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.
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.
With Google posting its strongest quarterly profit ever ($1.6b) and tech companies such as IBM following suit, the recovery is well and truly under way. Or is it? It is. Almost. Well…kinda. Not in marketing departments. Yet. I have spoken to a number of senior marketers over the past weeks and not only are they having to fight for money, but they’re being given their shredded budgets in the quarter they’re supposed to execute programs in. Yeah – that’ll help the ROI!!! And, as opportunistic as ever and well ahead of the marketing budget recovery curve, the same old vendors are busy repackaging the same old offers with a nice new ‘post recession’ bow on top. Some more subtle than others. On this occasion (and surprisingly), subtleness was brought to us courtesy of an agency! I know – hard to fathom, but true. Michael Gale from Strategic Oxygen was on form as he shared his vision of the new audience and content centric marketing landscape. I did laugh out loud when I realized that his proposed best practices may require regional/field, product and corporate marketing departments to actually TALK to each other – and align their activities. That was funny. I mean seriously – as if the recession has really changed anyone. Bankers are back on unexplainable bonuses – if THAT hasn’t changed, I very much doubt marketing divisions will start group hugging.
Anyway – what I did take away from his lively presentation were some useful reminders for all of us (supported by good data from thousands of interviews). The right content at the right time in the right place matters. A lot. Sounds blatantly obvious, but it’s not. It’s also not bloody easy when the ‘right place’ can be hundreds of places – this whole 2.0 explosion thing really hasn’t helped marketers with the old targeting challenge. Before you had a handful of communities with 10s or 100s of thousands of targeted professionals – now you have 10s or 100s of communities with your target audiences scattered all over the place. GREAT! Seriously though – how do you figure out where in this new landscape your audience spends their time during the awareness, consideration and purchase phases??? And even once you’ve figured that out – what about age? Appearently, the younger your target audience is, the more they consume. And as a result of that, boomers, cuspers and generation y have completely different content consumption preferences at the various stages of the purchasing life cycle. Oh yeah, and then there is the cultural nuances around various geographies…
Sounds like a lot to do with limited resource right? Wrong. In the same way that 2.0 has turned traditional content consumption rules on their heads, you can turn traditional marketing rules on their heads. This is not about customized content for each medium and individual, adapted by age and geo. It is about realizing and accepting that you’ve officially lost all control. You can’t possibly know who wants what, where and when. Empower your buyers with ALL the assets and THEY will chose WHAT they want, WHEN they want it, WHERE they want it. In my humble opinion, you as the marketer will – in turn – need to be empowered by some seriously fresh 2.0 marketing tools and partners to travel this journey with you. Let’s hope that they will provide YOU with the right content at the right time, in the right place. Peace out.
On November 17, 2009 I will be grilling a prestigious panel of three big name analyst firms, 1 CXO subscriber and 1 senior marketer on this question. Register by hitting the ‘attend’ button below. In a world of community empowerment, media is fighting for survival as its editorial voice struggles to compete with the web’s peer-to-peer conversations. Are analysts bound for a similar destiny?
Are these very communities the future of research, market intelligence and vendor reviews? Picture sophisticated social networks of highly targeted professionals – connected by powerful Web 2.0 tools and platforms – who not only generate content but also share the insights and conduct the research which analysts have become synonymous with. Will analysts be able to compete with the immediacy and fluency of these peer-to-peer conversations? This round table webcast will aim to answer these questions and look at the future role of analysts in this new landscape.
Mingling around at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco (a welcome newcomer in the top 10 of the healthcare event calendar according to industry insiders), one can’t help but feel inspired by this new movement that is emerging in the healthcare sector. ‘User generated healthcare’ promises to bring together content and transactions in a user-friendly way. Increased availability of data and today’s 2.0 tools (mobile devices, social networks, widgets, online events etc) provide a significant opportunity to create unprecedented engagement and conversation between patients, clinicians and (the much demonized) insurers and biopharma companies. With patients increasingly demanding to be heard and empowered (rightly so, since we pay for it all!!), 2.0 is precipitating a momentous power shift in the healthcare sector. Not only will patients be better educated on diseases and have a say in their own treatments or doctors, but they will be able to take charge of their own ‘preventative medicine’ journey and diagnose themselves using mobile and web applications and technologies. This will change the patient/healthcare provider/insurer/supplier landscape and one can only hope that ‘the system’ will put its weight behind this momentum and not stifle it as it has so often done in the past.
Speaking of which, the FDA is holding public hearings on social-media use – they’re being as open-minded as they’re heavy-handed when it comes to enforcing regulations under the new administration. The question on everyone’s mind is how you create the traditional delineations in this new (uncontrollable) conversational landscape. What are the liability considerations and what is fair play, what isn’t…my question is how this Health 2.0 movement will change the marketing landscape in pharma. I’m having some very interesting conversations with leading marketers in the world’s largest biopharmas, insurers as well as doctors and patients and will definitely be putting together a round table grilling on the subject. Stay tuned.
On Thursday September 24, CQ-Roll Call Group, the media company formed after The Economist Group completed its acquisition of Congressional Quarterly from Times Publishing Co. in August, announced a restructuring that included the elimination of 44 editorial jobs.
There used to be a time when editors were superstars – their name synonymous with an entire industry, their word irrefutable. Who could have predicated that three letters and their universe would topple this long-standing establishment? The World Wide Web has precipitated a change in the business information landscape, which is not only irreversible but puts in question the very existence of the media industry. As editorial voice gives way to user generated content and peer-to-peer communities, the controlled circulation model of free industry content is becoming increasingly unsustainable financially – en masse editorial staff lay-offs are testament to this new reality. So should you be investing your marketing budget in a dying business model? You can for now, but you really need to start thinking about alternatives. Especially as controlled circulation media owners are ruthlessly compromising their integrity by letting their sponsors and advertisers fill the empty seats of their editorial staff. Free content is now increasingly product-led which – ironically – is only accelerating the decline as their disappointed readers look elsewhere for knowledge.
So is the only reliable knowledge now something that is only available to your target audience on a paid-for, subscription basis? Not necessarily. Companies such as LinkedIn and BrightTALK are changing the knowledge landscape by offering viable and sustainable alternatives to professional audiences and marketers. Importantly, media and business information companies don’t need to die – they just need to reinvent themselves and adapt their business model so their communities don’t abandon their brand. As long as they can deliver engaged audiences, marketing budgets will continue to flow.
So how do I think they can achieve this? By empowering their community to shape content through measurable interactive and rich media experiences and taking a more open approach to their competitive landscape. B2B media must realize that they don’t OWN communities – they own a database of names that are worthless unless they are engaged and responsive. Their survival will depend on cross-fertilization of communities with other brands and competitors. Their key differentiator will be the vibrancy of their community’s conversation.
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.
With Google 
On November 17, 2009 I will be grilling a prestigious panel of three big name analyst firms, 1 CXO subscriber and 1 senior marketer on this question. Register by hitting the ‘attend’ button below. In a world of community empowerment, media is fighting for survival as its editorial voice struggles to compete with the web’s peer-to-peer conversations. Are analysts bound for a similar destiny?
Mingling around at the 
On Thursday September 24, CQ-Roll Call Group, the media company formed after The Economist Group completed its acquisition of Congressional Quarterly from Times Publishing Co. in August, announced a restructuring that included the elimination of 44 editorial jobs.
