The Innovative Marketer

What's your big idea?

I was having dinner with a super smart marketer a few weeks ago, and I asked him what his big idea was for 2010.  And this bright guy articulated a strategy of media dominance, of placing his brand everywhere that his market looks.  I said to him, "no, what's the big thing you want to do, the thing that when you point to it later on, you can say to yourself 'I did that.'"  He smiled and said he hadn't thought about it, hadn't come up with the big idea.

John Landau, Oscar-winning producer of Titanic, spoke to the CMO Club last week.  He described Director James Cameron's process of putting together the Terminator movies, that he originally wrote the story as one movie, but realized he needed to wait for the technology to catch up with his vision and so split the story into two pieces.

In marketing, we typically follow technology -- blogs, podcasts, social engagement sites like LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter -- all have pulled marketers into having conversations with customers.  And it's great that leading marketing organizations are following the customer conversations, engaging with our communities of users and embracing the 10-year-old tenets of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

But what's the next big idea?  What's the vision of marketing that will drive the technology?   How can we as marketers create a huge wish list of technological advancements and ways of interacting that will help our customers buy, use and recommend our brands?

Interested to have a conversation ...

Everybody talks about measuring social media, but nobody is doing anything about it ... are they?

I'm at the CMO Club conference in San Francisco this week, and while the audience of 80 texted "Doing more with less" as the number one issue facing marketers in 2010, the real buzz around the show seems to be ROI of social media.

Blake Cahill had a post over on VisInsights on the value of social media for B2B companies (he's doing a webcast with Sirius Decisions' Jonathan Block), and one of his lines stopped me:

A key data point was that while 40% of B2B companies are using social media channels to market their products, 50% are still at a loss as to how to show the impact that social efforts can have on their business.

What I wanted to know when I read this was, who are the 50% who know the impact of social media on their business?  They're certainly not at this show, and I would venture to say that the CMO Club attracts fairly progressive marketers.   What about those in the hinterlands?   Fifty percent seems a be a big improvement over one survey two months ago, which reported that 84% of social media programs have no ROI attached to them.

If you do a search on Google for "measuring social media" or "social media measurement," you get nearly a million results.  But typically what you get is a list of things to measure that looks something like this:

• Unique visitors
• Page views per visitor
• Time spent on site
• Total time spent per user
• Frequency of visits
• Depth of visit
• Conversions

These, indeed, are things you can measure, but it's kind of like measuring the volume of your house when you're remodeling your bathroom: the data doesn't apply to the problem at hand.  And companies like Radian6 are doing some interesting work around measuring "share of conversation."  What we're striving to do is to tie marketing performance to revenue, and if we're going to invest more than the 2-5% of total marketing spend of many companies in social, we need to come up with relevant, credible measures.

I've started measuring engagement in a number of ways:

1.  Using social media instead of or in addition to traditional media outlets to promote programs.

Twitter, blogs, Facebook and LInkedIn have proven to be effective tools for getting the word out about compelling content -- eBooks, audio eBooks, white papers, webinars and the like.   You have to use a tool like bit.ly or some other link tracking product in order to credit the inbound link to the proper source.

2. Tracking the velocity of deals when a prospect uses social channels.

Again, you have to do inbound link tracking, but adding the person's use of social media (and response to an offer via a click through), is a crude but important way to start assigning numbers to your social efforts.  Once you've tagged activity, you can measure whether deals that have engaged, active customers in the social media channel are more likely to close or close faster.

3.  Creating special promotions on Twitter

Twitter is an easy, cheap way to test instant marketing promotional ideas.  Guy Kawasaki calls Twitter the "ultimate tool for marketers" because it offers a way to get immediate feedback on your offers.   Whether you're offering a sneak peek at a new product, an enhanced eBook or a behind-the-scenes interview, offering it first on Twitter gives you the opportunity to measure the impact the channel has on your business.

What are you doing to measure the impact of your social initiatives?

A primer on Social Media ROI

Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

View more presentations from Olivier Blanchard.

Liveblogging at the Eloqua Experience Conference

In a room filled with 600 marketers from companies large and small.  Last night at the welcome reception, I met one-person marketing departments and reps from some of the largest multi-national corporations in the world for both service and products companies.   They're all gathering in SF for the annual global conference for Eloqua.

I'll update this blog throughout my day to share the ideas I hear.

- Joe Payne, Eloqua CEO introduces a packed, sold-out conference.   Announces a new book by Steve Woods called The New Revenue Engine.  Declares a need for standard marketing reports like income statements, balance sheets and cash flow statements. 

- Andre Yee, head of Eloqua engineering gives a sneak peek at the revolutionary new offering from Eloqua, making the application as easy to use as a Mac or iPhone.  (and it'll run on Mac and iPhone!).

- Matt Grantham shows a demo of the new Eloqua (tagline:  Power.  Simplified).  It's got universal search, some very sexy widgets and a thoughtfully designed new campaign canvas.  It looks like an app that Apple would have designed.

The staging of the conference seems to suggest Google, with primary colors everywhere, subtly reinforcing the ease of use message.  In fact, "easy" seems to be a theme, with new programs designed to make it easier for a marketer to train and deploy the company's marketing automation.

10 Great Marketing Podcasts you Should Not Miss

Before doing some spring gardening this weekend, I loaded up the ol' iPod with a bunch of recent marketing-related Podcasts.  Podcasts, you recall, were the world-changing, paradigm-shifting phenomena of four years ago, kind of like Twitter is today.  

My day inspired me to put together a list of the marketing Podcasts I know of, so you can check them out yourself.    Would love to hear what YOU think about these shows, and about Podcasting in general.

1. Jaffe Juice Podcast

Marketing Personality Joseph Jaffee has been Podcasting for years, developing a very comfortable style, a huge audience, and a pace that is casual and conversational.   This is less information-focused and more about the views and opinions of Jaffee.   It's a great example for how to build your personal brand around a topic you are an expert on.

2. Duct Tape Marketing

The grandaddy of marketing Podcasts, perhaps the oldest continuously produced one.  John Jantsch IS small business marketing and his tribe of contributors and friends is extensive.   This is one show that every marketer should subscribe to.

3. HubSpot TV

I'm a bit of a Podcast purist, preferring my shows to be audio-only, so I can multi-task while I'm listening to them.  But it's been fun to see the clever folks at HubSpot slowly building up the audience and structure of this Internet marketing show.   Smart marketing VP Mike Volpe wisely teamed up with a smart, cute sidekick named Karen Rubin, to make an engagingly watachable show.

4. Marketing Minute Podcast

Produced by a marketing services/strategy firm, this is a great example of how small businessess and conslutants can extend their brand by providing valuable content to the people they are trying to attract.

5. Marketing Voices Show

Focuses primarily on social media.  May have Podfaded.  No new show since November, 2008.  Then again, I haven't done a show in as long with The Innovative Marketer podcast and I do intend to bring it back.  Really.

6. Marketing Over Coffee

Definitely on the ascendancy, John Wall and Chris Penn have put together a solid "Inside Marketing" show, with at least one golden segment of information in each show to make you think the download is worth it.   Smart, slick and well produced.

7. 10 Golden Rules Podcast

Great practical suggestions on marketing, from SEO tips to strategic ideas.   It's a quick-paced show, built mainly around information, not personality.

8. Logotalk.com Radio Show

They say they focus on news, commentary and in-depth analysis on ... well, logos.  What a great example of microsegmentation.  If you're thinking about a new logo, it might be worth giving it a listen.  The info is good, but the delivery makes it difficult to listen to for any length of time.

9. The Persuaders

Local marketing insight from Dublin.  Good discussion of marketing from some smart practitioners.

10. Internet Marketing Voodoo

A slick show that delivers a lot of content/minute.   Not as off-the-cuff as some of the other conversational shows, but the guests are interesting and the host, Paul Lewis, does an admirable job asking questions I might think to ask the guests.

And, of course, you can check out the archives of The Innovative Marketer Podcast.    I recommend these interviews:

Seth Godin, the smartest marketing guy on the Internet

Dr. Robert Cialdini, expert on persuasion

Made to Stick author and Fast Company columnist Chip Heath

Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba of Church of the Customer

An open letter to PR agencies ...

Hello, my friends in PR.   Some of you have seen that I'm looking for a new agency, and a few of you have submitted responses to the RFI we sent out.  I even met with some of you these past few weeks.  I am excited to hear of your continued success, cheered to see that you continue to employ creative, passionate people, and heartened that in this challenging economy, you continue to be able to pay the rent on your trendy office locations, with hardwood floors and cute dogs running around and exotic bottled water.

So it is with the utmost respect and appreciation that I offer you these five tips for pitching marketers in the future:

1.  Cut the bullshit.

While many marketing executives are guilty of hyper-inflating the NASCAR slide, you know, the one with all your customer logos on it, how many of you really did work for Apple?  Or Sun?  Or Google?  Be aware that the community of marketing execs is small, and people talk, and if you feel confident enough to list a company as a client in your logo slide, be sure that we'll ring up our friends at the company and check on the work you did.  Especially if you don't list them on your reference sheet.

Also, if you are claiming fantastic results year-over-year, congratulations!  But please don't compare your work in a year when the company didn't have ANY PR representation, to the work you did getting ramped up.  

If the only time I'm going to meet the fantastic founders who drove strategy for Edelman/Fleishman/Porter/etc. is at the pitch meeting, tell me.  I'm going to ask anyway and you may as well come clean.   Tell me if my retainer is too small to get the big brains on the account.

and speaking of retainers,

2. Knock it off with the retainers.

I do want to be able to predict my marketing budget, so paying you variable rates based on project work isn't the best option.  But neither is writing regular checks to you every month, whether I have a big product launch you are working on, or it's December and not much pitching is happening.  I believe you should get paid a fair rate for the work you do, but exactly what you're doing is so opaque to me, and so painful to get from you, that I constantly feel like I'm getting ripped off.  I know you feel you're not, so let's come up with a system of billing that is transparent.

and transparency leads me to,

3.  Invest in a way to track the work that your people perform.

In speaking with a lot of PR friends "unofficially," it's pretty clear that most agencies have a pretty lousy system for tracking exactly what their staffers are doing day-to-day.  While I'm all for mid-day breaks for Guitar Hero, I also think you should be running your business like any professional services firm, and tracking your people's billable hours.   And by the way, once you get that system set up, let me, your client, have access to the same data, so I can see who is working on my account, how long they are spending, and what they are doing with all that time.  

and time reminds me of

4.  The time you spend managing the account is at least as important as the time you spend servicing the account.

I don't like threats and I loathe intimidation tactics.  Still, if your attention to my account spikes to feverish levels once I tell you I'm putting the account up for review, I'm going to view the delta between the number of phone calls I got before I gave you the news, and the number after, as evidence that I'm not getting the kind of attention I need.    We should be having regular chats, not just about progress on the account, but about my industry, your industry, and long-term strategy.  If the only time you head out for a power lunch is when our annual contract is up for renewal, that's an indication of how you manage relationships.  And through the transitive property of PR, I'm going to suspect that your relationships with the press and the media are run in a similarly opportunistic way.  I'll never argue your account management tactics with you, but I challenge you to develop a long term view of the agency/client relationship.  

and by the way, you should remember to always

5.  Challenge me.

I'm hiring you for your expertise, your accumulated time in the industry, your learnings from failures as well as successes.  If I'm asking you to do something that you KNOW won't work because you've done it before, tell me.  And stick to your guns.  If I question your decision, hold fast.  Don't do it because I tell you to do it, but explain to me all the reasons why your way is better.  Or different.  Or will generate better results.

In the end, it's all about results.  That's how I'm measured and ultimately, it's how I will measure you.  Be an honest, trustworthy, thoughtful adviser to me, and you'll be my agency for life, not just as this firm, but everywhere I'll go in the future.

And thanks for all the bottled water.

Not a blogfader, I

Well, it's been a while since I've made an appearance in this space.    Been a busy time.  As you can see from the right-hand nav, I've changed jobs, moving to TOA Technologies, an on-demand mobile workforce management company.  If none of that means anything to you, maybe you can relate to the problem we solve:  waiting at home for a technician to show up at your door.   

TOA makes software that lets companies give you a one-hour window of time when a driver will show up at your house, with 96% accuracy.  We help companies communicate to you before the appointment, and follow up immediately with a call (or SMS or email) to make sure you got what you expected.

What's challenging from a marketing perspective about this new company is that the organization has sales, finance, professional services, and development in place, but no formal marketing function.   So this is an opportunity to build a marketing organization from scratch, without politics or procedures, without preconceived notions or broken processes.   It's a clean slate.

It's the first time in my career I've been given such an opportunity, a chance to put into practice all my crazy theories about demand generation, building awareness and weaving marketing into the fabric of an organization. 

Stay tuned to this space for a report on progress, as well as the usual marketing thoughts.

Trendsurfing on That Marketing Show

Spoke with Rodger Roeser of That Marketing Show recently about Web 2.0 marketing tactics, measurement and Digital Body Language.  The show's online now.  Check it out here.

A click is not currency

Oh, the coveted click.  It’s traditionally been considered the Holy Grail of the Internet, and marketers have spent millions in search of clicks. Google made billions by providing them. The legendary dot-com bubble was fueled by an ever ballooning belief that eyeballs (really clicks) were a source of found wealth. 

But today’s smart marketers know that you can't bank a click. Clicks aren't reported on the balance sheet, in the annual report or to Wall Street. Your CFO doesn't care about clicks.  Neither, for that matter, does your CEO. And your VP of Sales is just humoring you when he tells you how great it is that your Web site received a million click-throughs from e-mail. The reality, my friends, is that clicks by themselves are meaningless.

What really matters? Revenue. And unless you're selling advertising like Google and getting paid every time someone clicks on a link on your Web site, clicks don’t represent revenue – the process of exchanging goods and services for negotiable currency.

Many businesses are spending big bucks to drive traffic to their Web sites: placing tiny ads on Yahoo, Business.com, and Google; buying banner and text ads; and using social media. It’s all in an effort to garner clicks. We do it, spending north of $10,000 per month – and that’s pretty modest for a company our size. How much do you spend?

And here’s a better question: What are you getting for your money?

Sure, it’s gratifying to measure clicks to your Web site. And if you use Google analytics, Omniture, or one of the other Web-tracking packages out there, you can tell yourself interesting stories about which pages are most popular, how people walk through your Web site, and which pages precipitate an abrupt departure. But does all that truly measure what you get for your search engine advertising? Nope.

But there’s a better way. A new model is evolving, one in which marketers track and measure not pay-per-click, but pay-per-close. This approach analyzes how your Internet marketing efforts translate to real business. Clicks still matter – but it’s what the click leads to, not the click itself, that counts.

Here's how we track pay-per-close at Eloqua.

When someone clicks on a keyword on Google and lands on our Web site, we start tracking their behavior (using our own product, of course). We don't yet know who they are, but that's fine because right now, we don't mean anything to each other. The prospect doesn't care to hear from us and we don't know that they are even interested in what we’re offering. We're just providing them information and passively observing their behavior, like an attentive shopkeeper watching someone browse his inventory.

However, when a person signifies interest -- by downloading an eBook, viewing a demo, or signing up for a newsletter, for example -- we take the opportunity to approach and engage them. "Can I help you find something?" we ask them. And they tell us, through their behavior, what they're interested in. 

At that point, we can tailor our communication. "I see you're interested in deliverability," we can say to them.  "Did you know that we have a full-time deliverability officer who maintains relationships with the major ISPs and spam experts around the world?" And now we're engaged in a digital conversation with them.

Throughout the course of that conversation -- which can last days, weeks, or longer -- we're always remembering what they did before and modifying our message like any good conversant. Oh, and we record every campaign they respond to, from first click all the way through to close of business.

Why is this more effective than tracking simple clicks? Because when the revenue comes in, we can now credit our search advertisements, social media efforts, or other sources of clicks with the actual amount of cash they contributed to our top line.

And that's a conversation that our CEO likes to have. It's one that our CFO can engage with. It's of interest to the Board and to Wall Street and it makes the VP of Sales authentically happy. 

So instead of getting excited about clicks, think about changing your approach.  Track the metrics that really matter. Using the pay-per-close approach is a better way of measuring marketing's contributions to the organization.

Podcast #24 - Interview with Robert Cialdini, expert on persuasion

Dr. Robert Cialdini will change the way you communicate forever.  His research, books and talks (he'll be keynoting at the Eloqua International User Conference next month), have been read and attended by hundreds of thousands.  He consults for Fortune 100 companies about how to get customers to do, well, what you want them to do.   

His best-selling book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is on my desk at work and on my bookshelf at home.   And his new book Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be More Persuasive is packed with ideas that you can learn and use today, to help you become a more effective marketer.

I spoke to him about how we can become much more effective in our every day communication.  Listen to the Podcast now.

And you can always subscribe to the Podcast in iTunes by doing a search for "The Innovative Marketer," and having the show delivered automagically to your desktop.

Q&A from the B2B Magazine Social Media Webinar with David Meerman Scott

David Meerman Scott and I went over time on our B2B Magazine Webinar on social media and agreed that we'd handle Q&A on this blog (and perhaps over on David's as well).   I consolidated some of the 50+ questions we received, answered a few specific folks privately, and posted the answers individually below.

If you have any additional questions, post 'em in the comments below this post.  Otherwise, we'll carry on threads under the questions posted below.

By the way, is this the best way to handle Q&A?  Let us know.

Question #1: Old-time Thinking of Print vs. Online

Stephanie writes:

Hi You hit it right on: Must Unlearn what you Learned. My struggle is old time thinking. 'How come we aren't in print magazine and our competitor is.' How do you convience old time thinking of Print versus Online?

It's important to reframe the question differently:  Are we where our customers are?   You'll often have competitors who are in marketing channels that are irrelevant or distracting to you.   Do you follow them, or do you find where your prospects are gathering today.  The other thing is that this isn't an either/or situation.  We're too early in the game to say that "x is dead," where x is anything that marketing was doing more than 10 years ago.   Consider adding new media to your existing tactics and dial back the old ones slowly.  And make sure you have a solid set of metrics in place so you can assess your results more objectively.

Question #2: How Much Info to Give the Customer Up Front

Zoe asks:

Is it better to market a product without telling the consumer what it is? Or giving them all of the information up front? What I mean is, is it better to make the consumer want the product before knowing what it is?

I'll let David comment on this one, but gosh, if you deceive or ignore a consumer these days, you'd better expect that the blogosphere will uncover it pretty quickly and spread the word.   Just ask Whole Foods or Kryptonite locks.

Question #3: Measuring Effectiveness of Social Media

Jennifer said:

How do you measure effectiveness of social media if you're not gating content?

There are a bunch of metrics you can use.  Links from other web sites.  Mentions on blogs.  Print publication pickup.  Increases in numbers of speaking opportunities offered to your social media participants. 

Question #4: Calculating the ROI of Social Media

Derick, Stefani, Andrea and a least a dozen others asked questions which I can best summarize as "How do you calculate the ROI of social media?"

I'm hoping that you asked these questions, before I did my little spiel on the webinar.  If you can, have a look at the on-demand version and let me know if you have specific questions about the calculation I walked through. 

You can find the excellent ROI of Blogging report from Charlene Li on the Forrester web site (note:  you have to be a subscriber to download it).

Question #5: Determining Which Social Media Channels Your Customers are Using

Robin and a few others asked:

How you can tell which social media channels your target customers are using today?"

Usually, I ask.   We do customer surveys.  We have user group meetings.  We talk to sales and account managers about what their customers are up to.   And we'll seek people out on Twitter, on Facebook, through Myspace, on blogs.  And then we... and this was another great point David made during the Webinar .. we start to participate in those conversations.  So we don't attempt to start our own networks until we've engaged with people where they already are.

Question #6: Blog Spamming

Roy asked:

Could you please explain blog spamming and how to avoid being considered a blog spammer by search engines?

Wikipedia has a great definition of blog spam.

Question #7: Blog Comment Strategy

Donna asked:

How do you comment into existing blogs without sounding self serving sales pitch? Suggestions would be greatly appreciated on strategy around this?

Donna, what a great question.  Look, buyers aren't stupid.  If you post something that is bright, funny, smart, empathetic, relevant and honest on a web site, they will seek you out where you are.   

My rule of thumb on posting blog comments is that if it's not something I'd say during the reception at a professional event to people I'm looking in the eye, I'm not going to write it on a blog. 

We've all been at shows where there's some jerk pushing their business card into your hand and giving you the "elevator pitch."   And we nod politely and wonder to ourselves whether we can gnaw our leg off to get away from this knucklehead.   Don't be that guy online.

Question #8: Social Marketing Conferences

Wendy wondered:

Are there any conferences for social marketing - especially making videos - you would suggest?

What do you guys suggest? 

I've been to a couple of great conferences this year.  The Web 2.0 show is always a valuable use of time in figuring out what new companies are out there.  David is speaking at a show on the East Coast next month that you should check out.  In fact, if you check out David's blog and just find what conferences he's speaking at, you should be in good shape to learn what you're after.

Question #9: Social Media Value Index Calculation

A number of you asked to see the social media value index calculation again.

Here’s one measurement, one calculation you can start using today.

And I modified this from a suggested formula by a blogger named Jason Stamper.

What we’re doing is calculating a Social Media Value index (that’s the SMV) by this simple math.

On the top you have the average daily leads that your social media intiatives generates and you can track this through call to actions, special landing pages, etc. Multiplied by your average cost per lead (excluding cost per social media lead).

Then you divide by the average number of hours a person or your team spends contributing, multiplied by the hourly rate of the person (or people).

Anything under 1 means you are not getting a return on your investment. Anything over 1 means you are earning a return on your social media initiatives.