March 18, 2024

Should we stop marketing to the CIO?

Technology marketers have spent the last 25 years trying to get and keep the attention of the people with their hands on the technology tiller inside multi-billion dollar organizations, CIOs.

And for nearly that long, pundits have been predicting that the CIO role would become extinct, and that the strategic decisions about technology would be subsumed into the business.

Those pundits have always been wrong. But this time, they may finally be right—at least about certain types of CIOs. For marketers, this diminished relevance of certain CIOs means two things, I think. First, that they must know more about their CIO audiences than ever, and second, they must rethink how they market to target companies.

Cloud creates a new buying decision pattern
In our ITSMA Webinar How Cloud Computing Will Change Marketing last week, one of our guests made a bold prediction: Major IT services deals will, in the future, bypass IT.

Now, you may say that few big IT services deals ever went through IT. They are too important not to be made by the business. Perhaps, but in most cases, CIOs were crucial to making sure that the deals didn’t completely fall apart. Business people heard grand promises of business efficiency, cost savings, and competitive differentiation, while CIOs provided crucial translation that weighed those promises against the reality of 30-year-old legacy systems, dispersed business units and geographies, business process vagaries, tangled infrastructure—basically, the IT hairball that threatens to choke any deal after it is signed.

CIOs’ power is rooted in complexity
For marketers, having good relationships with CIOs was like knowing the bouncer behind the velvet rope. It got you in the door and created a crucial ally for making deals that everyone could live with.

But while CIOs may have been crucial to the deals, there was always a problem. CIOs’ power has, to a certain extent, always been rooted in something that business people hate: complexity. CIOs were the only ones who had any insight into how the individual hairs of the IT hairball were knotted together.

Trying and failing to dislodge the IT hairball
For the last ten years, providers have been trying to dislodge the hairball. It began with Application Service Providers (ASPs) that promised to surgically remove the hairball from the throat of the business. But these outfits could never remove the lump entirely and failed to run things any more efficiently than internal IT departments could.

Then came the Software as a Service (SaaS) providers, who offered certain applications and business processes through their own servers. But most of these applications were peripheral and could only shave little slices off of the hairball.

Cloud moves IT outside the company
And now comes cloud, which is basically ASP with a lot more technology power and sophistication and without the reptilian brand associations. Providers now say that through some combination of cloud technologies, they can blast the hairball to dust and let companies create services that are not hampered by underlying technology complexity. A report from the Corporate Executive Board entitled The Future of Corporate IT predicts that up to 80% of application spending will move outside the company.

What will happen to CIOs
Let’s assume they are right. It seems like a good bet—Moore’s Law doesn’t show any sign of slowing down yet. Here’s what will happen to CIOs if the cloud prognostications come true:

  • The traditional technology-focused CIO will become irrelevant. There will be an entire category of CIOs that marketers should no longer waste time and resources on: Operational CIOs. These are the CIOs who keep the lights on in the IT infrastructure. They buy the hardware and services for the data centers. These CIOs will be written out of the equation when the infrastructure moves into the cloud.
  • Internal IT projects will become external services deals. Another CIO archetype, the Transformational Leader CIOs that have been focused on using IT to improve business processes, may disappear as distinct IT leaders. Those projects will happen outside the company, in the cloud. These CIOs could move to become heads of the specific business services that run in the cloud and manage the relationships with providers, predicts the Corporate Executive Board.
  • IT departments will shrink dramatically. The Corporate Executive Board predicts that 75% of in-house IT positions will disappear in the next five years. What few positions remain will be dedicated to supporting specific business services.

What will happen to marketers
Okay, so what does all this mean for marketers? I see four key shifts:

  • The technology sale will become the business service sale. All of this could spell the end of what we have traditionally called the technology buyer. The sale will have to be made on higher level technology-based business services. Marketers will need to stop focusing on technology-based pitches.
  • The importance of audience segmentation in B2B will increase. More than ever, marketers will need to know which CIO archetype they are talking to and make sure they are not wasting time on those who can’t impact the business service sale.
  • Idea marketing will become more important. With speeds and feeds no longer relevant, marketers must get the attention of customers through ideas about how to improve business services rather than technology comparisons.
  • Relationships will matter more after the sale. The cloud means that everything becomes a service. Without the IT hairball to lock providers and customers together in a death embrace, the barriers to switching providers will come down. That means that marketers will need to devote more attention and dollars to the loyalty stage of the buying process.

What do you think? How will cloud change the CIO and marketing to the CIO?

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How to get others to blog

One of the biggest challenges for B2B social media marketers isn’t creating content, it’s helping others create content.

Marketing is the default head of social media management in most companies. And while marketers can create some social media content, they can (and should) rely on their subject matter experts (SMEs) to create most of the stuff that’s going to build trust and relationships with customers.

At our two ITSMA briefings this week in Boston and Washington on social media, (we have two more coming up in New York and Santa Clara, CA that you can attend), marketers offered up a common complaint: They have a hard time getting their SMEs to start contributing (and keep contributing) content.

It’s no surprise. Creating content such as blogs is hard. That’s why marketers have to step in and help out. Here are some ways to do it:

Send them what interests you. If you’re in tune with your SMEs, then what interests you should interest them (at least from a business perspective—no need to go nuts and take up golf). Set up an RSS feed of key news sources and bloggers and forward the good stuff to your SMEs.

Get ideas from customers. When blogger’s block sets in at IBM, bloggers can get inspiration through software that lets customers suggest the topics they’d like to see covered. (Okay, so you need to work for IBM to access it, but Skribit is available to the rest of us.)

Filter research. Customer research can provide tons of fodder for content, but you can’t just dump it on SMEs unfiltered. Pick some key themes and ask them to comment on them.

Incite them. If you see a controversial assertion or question somewhere, forward it to your SMEs and ask them to craft a thoughtful (not attacking) response and link to the original through their content.

Interview them. If your star SMEs are struggling to come up with ideas for starting a blog or for keeping one going, start thinking of yourself as a reporter. These people are your beat. You don’t have to write their posts for them, but you must interview them regularly to find out what they are hearing from customers and what trends they are seeing in the market. Just as reporters take the heat for missing a story or failing to file regularly, you have to take on the responsibility for making sure these people keep posting regularly by checking in with them regularly and getting them talking. Record the interviews and get them transcribed. Then take a look at the transcript and highlight the sections that you think would be interesting for them to write about.

Have regular pitch meetings. Very few writers are able to get their best thoughts out on paper without some help. That’s why magazines and newspapers have pitch meetings, where writers blurt out their rough ideas and get feedback from others on how to turn those ideas into cogent stories. This all happens before the writing begins. When you check in with your bloggers, ask them to talk through their ideas before they start writing. It will improve the quality of their posts and it will also help you keep them focused on the issues that matter most to your business.

Create an editorial calendar. Companies have strategies and goals. Marketers should use them to help inspire their content creators. Pick topics that matter to your customers and your business and ask your SMEs to create content for those topics. Create an editorial calendar with a new topic at least each quarter (e.g., sustainability or cloud computing). Then make a plan for hitting those topics in as many different types of content as possible (blog posts, conference presentations, videos, etc.) so that buyers can consume the information in any form they choose. And target that content to all of the stages of the buying process so that anyone encountering your content will find something that speaks to them personally.

Hire a content director. Have you noticed what’s been happening to the media lately? There are many unemployed journalists and editors out there. Hire one to help your SMEs develop and disseminate their ideas. Journalists are trained to separate the compelling ideas from the chaff and develop them with supporting evidence and case examples.

Buddy them up. If your SMEs refuse to go solo because they think it will be too much work, find them a partner or partners to share the load.

Write for them. If all else fails, you can interview them and use the transcript to write something yourself. Just don’t relieve the SMEs of the responsibility for feeding you the ideas and thinking.

What have I left out? How do you encourage your content creators?

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Why I Don't Hate the Term "Cloud Computing"

I see now why they credit old people with having wisdom. If you hang around long enough, you begin to see patterns in the way the world works, mostly through sheer repetition.

I think I’ve been hanging around long enough—first as a technology journalist and now as an analyst—to explain why the concept of cloud computing seems to be gaining acceptance when other descriptions of the very same thing did not.

The evolution of the terminology for cloud computing mirrors what the best software developers are trying to do with computing in general: abstract away the complexity. The more you make the details of computing go away—at least for those of us who have to use the stuff rather than design it—the better off we all are.

Remember MS-DOS and the terror of the blinking C prompt? There wasn’t a day when I confronted that big, blank screen with that cursor blinking impatiently at me when I didn’t have at least a fleeting sensation that I had forgotten the secret code, that I would be struck numb, that the cursor would just keep blinking and blinking and blinking blinking and never stop. That a co-worker would happen by as I sat there staring into the black abyss and say what the aggro-geeks said about us users all the time back then: “Are you so freakin’ stoooopid that you can’t get past the C-prompt?!”

And then the question that allows people to pretend that they’re being helpful but which they know merely confirms your fecklessness and makes you feel like a five-year-old: “What is it that you are trying to do?”

How about kill the questioner?

We know what happened to the C-prompt. Apple killed it—or rather forced Microsoft to hide it. Today it’s like the monster behind a flimsy wooden door—you catch a terrifying glimpse every now and then and when the monster breaks down the door and the blue screen of death appears, well, you just have to run away.

But at least we don’t have to remember what MS-DOS means, or A: or B:, or C:. We have terminology for that now that abstracts away the complexity: Windows, folders, and of course “my computer.” I still feel like a five-year-old when I see “my computer” but at least I don’t have to rely as heavily on the deeply embedded memories in my basal ganglia when I start up my computer now.

But then things got complicated again. When we pulled computing out of the boxes and onto the network, we had client/server computing, which, in terms of terminology, was a lot like the C-prompt. It took many tries before you could absorb the difference between a client and a server—the forward slash alone was scary enough, like if you had to ask what the slash meant you were one of those stoooopid people who needed conjunctions. And the definition leaked like oil from an old British sports car. Did the client hold the entire application? Well sometimes, though usually just part of it. Did the server hold all the data? Sort of—eventually.

Then along came network computing. Ah, here was simplicity itself. The network is the computer. Just to prove it, Larry Ellison came out with a computer. But I thought you just said that… Makes you want sit on the floor and cry, doesn’t it?

To clear up the confusion, we gave up the metaphors and got back to our terminological roots (psychologists would use a slightly darker term: regression)—and came up with an acronym: ASP. An application service provider was someone who managed your applications and data for you.

But isn’t that what they used to call outsourcing? Well, not really, because they do it at their data center, not your data center. But wait a minute; don’t IBM and Accenture have their own data centers that they use to serve clients? Yes, but…

Clearly, what we needed to do in the aftermath of the ASP era was to think bigger. Metaphors weren’t the problem; it was that the metaphors weren’t big enough. We needed to go huge with this thing. So along comes IBM with on-demand computing. Computing was going to be like plugging a socket into the wall. Everything would just flow through the wire like power from the electric company. Except not for a while yet. For now, companies would continue to build their own data centers themselves, or have IBM build them for them, sort of like how companies used to build their own power generators, umm, before … we … had … power … utilities.

In a fit of candor, we then started talking about grid computing. Cause after all, that’s what this thing really was, a grid of computers linked together to create one huge, all-knowing, all-powerful computer somewhere. Except now you couldn’t do little things on the big computer. You had to do big things, like figure out the human genome. The way I understood grid computing, I assumed that eventually someone would come and take my computer and my Internet connection away. The grid couldn’t be wasted on people as dumb and lacking in ambition as me. I cried (again) when I heard about grid computing.

But now we’ve finally broken free with cloud computing. It isn’t just a big metaphor, it’s an infinite metaphor. It’s downright existential. Clouds are everywhere and nowhere, big and tiny—puffy white things from far away and microscopic droplets of water up close. Nothing says that computing happens somewhere else—but relax, it doesn’t matter where or how—as well as cloud computing.

If I were still a journalist, my life would be wonderful. I wouldn’t have to explain the cloud to my readers. There is no loophole in the definition that invites me to delve deeper to understand what it really means and determine whether it’s really a valid description of what’s going on here. The complexity has been completely abstracted away.

I know this all sounds cynical, but in the end it’s probably just as well that the cloud metaphor lets us off the hook of rigor. Like the DOS prompt, it’s not something most people need to know about.

It’s a lesson for all of us. Tech companies are complexity junkies, needing to explain and justify every detail until the marketing becomes as monstrous as the DOS prompt. We could all use a few more layers of abstraction—and some good metaphors—in our thinking and our communications.

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