpose of identifying these opportunities. Call in a few experts who can identify the points of integration. Evaluate your campaigns and how well the systems have handled each phase.

Evaluating the systems in use and providing insight, strategy, and execution to tap into the best of what you have will provide you with the shot you needed to improve your demand generation results.

These days, brands are looking for loyalty wherever they can find it. With consumers increasingly careful about discretionary spending, brands need to hold onto as many customers as possible. However, our recent work in tech and health care suggests that renewals may lull brands into a false sense of customer loyalty.
 
Think about it. Uninstalling software is a hassle. A program has to be truly disruptive or counterproductive to motivate users to go to the trouble. That’s why so many software companies spend big bucks to come pre-installed. Subscription renewals might be interpreted as a sign of renewed customer commitment. On closer inspection, however, the conclusion doesn’t hold up.

In conversations with consumers last month, we heard an earful about the trials and tribulations of various “infrastructure” software packages – think anti-virus, internet security, etc. It seems only a few people actually like the package they’re running, but most are willing to put up with bothersome features. These users seem content to simply wait until they buy a new computer, and see what price point-feature-brand options are available at that point in time.

The incumbent software providers have a vested interest in lulling users into inaction. However, upstarts have a real opportunity here to shake things up, rousing users from their inertia by offering drop-dead simple product installations that automatically uninstall old programs.

Health insurance is another category where renewals have historically been more a habit than an active choice. Every year, employees face Open Enrollment – the one time they can change plans or providers, if their employers offer options. If a new PC purchase is the main trigger for thinking about antivirus software, changing jobs is what leads people to consider new insurance providers and plans. Back in the day when people rarely changed jobs, they also rarely changed insurance providers. In fact, we spoke with consumers recently who have had the same insurance coverage for decades. However, job longevity is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

When it comes to health insurance providers, there are big obstacles to overcome. Consumers are skeptical of the motives of most players in the category (insurance companies, drug companies, employers), find it difficult to understand the total costs of treatment under different plans, and prefer anonymity for fear of repercussions on-the-job at renewal time.

By identifying triggers that are truly motivating – like getting married or starting a family or by providing or publicizing coverage options consumers really do care about (e.g., wellness and preventative care) — shrewd marketers will have an opportunity to take share in the health insurance category.

Software and health care are not generally known for brand innovation, and customer inertia may have been taken for granted, historically. That could change if competitors capitalize on new triggers to enable consumers to easily act on their dissatisfaction with incumbents.

Have questions or comments? Let me hear it!

Back in June 2008 when I wrote my blog and presentation titled The Mobile Internet Revolution is Here, there were some detractors who said that others had predicted that for years with little results to show. In that presentation, I applied the principles outlined in Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.
 
The latest data indicates explosive growth over the past year. The Fierce Mobile article about a Quantcast report points to 148% growth in the mobile web usage in 2009. According to this source, mobile page views represent 1.3% of all web page views for North America. And the report seems to focus just on page views from browsers, so misses all the other mobile internet traffic generated by client software on mobile devices that receives and sends email or Twitter messages, pushes of news stories, etc., meaning that the true number is doubtless higher.

The Mobile Internet Revolution is, indeed, already here. Are you ready?

The recent New York Times article, Is Our Data Too Vulnerable in the Cloud?, points out the real concerns and risks of our storing all our data in “the Cloud”.
 
While some of the commenters point out that many of these security concerns apply as well to data stored on enterprise servers, laptops, and desktops — the perceptions and fears are real. Any further hiccups in cloud computing can set back the growth of these services, as a result of low user confidence. As evidence, consider how many people we all know still fear paying bills by internet.

What is needed is for cloud computing service providers to display the equivalent of a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” to certify their data security is up to the standards of the best enterprises. This will help consumers and CIOs feel more comfortable leaving their data in the cloud.

To be effective this certification needs to address network and physical security, and also needs to apply global standards to meet the different needs of different jurisdictions. For example the theory of cloud computing is that we should not care where in the world our data is stored; but EU enterprises have stricter privacy rules than many others and need to know their data security is up to EU standards regardless where it resides.

Who will provide this certification? Perhaps auditors? Perhaps anew entity that creates a trusted brand? Someone ought to. Soon.

I am often amazed by how much Google understands and practices good business logic. The latest is their support for the Data Liberation Front. This is a group of employees with a common mission: “Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google’s products. Our team’s goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.”
 
There is much evidence that Google wants to be a leader in cloud computing, and they seem to realize that cloud computing is attractive only if it is possible to cost effectively and easily make our data portable. The old web strategy of trying to create “Stickiness” usually involved having customers invest much time and effort to add their own data and meta data, and thus, make it difficult for them to move. But instead, Google has realized that people could be reluctant to invest themselves totally in a specific cloud computing application (such as in Google Apps) if it is difficult to get their data out somewhere down the road and move to another service. Fixing this increases the trust level.

I wholeheartedly support this approach. I have found myself checking on several cloud computing sites (PBWorks and Evernote to name two) and have invested in their use only when I saw I could get my data out in some common format — such as XML.

Good for Google! This type of initiative sets a great standard for others to follow and may it help cement Google’s leadership.

A recent post in eMarketer, titled Putting Targeting to Work, points out that online publishers are offering increasing options to target advertising, advertisers get tremendous improvements in efficiency (quotes 400%), but that few advertisers are using these tools well.
 
The leading types of targeting offered included:

• Geography (presumably regional, but capable of more precise targeting),
• Contextual (what is the user doing or wanting at the moment),
• Demographic (self-explanatory),
• Time-targeting (presumably different ads for different times of day).

Interesting that behavioral targeting is near the bottom of the list. As an advertiser, the rank ordering of these categories equates to my experiences. I got caught up in such things as psychographic segmentation in the 1980s, but soon found that it was a dead end for marketing efficiency.

As advertisers learn to appreciate the value of these other types of targeting, they will turn more and more to the Mobile Web, where there is increased information about the location and context, and a greater opportunity for advertising efficiency and “ambush marketing” . The industry is still caught in the inertia of the former business practices, and so change is slow. But we are soon approaching a day when the only marketers who will be hired will be the ones that understand the advantages of the new technologies for targeted advertising, and who know how to use the tools. Perhaps we are approaching that “tipping point” now?

Our clients are not betting that the economy will get better soon. Not only are budget cuts remaining in place, but the focus on sales, and marketing’s direct impact on sales is growing. I believe this will become part of the “new normal” way of doing business.
 
As it relates to marketing’s direct impact on sales, one area of tremendous focus is lead generation and lead management – no surprise there. An interesting development we see (and we are helping clients with) is that sales is demanding that marketing provide a new service to them. Sales is asking marketing to use a combination of database marketing and market research to create qualified leads for them.
 
Here’s a quick overview of an approach that is working:

• Define the attributes of prospects that are most likely to buy,
• Create a research approach that will screen for those attributes,
• Develop targeted lists from existing customer data and new lists,
• Conduct the research (after screening out the least qualified) to more deeply qualify prospects,
• Collect the data and record in a lead management system,
• Determine the best next step for the company to reach out to each qualified prospect, which could include anything from immediate outreach to defining future nurturing campaigns,

Done correctly, the result will be a shorter sales cycle.

What do you think?

I have to admit that I was disheartened to see the article in the New York Times, “Group of Magazine Publishers Is Said to Be Building an Online Newsstand. My understanding from this article and others on the topic is that Condé Nast (publisher of Wired and other leading magazines), Time Inc, and other magazine publishers are working with Adobe to create a new “iTunes for Magazines”. It appears to be a complete platform of content, shopping site, digital rights management, and distribution to the rumored Apple e-reader due out next year.

This announcement comes at a time when we have an explosion of platforms for e-readers: the Amazon Kindle, the Sony eBook reader, the imminent Barnes & Noble Nook, and perhaps others. Users will not be able to read content bought on one platform on the other readers, which means consumers need to choose wisely — or hold off. In the case of magazines, there is already a great application and store at Zinio, that works great on PCs and tablets.

I am all for electronic distribution of content, and am glad to see the traditional media players get with the program rather than try to fight it. And I am all for competition; it makes our system work in the long run. But what is it with all these “platform plays” of late? When will people learn that it is often better to stick to what one knows and go with the prevailing technologies, rather than create a whole new platform?

By platform, I mean the proprietary links among the content, user interfaces, delivery methods, applications, devices, and so forth. iTunes is a platform play, and we can thank Apple for legitimizing the whole digital music industry with their design. Platforms can make real sense when (a) there are no other solutions in the market to which to attach, and (b) when it is necessary to control the end-to-end experience (as Apple argues) to ensure happy customers. Platform strategies in too many other circumstances are driven by the “not invented here” syndrome, a desire to keep or get a bigger cut of the revenues, a desire to have additional features, or a hope to become the dominant platform and force the competitors to deal on your terms. But so often platform strategies get in the way of what is right for the consumer and hurt your competitive position.

Consider the following examples:

• XM Satellite Radio and Sirius chose different technologies that required different equipment to decode the signals. As a result they confused customers who did not want to have to select one or the other, they spent most of their early years fighting against each other, and by the time they merged it was too late to save the category.
• Just about every wireless carrier created their own “walled garden” of content, applications, and commerce — and restricted user’s access to the outside world. Most consumers found the content in the walled garden to be inferior even to the hobbled access to content on the outside, and revolted. This led to a delay in the growth of the mobile internet, a waste of resources, and a growing consumer resentment of the wireless carriers.
• AOL fell into the “walled garden” trap with their internet service and were slow to open access to the web for their users. This strategy backfired. Now they are enjoying some success as a content provider.
• While Apple’s iPhone platform was a powerful driver of smartphone growth and almost single-handedly built the category, it is now under fire for being a walled garden in its own right. That is increasing the appeal of open platforms such as Google’s Android.
• In the U.S., the wireless carriers diverged in the 1990s into GSM and CDMA as distinct platforms. While CDMA is on the wane worldwide, and LTE 4th generation data will bring back a convergence, the U.S. consumers have paid a price for there being multiple platforms — limited roaming domestically and internationally, more expensive handsets, inability to move from one carrier to another, and devices locked into different networks.

Developing, winning, and sustaining leadership with a platform play is a very tall order. There is usually room for only one or two platforms to succeed in any given industry. My challenge to the strategists in the media industry is to weigh the pros and cons of joining an existing platform versus creating a new one. While winning with a new platform play might yield better results if it succeeds, my sense is that the time-adjusted, expected value of the platform play falls way short of ‘going with the flow’.

The rapid adoption of the social web, especially around social networks, has given marketers a unique opportunity to build vibrant online communities around a product, service, brand, or organization. The process of turning that community into a self-sustaining and growing business asset remains the key challenge. To meet this challenge, marketers must learn to strike a balance between so-called ‘Engineered’ vs. ‘Organic’ community development. It is essential that a community have a clearly defined purpose and a number of goals to set the tone for the overall content strategy and member discussion. Community managers must also work to enforce rules within the community to ensure that user generated content, discussions, and posts all meet an agreed upon terms of use. The delicate balance exists when a community manager or marketing strategist begins to see the community take on a life of its own. If all goes accordingly, the ‘engineered’ strategy may lead members of the community to interact and contribute as planned, but may only lead to slow and steady adoption. Community managers must then question whether there is a enough ‘organic’ growth within the community to really achieve critical mass. Creating a community that lacks a defined structure and purpose can lead to rapid adoption and growth. This type of community platform has a lot potential (Twitter for example), but if an organization were to try and brand this sort of community, they would surely lose control.

Organizations and brands considering creating an online community need to understand how to orient the tools, content, and purpose of a community to establish both ‘engineered’ and ‘organic’ growth. Most organizations choose to establish communities on easy-to-manage social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace etc. Using these tools, organizations can achieve solid organic growth with already existing user bases, a number of unique features/functionalities, and limited financial commitment. So how does one implement some sort of ‘engineered’ growth mechanism into these already established networks? One way would be to integrate Open ID technology within a branded URL. This allows a brand or an organization to utilize the existing user base of social networks, such as Facebook, while also allowing the business to form the community around a centralized purpose.

As an example I will use an interesting travel site, whereivebeen.com. This is an excellent social travel site giving users the ability to pin-point places they’ve traveled on a map, share those experiences with friends, read reviews of destinations, and much more. The site is completely integrated with Facebook Connect allowing users to share via the existing social network. As the site continues to gain momentum, something interesting has occurred within the community. Much of the user generated content on whereivebeen.com generally serves as a travel log or diary for individuals, citing interesting things that happened to them in a location or with people they met along the way. The site organizes these thoughts as travel reviews, but most of the time the comments do not actually review the location. So why does this disconnect exist between their ‘engineered’ community strategy and the ‘organic’ growth its sustaining?

Users generally consider Facebook as a personal network of friends providing infomation on personal experiences. Clearly this association and integration with Facebook has caused the user base to utilize whereivebeen.com as a part of their very personal social network experience. This is a good example of a community which has really taken on a life of its own. It also serves as an important lesson for marketers considering building a community. Marketers need to consider how people use networks such as Facebook or Twitter in their every day lives. They must also consider the existing user base of networks like Linkedin, MySpace, and Facebook. Building communities that embrace their intended use and audience, will most likely lead to rapid adoption. The ‘If you build it, they will come’ mentality is quickly fading as more online communities continue to take shape and users begin to expect certain features/functionalities. It will be those businesses who understand how to successfully engineer and organically grow their online communities that will be able to deliver on the true value of online community.

While Twitter can’t take all the credit for Avaya’s recent sales story, I’m impressed with its role in making the sale happen. Many kudos to Avaya for listening! (see more on Social Media Listening).
 
What are you doing to listen to your market?