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I don’t want to lose you!

November 12, 2010 by

Here’s why this sucks. I have to shut down the original carcass of my blog at wordpress.com because it has been dead for more than a year now and it’s starting to stink. I noticed the other day that it comes up right next to my new website in Google search when you’re looking for my blog.

Trouble with that is, I stopped posting on that blog more than a year ago, so it makes it look like I have given up on blogging. For better or worse, that is not the case.

So I’m going to have to take the wordpress.com site out back now and put it out of its misery. I don’t want anyone to be any more confused by me than they already are.

What that means in English is if you subscribed to my blog before November, 2009 you will have to subscribe again at my new site: (http://www.christopherakoch.com/). Just go there and click on the RSS button or fill in your email and you’ll be good to go.

If you subscribed to my blog in November 2009 or later, nothing will change and you don’t have to do anything. You will continue to be stuck with me until you choose to leave.

So what sucks about this is that my most loyal RSS subscribers, the ones who subscribed back in my wordpress.com days, will see the lights go out on my content. If you are one of those people, I want to say that I truly love you (just like I do my later subscribers) and don’t want to lose you. So please, please come to my new site  and join back up so I can continue to have you as part of my community.

If you subscribed through the old site and have been bored as hell for some time now and kept meaning to erase me from your life, here’s your chance. Just do nothing and I will disappear forever. Thank you for being part of the blog so far.

But I hope you will stay. I have a ton of new stuff to share this Fall (a new survey on thought leadership, for example) and I’d really like to get your opinions on it. A blog is nothing without community.

I’m going to follow this post up immediately with some real content that I hope you will find more valuable.

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Will you tell me what you think of my blog?

August 20, 2010 by

I’m going on vacation for two weeks so my blog will be going dark for a little while. I thought this would be a good time to ask you a big favor: Will you answer a few questions about my blog so I can make it better?

I have an easy survey tool provided to me by the good folks at FUSE that specialize in automated online surveys like the one that you are (I hope) about to take (special thanks to Charles Martin at FUSE and Joe Saylor for giving me a chance to try it out).

One of the things I like about the way Charles structures surveys is that he likes to keep it simple (there are just a few questions, we promise!). Another great characteristic of these surveys is that they don’t sound like you need a lab coat to take them. The tone of the questions is familiar and humorous without seeming trite. I got on the phone with Charles and worked with a template he had from doing surveys on other blogs and we whipped something together within 30 minutes (with some knowledgeable kibitzing from Joe, who blogs about B2B marketing.)

The link to take the survey is at the bottom of this post and will appear in the sidebar for a month or so.

I really appreciate that you take the time to read my blog. Thanks. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks fully energized with new ideas.

Take the survey here: http://conversation.i-op.com/topic/start/chriskoch1007/intro

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Have you created a waking dream for your customers?

July 16, 2010 by
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I’ve been reading through applications for ITSMA’s Marketing Excellence Awards this week and I have been blown away by the quality of innovation and creativity that’s going on out there among our members (and other B2B companies)—I mean, I’m talking about a quantum leap over what I’ve seen in the three years that I’ve been mingling with these folks.

I can’t name the specific companies because we’re still in the midst of the judging process, but it doesn’t really matter because the stuff is so innovative.

For example, in the three categories I’ve looked at so far (there are six categories altogether), we have one company using analytics to predict customer buying patterns (and this ain’t diapers or laundry detergent, ladies and gents—we’re talking six-figure jumbles of complex products and services here). Another company is using automated algorithms to seek out and deliver targeted customer and competitive intelligence to salespeople—on a daily basis!

Okay, so you might expect technology companies to do this kind of sci-fi geeky stuff (they do, in fact, employ rocket scientists, after all).

From marketing event to marketing retreat
But there is some real creative marketing thinking going on, too.

One example stands out for me. It’s an attempt to take a typical high-level executive event and transform it into something resembling a retreat. Through intense screening and prepping of attendees and a tightly managed agenda of facilitation, they take these executives out of their work lives for an entire week to think together.

Can you start to see how this would take us way past the level of the typical conference (assuming you had the clout to blast through the brick wall surrounding these peoples’ schedules) and into the I-love-you-man territory of life-altering bonding between customer and provider?

Sometimes, providing a fallow field for customers to create their own thought leadership is in itself the very highest form of thought leadership.

Why?

What is a waking dream?
Because you are helping them create a waking dream to play with.

You probably know what I mean by waking dream. For me it only happens when I’m reading a really good book (as opposed to a really good movie) because not only does time stop, I become engaged, and I stop thinking about the pyramid of human needs, but I start to create a vision—my vision—of the words that I am reading. The writer tees up characters, dialog, and plot for me, but I’m the one who realizes the scene, sees the faces, and draws the emotions.

I’m guessing this is one of the reasons that bad books sometimes make great movies; the director has that much more freedom to create that waking dream for him or herself and then build it for the rest of us.

That’s also why the best movie I’ve ever seen (for me, the Godfather) still pales next to the best book I’ve ever read (War and Peace) because I own the vision of Pierre lying on his back in the middle of a horrific battlefield and looking up to see the most beautiful blue sky imaginable. (I get to place the sounds, smells, clouds and the colors.) Coppola was just leading me by the hand through his vision of the Godfather (and I’m really grateful that he did, don’t get me wrong).

Dragging us back to marketing (sigh), this is what good thought leadership has to do. Through our events, white papers, videos, whatever, we must prepare our audience to experience that waking dream.

Can you imagine that putting some of your customer peers through a well-managed event over the course of a week could give them that kind of space? I can. Very cool.

How to create the dream
Since not all of us have the budget or ability to do that, however, let’s come up with ways that we can create waking dreams for our customers through our marketing. Here are a few ideas for that blatantly stolen from the tricks that novelists, playwrights, and directors have been using for centuries.

  • Awaken personal aspirations. Most of us say we want to have dinner with Abe Lincoln because when we see his unmistakable face it creates a waking dream in us about the kind of person we’d like to be (and how far we still have to go).
  • Create emotion. They say that true art is that which makes us feel something—anything—strongly. But all of us have the power to stir the kind of emotion that takes us out of the moment and “gets us thinking.” The trick is to do it in a way that leads to constructive thinking.
  • Use empathy. Evolution has designed us to have empathy for others. We enter waking dreams when we see the specific pictures of people in Haiti still living in the same shacks they put up six months ago when the quake first hit. We just have to design creative ways to bring it out so that it results in better relationships and ideas.

I think there must be many more than this. Can you please suggest some?

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Thought leadership is still dead; long live idea marketing

February 5, 2010 by

So much of what passes for thought leadership these days is little more than warmed over brochures. It may look better and read better than a brochure, but it’s still a brochure because it emphasizes our products and services over the needs of the people we are trying to reach.

Last year, I wrote a piece that talked about why thought leadership is dead and why we needed a new term to describe it.

This week, Gartner proved why we need to make the change. Proclaiming that thought leadership isn’t just for consulting firms anymore, Gartner said in this press release that thought leadership has emerged as an “organized discipline.”

Phew. Glad that we now have permission to finally get ourselves organized and go forth and do what we’ve already been doing for years.

Then Gartner did what it always does; it coined an acronym: TLM, or Thought Leadership Marketing.

Gartner has a peculiar habit of trying to lay an intellectual claim through acronyms—perhaps it’s the firm’s heritage in IT. Regardless, it’s a twist on an old consultant’s trick: Gain attention and credibility with press, customers, and influencers by creating your own definition, which gives you the ability to insert the “what we call x…” phrase into descriptions of otherwise basic things.

Having been a journalist for years, I know that these acronyms lead even the most feeble-minded of us journos to the next obvious question: What do you mean when you say (insert acronym here)? That gives the analyst an opening to define what’s behind the acronym and establish intellectual ownership of the subject area.

Now, I don’t mean to single out Gartner here. Like I said, this is an old consulting trick—everybody does it. And in Gartner’s defense, sometimes IT can be so complex and confusing that it really does help to have an acronym for talking about things.

I guess I’m a little bitter, through. At CIO magazine, I spent years writing about one of those Gartner-coined acronyms: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. The more I learned about it, the more I realized how little the acronym had to do with what the stuff really did.

So I’d like to try, with your help, to nip TLM in the bud before it gains the power to make us all miserable.

Gartner’s definition of thought leadership marketing is this:

“The giving—for free or at a nominal charge—of information or advice that a client will value so as to create awareness of the outcome that a company’s product or service can deliver, in order to position and differentiate that offering and stimulate demand for it.”

Yikes. What a mouthful. But beyond the awkward language, I think that the definition is just plain wrong. Or at least, as some colleagues who also write thought leadership marketing have told me this week, too narrow.

I think that this definition will lead to the perpetuation of the brochure-on-steroids interpretation of thought leadership. It is not about positioning your offerings at all. It is about selling a point of view that educates the audience. The education is the exchange of value that begins a relationship between the customer and the deliverer—whether that deliverer is a salesperson, a marketer, or a subject matter expert. That relationship is deepened through a coordinated, multistep campaign with successively more intimate communications over time.

At some point that relationship will include describing your offerings, but at that point it ceases to be thought leadership. It will be a case study of your offerings in use, or it will in fact be a brochure. But it won’t be thought leadership, because it will no longer be about ideas.

That’s why I suggested last year that we ditch thought leadership and use the phrase idea marketing instead. I even developed an acronym: IM. (Damn, guess that one’s already taken.)

Idea marketing isn’t easy. It presupposes that we have something to talk about besides our products and services. And the truth is that as marketers we don’t have anything else to talk about. Idea marketing means we need to do more. We need to do research. We need help from subject matter experts and salespeople with their ears to the ground in the market. The difficulty of lining up those other pieces is why we often wind up creating expensive brochures rather than ideas.

Idea marketing is not purely about the nature of the content (Gartner’s definition sounds like it intends the output to be white paper to me). It is a process for developing and disseminating ideas through various channels that build a relationship with prospects and customers. It is designed to move them through the marketing funnel more quickly.

True idea marketing (or, if you insist, thought leadership marketing) requires more than marketing. Here are the five important pieces:

  • Research the need for ideas. Idea marketing will be an expensive waste of time if your customers aren’t looking for it or don’t see you as an acceptable source for it. Doing research first allows you to set goals using reliable, objective data. Then when people start to question your strategy (and they will), you can show them the numbers. Survey internal sales and marketing staff, customers, target markets, and influencers to determine what they are looking for. Here are some questions to ask:
    • Do customers view of you as a thought leader? If not, can they envision you moving into that role—i.e., give you permission to be a thought leader?
    • What are customers’ areas of interest?
    • What types of vehicles (councils, conferences, white papers, social media, etc.) are target customers most interested in?
    • How can idea marketing influence customers’ buying behavior?

Answers to these questions will drive the structure of the program and its ROI goals.

  • Determine the readiness of the organization. Professional services firms expect their consultants to have new ideas, and that expectation flows through everything those firms do, from recruiting and training to marketing. Idea marketing requires a cultural commitment to creating an internal idea supply chain and strong executive support.
  • Build an idea network. There are two parts to idea marketing: idea development and content dissemination. Marketing is potentially great at the latter, but it needs help with the former. An idea network provides a reliable source of content for marketers to package and disseminate. The idea network focuses on identifying internal thought leaders and building alliances with external academics and customers who can help develop and test ideas. Primary and secondary research provide the inspiration for some ideas and the objective justification for others. Internal knowledge share sessions and reward-and-recognition programs provide the motivation for idea generators to step forward and help imbue the idea supply chain into the culture of the organization. (ITSMA clients can download a detailed example of a network here.)
  • Create a content development process. Marketing needs to develop vehicles for disseminating ideas to customers and salespeople. The key components of the program are:
    • Develop a publishing process. Marketers must become publishers, with a process for refining and presenting content through various vehicles (such as conference presentations, white papers, social media, etc.).
    • Create a calendar. A calendar helps marketing plan the frequency and focus of its output.
    • Align content with the buying process. Marketing needs to develop materials that are appropriate to each stage of the buying process so that customers and salespeople can get the right information at the right time. Marketing and sales need to agree on the alignment of content to the various buying stages so that sales will get the right signals about when and how to approach customers for a sale.
    • Install systems and metrics for supporting idea marketing. The goal of idea marketing is not simply to raise awareness of the company; it is to help move buyers through the sales funnel and to make a sale. For that reason, the program needs to be tightly integrated into the company’s IT systems—and particularly its CRM systems—so that the impact of thought leadership can be tracked all the way through to the sale. These are the key components:
    • Install a lead tracking and nurturing system. Marketers can use the consumption of idea marketing to track the readiness of prospects to buy if they have a system for tracking a prospect’s activities. For example, if a prospect downloads a piece of content targeted to the interest phase of the buying process and reads it thoroughly, a lead tracking and nurturing system can track that activity and send a signal to salespeople that the prospect is most likely ready for a call. As the lead is passed over to sales for follow-through, the idea content is tagged as part of the sale. If a sale doesn’t result, the lead can be put back into the nurturing process while keeping track of the content he or she has already consumed. This lead tracking system should be integrated with the company’s CRM system (most traditional CRM systems are not set up to handle lead nurturing) so that leads can be handed back and forth between marketing and sales without losing anyone along the way.
    • Agree with sales on the definition of a sales-ready lead. The benefits of the program will be lost if sales and marketing can’t agree on the point at which the consumption of the content provides a reliable signal of intent to buy. There needs to be a smooth handoff of prospects between marketing and sales for idea marketing to have the fullest possible impact on a sale.

So I think we need a clearer and broader definition of thought leadership marketing than the acronym gives us. What do you think?

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I’ve moved to a new domain

October 12, 2009 by

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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Create an idea network

March 6, 2009 by

Time and again, I see companies relying on their marketing departments to develop and disseminate what they think is thought leadership. And marketers think they are doing a great job because they are so good at disseminating the stuff. They put those case studies out there on the web site, push them out through PR channels and reuse them in all sorts of different forms, from podcasts to videos to conference presentations.

The dissemination is great. But what we need is more focus on the content generation. Of course, not all of this is under marketing’s control. I’m sure many of you have pleaded with your businesses to offer up content and they haven’t stepped up. But you have to try harder. Thought leadership should be managed by marketing, but it can’t be sourced from marketing.

I’ve offered up an example of how you could create a thought leadership engine inside your company in the slides from a (free) presentation that I link to at the bottom of this post. If you do nothing else, get a budget for creating internal knowledge share sessions.

Any company should be able to get executive commitment to make employees present their latest hot projects or thinking that is coming out of work with customers. You can have weekly or monthly presentations and sweeten the pot by setting it up as an awards program, with the best submission receiving stock options or a gift card.

The other key elements are research with customers and among competitors and some kind of external check and balance, whether it’s creating alliances with academics, research consortia, and/or analysts. There needs to be a way to test your thinking with third-party experts to make sure that your ideas are worth pursuing.

The idea here is to create a closed-loop cycle that includes internal subject matter experts, customers, external resources like academics and analysts, and primary and secondary research. You start with a nugget of a POV and you put it through this cycle and refine it with all those constituencies. And then send it around again. There no reason why you can’t do this in stages-build upon the POV and report it—then report it again when you have more to say and more proof points.

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

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Does your idea marketing have a point of view?

February 13, 2009 by

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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Plucking the Low-Hanging Fruit

September 12, 2008 by

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

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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