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I’ve moved to a new domain

October 12, 2009 by Chris Koch

No, my house hasn’t been foreclosed on, I’ve just graduated from a free wordpress.com blog to my own hosted site. The old domain is http://chriskoch.wordpress.com/. The new one is http://www.christopherakoch.com. If you wouldn’t mind re-subscribing to my RSS feeds and e-mail feeds through the new site and bookmarking the new site, I can retire the old one with honor.

I’m still on Wordpress (though with a new, more flexible free design or “theme” called Room 34 Baseline) and am continually amazed at how intuitive and easy to use it is and how good the support network is for something that is free. You really should consider it if you’re thinking about doing a blog or would like more traffic from your existing blog. It’s an incredibly powerful tool. Wordpress has a list of hosting services on its site to help you get your site started. I went with Bluehost because it had a live 24-hour chat window on the front page where I could ask questions as I migrated my site. Made it very easy.

I’m happy that my blog has grown to the point where I can justify having my own site. And that’s due to you. So thank you.

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Want to know which social media tool to bet on? Look at their relationship models.

September 18, 2009 by Chris Koch

We’ve all been reading a lot about the social media horse race. Will it be Facebook or MySpace? Or will it be Twitter by a nose?

For marketers trying to figure out where to put their resources into social media marketing, the horse race looks more like a crapshoot. These brands all start to sound the same and there are so many variables at play—the usual business stuff like VC funding, marketing, strategy, management, funding, M&A, etc.—that it’s hard to know where to place your bets.

We need to dig deeper to start to make meaningful comparisons. Analysis that looks at the concept of the different social media tools as “technology platforms” adds a little more clarity—as in, Facebook could win because it has the largest number of users and therefore, like Microsoft Windows, it could emerge as the de facto monopoly in social media.

But even this way of looking at it is suspect. People are fickle—especially young people—and all it takes is a shiny new technology or good branding to make an end run around the incumbent technology platform in social media. That’s because unlike Microsoft Windows, all the different social media tools are based on universal technology standards—i.e., the internet—and so linking different tools together or switching outright from one to another is simple and easy. Just look at how quickly MySpace has become uncool vs. a nearly identical competitor, Facebook.

What is a relationship model?
If you want to be able to place your bets more reliably—and I think marketers need to do this, given that social media marketing can be an incredible time sink—I think you need to consider the underlying social models of the different tools. The big question to ask is: How are relationships formed through this tool? I call this the relationship model of social media—it’s the underlying driver that attracts people to use it.

Right now, I think there are two primary relationship models in social media, the permission model, and the viral model.

  • Permission model. This is the model of most relationship-based social media tools today, such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Plaxo. You search for people you know and you ask their permission to start a relationship. Then, and only then, can you begin to figure out their networks of relationships—the people they know that you would like to know (and market to). Then you need to get those people’s permission to build your network further.
    For marketers trying to build relationships with influencers and customers, this is a fundamental roadblock, because the permission model tries to replicate the way we form relationships in real life: Trust needs to be established before we enter into a relationship. For marketers, it’s a Catch-22. How can we establish trust with influencers if we can’t get to them?
    The recent growth of permission-based groups on these sites helps a little bit, but so much of what gets posted on group pages is noise—blatant advertising, desperate job seeking—that it can be difficult for marketers to cut through all that crap and establish trusting relationships based solely on being in the same group as someone else. Only if marketers are starting and participating in meaningful discussions in the groups can they take the next step and try to form a relationship. And that kind of participation takes time—and subject matter expertise.
    Thus, I’m growing increasingly convinced that the permission model is of limited use to marketers. It’s a way to broadcast messages for sure, but you can do that better through your own channels. And the opportunity for real relationship building—which is what social media is supposed to be all about—in this model is limited.
  • Viral model. This model differs from the permission model in that it does not try to mimic the way we form relationships in real life. In fact, in real life we might call it something else: stalking. This model was popularized by the folks at Twitter (others are also using the model, such as Yammer, which is a social network for use inside large organizations), who realized that technology could be an effective substitute for trust—up to a point.
    Of course, by now you know that on Twitter, you can follow whomever you choose and listen in on what they are saying—one of the key benefits of social media for marketers, as I explain in more detail in this post. Because Twitter has written its own rules for relationships and because by signing up for Twitter we all agree to play by those (new) relationship rules, the trust barrier is effectively removed. The brilliance of the people at Twitter was to realize (or at least hope) that we wouldn’t mind if they changed the rules of relationships on us. And we don’t mind. In fact, the dizzying growth of Twitter shows that many of us have been waiting for someone to change the rules of online relationships for some time.
    We are tribal creatures, so we respect group opinions and authority. We tend to accept rules that the majority of those around us follow. Of course, that has good implications and bad implications. But in the case of the viral model, it’s all good—at least for marketers.
    The reason I call this model viral is that following someone is just one piece of the equation. The openness of the model means that once you discover and follow someone, you can then use one of a number of free tools such as TwiPing to discover their followers and add those people to your network. By finding and following just a few key influencers who have well established relationships on Twitter, you can grow your network of relationships exponentially (though not too exponentially, otherwise Twitter may throw you out).
    The nice thing about the viral model for marketers is that we don’t need permission, or even reciprocity, to get benefit from the relationship. It’d be great if your target influencers follow you back (so you can engage them with your messages and begin to build a deeper relationship), but if they don’t, you can still gather valuable information. And because the model is so open, if you post good, useful information (think education, not promotion) then you will inevitably build relationships and at some point, those reluctant to reciprocate will see your stuff being passed along by others that they follow, and they will have cause to reconsider their decision. Content is also viral in this model, passed on and on by people to their various networks of followers, which means that good content producers have another avenue to grow their relationships exponentially.
    And the viral model acts as a nice front end for building a deeper relationship through the permission model. For example, if you start to exchange messages with an influencer, it’s a logical next step to enter into a permission-based relationship on something like LinkedIn.
    Now the openness of this viral model has already led to some problems. Spammers and hackers are slamming away at it, trying to find cracks to exploit. Public figures like football players say things they shouldn’t and are banned. But for now anyway, the model seems to be hanging on.

If you start to look at social media based on the relationship model, I think it becomes a little easier to make decisions about where to spend your limited marketing time. Right now, given that B2B buyers are just beginning to adopt social media, I think the viral model clearly gives us the most bang for the buck. It gives us a shot at accomplishing the three aspects of social media marketing:

  • Monitor. You can follow all conversation.
  • Engage. There is the potential to develop a closer relationship.
  • Manage. Though you can’t control your Twitter community like you would say, a user group, the network of relationships does form a loose sort of community that you can speak to and interact with as a group (e.g., ask a poll question, etc.).

In B2B, there are broad caveats to investing too much in any social media marketing—the major obstacles are outlined in a good post by B2B blogger Kip Bodnar here—and anything you do should be integrated with your other marketing activities. But assuming some of the people you’d like to reach are out there—and ITSMA’s recent survey of 300+ technology buyers says that they are (even senior executives) then the evidence seems to suggest that you should be emphasizing the viral model in your marketing.

What do you think? Is this the right way to place your bets? Have I left out any other relationship models?

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Praise the Lord and pass the tweets!

May 15, 2009 by Chris Koch

I’ve done enough presentations about web 2.0 to see that the sessions tend to fall into one of two categories: revival meeting or therapy session. This week, I experienced both.

Most of my web 2.0 sessions are with marketers from big B2B technology companies and I often experience deep cynicism, even anger, from people who question whether web 2.0 has any value for marketing. I present the usual stats showing web 2.0 taking off generally, and ITSMA research showing increased uptake by their peers in B2B. But it doesn’t sink in. Being more of a content guy than a heckler handler, I tend to let the venting go on too long and try to address their points one by one. By the end, everyone is frustrated, including me.

But yesterday, I finally figured out what’s really going on here: fear.

I should have seen the parallel from all my years covering big IT projects–the anger that IT people absorb as they try to change the ways that people do their jobs. It stirs up some primitive emotions–and PTSD among IT people, who get frustrated with being the messenger at the receiving end of all those pot shots.

I’ve always counseled them to not take it personally, and to try to reach out to business people and let them vent their anger and get past it. But it’s hard. I get pissed when the venting starts, though I don’t think I show it.

Yesterday was different. I shared the stage with Marijean Lauzier, the CEO of Digital Influence Group, an agency that consults on Web 2.0. Marijean didn’t try to tit for tat the cynicism and saw what was behind it. When I asked her to address some of the “questions,” she took a long, dramatic pause and smiled.

Then she said: “They’ve moved our cheese! We’ve been doing what we’ve been doing for 20 years and now it’s all changing!” “Dr.” Marijean then proceeded to lead the group through the various stages of grief in the span of 20 minutes.

This is going to be hard. Web 2.0 is uncontrollable, always changing, and always on. We need time to get used to it. But as the good doctor said, we are all experts because we are expert communicators. It will come.

Thankfully, earlier in the week on Tuesday, I had my first revival meeting. This crowd was ready to go, full of enthusiasm and the frustrations were in the lack of success they were seeing in some early web 2.0 efforts, and lingering resistance from some internal skeptics. But everyone understood that there was no turning back. Because it’s not possible. The old media channels are crashing down around us.

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Does your thought leadership have a point of view?

February 13, 2009 by Chris Koch

We at ITSMA a broad, inclusive definition for what constitutes thought leadership. All you want it to be able to do ultimately is spark interest among the people you want to reach with ideas that map with your ability to deliver.

To do this, you need to do research with customers and across your target markets. You also need to cultivate a group of internal subject matter experts to collaborate with customers and third parties to develop and refine a point of view. Finally, you need to implement this with customers so that they can provide corroboration that the idea is valid and practical.

These are the core elements of thought leadership marketing. Think of any of the best articles you’ve read in the Harvard Business Review, for example. Each has:

  1. A relevant business issue of interest to a lot of people
  2. A strong point of view
  3. Grounded in some kind of market research
  4. Validated by case examples

Now, I really don’t think this point of view has to be especially new or creative. It doesn’t have to be something that no one has thought of before. But it has to crystallize a point of view that is of interest to people and makes them stop and think.

Look, Al Gore had nothing new to say about global warming when he did An Inconvenient Truth. But he packaged all that stuff up in a very strong, clear point of view that said that we can’t continue waiting to make the sacrifices necessary to stop all this because if we don’t, we’re going to harm our children. It’s going to be hard to do what we have to do but we have to suck it up and do it now for their sakes.

What I see so often in thought leadership content is that there is no point of view linking it all together like that. At the top, you have broad research surveys and at the bottom, you have case studies of customers implementing a particular solution. But what’s missing is the point of view to take the customer from that broad research down to the case studies, the proof points. There needs to be a link.

I’m going to be giving a presentation next week on how to use thought leadership as a marketing tool during a recession. It’s being hosted by a web conferencing company called BrightTalk. It’s free and I hope you’ll attend. I’ll be talking about how to develop a thought leadership content engine inside your company and how to create a thought leadership dissemination supply chain to develop and refine the ideas and point of views that bubble up through the content engine. Here’s a link to sign up:

http://www.brighttalk.com/webcasts/2656/attend

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Social media: the decision is being made for you

October 31, 2008 by Chris Koch

The economic collapse has big implications for marketers who are already sick of social media (admit it, you know you’re sick of it—at least a little bit). Cost cuts are coming—if they haven’t arrived already—and marketing is going to have to re-prioritize (again).

In other words, you’re going to be doing more social media marketing, whether you like it or not.

ITSMA research shows that customers consistently favor live events that let them mingle (and job hunt) with their peers. It’s human nature. We’re social animals and sales pitches always look better through beer goggles and sound better when interspersed with good conversation with people you know and trust.

But events are expensive. And travel is always the first thing to go in a downturn.

Meanwhile, digital marketing (I make a distinction between digital marketing and social media) has made slow progress for two reasons: First, Webcasts, e-mail marketing, and microsites are not substitutes for cornering C-level executives by the buffet table. Second, digital marketing is less expensive than pressing the flesh, but it isn’t exactly cheap, either. If you want to create a program, you need to build an infrastructure and maintain it. So while digital marketing is the fastest growing part of the marcom budget, it’s still a smaller portion of the budget than collateral.

Meanwhile, social media isn’t just cheap, it’s free. Just go to Wordpress.com and you’ll see what I mean.

But we hate social media. Of course, when I use the word hate, what I really mean is fear.

As marketers, we are terrified of social media.

We are terrified for some rational (though preventable) reasons, like giving away sensitive company information or sullying our carefully crafted brand images.

But we are also terrified for one very important, irrational reason: social media marketing seems like a Murder One sentence. You’re going away and you’re going away for a long, long time. Indeed, the only thing scarier for marketers than being responsible for a corporate blog where people can say anything they want about you and your brand is the prospect of having to sustain it—to keep coming up with smart, thoughtful things to say. FOREVER.

Since you are going to have to do more social media marketing whether you like it or not, here’s some advice for keeping your sanity:

  • Don’t wait for your social media programs to die—plan for them to die. Social media has a teenager complex. It feels like such a young phenomenon (even though it isn’t—anyone remember message boards?) that no one goes into it planning for it to die. Companies start open-ended blogs only to watch them suffer a slow, painful, premature deaths due to lack of direction, accountability or content. Why not declare its death prematurely? You probably already know the issues that your customers really care about. Pick one and create a blog or podcast series designed to end within a specified—but meaningful—period of time, such as after completing a research project on the topic.
  • Go outside the firewall. So many marketers can’t bring themselves to start social media programs because they fear the implications for their companies (and their own careers). So put your programs outside the firewall. It’ll be cheaper, too. And don’t restrict employees from getting involved. Just have a clear and simple policy about employee conduct and require a disclaimer if they are going to act as representatives of the company.
  • Integrate and cross-reference. Blogs should reference podcasts, which should reference the website, which should reference online communities inside and outside the organization. One of the reasons that social media does poorly is that there are not enough traffic drivers. Make them yourself.
  • Comments don’t matter. People are lazy. Research shows that fewer than 10 percent of people contribute any kind of content and less than two percent are active, regular contributors to online communities. The most important thing is to create quality content. Readers will appreciate it, even if they never say so.
  • Popularity is irrelevant. B2B buyers don’t consume marketing content because they want to, they do it because they have to. They are looking at your stuff because they are researching. If they only visit your blog once but they get useful information, that’s what matters.
  • Social media sucks—get used to it. Many marketers complain to me about the quality of blogs, videos, and podcasts. I ask them, why should we expect new forms of media be any different from the ones we already know?
  • Reassign PR people to develop online influence. Journalism is disappearing. Assigning ten PR people to harangue the two remaining editors at your favorite trade pubs won’t do anyone any good. I can remember when the editorial staff of my alma mater, CIO magazine, didn’t fit in a large conference room. Now they can share a cab. Believe me, they don’t have time to read your press releases. Reassign some of those aggressive PR people to aggressively build your online reputation with influential bloggers and online communities. If the targets don’t exist, have them create some.

The time for experimentation in social media is over. Pretty soon, it might be the only new thing you can afford to do.

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Fix the relationship with IT

October 3, 2008 by Chris Koch

In 13 years of covering IT for CIO magazine, there was a recurring theme: the tribal mistrust between IT and the business. It’s those Mac vs. PC ads writ large—almost postal. IT people are really angry about the way business people treat them like servants, and business people hate how IT people treat them as if they are stupid and helpless.

So when I created our survey on marketing automation this summer, I made sure to ask questions about marketing’s relationship with IT. I wasn’t surprised by what I saw. Nearly 70% of respondents said they have no formal IT strategy. Marketers don’t think it’s their fault, however—67% of respondents blamed the lack of strategy on a lack of support from IT.

Clearly, we have a relationship problem here. When we asked people about their biggest challenge in marketing automation, 70% said money. But everyone always says that. It’s a bit of a red herring. Our belief is that it’s the relationship with IT that’s really getting in the way here. Following closely behind money as the primary challenges were organizational support and change management processes. Who in the organization is supposed to provide support for technology? And who is supposed to develop change management processes for the implementation of technology? I hope you said IT.

Marketing Needs Help

One of the things that intrigued me about the relationship issues I saw between the business and IT when I was at CIO was the currents flowing beneath the sentiments. IT people are like tradespeople, often more loyal to their craft and their peers than to the businesses they serve. This drives businesspeople crazy, partly because they think it leads to poor IT support inside their companies, and partly because businesspeople lack that kind of broader community. The business itself is their community and that’s where their entire loyalty is focused—they are impatient (and maybe a little bit jealous) with those whose loyalty is more broadly focused.

I guess I hoped that marketing’s relationship with IT might be a little better than the broader relationship between IT and the business, because IT and marketing have something very important in common: they are both viewed as support functions by the clueless inside their organizations.

Marketing people can be as downtrodden as IT people can. And empathy is a critically important component of good relationships. If you can’t get inside your significant other’s head and imagine what it was like to hear that snarky comment that a colleague made at the meeting, you have a problem.

But IT and marketing people both know what it’s like to be treated as a servant and it could actually be the key to improving the relationship. You should try sharing some of that misery with them sometime.

I say that in part because having a technology strategy is going to become more and more important to success in marketing because marketing needs more automation—especially as so much of our work begins migrating online. IT decisions have gotten much more complex. Years ago, marketers could get away with approaching their major IT decisions much as consumers do: Discover a need, find a tool, and install it for yourself and perhaps for a few colleagues. But today you need to weigh carefully issues such as scaling the tool to all areas of marketing, data storage and retrieval, and integration. These are not decisions that marketers are equipped to make on their own.

Marketing needs to take steps to fix the relationship with IT. Though IT is the natural target for blame, marketing needs to take a share of it, too. In our survey, we found that only half the marketers had tried to develop a formal liaison relationship with IT (and vice versa). This has to change. If it doesn’t, it’s unlikely that marketing will ever achieve its goals with automation. If you lose the ongoing dialogue with IT below the C level, it’s unlikely that things will go your way at the C level, either.

This is something you can look into and fix today. Do you have someone in your marketing organization who loves IT and is interested in working with IT? You have your spokesperson. It costs you nothing. They can still do their day jobs.

There are many other mechanisms for creating a better dialogue with IT that are more formal, such as steering committees, periodic joint off-sites, collocating IT and marketing people together, and, at the ragged edge of reality, a coup d’état. At one of our member companies, the CMO literally took over the responsibility for IT. As you can guess, there were no issues with the marketing automation budget after that.

So before you start being one of those outlaws who goes around IT when you need software, first pick up the phone and see if you can enlist IT’s help. It will hold up your plans a bit, I know, but it’s becoming ever more critical to success.

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Plucking the Low-Hanging Fruit

September 12, 2008 by Chris Koch

The results of our marketing automation survey are out. The results show that two primary forces—driving more business and improving the tracking and measurement of marketing activities—push marketers to automate.

The good news is that you are starting to put more emphasis on those goals. About 63% of marketers in our survey said they expect to increase spending on marketing automation this year.

More good news is that there’s evidence that marketing has a reasonable budget for automation. This percentage, 3-5 percent on average, mirrors the overall spend on IT in most businesses today—in fact, it’s on the generous side. And while marketing automation surely accounts for most of marketing’s IT spend, it doesn’t cover everything. So investments are being made.

Unfortunately, however, the overall state of marketing automation today is pretty mediocre. Only four percent of respondents in the survey said they consider themselves leading edge users of technology.

Many different marketing processes can be automated with software. The trick is to figure out which ones will:

1.       Benefit the most from automation (some processes just don’t lend themselves to being automated).

2.       Translate into business benefits-not just productivity or operational benefits.

So we looked at the most important goal of services marketers today. Based on our past research that goal translates this way:

Use highly targeted thought leadership content to build awareness, develop relationships, and generate leads that will close business.

Using that lens, we wanted to figure out which processes we could automate to help accomplish that goal more productively and effectively. We see four:

  • Segmentation and predictive analysis. You need to find and focus your efforts on the right customers
  • Content management. A smart, efficient system for managing all that great thought leadership content you’re creating.
  • Campaign management. A way to coordinate the development and dissemination of that thought leadership
  • Lead management/nurturing. This is an emerging area of automation. You need to send the right thought leadership to the right prospects and customers at the right time in their buying process.

These are the processes we would expect would be automated.

Unfortunately, that’s not what we’re seeing. What we saw on the survey is that we’re automating the low hanging fruit—the easy stuff like email marketing, contact management and web analytics.

Are you surprised?

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Put Your Competitors on Your Website

May 1, 2008 by Chris Koch

We all know how the airlines blew it. There are few markets that have a clearer view of why their customers choose them than airlines. It is all about price. And if it isn’t about price, it is about convenience—about figuring out which airline can get you there in the shortest amount of time or at the right time, with the fewest stops.

In short, the customer is never going to book a flight without seeing what else is available out there. Airlines may be the closest thing to an efficient market that exists today.

Yet when the Web came along, airlines refused to face this reality. They dragged their feet and withheld the comparison information that they knew their customers were looking for.

We all know what happened next: startups literally came out of nowhere and erased overnight the brand advantage that airlines had spent decades building. I mean think about it. Remember the Orion III spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey? It didn’t say Travelocity on the side.

Yet we’re marching slowly down the same path in B2B. No one visits company Websites to read about what a wonderful product they have. CIOs and their employees are looking for information to form the basis of comparison with competitors.

Gord Hotchkiss has a heretical idea for you. Feature your competitors on your Website before aggregators come along and do it for you. “Understand that buyers are going to compare alternatives,” says Hotchkiss, who is President and CEO of Enquiro, a B2B search engine marketing company. “They would probably be fired if they didn’t. So understanding that that’s going to happen anyway, doesn’t it make much more sense for that research to happen as much as possible in your space where you can control the messaging, control the brand awareness and get into the position of being the wired vendor?”

He’s not talking about the kind of rigged comparisons that customers dismiss before bouncing back from your site to the search engine to seek something truly objective. “If you go down this road, you have to be authentic about it because people can pick up something that’s not authentic a mile away,” says Hotchkiss. “This can’t be one of those typical comparison charts where you say, oh, look we have checkmarks in all our boxes and our competitors don’t have any in theirs.

“But if you are honest and you say, look this is where our stuff shines and here’s maybe where we don’t stack up so well, you will gain a lot of credibility and hang onto search visitors better.”

Of course, as Hotchkiss acknowledges, B2B is not the airline industry—a vast commodity market. It’s harder for aggregators to enter B2B, which is much more diverse and fragmented, with smaller customer bases.

Don’t mistake that for an excuse to dismiss the idea, however. It sounds dangerous, but only if you view it in the context of traditional marketing and traditional markets, where it was easy to withhold information from customers and get away with it. “This is completely against everything we have learned in traditional marketing and that’s the problem,” says Hotchkiss. “Traditional marketing rules don’t apply in a new consumer-empowered marketplace. The rules have changed. It’s just that many marketers are slow to realize that the power now rests with the buyer not them.”

What do you think?

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