From Stina Stockholm, Flickr

When I became a corporate “outsider,” almost three years ago, I felt that marketing as a business function was changing fundamentally.  I plunged into research mode to learn how the “old media” (print publications, radio, network & cable TV, with staff writers employed by giant media companies) were giving way to the “new” (citizen publishers producing content on the web for free).

I launched my consulting business by exploiting social networks, this blog, and free content (see Resources) in order to stimulate my network and tease out interest in project work ranging from part-time-CMO to white papers.  It worked.

I also witnessed “tulip mania” as self-styled (and genuine) experts emerged and captured the attention of almost everyone on a marketing career path.  For a time during 2009 old media events (conferences) were popping up left right and center headlined by new media gurus extolling one of the movement’s foundation principles: Give, give, give… listen, listen, listen… engage… and in the end you will be rewarded a hundredfold with opportunity (and, presumably, filthy lucre).  Become known as a source of quality content, and customers will beat a path to your door.

A couple of months ago, I spotted an ad on Facebook which quoted social media beacon Chris Brogan’s daily rate at something in excess of $20,000.  The offer was to gain all of that wisdom by joining a new community featuring Chris, Darren Rowse, and Brian Clarke — known as Third Tribe Marketing — for a mere $97 initial payment, followed by $47 per month.  As their blogs, collectively, have over 300,000 readers, even using the old school marketing yield on direct mail of 2%, that’s a neat $3 million (with an M) per annum!  Now that’s capitalism for you.  My guess is they timed that initiative just right.

Go for the promotional material on the website if you wish (after all, they’re amongst the best at web copy writing), but let’s be clear: as well as these guys have been doing living off the “give it away for free” model, these leading lights have clearly seen an opportunity to do business one $500-per-year subscription at a time.  Perhaps, like Lebron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh — it’s not about their ego or the money — they just want to win the new media world championship.  Time will tell.

Another recent observation: though the new media mantra of “inbound marketing” (nowhere more religiously observed than at Hubspot) poo poos the old-school outbound tactics of telemarketing and direct mail, I know many of us with marketing in our online profiles were bombarded with offers to sign up for the April Inbound Marketing Summit in San Francisco — notably as the conference’s dates were drawing perilously near.

So should this mini-bubble burst, should the petals drop from the precious tulips (and I believe it/they will), what can we take away?

First, it is true that the media have irreversibly changed. The problem is, the changes are not that dramatic, nor are the implications that difficult to understand.  There isn’t a huge amount of magic; no need for wizards; no new secret handshakes and shibboleths for the elite of this new marketing paradigm.  Brands are their own publishers, and they are largely in control of their own media.  A capability once outsourced to one or more agencies has moved in house, and media costs are heading toward zero.  That’s about it.  I speak to groups of young entrepreneurs from time to time… and after two hours of very high level teaching, they are off and running and becoming their own content foundries.

Psst… guess what… it’s not really that hard to figure this stuff out!

Second, brands (and marketing professionals in particular) need to take much more seriously the content responsibility with which they are now saddled.  We used to talk about a people to programs ratio of 40:60.  Leverage in marketing meant distributing costs 40% in human resource costs, and 60% in media and external programs designed to “drive the fish to the nets.”  Today companies need to invest much more heavily in the creation, curation, and distribution of content — using human beings to do so.  Marketing departments will be moving discretionary spend (which is easy to cut in case of a revenue shortfall) to personnel expense (which is difficult to cut, at least for most sentient humans).

Finally, marketing needs to attack with every fiber in its being the “signal-to-noise ratio” problem which all of this new media and social networking technology has created.  Zero barriers to entry for publishing and vastly expanding user-generated content volume conspire to create a polluted information environment which makes the BP Deepwater Horizon mess look like “On Golden Pond.”  In addition to relentless promotion of our own messages and achievements, we are going to have to exhibit leadership in filtering the extremely high volume of extremely low value information, and continuously enhance our web sites to make them more like museums, libraries, and exhibits — destinations for quality, creativity, and clarity — and less like cheesy storefronts.  Content curation solutions, like the one just launched by HiveFire, may be extremely valuable in attacking this enormous challenge.

What do you think?

One of the fastest-growing categories of articles or posts I read in the blogosphere these days is “ego posts.”  I wrote about this once back in the early days of the swine flu… suggesting that the downfall of our nice little social media world may be “IM#1,” not H1N1.

I’ll figure out how to use semantic tools to rate blogs’ ego quotients some day.  The lowest of the low might get the “Bill O’Reilly” prize, which should probably be 30 days spent in O’Reilly’s company.  Those with ego in check might earn the “Barack Obama” medal.  OK — I’m kidding with that one.  I’m sure you’ll share even better ideas for the prizes.

But you know what I’m talking about: those posts which describe “how someone as famous and busy as I get through my fun- sun- fan- and follower-filled days;” the rants which essentially proclaim “hey, I’m out here — criticizing you and your business, and you haven’t even bothered to tweet me back or comment on my post.”  It’s a pet peeve of mine.

So here I am writing an ego post.  I hate these things, but this request forced me to reflect a bit, do some writing that isn’t in support of some commercial enterprise, and so I’m going to go ahead and share it here.

I’m hurtling toward my 30th college reunion next spring, and some of the fine folks organizing the event asked me to complete a “survey” to share with classmates during the run-up to the big party.  Whether this serves to encourage attendance or scare away I leave to them… but here’s a slightly edited version of the questions and my responses:

• What did you think you’d grow up to be when when you were age 5:
  • A singer with The Four Tops or The Temptations
• Your current life ambition:
  • To teach my children and other young people the hard-learned lessons from my own life
  • To teach small business people that they can have as great, or greater, an impact on their customer communities as bigger, better-funded brands
  • To capture more of life and the world in pictures
• First impression of  your freshman year:
  • “Ok, pinch me: I’m surrounded by beautiful women, I’m getting As, and I can have all the beer I can drink at a Speakeasy for $5.”
• Memorable experience at college:
  • Sunny fall afternoons spent with Florence and friends at Harkness Beach.
• Favorite professor and why:
  • Mel Woody (Philosophy).  He would take the title page of every paper written for him, roll it back-side into his typewriter, and provide an entire page (single-spaced) of comments on my exposition.  ‘Nuff said.
• Biggest misconception about life:
  • That the majority of people would work hard to achieve their life’s dreams.  Rather, I find one-third do, another third don’t care, and the final third are just plain entitled to them.
• What are you proud of?
  • I’m proud of the balance I have in life.  Though occasionally extremely stressful, I’ve been able to start a business which allows me to spend time working with growing companies in the States and in Europe; to be available to my children as they grow up into young men; to resume my love of photography; to help local small businesses get with the web marketing program; to continue the never-ending project which is my current (and fourth) significant home renovation.
• Words you live by:
  • “Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night”
  • “Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them.”
• Guilty pleasure:
  • Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band concerts, in “the pit.”
• If you could be anywhere in the world right now I’d be . . .
  • On Block Island, at sunset after a day at the beach, relaxing with family and friends, cooking dinner.
• Your road not taken:
  • Boston University Law school, likely followed by law practice down on the Jersey Shore
• Biggest myth about you:
  • That I had cosmetic surgery to create this fine if somewhat pronounced proboscis
• How is college part of your life now:
  • On my Connecticut College chair, given by my mother, is a needlepoint pillow, made by my mother, featuring the Connecticut College camel.  Next to it, another needlepoint pillow, also my mother’s work, that reads: “Money may not be everything, but it sure keeps you in touch with your children.”
• My favorite song from college that I hope we dance to at Reunion:
  • Birdland, by Weather Report
• Who I am dying to see at Reunion:
  • Anyone who ever attended “Scotch Night” at the Park Housefellow Suite during our senior year.
• Why I am coming back after 30 years:
  • Fellowship.
• Other fun facts about me:
  • I spend about 100 days per year in Geneva, Switzerland
  • My photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Taliesin West” is on display at the Skysong Center at the University of Arizona
  • I hold the world speed record for reciting the alphabet backwards.
  • The night the ball went between his legs in the 1986 World Series, Bill Buckner slept in my bedroom.  I slept elsewhere.

Brew Hammerling

Plus Ça Change, Plus c’est la Même Chose

I’m in tears over “Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley.”  I first heard about it through the folks at Version 2.0 Communications, then read a follow-up on PR2.0, Brian Solis’ blog.

This morning I checked the date on the article again to make sure I was here, in the present moment, and not somehow transported back to July 1999.

To summarize: the article is about shifts in the world of public relations, and the leadership being exhibited by Brew Hammerling.

Disclosure: I don’t know Brew Hammerling, I’ve never met Brew Hammerling, but based on the article I’m sure we were at the same industry event on a few occasions, and I think she’s got a great nickname.

Here is an excerpt which reveals how Brew earned this position of leadership:

Ms. Hammerling, while popping green apple Jolly Ranchers into her mouth, suggests a press tour that includes briefing bloggers at influential geek sites like TechCrunch, All Things Digital and GigaOM.

But Roger McNamee, a prominent tech investor who is backing Wordnik, is also in the room, and a look of exasperation passes across his face at the mere mention of the sites.

“Why shouldn’t we avoid them? They’re cynical,” he says, also noting his concern that Wordnik would probably appeal more to wordsmiths than followers of tech blogs. “That’s where I would be most uncomfortable. They don’t know the difference between ‘they’re’ and ‘there.’ ”

Without missing a beat, Ms. Hammerling changes course, instantly agreeing with Mr. McNamee’s take. “I love you for that,” she intones. “I’ll leave the tech blogs out. Let them come to me.”

Instead, she decides that she will “whisper in the ears” of Silicon Valley’s Who’s Who — the entrepreneurs behind tech’s hottest start-ups, including Jay Adelson, the chief executive of Digg; Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter; and Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo.

OK: let me get this right.  Brew is rolling out her launch strategy — and to sound au courant, she must of course include outreach to the new media influencers.

Unfortunately for Brew, the client’s CEO has her board chairman in the room to hear the agency pitch.  A nightmare for the marketing team under the best of conditions, but in this case it’s Roger McNamee: to the manor born, Ivy Leaguer, Grateful Dead cover-band leader, chum of all the technology industry’s big names.  No problem for Brew: she knows Roger,  and Larry Ellison and Bono, too, because, according to the article, she dated one of the band members from REM.  Aha!

However busy the social calendar, Brew did not miss the class which advises: “When the chairman challenges your strategy, immediately embrace his point of view.  Make his idea your idea.”  She goes one better, proclaiming her love for the genius.  Can she get any further up McNamee’s nether portal?

The article in question is about Brew’s launch of wordnik.  Wordnik’s results page for the word “integrity” includes the following: “Steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code.”  To have integrity, you have to have principles.  You have to adhere to them.  If you believe in your ideas and your plans, Brew, you stand up to the chairman and you tell him what you think.  Especially when a New York Times correspondent is in the room recording the conversation.

This whole article brought me back to a time — the late 1990s — when the tether broke.  We were so high on our own fumes we thought it was sustainable that business without customers, revenue, or written plans could enjoy valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars at their hastily executed IPOs.  In those days, you could get away with making ridiculously ambitious statements.  Indeed, the more outrageous the claim, the greater the reward from industry pundits, and, subsequently, the market.

The fun didn’t end, though, before McNamee’s (and many others’) pockets were even more richly lined than they were at birth.  I won’t ever forget how Roger spoke at my Internet Startup’s launch party at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco — saying that the industry had changed forever, and there was no end in sight to how the internet and tech firms would continue to create these enormous pools of wealth.  Roger has been correct about many things, but on this occasion, March 16, 2000, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

The startup was called Bowstreet.  After gathering up nearly $150 million in venture capital, the firm soared, then crashed — unable to make the IPO window as the bubble famously burst.  What was left of the firm was sold to IBM for 10 cents on the dollar in 2005.

Dear readers, I find what’s going on in the media world today fascinating.  But occasionally it is also humorous, as I see us condemning ourselves to repeat the history from which we are supposed to learn.

Or am I naive and idealistic to think that in our professional pursuits we should have principles, integrity, and boundaries?

Oh, that’s right — we’re talking about P.R.

I would love to read your comments on this topic.

The Year the Media Died

An old friend shared this link with me last week — an incredibly ambitious undertaking, extremely well executed: a parody of Don Maclean’s “American Pie,” recast to survey the demise of the old media at the hands of the internet and Google.

The piece is cute. It tests your sensibilities lyrically from time to time, but a tip of the hat to “lmcduff” for writing and producing in a single day!

Now let’s stop crying about the end of print journalism, the end of the big agency team, the end of all the perks (my favorite: tickets to see Bobby Short at The Carlyle). It’s like lamenting the end of the horseless carriage for God’s sake. Last time I checked we still had horses and ponies around and people spending plenty of money to watch them play polo, and take left turns around grass and dirt tracks for big prize money.

The media have changed. How do we protect the message? How do we answer my brother David’s question: “Who’s going to staff a bureau in the dark corners of the world so that we can get reliable news when things start blowing up in the Pashtun provinces?”

We do so by creating value, and choosing to bring that value to markets willing to spend to support it. The mistake failing media outlets are making is this: they believe that their key asset is their readership. Wrong again, Watson! Their key asset is their staff, their writers, and their ability to find and produce the right story at the right time with the right insight. Readers will find the media source with the best writers… and the eyeballs will turn over — and over. Readers will be loyal to you if you are loyal to your bureau chiefs, your editors, your stringers. Find your niche and protect it!

Thanks to industry colleague and friend Lance Shaw for this post to his Facebook profile: “Gartner cancels 2 upcoming ‘flagship’ conferences.”

I wrote back at the time of the Gartner Symposium in Orlando – their surviving ‘flagship’ conference — pleading with their junior anal-ysts in particular to take a couple of affect lessons and consider how their basic and stereotypical interaction model just might need to change in the face of economic hard times.

As a perennial vendor representative, and often small and upstart vendor representative at that, I have been on the receiving end of “helpful advice” for years.  So I admit it: guilty as charged of schadenfreude!

But on a more serious note… this is yet another reminder of what is required of leaders in these trying times — humility, honesty, and refreshed and recalibrated vision.

As the prevailing state of things economic and political is “excitable,” and as we are nearing the typical year-end planning cycle for many companies, it’s time to start sharpening our rapiers and getting ready for another vicious round of “blamestorming.”

You know — when we get to see the worst in our colleagues and bosses as the scramble for attention, budget, and self-esteem reaches fever pitch.

With a US Presidential election, market turmoil, and just plain bad weather as an overlay — this calendar Q4 should be a doozy!

“The message isn’t resonating.”

“Our story isn’t working.”

“Look at what IBM did with those servers sprouting all those flowers.  That is cool.”

Like the post-season in baseball (once again without either the Ynakees or the Mets, thank goodness), the turning of the leaves, setting back the clocks and the formal launch of seasonal affective disorder — sales teams all over North America are preparing to do battle with marketing.

Can’t wait!  As a consultant (at the moment), I get to observe these absurd skirmishes with a fabulously fresh objectivity.  And will share here as the season heats up.

I crossed a line last week when I departed from my usual professional subject area and flamed aggressively about the performance of my town zoning board in receiving my request to repair and restore a screen porch on the back of my house. Above is a photo of one of the support posts — whose job is to hold the porch up off the ground.

So I’m going to close the book on complaining about local public servants — not because the Andover Twilight Zoning Board under the leadership of Stephen D. Anderson and with Nancy K. Jeton’s support has earned any reprieve, but because Kaija Gilmore, Inspector of Buildings, took time to meet with me today and review photos of my porch, discuss remediation to some of the problems, and classified the project a “repair.” You see if you cross the line from “repair” to “remove and replace,” you invoke regulations and requirements that make your hair hurt. In my case, requiring a $1500 certified plot plan (thanks Kaija for saving me this significant “flush money” expense), requiring a hearing before the zoning board to dig into setback laws (despite prior building department and zoning board approval of the original structure… whose footprint I was only going to reduce). Pending the outcome of that mercurial group, I may have had to stop at “remove,” if you know what I mean.

Thanks, Kaija, for restoring what was left of my faith in the building / zoning process in Andover, MA.

Chief BlahBlahBlah.jpg Originally uploaded by TimDD

A dear friend put me on to an article today about the impact of blogging and new ways to engage with customers. Here’s an excerpt from “Chief Blogging Officer Title Catching On With Corporations” from “Workforce Management.”

“For better or for worse, it seems corporate blogging—and the title of chief blogger—is beginning to hit its stride. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Marriott and Kodak have recently recruited chief bloggers… to tell their stories and engage consumers.”

Chief Blogging Officer. Pretty soon there will have to be Chief Twitter Officer — but perhaps they’ll just be known as Chief Twit. Did we need a Chief Western Union Officer when the telegraph was introduced? I am working with Ginny Redgate from The Redgate Group to assemble an offering that can help companies find a path through the madness. How should your company engage in “the communities at large” with what technologies and what resources? It is our belief that this can be a managed and manageable process with clear links to business strategy, not the acts of Chief Twits flailing about trying to make sense in a marketing world with a rate of change that has them on the ropes. Contact us to find out more.

In the Marketing Unbound. e-book, Level 4 Motion is about establishing a concrete and measurable frame of reference for your business (current position, future state), and charting a specific path with specific goals to which marketing investments are tied.

I got a great piece of feedback from one reader, about how an important internal dynamic shifts at Level 4: the relationship between marketing and sales.  I wasn’t smart enough to call this out in the book, but she’s right.  With the clarity and validation achieved at Levels 2 and 3, and the disciplined metrics in place at Level 4, there is a critical shift in the nature of the sales / marketing interaction model.

Let’s stipulate that in the transition to Level 4, target segments and prospect personae are specifically defined, and conversion metrics (lead to opportunity, opportunity to contract, and the dozens of variations and refinements thereof) are known — even if they are not 100% precise.  If a marketing program is not performing to expectation (and typically by this stage the over / under performance of programs tends to be marginal, i.e. within 20% of original goal), the conversation becomes very precise, and for more valuable than the typical "those leads were useless" rhetoric of earlier Levels.

The sales / marketing conversation becomes one about refining the definition of the target prospect; improving, through better testing, the resonance of messages to those targets; revisiting the sizing of the addressable market.

Index fingers: return to your brethren!

I’ve been talking to friends and former colleagues, and reflecting on 10-plus years as a marketing executive in the software industry.  It’s remarkable how many solid, seasoned marketing professionals describe the roller-coaster ride: high highs characterized by thrilling success and bursting energy; low lows where you feel like you’re being blamed for every problem in the company.

With the encouragement of many, I decided to put some effort into an e-book that would draw upon my experience to offer an explanation, and a solution.  My first such offering is now available here — and I hope you will not only read it, but comment or email me with comments, critiques, and suggestions for improvement.

It is called "Marketing Unbound."  Yes, it draws inspiration from the Prometheus myth, and hence the title of this post.  It presents a new model for marketing management, whose pillars are Presence, Authority, Reputation, Motion and Momentum.  It is intended to present an alternative to the scholarly but wizened "Four Ps," and the "awareness-consideration-preference-action-loyalty" funnel.

Today’s post is to provide a bit of a weekend preview, prior to what will undoubtedly be final tweaks and refinements before formal launch Monday.  Thanks in advance.