Aug 12, 2010
IDG News Release, 8/12/10
Computerworld, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), and SNW are seeking IT user-organization case study submissions for their Best Practices Awards Program.
Eligible nominees are exclusively IT end-user organizations. Nominations of IT end-user organizations are accepted from IT users themselves, their public relations representatives, or vendors on behalf of their IT end-user customers. Multiple submissions of case studies describing different deployments per IT end-user/organization will be considered.
Deadline for Receipt of Submissions via Online Process: Monday, August 30, 2010. Five finalists will be chosen in each category and honored at SNW, taking place October 11-14, 2010, at the Gaylord Texan Conference Center in Dallas, Texas. Award recipients will be recognized on the conference website (www.snwusa.com), in an event press release, and may be featured in a special Computerworld supplement.
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Jul 12, 2010
IDC News Release, 7/12/10
Cloud risk management solutions gaining consideration among leading banks
IDC Financial Insights today announced the availability of a new report, Best Practices: 2010 Survey of Senior Risk Managers — Technology Implications for Vendors in a New Risk Management Environment (Document #FIN223915, July 2010). The study – based on a series of interviews with senior risk managers at tier 1 and tier 2 banks – reveals that more than 40% of respondents indicated their bank will materially increase spending on risk in 2010. While positive, this number suggests that risk is paramount, but overall capital is still precious. As a result, senior risk managers will struggle to fulfill the need to improve processes that include data, analytics, and reporting to meet increased regulatory requirements while dealing with limited investment capital.
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May 26, 2010
5/26/10, ClickZ
Sometimes senior management wants things boiled down into easy-to-consume-and-understand packages. Because time is valuable, these executives want a high-level understanding of a concept or an idea. That can be pretty tough to do with social media marketing, especially when overnight successes have been touted on the latest business channels.
There is a way to break it down and explain that social media marketing is not quite as easy as starting an account on Facebook. It’s a way to make things easier for directors, vice presidents, managers, and even practitioners. I call it the “Four Pillars of Social Media.” Without any one of them in your strategy or planning, your foundation will be wobbly.
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May 25, 2010
Rich Vancil and Joseph A. Ferrantino
IDC, May 2010
Tech marketers are re-examining how they select, work with, and compensate agencies, according to IDC’s CMO Advisory service. No longer is it enough to simply reduce costs.
In a recent survey, IDC found that more than a third of a company’s marketing budget goes to outsourced programs. With such a significant percentage, IDC has identified a handful of key considerations from agency selection to ongoing performance measurement and compensation. To steer your organization in the right direction, click here to learn about some more best practices.
Download a free abstract here.
- © 2010 IDC. Reproduction is forbidden unless authorized. All rights reserved.
May 17, 2010
Rich Vancil and Joseph A. Ferrantino
IDC, May 2010
As the economy continues to recover and so do marketing budgets, most of the increased funding will flow into digital marketing. According to IDC CMO research, company websites, digital events, search, and email are expected to do well.
Today, digital marketing requires a shift in focus from activity tracking (pageviews, messages, and registrations) to business impact. This change starts with identifying strategic business metrics and demanding business results inside and outside a company.
Download a free abstract here.
- © 2010 IDC. Reproduction is forbidden unless authorized. All rights reserved.
May 4, 2010
5/4/10, Social media B2B
David Thomas, Social Media Manager, SAS presented on how a company’s social media policy is the key to their social media success. It was an interactive session where Dave spoke for a brief time as an introduction, and opened up the floor for discussion. Companies use social media as a new way to communicate.
Build awareness – Find the people who will guide the policy development, including the evangelists and the skeptics. The practitioners must be there with the rulemakers too.
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Apr 9, 2010
4/9/10, Online Marketing Connect
They say it can’t be done.
I’m told it’s impossible.
Ridiculous!
Scandalous!
In SEO school we are taught that you can’t optimize a single web page for more than two or maybe three keywords at a time. Many say you can’t truly be effective optimizing for more than one. It just doesn’t work!
But what if there was a way that it could work? What if you could successfully optimize a single web page for 15 or more keyword phrases at a time and get rankings for all of them? What would that kind of information be worth to you?
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Apr 9, 2010
4/9/10, Online Marketing Connect
SES New York kicked off with an excellent keynote presentation by David Meerman Scott (interview) followed by a panel on Digital Asset Optimization including Mark Knowles, Chris Boggs and myself. Richard Zwicky moderated.
The rising importance of optimizing one’s digital assets came out of Google and other search engines’ decision to start including information and file types from other sources than their main search index. Some queries trigger search results that go beyond web pages, MS Office docs and PDF files to include sources such as images, blog posts, news, video thumbnails, books and shopping.
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Apr 1, 2010
4/1/10, ClickZ
The unsubscribe function in commercial e-mail is too often treated like the black sheep at the family reunion: they have a right to be there, but nobody wants to deal with them.
That represents a major loss of opportunity. The unsubscribe can provide a wealth of knowledge for marketers, who can use what they learn to improve their e-mail marketing programs’ efficiency and productivity, as measured by better deliverability, higher ROI (define), and lower list churn. Besides that, getting unsubscribe right, like communing with the family black sheep, is just the right thing to do.
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Mar 15, 2010
Rich Vancil
I have just returned from the Bay Area where last week I moderated a panel of senior marketers on the topic of Social Media within the complex B2B marketing mix.
The more I think through the potential for this area, the more excited I become about the contributions that Social Media will eventually make to marketing.
What is most promising is that “Social” will help to transform marketing communications into what it should be: a two-way interaction between buyer and seller. Presently, much of our marketing communications is just the opposite: a one-way push of the vendor’s voice.
But Social Media is not Marketing…Yet. Mostly, it’s a jumbled mass of dialogue with a lot of static to sort through.
Social Media will become marketing when two things happen. First it needs to contribute to the “inbound” side of marketing. Web 2.0 conversations about your company’s product and services need to be mined and gleaned so that they become valuable components of your product management decisions. The litmus test here is that your product managers start to depend on those contributions.
The second thing that needs to happen is on the “Outbound” side of marketing. The litmus test here is that Social Media needs to become a primary preference for how buyers inform their decisions. IDC research shows that buyers almost always prefer to receive information from independent third parties and from their peers. So, Social Media should really shine in this application.
There is important work ahead to make it this happen. It’s all about how to operationalize your marketing organization to reap the benefits of Social Media. “Operationalize” doesn’t make it through your spell-checker… but it is on the lips of the best marketers in tech, today. Only with operational depth will Social earn its way into the marketing mix. In our latest survey of CMO’s less than one-half said that they were making “significant” progress on this task – and that’s from an audience who tend to self-rank pretty high.
Here are three operational Best Practices that I see marketing leaders taking, right now. These leaders, by the way, are moving quickly on these. My sense is that they know that these basic operational tasks need to be completed well before the inbound and outbound marketing benefits can be realized.
1. Centralize. If you have followed the IDC CMO area research, you know that we are not great fans of heavy-handed corporate marketing. But in this case we are pressing hard for this. The issue is that (Congratulations, by the way) everyone in your company is now in marketing! Well-meaning engineers are merrily blogging about a new technical advance. Your sales reps are tweeting about a local seminar that they are setting up. The problem is that we are creating the perfect environment for a major breach of data. A privacy issue will be violated; an important confidentiality will be disclosed. When this happens, the blame I think is going to wind its way back to the marketing department, regardless of marketing’s role in the breach. So, corporate marketing needs to have the basics of governance and policy in place.
The second opportunity for centralization is for shared service creation. One of my clients has five major development groups and the lead developer in each group took a separate initiative to construct a community site for the development community and their most engaged customers. Couldn’t the deployment of a master community site with five sub-divisions have saved money? Yes. And wouldn’t it be easier to then deploy a single mining tool across those sub-divisions? Yes.
2. Train. I don’t think that there is a lot of good external “courseware” for how to conduct Social Media Marketing. But wait! Remember that everyone in your company is now in marketing?? I would bet that for every 100 people who are involved in Social conversations, that you have two or three real sharp-shooters. Find those two or three, and have them train the rest.
3. Measure. Poor metrics can give good marketing activities a bad name. One of the basic faults in metrics development is measuring activities and not results. Measuring the number of Tweets or enumerating the cast of your Followers are stark examples of these errors. Measure how many buying decisions you influenced. Measure how many customer service issues you identified and passed on to the right area for resolution. It seems basic but I am surprised at how many marketers still measure just the volume, the activities. Why? Because it’s easy. You have to be willing and able to do the harder work.
“Operationalize” for Social Media. An important initiative for 2010.
