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?

Narcissus by kazukichi, Flickr

I haven’t posted in quite a while; which is always a sign that lots is going on of the kind that offsets future tuition obligations, which for the next few years of my life is a good thing.

So what awoke me from my social publishing slumber?  As is often the case, it was a visceral reaction to a seemingly small thing… in this case a tweet from a friend and industry colleague — but the content of which furrowed my brow.

This friend is a great writer, speaker, affable fellow, and has been a great advisor to me personally as I gave up suckling at the corporate teet about two years ago.  He has a big following.  When he speaks or blogs or tweets, lots of people listen, read or retweet.  He’s a new media guru.

He has been a thought leader as fellow marketing functionaries sought to understand how new communication tools (blogs, in particular) and the power of web search engines turned the traditional media context upside down.

He uses his first-mover advantage to spread what was once riot-inciting marketing rhetoric, and is now common sense about social media, social networks, social publishing:

• Listen ten times more than you speak
• Give ten times more than you expect to receive
• It’s all about the virus: try to create ideas that will spread to squillions over the web

He uses his platform to challenge brands to wake up to the ways of this new world, and always acknowledges them when they respond.

He blogged recently about what one of the very large manufacturing entities bailed out by the government could do to fix its marketing.  Excellent suggestions and, as usual, steeped in the perspective of the new media.

The next day, he went out on Twitter, essentially saying:

“Knock Knock. Hello? Hey  is anyone home? Care to comment on my post??  It’s been 24 hours..”

I dashed off a reply (via Facebook, where I first saw the tweet), which said:

“Yo: Those guys have  just been told to take orders from a 31-year old who’s never held a job with products or revenue on the line in his life. Perhaps they’ll get back to the social media moguls a little later on. ”

It was meant in light seriousness… but it got me thinking.  The new media are so powerful.  And yet the temptations are so great.  Here was a case where a good guy and a bright industry light used his platform to essentially say, “Hey — I’m talking over here.  Are you listening to me?”  To me, it read like a violation of the Gospel according to the New Media Gurus.  Off to confession!

Thankfully, about an hour or so later he tweeted again:

“OK, this company has more important things than my blog to do this week.”

I was relieved.  But there’s a lesson here: with barriers to communication to vast audiences so low, people need to keep in mind that social media aren’t always at the center of everyone’s universe.

We are stewards of our online persona(e) — a very very big responsibility indeed.

Unilever: 400 brands!

I’m sure the twitterati and digerati and otherati will be all over this speech:  : from Unilever CMO Simon Clift.

The denial: “Social media is not a strategy.”

How right he is!  Of course you knew that already, since you read this blog.  :-0

The new media are just media; buyers have taken control of information about sellers; vendors need to learn first how to listen… I think I like this guy!

Thanks to Mark Mullen for the tip on the speech!

Holland-Mark, Boston

Demonstrations of leadership and courage are rare in times of economic crisis, and basically invisible at present.  Thus one is tempted to suspect a challenge to the digerati-twitterati and the marketing profession as a whole as just so much more hype in a period of zeal and desire for revolution unlike any I’ve observed in my twenty years in the marketing trade.

Read Chris Colbert’s recent post from his new blog.  Marketing is the only profession with no real accreditation.  Marketers are challenging congresspeople and lawyers on the approval ratings front.  And this more extensive quotation:

As example, the last few years have brought the declaration that traditional media no longer works and that the online milieu does, or works better.  The flaw with that platitude is that no one ever knew whether traditional media worked(s).  So what are we comparing online media too?  And even in the online realm there are a dearth of quantitative cases to show how it delivers tangibly better performance and/or performance that is scalable.  The entire topic and our industry’s ability to declare anything “for sure” about it is thwarted by a gaping lack of analytical and intellectual rigor, made worse by a gaping hole of data.

Kudos, Colbert.  I encourage all to subscribe to Chris’ new and fresh feed.

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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.

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.

Block Island: Shifting Sands
Originally uploaded by TimDD

Say that five times fast.

"Houston, we have a problem."  Over the past five years, the metrics which are relevant and effective for the measurement of marketing’s performance have changed.

I would argue that they will continue to change, markedly, in the next five years.

How are the metrics changing?

First, they are changing because technology is driving a fundamental change in the marketing mix.  I worked at Lotus Development back in the day — right up through the acquisition by IBM, and we used to be an anchor tenant in the Comdex shopping mall.  And we went to Networld, and Interop, then Networld / Interop… the booths were constantly in transit.

More recently, I have been recommending and driving WAY down the investment in trade shows and conferences.  They, like print editions of our beloved trade magazines, are on their way to extinction.

Some conferences are more targeted, and for a time these more narrow-cast events were effective, but even these are giving way to more effective online vehicles now at our disposal.

But here’s the rub: these old school marketing programs are being deprioritized in favor of a new class of activities which are different in a really important way from their predecessors.  Instead of events and seminars and trade shows, [and print advertising, and traditional PR, and live webinars the list goes on], marketing execs I speak with are moving investment into:

• blogging, er, duh
• e-books (white papers for the ADD-afflicted, and prettier to look at)
• SEO-sensitive site content with far fresher frequency
• flash or other more dynamic and interactive media

Why are these changes necessary?  Because prospects in the addressable markets for our products are moving dramatically and rapidly toward self-service means and methods for assessing solutions, and decisively away from the old same-time-same-place vehicles.  The online community is putting the hurt on some aspects of the live-and-in-living-color community.  I’ll have to ponder that a little further in future posts.

Well if you read my opinings regularly, you know I believe strongly in transparency, metrics, no secrets and no surprises marketing.

So how, you should ask, do you manage expectations, and report on performance, if "the goal posts are moving?"

Fine question.  Simple answer: you have to engage in one of marketing’s key leadership activities, metrics management.  You have to predict the future.  Shine a bright light on the one- to three-year horizon for your executive team.  Build the case which illustrates your analysis of why this shift in the marketing mix is occurring.  Test and share the results of your pilot programs with the new media and new vehicles, and clearly identify how and when new approaches and tactics will supplant older ones.

Lead!

I have been doing some "primary research" [which, by the way, means talking with friends and former colleagues]  to answer the question, "Why does marketing often fail to obtain a seat at the executive decision-making table?"

I have learned a great deal in the process, but one of the most quotable interactions came last Friday when I was speaking with a fabulous marketing professional (of course because I hired her many years ago) from a company that deals in fairly arcane integration middleware.

My survey questions attempt to illuminate several aspects of marketing:

1. to discriminate marketing responsibilities (the role) from marketing activities (the tactics);
2. to identify how marketing leaders feel about the importance, and the effectiveness, of both;
3. to identify relationships which help illustrate why certain companies are or become market-driven and marketing-led, while others don’t

She revealed first that marketing responsibilities and staff are distributed across four different organizations (which is no surprise, she is at a technologist-dominated company).  But she went on to describe how, despite the potential political challenges of the organizational model, she has been able to "appreciate her capital" [my words] within the company.

"We improved our credibility and trust with Sales by showing them ‘the math of marketing.’"  She went on to describe how.  By decomposing the revenue stream on the one hand, and the demand creation plan on the other, into small pieces that were both obviously linked and easy to understand, the dialogue with sales has moved to a new and more strategic level.   Trust has developed, and interactions are not based on the "blamestorming" so common between sales and marketing, but on real discussions about market problems, solution value, shifts and trends in marketing mix and in sales execution.

Nice.  And achievable by any technology company with a marketing leader willing to control internal debate and eliminate blamestorming.

When I was a wide-eyed and youthful systems programmer back in the eighties, marketing executives at my company (Lotus Development Corporation) would stand up in front of large crowds and give magnificent presentations (often using 35mm transparencies back in those days) to talk about what great marketing was going on at the company.

I didn’t really know how to spell "PPPP" in those days.  But man could I write assembler code.

Marketing people talked then and still do today about "awareness – consideration – preference – action – loyalty," or some variation thereof.  [Image: Forrester Research]

At first blush you might think they are referring to the steps prospects pass through when they are seeking a solution to a business pain.  Wrong!  They are describing the structure of their very own marketing mix, and their hope that by executing tactics to raise awareness, tactics to encourage consideration, et cetera, that some number of the "fish" captured in the marketing "net" will make it into the sales pipeline and maybe even someday into a sales forecast.  Oh yeah and then transform into revenue.

I believe that the foundation of marketing, at least in the software industry, and probably for technology at a price point in excess of $10k more broadly, has changed.  That the new foundation for establishing credibility, building momentum, and achieving critical mass in your addressable market needs to be though about through a new lens.

First: presence.  Today, table stakes for being in the market is having a viable, robust, relevant presence on the web.  More on this later, but this means having an essential and detailed content-based (SEO) and paid (PPC) web marketing strategy.

Next: authority.  No longer satisfied with "if we build it, they will come" dreams, we now realize that emerging from the crowd, breaking through the noise, establishing distinction in crowded and fast-moving markets requires the establishment of authority: for your product, and, at least as importantly, for your people — your thought leaders and innovators.  Here’s where the "C"-word comes into play: communities.  Create your own or, more likely, participate on some already established (especially if you are a new or very small player).  Identify where prospects with the problem you address congregate to address the issue, or an immediately adjacent one, and begin to share your insight and expertise.

Third: reputation.  If steps one and two are executed with brilliance, this one is easy.  But more often than not there is work left to do.  We used to call them public relations and analyst relations, but now we need to think in terms of a thought leadership development program.  At the intersection of a company’s technologies and its innovators and evangelists is a "glowing nuclear material" (and I mean that in the most positive and powerful sense ) that the world needs to see validated by other geniuses.  I think Macchiavelli would recommend that you let bloggers, journalists, and industry analysts borrow your brilliance, that you praise them for their insight, and that you sit back and let them begin to tell your story as though it were their own — to the thousands or hundres of thousands of subscribers that constitute their respective communities.  It’s a trust fall… but the "halo" effect is well worth the risk.

[Found an interesting presentation by Shiv Singh of AvenueA / Razorfish on related and broader topic.  Worth a look!]

I have spend the last few weeks "pursuing personal interests."  I love that phrase: bluntly euphemistic.  I like that phrase, too.

This has meant time with family and friends; executing projects long held up in the household chores queue; embracing hobbies and other interests, neglected for many years.

As I have spoken with colleagues about marketing at their companies, spoken with investors and executives looking for marketing leadership, and perused the exploding variety of online community resources now available to assist marketers, I am struck and frustrated by the failure of marketing executives and their teams to step up and lead their companies.

Everywhere I find laments about how marketing is derided and demeaned: victims, we in marketing, of those numskulls in sales; challenged by CEOs and boards to "beat the unbeatable foe."

Nowhere (OK, I exaggerate a bit) do I read of marketing leaders stepping up to turn companies into market-driven juggernauts.

I postulate why.  Technology companies continue to deny that our industry is maturing.  In mature industries, marketing is not some "black art," whose potions and spells are the closely held secrets of a few conjurers (or descendants of Lord Voldemort).

Instead, marketing must be perceived as a transparent, measurable process linking strategic market planning to execution in sales and customer support — all the way.

And marketing leaders must drive their organization toward conversations about market planning and business strategy, and away from debates over tactical program effectives, and lead volume and quality.

Over the next few posts, I will enumerate what I believe are the key aspects of a mature marketing function within a rapidly maturing industry.  As always, comments welcome!