Janet Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I’ve been doing a bit of networking lately, and have received some fascinating feedback as a result:

“I occasionally read your blog to catch up, and rarely understand a word you say; but you sound very, very smart.”

<ouch>

“I’ve seen your blog, and it’s quite a collection of ‘bright and shiny things’ you talk about.”

<guilty as charged>

“I went through your paper, and it’s very, very technical. Who’s your audience?”

<great question!>

These comments have given me pause, and they couldn’t have come at a better time, as I am personally trying to define my own use of social media tools in my business, in order to better clarify their uses for others.

In an effort to do so in public, here’s a stake in the ground:

RSS: Every time I get a new client, I set up a new RSS feed in my Attensa RSS reader to gather news and information about them. (I posted screen shots on SlideShare, in case you like pictures to walk you through how it works.) I also subscribe to a few blogs that I find interesting - and read them within Attensa because it’s more convenient to have one place to go to read and comment on them all.

RSS is like the nervous system of social media - it grabs news from the entire universe and routes it to the brain.

RSS readers are the brains of social media - we train them to understand what we pay attention to, and the smart readers anticipate how to prioritize the information to feed our attention properly.

Blog: I use my blog to personally comment upon things that move me. Whether it be a new tool, a personal experience, or software to help marketers. I agree with Ken, though, that it seems a collection of bright and shiny objects. I’m okay with that, although I think it might be time to mix it up a little more. The danger in blogging is that I seem to be obsessed with, and harp on similar themes; so my posts might become boring for those who subscribe or visit often. But this is my space, so I get to be the medium of “me.”

Blogs are the hearts of social media to me - if I care enough to write about something at length, I’ll blog it. My readers know how I feel about pretty much everything I choose to share. For businesses, blogs can create a glimpse inside your organization and get right to the people who make it work, connecting with their obsessions, thoughts and (yes, even) emotions.

Twitter and other “micro-blogging” tools: I use Twitter to connect with what people are thinking/doing “in the moment.” It fits my “bright and shiny object” proclivity to a tee. Through it, I can check out breaking news, get to know people I work with in a much more casual, personal way, and share thoughts/jump into conversations and engage quickly and directly - right now.

Twitter is like the eyes and ears (maybe all the senses) of social media to me. Blink, turn your head, sneeze and you’ve missed something. But it adds color, depth, taste, and texture to the people, problems and knowledge of those I follow. I tell people in business that teams who are working together should follow each other on Twitter. Especially virtual or geographically diverse teams… they’ll learn more from each other, be more accessible, and get more done with each other as a result.

I ‘d love to hear what others think… as I’ve found this week, it’s most enlightening and helpful to get feedback. It helps focus my thoughts and further define my messages and how I relate them to others.

Which is the true beauty of social media and marketing to me.

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Over on ReadWrite Web Sarah Perez wrote a compelling post summarizing Forrester’s predictions of Web 2.0 adoption in the enterprise. She gives a great synopsis of the report, and speaks about the barriers to adoption:

“….One of the main challenges of getting Web 2.0 into the enterprise will be getting past the gatekeepers of traditional I.T. Businesses have been showing interest in these new technologies, but, ironically, the interest comes from departments outside of I.T. Instead, it’s the marketing department, R&D, and corporate communications pushing for the adoption of more Web 2.0-like tools.

Unfortunately, as often is the case, the business owners themselves don’t have the knowledge or expertise to make technology purchasing decisions for their company. They rely on I.T. to do so - a department that currently spends 70% of their budget maintaining past investments.

Despite the absolute mission-critical nature of I.T. in today’s business, the department is often provided with slim budgets, which tends to only allow for maintaining current infrastructure, not experimenting with new, unproven technologies.”

And she goes on to say,

“By 2013 Web 2.0 will be a feature, not a product.”

And while I agree with the overall premise of that statement, I agree with Forrester:

By 2013 Web 2.0 will be a fabric, not a phase.

And I think it’s that vision - coupled with fear, not budget constraints - that is precisely what’s holding so many businesses back from Web 2.0 adoption today. Scott Niesen over at Attensa has blogged a leading indicator (to me) of the fear when he said,

“We are working with forward thinking IT professionals [JLJ’s emphasis] who are partnering with business teams to integrate Web 2.0 technologies to enhance existing systems and business processes….”

I agree with Scott that finally enterprise RSS adoption is coming into fruition - but why has it taken us so many years to finally get here?

Why do the folks considering (what James Dellow has called “the DNA” of enterprise communication and collaboration) enterprise RSS today have to be the “forward thinking” ones? Because of fear.

And it’s not the IT folks who are to blame. Many business leaders (in all sizes of organizations) are fearful of Web 2.0.

Why the Fear? Because Web 2.0 Fundamentally Changes Business Rules

Many have written compelling visions of the future of the enterprise under the influence of Web 2.0 technologies. (I still enjoy Sam Lawrence’s “Enterprise Octopus” vision as a succinct roll-up of what happens to a business in a Web 2.0 environment.)

And I believe Hugh Mcleod, in writing his extremely insightful “The Hughtrain” post from 2005 was right:

“: There’s only one thing harder than starting a new business: Re-inventing an old one.”

Hugh’s “Porous Membrane” description (which could look a little like an octopus on it’s side) sums up “why the fear?” to me:

“….So I drew the diagram above.

1. In Cluetrain parlance, we say “markets are conversations”. So the diagram above represents your market, or “The Conversation”. That is demarkated by the outer circle “y”.

2. There is a smaller, inner circle “x”.

3. So the entire market, the “conversation” is seperated into two distinct parts, the inner area “A” and the outer area “B”.

4. Area “A” represents your company, the people supplying the market. We call that “The Internal Conversation”.

5. Area “B” represents the people in the market who are not making, but buying. Otherwise know as the customers. We call that “The External Conversation”.

6. So each market from a corporate point of view has an internal and external conversation. What seperates the two is a membrane, otherwise known as “x”.

7. Every company’s membrane is different, and controlled by a host of different technical and cultural factors.

8. Ideally, you want A and B to be identical as possible, or at least, in sync. The things that A is passionate about, B should also be passionate about. This we call “alignment”. A good example would be Apple. The people at Apple think the iPod is cool, and so do their customers. They are aligned.

9. When A and B are no longer aligned is when the company starts getting into trouble. When A starts saying their gizmo is great and B is telling everybody it sucks, then you have serious misalignment.

10. So how do you keep misalignment from happening?

11. The answer lies in “x”, the membrane that seperates A from B. The more porous the membrane, the easier it is for conversations between A and B, the internal and external, to happen. The easier for the conversations on both side of membrane “x” to adjust to the other, to become like the other.

12. And nothing, and I do mean nothing, pokes holes in the membrane better than blogs. You want porous? You got porous. Blogs punch holes in membranes like like it was Swiss cheese.

13. The more porous your membrane (”x”), the easier it is for the internal conversation to inform and align with the external conversation, and vice versa.

14. Not to mention it makes misalignment, if it happens, a lot easier to repair.

15. Of course this begs the question, why have a membrane “x” at all? Why bother with such a hierarchy? But that’s another story.

[AFTERTHOUGHT:] And yes, this works with internal blogs as well, poking holes in the membranes that seperate people within a corporate culture; aligning “the conversation” internally etc. The other advantage of internal blogging is that it organises conversation into a long-term manageable form. Two people sharing ideas via blogs is a lot more permanent, viral and useful for the company than two people sharing the same information over by the watercooler.

[AFTERTHOUGHT:] Poking holes in membranes subverts hierarchies. Avast, ye scurvies etc.”

Avast ye scurvies it is! Let’s subvert the hierarchies, get over the fear of changing the way we do business and let the porous membranes dissolve. Our customers, employees and (I’ll bet money) shareholders will appreciate us for it.

Again, in a succinct summary statement, Martin Koser over on Frogpond said:

“Don’t spend hours pondering the details and splitting hairs - actually use this stuff and find out.”

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A great marketer cannot succeed without a great understanding of the sales process. Period. Anyone spending money to generate leads needs to understand exactly what happens to them from the sales perspective.

I’ve been cold-calling for a couple of hours twice a week for one of my clients for several months. It’s been one of the best things I could do as a marketing “consultant.” In fact, every marketer earning a paycheck should spend a few hours every month (at least) cold calling… which means finding prospects on your own and calling into them.

Why Cold Calling is Good for Marketers:

• It refines your positioning in real-time. It’s amazing how short your “script” becomes - get in, get to the point, get to the next-step.
• It defines your prospect - no longer is the “VP of HR” a “Persona” - she becomes a person. She’s an (im)patient voice on the phone with whom you have a real conversation (if you’re lucky) in real time.
• Your internal customer (the sales person) suddenly becomes very real as well. You’re living in his world, doing what we ask him to do every day. Nothing says loving like hearing someone say, “Is this a sales call?<CLICK>”

No wonder he wants decent leads. Cold calling is hard.

Intelligent Leads - Handcrafted with Care

For other clients I’ve pulled together lists of highly targeted leads, complete with market intelligence. Here’s the methodology I used:

• Create a vertical/geographic prospect list based business objectives (BTW, leading a business strategy session to uncover them is always a plus, making the linkage even stronger, you can do this as well)
• Profile prospect companies, products and managers in HighBeam, LinkedIN, Technorati and various other web sites
  • With the luxury of time I set up persistent searches on company keywords for a couple of days and “listen” to the market - via RSS
• Develop an up-to-date, accurate picture of the state of the company’s:
  • Ecosystem - including public filings, blog posts, “memes”
  • Leadership profiles - including potential LinkedIN connections
  • Partner contacts, etc.
• Create pain points, provide possible scripts
• Deliver in an Excel spreadsheet with fields and notes carefully mapped to my client’s CRM system

It takes hours. Gathering market intelligence isn’t easy.

Buying Better Intelligence

Two weeks ago I received an email from Raksha Varma from InsideView who thought I might be interested in looking at their new product, SalesView…

From their web site:

“…it’s no longer just who you know that will make business deals happen but “what you know about who you know” tightly synched with “when and where you should know it”. You need to be able to combine the best enterprise-ready information sources with the best insights from social relationships and buyer behavior to identify the right opportunities at the right time and determine the right people to contact.”

When Raksha offered me the opportunity to chat with InsideView CMO Rand Schulman, I jumped at it.

Basically, InsideView’s SalesView automates what I’ve been doing for clients. Their model is built to leverage social media, score and rank results based on algorithms they’ve developed and common sense - for example, a ZoomInfo profile is not ranked as highly as a LinkedIN profile - and (I think) rightfully so.

I like their pricing - SalesView PRO is $79 a seat, and they offer a free version to whet the appetite. The cool thing about the content that SalesView scrapes? With the two paid versions, you can map fields of SalesView into SalesForce or other CRM solution, and content can be updated immediately so content is always contextually relevant (SFA “enrichment”).

I need to use it for awhile, but I’m predicting that SalesView is likely to make my Top 10 Marketing Tools list within months. I’m sold on the concept, having built it by hand for months…

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I was over on ChiefTech’s blog (thanks for the link, James!) checking on the latest reception for the Enterprise RSS Day of Action on April 24 (it’s been good) and he found an excellent article and illustration (below) on enterprise 2.0 from Fred Cavazza that I just had to post about.

Fred’s 2007 article is extremely well-researched and thorough - it’s a classic if you take the time to read it. For most people, it’s likely TMI, but a great reference piece for many of us. What I found most interesting was the illustration of enterprise 2.0 - replicated here (click on it and you can see it larger).

RSS is clearly an enabling technology for any “enterprise 2.0″ application - and we’re talking enterprise-capable RSS, not merely Google alerts.

So with this foundational understanding and knowledge, I’m about to jump into the “mashup” or “buy” options available for enterprise RSS applications… stay tuned.

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But that’s why NY Times’ David Pogue is a writer, and I’m a blogger… his post yesterday on Web 2.0 and why businesses should embrace Web 2.0 concepts is perfectly written and sound. Check it out.

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