Jul 27, 2010
BtoB Inside Technology, 7/27/10
Telecommuting is changing the way technology marketers do their jobs—or at least it should be, according to a new Forrester Research report based on Forrester’s “Workforce Technographics U.S., Canada, and UK Survey, Q3 2009.”
The online survey—conducted in September and including answers from 3,904 information workers at companies with 100 or more employees in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.—said by 2016, 43% of all information workers will telecommute, which will present specific challenges for the IT department. Meeting this new workforce’s needs while keeping costs low will prompt many to allow employees to use their own IT resources, including software, hardware and cellular phones. Forrester, which coined the phrase “technology populism” to describe this trend, said it will force technology vendors to sell not simply to the CIO and corporate buyer but also to the individual end-user.
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Jun 29, 2010
BtoB Labs, 6/29/10
Later today, I’m presenting the early results from a study aimed at understanding how technology buyers consume information at different stages of the funnel. I’m really excited about the results as it points out a few key nuggets that will help further tailor content through the funnel to meet buyers objectives. The study will be posted later online and I’ll update the blog with locations… but a sneak peak includes the following data points:
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Jun 14, 2010
6/14/10, BtoB
Eduardo Conrado, senior VP-CMO, Motorola Enerprise Mobility Solutions and Networks
“Over the past 10 years, I’ve seen marketers and marketing organizations evolve from tactical to strategic as they realize the benefits gained from better organizational alignment, integrated marketing communications and interactive marketing. The structure of marketing organizations in general was not functionally aligned—it was fragmented, with different reporting relationships. With the emergence of the role of CMO in the b-to-b space, organizations have begun to realize the value of aligning all marketing resources, including budget, to the CMO…”
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May 26, 2010
5/26/10, PR Newswire
Research Guides Tech Marketers on How to Use Social Media to Connect with Tech Decision Makers
UBM TechWeb (www.ubmtechweb.com) just released a social media research study that provides a comprehensive portrait of how technology professionals and technology marketers are using social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and blogs. The study, “Social Media at Work,” is the first study of its kind to examine both the usage and preferences of technology decision makers and the activities technology marketers employ to reach them.
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May 25, 2010
5/25/10, MediaPost
Is all mobile social?
Five years ago, penning a MediaPost piece that feels like it was written far more recently, I asked, “Is all mobile local?” That question would have been a more fitting title for the column rather than the wonkier one I used, “The Mobile-Local Redundancy,” which sounds like a rejected name for a Jason Bourne movie. The question and the column answering it remain relevant, making me wonder if so little has changed in sixty-one months.
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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.
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.
Jan 28, 2010
1/28/10, iProng
Although Apple’s new iPad tablet computer won’t ship until late March, fans can get the educated scoop on the upcoming product in about two weeks. Macworld 2010, the premier annual event in the Apple industry, has announced a “Special iPad Event” which will take place on February 13th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Jason Snell, editorial director of Macworld Magazine, will lead the preview session.
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Jan 27, 2010
1/27/10, MediaPost
I find myself quoting Randall Rothenberg, Chairman of the IAB, more and more these days. Earlier this month, Randy proclaimed that “the Web has been colonized by the evil aliens of the direct-response planet.” In saying this, he acknowledged what others have also felt for some time — that the precision of online media is a both blessing and a curse for marketers. Left unchecked for way too long, online advertising has been overrun by tactics and success measures that are singularly suited for direct marketers and are not so effective for brand builders. Leads, click-throughs, downloads and/or page views may adequately measure a Netflix campaign, but holding Coke to the same standard just doesn’t make sense.
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Jan 26, 2010
1/26/10, eMarketer
Though not immune to the recession, digital marketing rode out the downturn, and marketers worldwide are bullish about the space’s prospects in 2010, according to research from the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA).
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