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What the slow death of B2B publishing means for marketers

March 4, 2011 by

Marketers always struggle with what to do next. There so many channels out there and so little time. But if you step back and think about where the real opportunity is for B2B marketers, it is idea marketing. Start with a good idea and the channel questions will resolve themselves.

B2B buyers are tired of marketing, but they’re not tired of ideas. In fact, buyers are hungrier than ever for good ideas presented in an objective way that target their specific needs. The people who used to do that, B2B journalists, aren’t doing it so much anymore.

This cartoon making the rounds online captures the frustrations of trade journalists--and reveals the opportunity for B2B marketers.

The business model is broken
It’s not that the journalists have gotten lazy; it’s a problem with the business model for B2B publishing. The business side of these organizations is trying to maintain profitability by slashing staff and by maximizing online traffic to make up for lost print ad revenue (and other desiccated revenue streams like events).

But unlike the old print subscription models, where publishers qualified their audiences by setting minimum requirements for things like role in the organization and buying power (which allowed them to justify high prices for advertising), online traffic is essentially random. Today, publishers must substitute traffic quantity for quality of subscribers to get advertisers to buy. That drives publishers to produce a lot of short content designed to reach the broadest possible audience (at least one online story about Apple per day for a technology pub, for example).

Half your ad dollars wasted? Try all of them.
Meanwhile, B2B buyers still hunger for good, specific content just as they always have. But because advertisers don’t believe in print anymore, the economics aren’t there for publishers to provide it. We keep hearing that quote from John Wanamaker about how half of his print advertising dollars were wasted. Trouble is, with online that figure is closer to 100%. Advertisers have abandoned print display advertising that at least had some degree of targeting for online display ads that have no targeting at all.

It’s a no win for everybody except the ad agencies. Publishers are left with a trickle of revenue and B2B companies discover just how uninterested a generic online audience is in their products and services. Meanwhile, Google, which has become the biggest ad agency of them all, gets rich by presenting hungry content seekers with links to JC Penney.

From the ashes of trade journalism, an opportunity for marketers
However, the tragedy that has become trade journalism is an opportunity for B2B marketers.

Providers have the opportunity to fill the content gap themselves. Too bad more of them aren’t doing it. Though most respondents in our How Customers Choose research said the quality of their providers’ thought leadership was pretty good, nearly 40% said it could be better. The number one suggestion for improvement: Focus more specifically on buyers’ particular business segment and needs (which B2B print publications used to be measured on each year in reader surveys).

This longing for personalization isn’t just heard in the context of thought leadership, however. When asked to name the number one factor in choosing a provider, variations on the “know me” theme came through 42% of the time.

Measure relevance, not output
But most marketing organizations don’t measure relevance; they measure output—whether it’s in leads or downloads. Marketers need to invest their money where B2B publications used to invest it—in constantly researching their target audiences and identifying the trends and ideas that are most relevant to them. Then marketers need to provide that relevant content.

When they do, they win business. In our recent survey, How Customers Choose Solution Providers, 2010: The New Buyer Paradox (free summary available), nearly 60% of respondents said that idea-based content plays an important or critical role in determining which providers make it onto their shortlists. But if providers go farther and use thought leadership to help companies clarify their business needs and suggest solutions, 30% of respondents said they are more likely to choose those providers. Even better, more than 50% of this group said they would consider sole-sourcing the deal. And this potential windfall isn’t limited to new prospects. Existing customers are also looking for new ideas. There’s no reason you can’t explore the epiphany stage with them more than once.

Does that help clarify what to do next?

What do you think?

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Eight attributes of a thought leader

February 18, 2011 by

Social media are growing up. The initial thrill of connecting to a bunch of peers that we’ve never met is giving way to the desire to get something useful out of those connections. Interesting research from Edelman shows that there has been a decline in trust in “people like myself” and “regular employees.” Meanwhile, trust in “credentialed experts” and “company technical specialists” is rising—we’re getting so desperate we even want to hear from the CEO.

Clearly, there’s a growing hunger for thought leadership in social media. Our prospects and customers want us to cut through the noise of social media just as they’ve wanted us to cut through the noise of every other communications channel that came before. Thought leaders themselves must be better-rounded than in the past, as comfortable online as on stage or in an interview.

I’ve been interviewing ITSMA members about their thought leadership programs as follow-on to our recent thought leadership survey and asking about what makes a good thought leader. Based on these interviews and on my own experience working with thought leaders, I’ve started a list of key characteristics (please add your own attributes to this list):

What are the personal attributes of a thought leader?

  • Relevant experience. At a minimum, a thought leader must have experience that will sound relevant to your target audience. But they can’t merely seem like a peer; they need to be perceived as an expert. Usually, that means experience that is deeper than the target audience has, or breadth of experience working across multiple companies or industries, or all of the above.
  • Presence. Hard to define, but you know it when you see it. These people aren’t just comfortable in their own skin; they know how to take over a room or an interaction in an un-threatening way. Like most mammals, our first encounters with strangers involve a subtle sorting out of who is dominant and who is submissive. Those with presence can make others willingly go submissive, and therefore make them receptive, without anyone minding.
  • Rapport. This is beyond just good people skills; it is the ability to adjust to other others’ individual pace. Thought leaders (like successful presidents), can meet all sorts of different people at their own level without pandering or patronizing.
  • Curiosity. Thought leaders are endlessly curious, not just intellectually but also about people. Their rapport with customers extends to a genuine, ego-free interest in the problems those customers face. Good ideas aren’t enough; those ideas need to be informed by a wide-ranging exposure to other inputs and opinions.
  • Synthesis. Thought leaders see the threads of insight lurking within a complex stream of information and use them to create a new idea or a new way of looking at an old problem.
  • Storytelling. One of the most important attributes of a thought leader is the ability to weave insights into a cogent narrative that brings ideas to life for others.
  • Courage. Not all new ideas are met with a warm reception. Thought leaders can’t be afraid to question the status quo and defend their ideas from critics. But this courage must be tempered with patience in the face of harsh criticism. Taking the high road in these situations is the highest form of courage.
  • Empathy. Accusations of elitism and being out of touch will follow thought leaders who can’t see things from the perspective of others.
  • Humility. This isn’t just about admitting when they’re wrong, it’s acknowledging that they don’t know everything at each step of the way. The goal isn’t just to be ingratiating. Humility contributes to success by making others feel welcome to contribute their own ideas and feedback.

What other attributes do thought leaders need to have? Which of these attributes are most important? Please give me your thoughts!

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2011: The year of personal brands

January 28, 2011 by

This is the year that the personal brand begins to do battle with the corporate brand. I think we need to let the personal brand win—especially in B2B.

Featuring big pictures and bios of your subject matter experts on your website is a good start, but it is the equivalent of paid search. It’s relevant but still a step removed from the truly personal connection. We need the equivalent of organic search, where our people rise to the top on their own, independent of their corporate affiliations. Then as marketers, we create a virtuous cycle that links these personal brands to the corporate brand. But it’s going to mean letting these people roam free outside the corporate firewall.

Pitting the corporate brand against the personal brand
Forrester Research is testing both sides of this argument. Now, awhile back I wrote a post criticizing Forrester’s decision to prevent its analysts from hosting their own personal blogs. I still believe what I said is right, but that’s not the purpose of this post.

The reason I bring up Forrester again is because they are actually so far ahead of the curve on this issue that they are the Sputnik dog of personal and a corporate brand testing. It’s a good problem to have, to be grappling with this issue as Forrester is.

Testing the popularity of content
If you follow social media, you probably know most of the story already. One of Forrester’s former analysts, Jeremiah Owyang, developed a big following on his personal blog “Web Strategy” in part because he hits on all cylinders of blogging: frequent posts, engaging content, and an active audience that contributes interesting and insightful comments. (And it should be mentioned that he started his blog before he came to Forrrester.) Another reason for his popularity, at least more recently, was because he was a Forrester analyst, and that brought instant credibility and gravitas to his words, because Forrester has such a strong brand.

But Owyang didn’t just post on his own blog; he also posted on a Forrester blog that was created around his business line. In other words, you had two avenues of attention and traffic that both complemented and competed with one another, at least from a branding perspective. In the early days, Owyang’s personal blog was driven by his personal brand and enhanced by the Forrester corporate brand. First you found Owyang, and then you found that Forrester was behind him.

Meanwhile, the Forrester corporate blog that he contributed to was driven by the Forrester brand and enhanced by Owyang’s personal brand. First you found Forrester, and then you found Owyang.

What better a, b test of personal vs. corporate branding could you get?

I wish I had the numbers to prove it, but my sense based on my own experience in social media is that Owyang’s personal brand won that battle. It certainly did in my own view. I found him on his own blog before I found him on Forrester’s and the conversation on his personal blog was more interesting and his community more engaged than on the Forrester blog.

What happens when your personal brand quits?
Of course, then Owyang left Forrester for a startup, Altimeter, that was started by a former Forrester analyst and which has since scooped up a number of other Forrester analysts. Right around that time, Forrester announced that it was ending the cross-posting experiment—no more personal blogs for its analysts. Any blogging would now be done from behind the firewall. I don’t want to assert cause and effect here, just pointing out the change.

Co-branding the individual and the company
As part of the change in its blogging policy, Forrester revised its blogging strategy as well, making its analysts more visible and giving them their own personal blogs behind the Forrester firewall. For example, Owyang’s replacement, Augie Ray, has his own personal blog, but his posts also appear on a group blog targeted at the business line he serves, “Interactive Marketing.” It’s a kind of co-branding strategy: individual analyst, line of business, and company brand all have equal billing at the top of the blog. So when Ray leaves, Forrester banks that people will want to follow the replacement analyst in interactive marketing for Forrester.

Meanwhile, Owyang still has his personal blog and it is as popular as it ever was—if not more so—than when he was at Forrester. And that’s a really good thing for Owyang’s new company, Altimeter Group. If you don’t agree, just go to Alexa and compare traffic at Owyang’s personal blog, the Forrester site, and the Altimeter site.

For smaller companies like Altimeter, the personal vs. corporate branding decision should be a no-brainer. Owyang’s traffic dwarfs that of the company. They should be thrilled that Owyang is still blogging, because he is constantly driving traffic to their site and exerting an upward pull on the corporate website’s traffic chart. People are going there to find out what company is backing Owyang and what they offer. If he left, would that traffic diminish? No doubt, but in the meantime, it’s all good for Altimeter.

For well-established brands like Forrester, the decision is less clear. The site already has lots of traffic and most people have heard of Forrester. Forcing analysts to start over again to build a personal following after they leave the fold may make it easier for replacements to follow acts like Owyang—at least from the corporate brand’s perspective

No doubt some will say that that proves that Forrester should never have allowed Owyang to keep his own blog. When he left, so did a lot of traffic that could have stayed with Forrester had he been surrounded by the corporate firewall.

The legacy of the corporate brand in the personal brand
But who’s thinking about the customer here? Will they really think less of you if one of your stars leaves? Was it a waste of time letting Owyang promote himself like that?

I don’t think so. Owyang’s blog is still packed full of references to Forrester and his work there. It’s clear searching on his blog today that Forrester played a big role in bringing him to prominence. And that association will never go away unless Owyang decides to one day just erase all traces of his past. There’s a very positive association there that underscores Forrester’s ability to nurture talent.

Now let’s look at that from the opposite perspective. Let’s say Ray builds as big a following through his Forrester blog as Owyang did through his personal blog. What happens to that content when he leaves? To me, the association is less positive over the long term. Do you really want a former analysts’ content to dominate your corporate brand’s search rankings after he or she leaves?

What about the customer’s view?
Now, I think that if we look at this from a traditional corporate branding perspective, your immediate reaction would be to expunge the analyst from your audience’s memory and start pushing the new content instead. And no doubt since the blogs are all behind Forrester’s firewall now, they can decide what stays and what goes, and can probably create ways through SEO to make the newer stuff more prominent in searches. I don’t want to speculate too much here because I’m not an expert on SEO.

But looking at it all from a customer’s perspective, I think Forrester looks better being a legacy on a star’s personal blog than having a star that leaves a void in content upon leaving. Let me underscore again that this is a good problem to have.

But as social media raises the ante for putting a personal face to the corporate brand, we are going to have to work through the issues that Forrester is grappling with right now. And we will need to avoid making knee-jerk decisions based on traditional brand thinking, because, like it or not, the brand game has changed forever.

What do you think?

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How to make social media add up

December 16, 2010 by

Back in the eighties, when newspapers were only beginning to disappear, I worked for a local paper in a very competitive (journalistically, anyway) part of the world: the moneyed, New York City suburban area of Fairfield County, CT (Greenwich, Stamford, etc.).

Among the five different newspapers that covered the same turf as I did was the New York Times, which had a section called “Connecticut Weekly” on Sundays. In this section, the Times would do something that drove me insane with envy and jealously.

Just as in the main daily edition of the Times, all the news that’s fit to print for the “Connecticut Weekly” section didn’t include sweating the small stuff, the slowly developing, often tedious stories that are the bread-and-butter of local weeklies and dailies desperate to fill their pages.

During the weeks and months that I slaved away on developing stories like a proposed new office development, dutifully updating my readers on every little shift in their fair city’s mood and shape, occasionally something of real interest would happen. A neighborhood might get really angry and stage a rally protesting development, for example.

The predatory strike of summation
In instances like this, the Times would hire a talented freelancer to swoop in like a predatory bird, scanning everything that me and all the other beat reporters on the other local papers had written on the subject in the months leading up to this point and nail the story with a killing strike—a single, cogent, engaging, original (never plagiarized) narrative leading up to the dramatic denouement of the protest. I was so obsessed with following the breadcrumb details of stories like this that I rarely looked up in time to preempt the predatory strike—my only satisfaction came from seeing my serial accounts shifted from their usual spots somewhere deep inside the pages of my newspaper to a brief, fleeting appearance on the front page.

Well, this week I finally have my revenge on the Times, thanks in part, to you.

How to use social media to create thought leadership
In the nearly three years I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve been relentlessly chronicling my pursuit of the developing story of social media for B2B marketers and absorbing your comments and real-world stories. And while I know that others have already made the predatory strike in terms of trying to sum all this stuff up for marketers, at least I can be the first to digest and transform my stuff into a proper summation narrative. This week, we released my ITSMA Special Report: “How to Fit Social Media into your Overall Marketing Strategy and Make it Stick.”

The report is a combination of the reporting I’ve done here on this blog, case studies of social media that I’ve done for ITSMA, and two surveys that we’ve done at ITSMA over the past three years. But it’s also more than the sum of its parts. In combining all this stuff together, I was forced to create a summation narrative that made sense of all the different pieces. In the process, I discovered five important steps that B2B companies must take to integrate social media into the overall marketing strategy.

Why creating a summation narrative is better than reuse
Putting this report together has made me realize the value of turning the breadcrumb trail into a summation narrative. You’d save yourself a lot of time if you made this part of your content strategy from the beginning. Here are some reasons why:

  • Create a larger goal. About the time that we did our first ITSMA social media survey, I realized that I should begin trying to write about all of the different areas that we were asking about on the survey so that we could come up with something more definitive than a bunch of numbers. Having this goal in the back of my mind helped push me to continue to blog about social media even though so many others were doing the same thing. At some point, I thought, all these little posts are going to add up to something bigger.
  • Motivate yourself to write. As I started investigating and writing about the different facets of social media that we were looking at in our research, it all became like a puzzle with missing pieces. I became driven to fill in those pieces.
  • Create new IP. What drove me especially crazy about the summation narratives that the Times did was how the process of summarizing the story forced the writer to create logic that linked everything together. What were the precipitating factors that had led to the neighborhood revolting against the office development? How were they connected? These aren’t questions that occur to you when you’re focused just on the individual pieces of the story. When I started putting together our social media report, I had to do the same thing. In creating logic to link all the different pieces I had together, I created new IP.
  • Anticipate the next big change. Once you’ve created a larger summation narrative, it becomes easier to see when the world has changed. It’s much harder to see the big changes when you’re focused on the little pieces. Just as I didn’t see the neighborhood insurrection as the defining moment in the office development story, IBM, for example, became so focused on optimizing the individual pieces of its portfolio back in the eighties and nineties that no one saw that the bigger narrative had changed: IT was moving from selling individual boxes to fixing bigger problems with a mix of products and services.
  • Move beyond simple reuse. Sure, regular readers of my blog will recognize some sections of the social media report from some of my posts here, but in nearly every case I had to add more to weave these pieces into the larger picture. Needing to create a larger linking logic gives new life to older content.

I know I’ve been telling you to reuse and re purpose content, but now I realize that there’s another important opportunity in this strategy: creating a summation narrative. What do you think? Have you done this with your content?

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13 questions about social media and idea marketing

October 1, 2010 by

Earlier this week I participated in one of MarketingProfs’ TechChats (just do a Twitter search on the #TechChat hashtag to find the dialogue).

It’s a warm-up for the great dialogues we’ll be having at MarketingProfs’ SocialTech conference later this month in San Jose, where I’ll be speaking about social media and the B2B buying process. If you’re in B2B marketing, you gotta go to this thing. All the top social media pros will be there and the focus will be all B2B. I can’t wait.

MarketingProfs’ Megan Leap came up with some excellent questions for me about thought leadership and social media for this week’s TechChat. My answers sparked a lot of debate, so I’ve put them together for you here to see if they will spark the same kind of discussion here. (As an extra added bonus, due to Twitter’s typical evening queasiness, we weren’t able to post all the questions during the appointed hour. So they are all here for your enjoyment.) Please add your thoughts!

Q. Let’s get back to the basics. What exactly IS thought leadership?
A. Ideas that educate customers and prospects about important business and technology issues and help them solve those issues—without selling.

Q. Why should B2B companies try to be thought leaders in their industry?
A. Because online search has become so important to the B2B buying cycle. Content is replacing salespeople in the earliest stages of the buying process. If buyers find your content you’re a step ahead.

Q. What are some ways B2B marketers can position themselves as thought leaders?
A. Marketers can never be thought leaders! Especially in social media, their subject matter experts need to take center stage. But marketers must lead and support SMEs in the development and publishing processes. http://j.mp/8YsPBg

Q. What are some ways B2B marketers can improve their thought leadership?
A. By investing more in the idea development piece of thought leadership. Marketers today are too focused on the publishing part. Another way is by picking themes to help guide your TL development. Smarter Planet helps SMEs at IBM focus. http://j.mp/dzaioo

(Note: At this point, we had a lot of discussion about how ITSMA divides thought leadership into two pieces: development and publishing. Some people thought that publishing was too limited a term for describing the process of getting your ideas packaged up and out into the market. My feeling is that it is apt, because the best model we have for doing this is publishing—i.e., traditional media companies. Just because their business model doesn’t work anymore, that doesn’t mean that their model for developing ideas and getting them out into the marketplace should also be tossed out. It works.)

Also at this point, participants started a really interesting debate about the qualities of a thought leader—but that dialogue is too long to reproduce here—you’ll just have to check out the hashtag!)

Q. Who should be in charge of developing thought leadership? Marketing? PR?
A. Marketing. Marketing has more peer relationships with thought leaders inside the company than PR. Marketing is helping develop offerings.

Q. What social media vehicles are best for promoting B2B thought leadership? Video, blogs, Twitter?
A. Whichever channels your prospects are interested in receiving it and at the stage of the buying process they are at. Research them!

Q. How can marketers integrate thought leadership with traditional marketing tactics?
A. ITSMA research shows that nothing comes close to peer networking and small-scale events. So we should find ways to use social media to support and enhance the live meetings. IBM does that. http://j.mp/c9fWuX

Q. What are some qualities of a good social media voice? (Yes, stole this one from your blog 😉
A. I see 15 qualities, but if it had to pick the top one it would be authenticity. More about it here: http://j.mp/cdcbo9

Q. What are some examples of B2B companies who are successfully using social media and thought leadership? Companies who aren’t?
A. I think B2B companies that have social media policies are ahead of the game in using social media and thought leadership. Companies that don’t let their SMEs talk are going to fall far behind.

Q. Let’s say you market a highly commoditized industry. Would you say thought leadership is even more important?
A. I think it’s important for any B2B company. Anywhere there’s a business process you have the possibility to create thought leadership. That’s where the trade magazine explosion of the 60s-90s came from. Heck, I remember a trade magazine about coin-op laundromats! Everyone wants to improve what they do and how they do it. .

Q. Where will social media and thought leadership be in 2 years?
A. More integrated. Companies and customers and prospects will have a more continuous relationship than they do today. Marketing is still very episodic today, even with social media.

Q. What works better: a blog with a multi or single author approach?
A. I think single authors work best, but it’s much more work and can distract from the brand. I see companies adopting multi-authors for that reason (brand defense). But in B2B, people want to connect with other people, not with brands. Most multi-author blogs are really boring, with few posts and even fewer comments.

Q. How can B2B marketers measure their thought leadership investment?
A. There is no measurable ROI from thought leadership. Period. You will never track it through to a sale and if you do, you’ll never be able to separate it from other factors affecting the sale. I wish the pundits would stop selling that fiction. But I guess it keeps consultants in business. Thought leadership has a role to play, but it’s more to do with building a relationship than making the sale. Content builds intimacy between the company and the prospect until you can put them in touch with a salesperson.

Like these answers? Hate them? Have something to add?

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Why our thought leadership is broken

September 17, 2010 by

All of our talk about marketers becoming publishers is incomplete. We can’t just become publishers, we also have to become advertisers.

Let me explain.

For centuries, publishers had an uneasy, co-dependent relationship with advertisers. A wall existed between publishers and advertisers. Publishers (the good ones, anyway) gave some of the most prominent pages in their newspapers and magazines to advertisers in return for a lot of cash, access to a targeted group of customers, and editorial independence from advertiser influence.

Marketers, meanwhile, didn’t have a wall, so they filled their content with self-aggrandizing references to their own products and services that pissed off readers and sent them to other sources for advice.

What’s the point?
Lately, as traditional media fall away, marketers are getting the message and creating content that looks just like the stuff that readers love from traditional media: news, advice, and new thinking that is not meant to manipulate them into buying something. And they’re linking this content to their social media management strategies.

But that’s only part of the answer.

Ironically, a lot of this new content is pissing off readers in a new way: they like the content but they don’t understand why it’s there, where it’s going, or what they should do with it.

Marketing through association
This is where the advertising part comes in. One of the reasons that companies used to like to advertise in publications like Fortune and BusinessWeek and in trade magazines like CIO was that they could associate their companies with the smart content that these publications produce. The association was subtle, not overt. It may have taken quite a while before a reader started to associate a company advertising in a magazine with the subject matter covered in the magazine. But it happened.

Of course, then the internet happened and advertisers got tired of subtle. They demanded that readers click on their banner ads on publishers’ websites before they’d pay. Readers, long accustomed to the subtle approach, may have looked at those crappy banner ads but they didn’t click and the publishing industry has collapsed as a result.

But from the ashes of publishing, subtle association is making a comeback. The same web analytics that have destroyed publishing are now getting marketers fired because nobody’s clicking on their white papers and surveys.

Partly that’s a quality issue, but it’s also an issue of B2B marketers taking the publishing analogy too literally. They duplicate the content they used to see in trade magazines without providing the context that magazines provide for why that content is there in the first place.

Idea marketing as checklist
For many B2B companies, idea marketing is a check box on a marketing list. They think up all the different things that magazines offer to readers and then make a list: Surveys? Check. Interviews with industry luminaries? Check.

But readers are left to wonder, what’s the point? Why are you giving me all this stuff? What does it mean?

A new way to make idea marketing relevant
Marketers need to invent their own version of subtle association. The publishing model of ads next to content won’t work, of course. Putting ads for your own company next to your own content is silly.

Instead, marketers must create a clear line of sight for readers. They need simple, clear, visual messages that integrate with but don’t detract from their idea marketing content and make a reference to the services that they offer. A simple entry point leads to deeper and deeper related content. And all this deep thinking relates, by association, to the services that you offer.

The nice thing about online is that its hierarchical structure makes this kind of integration easy.

Here, marketers need to tear down a wall of their own creation—the one that separates the ad agencies from the idea marketing content producers. The two have to work together to create themes that are thoughtful and that are about getting readers interested—it’s about leading the horse to the idea marketing bucket. Rather than just shoving readers’ muzzles in the bucket of surveys and white papers, we lead them there with some short, clear, visual themes that are focused on issues that matter to customers rather than on silly ad tag lines or collages of the logo.

Association in action: Smarter Planet
The best example of this that I can think of is IBM’s Smarter Planet. I’m guessing that the term came from an ad agency. But it straddles the issue of green in a way that seems to show knowledge of the target audience and the kinds of ideas they might be open to receiving through such a campaign.

Most CIOs wouldn’t mind being green, but their businesses evaluate them on cost and efficiency. If they can be greener while cutting costs and becoming more efficient then great, but they won’t respond to a purely green message or content. Using “smarter” rather than “greener” seems to encapsulate and get beyond that dilemma in a way that only a good ad copywriter can.

Themes send a signal to the organization
Much as a good simple teaser headline on the cover of a magazine leads readers to the well of deeper content that is the feature story, so too does smarter planet serve as a simple way to lead readers to a bunch of what we would consider traditional thought leadership content: case studies, whitepapers, and a few links to services that CIOs could use in their own departments (with IBM’s help, of course).

The theme (as opposed to an ad slogan) is something that IBM’s marketers can use in many different channels, like social media, and sends a clear signal to the organization that Palmisano probably won’t complain if you decide to write a few post about the intersection of green and efficiency on your blog.

We’re building the publishing engines in our marketing groups, but I think we’re leaving this larger issue of themes and marketing by association out of the process. What do you think?

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Do too many cooks spoil the blog?

July 28, 2010 by
Scoble, Longhorn Evangelist
Image via Wikipedia

Companies who want to add their voices the blogosphere have a decision to make: Do we allow individual employees to be the dominant force in our efforts, or do we keep the focus on the company by creating group-authored blogs?

In part, this is an issue of control. Some companies have decided to let a thousand flowers bloom—i.e., individual employees can blog as long as they adhere to the company’s social media policy. The other is to take a more controlled approach and put a blog or a handful of blogs on the corporate website.

Multi-author blog are easier for companies—but what about the audience?
It seems that most blogs that are on the corporate website are multi-author affairs. The advantage to multi-author blogs (though not necessarily to the audience’s advantage), is that the workload can be shared, reducing the dreaded gaps in posts if bloggers get really busy in their day jobs. There is also less disruption when a blogger leaves the fold. And the brand or the issue that the brand wants to promote (say cloud computing, for example) remains the focal point of the blog rather than a particular personality.

The downside to this approach is that the blog can seem muddled, with bloggers of varied interests and abilities going off in their own preferred directions, leaving the reader to wonder who’s in charge here. It’s also harder to avoid the perception that the blog is a corporate organ rather than a natural outgrowth of your employees’ passions.

Multi-author is part of traditional branding
The multi-author approach is more loyal to the traditional marketing approach that says that the brand comes before the individual. Yet there’s no question that blog readers are looking to connect with a person, much as people follow their favorite columnists in a newspaper or a favorite character on a TV show. They enjoy getting to know the blogger over time.

Increasingly, I think the multi-author approach will become old school. An interesting article this week, Brand Building, Beyond Marketing, essentially argues that the issue of brand has gotten beyond the control of marketing and is increasingly embodied in the actions of individual employees. (This is especially true for services companies, which don’t have concrete products that can do the branding for them.)

Individuals can burn out—or just leave
Now, it is possible to highlight individual contributors within a group-authored blog to give readers a better sense of connection, but for me it never works as well as when the individual takes responsibility for the whole enchilada. Individuals can’t afford to play it safe if they want to build and keep their audiences.

The downside to this approach is that individual bloggers can get burned out easily (most already have day jobs, right?). Another problem is that they may move on to another company, perhaps taking their audience and any brand cred they’ve helped you build with them (most people pick on Robert Scoble as an example of this).

I don’t think there’s a definitive answer to this question yet—at least I haven’t seen any good research comparing individual vs. multi-author blog performance.

What do you think?

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Filed Under: Blogging, Brand, Reputation, and Positioning, Idea Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Why serious games are a serious form of idea marketing

July 9, 2010 by
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I’ve been looking at the growing connection between gaming and thought leadership this week. I know, I know. It’s hard to utter thought leadership in the same breath as video games, avatars, and conversation balloons, but all of these pieces have converged.

Turns out that video games have a role in making the complex (i.e., almost every B2B service ever created) explainable.

Think about it. Case studies are great for building trust, but they don’t do something that video games do by default: put the user at the center of the experience. Ask anyone forced to sit out a video game session while his (gamers are mostly guys) friends play and they’ll tell you that experience trumps observation every time.

Games destroy complexity
An example of what I’m talking about is IBM’s Innov8 online game. This game deals with two of the most complex issues in B2B technology today: business process management (BPM) and service oriented architecture (SOA).

Now in its second generation, the game is part PlayStation and part knowledge management repository. It aggregates some of the typical decision scenarios that IBM customers must make when trying to improve processes in three major areas: customer service, supply chain, and transportation.

In the customer service game for example, you learn through some earnest virtual characters that there are two big issues in BPM for customer service. First, after receiving advice from virtual characters you get three chances to map the process—i.e., how should calls flow through to our call center?—with points for picking the most logical flow. Second, you play with business rules for automating the processes you’ve just mapped—i.e., if we want to cross-sell and up sell, what percentage of calls should be routed through our most experienced call representatives vs. our less experienced (and less costly) representatives?

The connection between gaming and thought leadership
The game succeeds in a number of ways. First, it frames the discussion of BPM in a way that makes sense and that connects it to business results. Second, it establishes IBM as an expert—after all, if you developed the game, you must understand how this is done, right? Finally, as you play with the business rules and see the impact they have on revenues, you get a visual, visceral demonstration of the role that IT automation plays in business performance—which helps IBM sell its Websphere SOA software (the stuff that enables the automation).

They call these things serious games. I think they will force us to seriously rethink our approaches to thought leadership. What do you think?

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Six ways that marketing needs to lead the organization in social media

May 14, 2010 by

Social media creates the need for marketing to lead within the organization.

At least that’s the conclusion we reached at ITSMA recently when we did our social media survey (there’s a free summary if you’re interested).

Now what do we mean when we say that? We mean that within the organization the leadership of social media is falling to marketing. We think that’s because social media is seen primarily as a tool for marketing. Therefore, the marketing group is becoming the default center of social media, right?

I’m really excited about this because it’s rare for a function like marketing to get an opportunity to lead the entire organization. But think about it. Marketers are the not the only ones who are going to be doing social media. Our subject matter experts (SMEs) are talking to customers. We’re seeing HR departments using social media for recruiting. We’re seeing companies use social media to bring customers into the product and service development processes to collaborate on new ideas and improvements. We’re seeing companies use social media for customer support. (Shameless plug here: My favorite B2B blogger Paul Dunay is going to talk about how Avaya uses social media for customer support at ITSMA’s Marketing Leadership Forum on May 25-26.) The entire organization needs to get involved in social media and marketing needs to lead that effort.

I have to say that we were pleasantly surprised and I have to admit a little shocked when we discovered that many marketers seem to get this intuitively—67% of marketers said they are taking on the responsibility of identifying the appropriate subject matter experts and assigning them to engage with their target audience and influencers in the online conversations that are happening out there.

But if marketing is truly going to be the catalyst for social media in the organization, many things are going to need to change. To be a leader, you have to have your own house in order. That means that marketers need to integrate social media with the larger marketing and business strategies. That’s why at ITSMA we’re calling 2010 The Year of Marketing Transformation (sound the bugles!—a little portentous, I know, but we really believe it and the data really shows it). And social media is the main driver behind the need for this transformation. We don’t think marketing can afford to continue doing more with less. With marketing budgets as percent of revenue being an all-time low — less than 1% — social media can’t just be another add-on to everything else that marketing is already doing.

Remember that marketing can’t do this alone. Social media gives us the opportunity to bring the rest of the organization into our efforts. But to do this effectively, we have to define new processes, roles and competencies for marketing and we have to play a large role in leading social media for others inside the organization.

So in our research and our discussions with members and influencers on social media, we’ve identified six major areas that marketers need to focus on to lead the rest of the organization effectively.

  • Research. We have to figure who we want our SMEs to talk to so they don’t waste their efforts.
  • Ideas and content. We need to create an idea engine within the organization to help SMEs come up with things to Twitter and blog about.
  • New roles. We’re seeing a role that is sort of a director of ideas and content emerge. Someone who helps identify smart ideas and people within the organization and makes decisions about how to develop them. We’re also seeing directors of community—Jeremiah Owyang tracks these people on his blog.
  • Governance. Social media policies are the foundation of social media governance. And even small companies can benefit from having a social media council. Listen to IBM’s Sandy Carter talk about how she set up a social media council in her group at IBM.
  • Training. We shouldn’t just turn employees loose without helping them learn about the tools. But we also need to teach them about the strategies for using those tools. Telstra has a cool example of social media training that anyone can watch.

What do you think? What have I left out here? Anything to add?

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How to establish a voice of authority in a blog

April 9, 2010 by

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how to get others to blog. But it’s not enough just to support bloggers. For them to be successful, we need to help them establish their voices in a blog.

The way that we establish trust and relationships with buyers is through authority. We want readers of our SMEs’ blogs to see them as experts. But you can’t establish that authority by putting a link to their LinkedIn profile on the blog. You have to establish authority through the writing voice that your SMEs use in their blogs.

It would be wonderful if your bloggers were the only experts writing about their fields. If that’s the case, great. Stop reading. But most likely, there are already other experts out there who are more expert and write better than your SMEs. In this case, just showing how smart they are won’t cut it. SMEs need an angle. Here are a few to consider:

  • Lead a niche. Pick a subject that few others have staked out. SMEs with deep expertise in a particular niche can build a strong and loyal following—if not necessarily huge blog traffic.
  • Show your age. A former colleague that I really admire managed to mention his 30 year experience in marketing into the first minute of conversation with anyone new. The voice of experience is powerful.
  • Be timely. Being the first with the latest news builds authority.
  • Have the data. This is how analysts (like me) establish their authority. They can make assertions based on what everyone is doing—not just what they themselves think.
  • Aggregator. If your SME is a person who loves to collect information, then becoming an aggregator is a route to trust. People know that they can count on this person to provide or link to the most insightful information in the topic area—no matter where it first appeared.
  • Futurist. Some SMEs are always looking to see what happens next. If they are focused on developing new offerings, for example, this is a natural voice for them.
  • Iconoclast. SMEs can construct a great voice around questioning existing practices and trends. But be careful; these SMEs need to have thick skins and handle negative comments constructively.

What suggestions do you have for establishing a voice of authority in a blog? Let’s get a conversation going.

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