Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I’ve been in technology sales and marketing for 23 years, and Shel Israel’s competitive analysis of Google vs. God is the funniest I’ve ever seen.

Shel, you’re 100% right, and if I were smarter about the God part, I’d try to come up with some additional comparisons.

As it is, I’ll just say Amen, brother!

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Why don’t CxO’s take advantage of the best productivity tool available today? Are they ignorant, or are we just not speaking their language?

Forrester Research has just released a report on Enterprise RSS, and has struck a chord that I’ve been humming a lot in my head lately - we’re drowning in data. Thanks to Richard McManus of Read/Write Web; we-who-don’t-have-subscriptions get a glimpse into the findings:

• Richard posted: “I think we all know about the issue of information overload - and the resulting value of good filters and smart aggregators. In some ways the problem is worse for enterprise employees - because as well as external news sources, they have potentially hundreds of internal RSS feeds to track via company blogs and wikis.”
• Forrester recommends enterprises adopt an Enterprise RSS solution like that from Attensa (a Portland, Oregon company and client of mine).
• Forrester: “Enterprise RSS turbo-charges the benefits of unmanaged RSS adoption with internal content syndication, filtering, and collaboration. It also provides increased security and reduces IT requirements.”

I think the problem with “this whole RSS thing” is that we don’t explain very well what it is or what it can do for a typical enterprise. They’re not ignorant, we just don’t ’splain things very well…

So here are my top three benefits of RSS for business executives to note:

1. The power of all being on the same page. I use Basecamp (a project management system) with several clients, and am automatically notified via RSS when anything is updated on any project. Notifications automatically go to Outlook - which then go to my Blackberry.
1. Every team member automatically knows the status of a project because we subscribe to changes/updates - no matter where we are in the world.
2. Any executive can get those same notifications and alerts - they’ll have access to key information “just in time” rather than waiting for team updates.
2. The right people have the right information at the right time. Let’s break this one down:
1. The right people - I have a client who’s the CEO of a company. His IT staff forgot to add him to one of the email groups in his organization - so he never got email notices sent to that particular group (which happened to be an all-company email list).
   This kind of thing happens in organizations every day. I can’t even imagine how much time IT folks spend keeping email groups up to date. With Enterprise RSS; Stephen would have the choice and control to subscribe to any feed that interested him.
2. The right information - Scott at Attensa tracks their marketplace using their platform. He posts information on an internal Wiki when he finds something substantive to note about a competitor, mergers in the market, what not.Anyone in the organization who needs market information (R&D / product management / finance) can opt into Scott’s marketplace news feed and have the information delivered to them without having to search for it on their own. Suddenly you’re leveraging the intelligence of others in your work.
3. The right time - information is delivered as it appears online. Imagine you’re a PR professional, needing to know when your product or service is mentioned anywhere online. Better than plain old Google alerts; Attensa lets you know instantly when anyone categorizes (tags) a blog post or mention with your keywords on del.icio.us or Technorati.
3. The business retains the knowledge when key employees leave. A business partner of mine says that every time an employee leaves their organization, it costs the company about $150,000 to recruit, hire and train a new employee.Imagine being able to retain and pass along the key observations, news and subscriptions (often the nuances of knowledge that are impossible to teach) of the person who’s left the company and passing it along to the new hire via their persistent searches, feed subscriptions and such. My bet is that training and ramp up time would be cut significantly through this efficient automatic knowledge transfer.

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I’m at Innotech today in Portland, OR, about to hear a panel on “Media 2.0″- Scott from JanRain, Ray from AboutUs.org, Johnny from Feedia, Kent from Anvil Media and Brian from Intel.

JanRain works on OpenID, which is like your drivers’ license online - identity verification.

Intel’s Developer Forum recently was held in Beijing and was blogged live - a first for them, and probably for many there.

I’m working with Anvil Media on Search Engine Marketing PR - (SEMPR) for Attensa.

AboutUs.org is a wiki with information on 4million web sites - they’re like wikipedia for the “long tail” of the internet - for those of us who are not famous.

Feedia implements social networking framework so people can handle ipTV, podcasting, etc.

Q. What are the implications of social media?

A. Ray notes an increase in transparency is mandatory - people are being pulled over the threshold and taking the communications platform. Companies are being pulled with them.

A. Brian says, I’m trying to take marketing out of the equation, and give subject matter experts (SME’s) the opportunity to talk directly to the consumer.

A. Johnny said with millions of people playing with people’s brands, how do you control the brand experience? You don’t.

A. Kent - as a marketer, people are looking to agencies to help them negotiate this new world. Clients need to rely on agencies and marketers to help strategically advise companies on how to deal with it.

Thank goodness, because that’s exactly what I’m doing…

Q. How do you justify time spent on blogs vs. doing your regular job?

A. If you’re using the tools correctly, you might save time from a communication perspective. And at JanRain, they have engineers blog together with customers - it adds relevance for the brand.

A. At Intel, they encourage engineers to blog - and they make it really easy to blog. So it becomes fun and engaging for them.

A. Ray said wikis are even better at helping engineers interact. And in a wiki environment, everyone has the opportunity to “refactor” the conversation - so anyone can clarify a question or an answer which allows the group to make the whole conversation more meaningful.

A. Tip the funnel, let these collaborative technologies help people talk about your products themselves.

A. Pointing people to a publicly owned, collaborative site has more power in terms of marketing - third-party endorsement.

Q. What’s the difference between a blog and a wiki?

A. A blog is a platform for a single, knowledgeable individual / group to stream information. A wiki is a collaborative environment. ICANN wiki will allow you to create a blog-like wiki using wiki technology.

The culture of a wiki can be hard. You have to build a group of contributors - one person has to build an area of content that’s quality information - then get volunteers to help do the editing. Ray’s group welcomes their new contributors to further engage them. And comment moderation is important, because spammers will kill you.

PBWIKI has a great technology to allow regular people to start wikis. They’re “hosted” services - which means you pay by the month - and they hide the “wiki syntax” that will allow regular people who are familiar with Word to edit on a wiki.

Q. Is there a book about the strategic elements of all this?

The Long Tail, Wikinomics, Blogging for Business, any Seth Godin book, Naked Conversations…

I’m writing a book on both the strategic communication initiatives and breaking it down to practical how-to tips… will have to pick up that guy’s card…

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One of my clients, SnapNames, is hiring a key employee after my own heart, a Director of Marketing Communications. I’d like to help them fill the role, and would love your help in getting the word out to the best marcom talent around Portland, OR.

The position requires someone who blends the art and science of marketing extremely well. In other words, we’re looking for someone who can not only deliver results, but who can accurately forecast and measure them.

The successful candidate will have a background and familiarity with online marketing – including online promotions, search engine marketing, delivering buzz and word of mouth.

If you have someone in mind who’d enjoy the excitement of taking a company to their next stage of growth, send them our way - Kristen McKinney is handling the recruiting.

Here’s some background:
SnapNames developed the original aftermarket for domain names – names that have come back on the market after being created by someone else. The company is the market leader in the sale of expiring and recently deleted domain names.

SnapNames’ flagship domain auction has been used by tens of thousands of customers around the world to secure domain names with inherent commercial value such as:

• Brand-ability – driving high resale value;
  i.e. super-generic short names, vanity names, etc. (vodka.com recently sold for more than $6M)
• Direct navigation – a growing phenomenon in search;
  i.e. “guessed� domains which are typed into the browser bar in lieu of search – also called ‘type-in’ traffic.
• Domains containing high pay-per-click keywords;
  i.e. realestate.com

An entire industry has sprung up around buying and selling domain names. SnapNames alone sold more than a quarter million previously created domain names in 2006.

SnapNames’ customers include:

• individual entrepreneurs (professional domain investors)
• big brand marketers
• business owners

It’s an exciting opportunity for the right person…

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