September 15, 2010, 9 a.m. Pacific Time, 11 a.m. Central Time, 12 noon Eastern Time, 5 p.m. UK Time
Ekaterina Walter, Social Media Strategist at Intel Angela LoSasso, Global Social Media Strategy and Programs at HP Petra Neiger, Senior Manager, Global Social Media at Cisco Holger Schulze, Director of Marketing at SafeNet
Ok, I’m back on it after a busy summer. On September 15, I will be chairing a round table discussion with these seriously knowledgeable industry experts to figure out how businesses can adapt emerging social media technologies to their existing marketing plan and how can they benefit from integrating social media into different functions of the business. Join me in grilling this panel on the impact and emerging issues of this fundamental shift in thinking, and the metrics involved to ensure a maximized ROI.
June 9, 2010, 1 p.m. Pacific Time, 3 p.m. Central Time, 4 p.m. Eastern Time, 9 p.m. UK Time
Isaac Garcia, Co-founder & CEO at Central Desktop Ross Fubini, Chief Evangelist & Co-Founder at Cube Tree Mike McGurkin, VP Services & Support at Newsgator
Join this influential panel, as we explore microblogging and social collaboration in the enterprise. As per usual, the panel will be grilled and either emerge frazzled, shining or both…topics include:
Landscape – Where have we come from and where are we now? - Communications such as mobile or e-mail have become ubiquitous
- Consumer world has adopted microblogging and social media fully
- Professionals are starting to follow suit…or are they?
Grilling question: time suck? Is this creating noise which decreases workforce efficiency? (e.g. IM)
Grilling question: it’s great that collaboration is accelerated, but what effect does that have on data governance and security?
Live polling question: are you using microblogging or social collaboration in your organization? (yes, no, don’t know)
Where are companies successfully deploying microblogging and social collaboration? Internal vs. External Communications? - Status updates improves task management (context on progress)
- Organizations are using microblogging as a way to escalate support issues in call centers
- Sales & marketing examples
Grilling question: how successfully have these apps been integrated into core platforms such as Helpdesk Support, CRM, ERP or Marketing Automation systems
Grilling question: how realistic is it that companies will create systems outside of the above core systems
Live polling question: Do you think microblogging and social collaboration… 1. increases workforce and operational efficiency or 2. decreases workforce and operational efficiency?
Adoption & The Future - Are professionals deploying these tools on an ad hoc basis or do many organizations centrally purchase/roll out microblogging and social collaboration?
- What needs to happen for these tools and techniques to become as ubiquitous as e-mail or mobile (is that realistic)?
Grilling question: with these tools and techniques being so early stage, is it possible to make the business case without hard data demonstrating ROI?
Live polling question: Following this round table discussion, are you more likely to adopt enterprise microblogging and social collaboration within your team or company? (yes, no)
Register for upcoming webcasts by clicking on the ‘attend webcast’ button below.
Having lost my iPhone at Coachella, I was convinced that I could survive until my next official upgrade in September. So I made some calls and sure enough, a friend volunteered a Blackberry as a consolation plaster to fill the void. Fill the void it did – with an endless stream of frustration and an unbearable sense of detachment. Although I use my iPhone for pleasure, it was its business pedigree that I really missed. From keeping on top of endless e-mails in a manageable fashion, updating this blog, to tweeting with peers, to updating salesforce.com on the go, joining web conferences and reviewing documents – the Blackberry’s UI, OS and apps simply crumble in the face of its towering sibling. Goodbye Blackberry, hello iPhone.
April 14, 2010, 1 p.m. Pacific Time, 3 p.m. Central Time, 4 p.m. Eastern Time, 9 p.m. UK Time
Andrew Kordek, Manager of Optimization at Groupon, Inc Stephanie Miller, Vice President Market Development at Return Path Naylor Gray, Director Global Marketing at Frost & Sullivan
Join this influential panel, as we look at how relevant e-mail is in today’s digital marketing landscape. As per usual, the panel will be grilled and either emerge frazzled, shining or both…topics include:
What Hasn’t Killed Email Yet?
Unique and Interesting Uses of Email Marketing
Email Throughout the Lifecycle
Making a business case for segmentation and targeting, vs. just broadcasting the entire file
How to be Really Good at Email Marketing in a Multi Channel Context?
Register free by clicking on the ‘attend webcast’ button below.
March 9, 2010, 9 a.m. Pacific Time, 11 a.m. Central Time, 12 noon Eastern Time, 5 p.m. UK Time
Richard Brewer Hay, Chief Blogger at eBay Michael Brito, VP of Social Media at Edelman Digital Michelle Broderick, Marketing Director at Yelp
According to a survey by Edelman, just 25% of consumers say they trust their friends to give them good information about a company, compared with 45% in 2008. Social marketing is built on the idea that people trust their friends more than they trust official voices so what does it mean for the future of social media? Join this roundtable discussion as experts from eBay, Edelman Digital and Yelp provide insights on how we’re social media today and what the future holds for this space.
As per usual, the panel will be grilled and either emerge frazzled, shining or both…questions include:
Is trust in social media dying?
Do social media platforms need to change in order to adapt to peoples’ behavioral evolution on the web? How so?
Is there a difference in the community’s trust when we compare transactional and non-transactional social networks?
Is the future of trust likely to be the migration towards official voices or your friend’s recommendations?
Register free by clicking on the ‘attend webcast’ button below.
Today, I grilled Bill Scully, Director of eMarketing at Siemens and Lauren Vaccarello, Senior SEM Manager at salesforce.com to find out whether search engine marketing is really working and how it stacks up against some of the other techniques in the digital marketing mix. To attend the recorded round table webcast, simply click the play button below. With search now firmly established in the digital marketing mix, ROI metrics are evolving. It started with hits, then moved to click-through rates and finally conversion. This round table discussion looked at today’s search market, explore best practices on measuring search ROI and look at real life examples to establish the effectiveness of search in building brand/messaging awareness and demand. The panel will tackled questions such as:
- How do we think of search ROI today?
- What are the best practices for measuring ROI in search?
- Is search money well spent?
- Have you seen some alternative applications for search?
- The future of measuring ROI?
As a buyer of sales and marketing automation, I cannot help but getting seriously wound up about the over-hyped solutions on offer today. One solution doesn’t integrate with mainstream CRM systems, the other requires an entirely separate data warehouse environment to actually take it through the required workflows and yet another charges an arm and a leg for the e-mail portion of the lead nurturing process. It seems that practically every vendor matches my needs by 50-80%. Which leaves me with 20-50% manual tweaking or bridging the void with yet another ‘gap filler’ solution or app. That’s hardly ‘automation’…
So, can automation really be achieved? Are sales and marketing needs too varied by industry and/or product for vendors to provide a 90-100% match every time? Tell you what, that’s who I’m grilling next: senior execs of marketing automation vendors here I come.
As face-to-face event attendance continues to decline, professionals are increasingly turning to web-based events to educate themselves and inform their purchasing decisions. With this trend gaining momentum, marketers are trying to figure out what this means for their marketing mix. This panel will aim to answer the following questions and many more (including yours):
- If offline events are less profitable for its organizers, will inventory subside?
- Can online events match the networking-power of onsite events?
- Does digital budget allocation need to be exponentially increased to handle this shift? Will budget shift to digital marketing?
- Are online events a replacement for physical events?
- How does social media affect the offline vs. online debate?
Register free by clicking on the ‘attend webcast’ button below.
I’m surprised I even made this grilling – I suffered from the worst bronchitis in living memory in the run-up to this session. Fortunately, I managed to recover just in time. So, do analysts still matter? The live broadcast was positively animated with a few tense moments during the grilling phases of the discussion. And it wasn’t just me grilling – the audience thoroughly enjoyed unpicking the panel. And so they should!
Speaking of the panel, Michelle Accardi runs the shared services group at CA, a leading IT Enterprise Management Software vendor, and in that capacity oversees their global marketing programs. She is both a client of various analysts such as Gartner and Frost & Sullivan as well as an ‘end user’ – a subscriber to reports and industry research which is relevant to her as a marketer. “Analysts matter as much as my customers care about them” she says. Her big thing is trust. She advises any marketer to canvas customers and find out which analyst firm THEY trust and to invest your marketing dollars accordingly. For Michelle the whole analyst thing is not just about the products, but also about understanding her customers’ needs so that CA can deliver the right solutions (read: ‘make sure that the messaging aligns with the customer need’). Now, since Michelle is big on the trust issue, I challenged the subject of objectivity as analysts often seem to get ‘won over’ – directly or indirectly – by vendors such as CA. Michelle agrees that there is a perception that vendors use (read: pay) analysts to push their own agenda, but insists that more often than not, analysts remain true to their role as ambassadors of reliable and trustworthy industry insights.
Chris Ross, VP of Marketing at the Burton Group, arguably the most neutral IT research and advisory services firm, disagrees. He believes that there is no way for those ‘reliable and trustworthy insights’ not to be shaped by the tens of millions of dollars which vendors are pouring into these analyst firms. Chris believes that any analyst firm whose majority revenue is driven by vendors (e.g. Forrester, Gartner etc) will provide great insights to the vendor, but may have a penchant for more subjective recommendations to their buyer community.
The audience was getting animated, joining in the debate. One delegate was lamenting the difficulty of getting the analysts’ mindshare as a small medium enterprise vendor with limited budget, while another countered that analysts have a bias TOWARDS small medium enterprise who shake up the space and AGAINST the big incumbent players.
Naylor Gray, Frost & Sullivan’s Global Marketing Director turned the trust question on its head and put 2.0 on the hot seat. Frost and Sullivan are a well recognized analyst firm focused on accelerating growth for their clients. In his opinion, trust and the reliability of data gets established through questions such as 1. do they have a methodology, 2. is it transparent, 3. can the model be easily manipulated or is it ‘vendor proof’, 4. do they have the industry coverage and the capability? According to Naylor, social media cannot be trusted at a deep level. There is no methodology – there is no brand – social media is made up of individuals and individuals will never be trusted brands upon which professionals will make significant business decisions. He has a point – analyst brands play a role in empowering the buyers to make their business case. Going to your boss(es) for funding, validating your request with a leading analyst brand and related industry research/insights will go down better than ‘Someone on Twitter said’ or ‘this blog I read on a daily basis mentioned that’….
Still, Chris argues that analysts are under threat if they do no position themselves correctly in this new landscape. Interestingly, Naylor quoted Google as a key competitor due to the accessibility of industry insights and data which competes with the ‘off the shelf’ reports which analysts generate revenues from. “If the customer can get everything they need through search and Web 2.0 tools and platforms for free, they should.” says Chris. So, the ball is in the analyst’s court to stay relevant. “The analyst business model is strong, but our related services need to evolve. These days, we’re so much more than creating documents – we develop ‘Google proof’ non-commoditized insights, we sit in on staff meetings, develop highly custom research. The basic subscription model works, but the value proposition is shifting from content to advisory.”
So, the reason why analysts still matter is that information is not insight. And – according to the panel – analysts have a role to play in deciphering the many moving parts in their subject matter area to provide unparalleled depth and breadth which is indispensable when making important business decisions. Another consideration is that social commentary and/or communities are not necessarily prevalent in all B2B industry sectors.
So, the whole notion of empowering professionals with credible, reliable and free knowledge is a pipe dream? Naylor dryly interjected that business isn’t quite that altruistic, but could definitely see how more credible ‘vertical’ social networks could start making a difference (i.e. Sermo vs. LinkedIn). Michelle pointed at her work with ‘community of interest websites’ which CA developed with TechWeb TO empower the community. Which brings us back to trust – an industry professional will rarely believe a vendor-driven resource (even if that fact is well hidden). What would be really powerful, Michelle argues, is to ask the customers which brands they trust and to use that social consensus to develop trusted professional communities to empower professionals to rate products, exchange experiences and trade insights. The audience agreed: 73% would like to see these type of resources for their respective profession.
Yeah yeah, I know – the only reason you kept reading, is because you’re into leads and demand gen. I’ll get back to marketing porn in a moment. Is there really a difference between lead generation and demand generation? Our friends at Marketo put it well: “Demand generation is the evolution of traditional lead generation. Unlike traditional programs that throw any lead over the wall to sales, it is about qualifying and prioritizing prospects, nurturing a steady crop of qualified leads that want to engage with sales, aligning marketing with sales, and measuring and optimizing the results over time.” That’s kind of true, but it’s a little simplistic. Large enterprise hardly ‘throws any lead’ over the wall to sales – the qualification process (often telesales) was in place way before the term ‘demand generation’ was even coined.
There’s no doubt that B2B marketers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in sustaining an ongoing dialogue with their prospects to improve the quality of the lead and ultimately increase conversion ratios – thus, demand gen rules. Now if you follow that logic through…as ‘bare bones’ lead gen (e.g. white papers, cpc, webinars) gets commoditized and marketers apply price pressure to vendors, will their budgets increasingly flow into data warehousing, data mining and marketing automation? Will marketers want to bring the entire nurturing cycle in-house by generating cheap leads and scoring and intensifying each ‘dialogue’, thus providing their sales organization with optimal inbound demand? Or will they want to outsource and be handed ‘the perfect lead’ at a much higher CPL?
Knowing the time and resource constraints of the 10,000+ marketers I have spoken to over the past 12 years, I would hazard a guess that what they would really like is control of the ‘demand generation’ cycle without the headaches of en masse data handling and interoperability. Here is – in my humble opinion – what needs to happen for this to become a reality over the next 5+ years (and yes, it WILL take that long):
1. ‘Marketing Automation’ will need to grow up and become a turnkey data warehousing/data mining/marketing automation environment and provide the technology and associated services to adapt to individual needs more intelligently. There will need to be a universal industry standard, developed by marketers and the various vendors in the field.
2. ANYONE who sells leads (online or offline) will need to use related technologies which will seamlessly integrate with this universal industry standard for data transfer and scoring purposes. This, in turn, will provide an opportunity for these vendors to play a more significant role in extending their services to nurture leads without the ‘scoring disconnect’ which is so frustratingly prevalent today.
3. Any company must measure its demand gen marketers ENTIRELY by pipeline or business closed, all whilst rewarding creativity and commercial smarts.
4. Once these steps have been accomplished, lead generation will be FREE and marketers will hold vendors accountable based on conversion to opportunity or even conversion to sale – which will of course become the new points of transaction. And yes, they WILL enjoy watching vendors fall over themselves to make sure THEIR ‘nurturing’ programs lead to the highest conversion ratios. Sound good? Since we need a soundbite to go with the times, let’s call that TRUPEBAMA (“true performance based marketing”). Needless to say, TRUPEBAMA is marketing porn.
Yeah yeah, I know – the only reason you kept reading, is because you’re into leads and demand gen. I’ll get back to marketing porn in a moment. Is there really a difference between lead generation and demand generation? Our friends at Marketo put it well: “Demand generation is the evolution of traditional lead generation. Unlike traditional programs that throw any lead over the wall to sales, it is about qualifying and prioritizing prospects, nurturing a steady crop of qualified leads that want to engage with sales, aligning marketing with sales, and measuring and optimizing the results over time.” That’s kind of true, but it’s a little simplistic. Large enterprise hardly ‘throws any lead’ over the wall to sales – the qualification process (often telesales) was in place way before the term ‘demand generation’ was even coined.
