Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I had a burst of organizational energy yesterday, and went through two boxes of work stuff I’ve hoarded over the past few years. I recycled the majority of the paper, and (miraculously and fairly virtuously) filed a bunch of information away - including a new “blog it” folder. What a great start to the New Year!

I had saved a copy of a Forrester Trends report published in March of 2007 called “Interactive Marketing Channels to Watch In 2007″ which noted (- JJ: my summary of each point called out):

“Experimentation Still Makes Marketers Skittish”

• Email and search still dominate the mix. - JJ: 97% use email marketing , 91% search marketing…
• Online advertising takes second place. - JJ: 75% place online advertising with little behavioral targeting (38%)…
• Social media is the biggest up-and-comer. - JJ: RSS pilots grew from 10% in 2006 to 40% in early 2007; blog pilots grew from 13% in 2006 to 34% in early 2007…
• Mobile and game marketing still get no love. - JJ: 13% marketers tried mobile text messages, 11% created wireless application protocol (WAP) sites. 24% tried ‘advergames’, 10% in-game placements, and 7% experimented in virtual worlds like Second Life…
• Marketer budgets demonstrate marketer reluctance. - JJ: marketers relied on traditional budget dollars redirected from print, TV and direct mail to fund the emerging channels - email and search marketing budgets were kept intact…

Forrester’s recommendation in March were to:

“Adopt Advanced Targeting, RSS and Blogs Now”

• Start behavioral and contextual targeting immediately. - JJ: buy online ads from TACODA (behavioral ad network) or 24/7 Real Media or BlueLithium (generalist ad networks who integrate contextual / behavioral targeting into regular / geographical buys).
• Make your first strides into social media with RSS and blogs. - JJ: RSS is recommended as a ’simple first step for marketers… initial RSS feeds can consist of repurposed email content.’ Further, RSS content can be used as initial blog posts.

I hope Forrester will reproduce the research this year to see how far marketers have moved.

My predictions?

Mobile will be the top priority for B2C marketers. Blogs will be second for B2C, third for B2B. RSS deployment will be the top priority for B2B marketers, third for B2C.

Why?

Mobile: Interactive marketers for B2C companies would have to be asleep at the switch not to realize what a force smartphones have become. And testing is relatively inexpensive and immediate. Over the holiday break I found a great new resource for mobile marketing tips and hints, Kim Dushinsky’s Mobile Marketing Profits.

RSS: B2B marketers should be clamoring for this additional channel to be added to their marketing suite. Engage your IT resources to download a virtual RSS server (a 1-5 user server license is free from Attensa) and test it. You’ll gain competitive insights, productivity, and a new channel of distribution (Forrester’s point) that’s better than a “double 0pt-in” engagement in email marketing.

Blogs: This one continues to amaze me in terms of business’ adoption rates being so dismal. In four years of blogging for business, I’ve found the blogosphere to be a rich, engaging, self-cleansing and increasingly civilized place to exchange opinions and information with customers, prospects, vendors and competitors. The technology is cheap, the advantages are many, and the time you spend blogging can be the most personally fulfilling time you spend as a marketer.

I’ll report back in a few months to see whether my crystal ball is any better than others’ when it comes to predicting marketers’ behaviors.

If not, hello TACODA. I could really use some behavioral targeting help.

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Here’s a glimpse inside how British Telecom has adopted enterprise 2.0 technologies like blogging, wikis, enterprise RSS and podcasts to power their intranet and engage their knowledge workers. Fascinating case study, and well worth scrolling through the slides. Thanks for sharing, Richard Dennison.

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I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about seamless connectivity lately - and so have other, way more influential people in the IT space, thank goodness. From a CIO’s perspective, I should think that seamless connectivity for their users should be key. Knowledgeworkers shouldn’t have to suffer from partial solutions or difficult integrations from their vendors or IT department.

Apparently, there’s a conversation bubbling up about Microsoft’s Feedsync announcement earlier this month. It astounded Mike Gotta, and I’m glad. Mike’s an analyst with the Burton Group, and I believe he has influence as well as obvious insight - at least, I hope so. In his Dec. 6 post, Mike said:

“Microsoft has not articulated any coherent vision on feeds in general so my initial reaction is that this announcement strikes me as somewhat of a “one off”.”

James Dellow, another smart, enthusiastic enterprise 2.0 blogger I follow over at ChiefTech riffed:

“is it also a failure in the enterprise IT camp itself for failing to recognise why this important piece of messaging and computing architecture is so important? i.e. if they don’t ask for, they won’t build it”

I couldn’t agree more with both fellows. I only hope they have more pull with the CIOs in the world. I sometimes get frustrated that I approach the IT equation from a relative position of powerlessness. I’m a user. A marketer who relies on IT for my information. I know the business benefits of an interlinked, powerful IT organization. And I know the power of a secure, robust, enterprise RSS system - because of my relationship with Attensa, not Microsoft. Go figure.

I just hope the ears and eyes of CIOs are open and listening to James and Mike. I am a firm believer that customer requests are what drive business decisions.

It must be hard to be customers of Microsoft sometimes.

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I love the end of a year/beginning of a New Year. It always gives me the opportunity to look back over the past 360+ days and note what I’ve loved, and what I want to do differently in my life. I’m starting to think about that now - and here’s what I’ve loved from a work perspective. (Don’t worry, you’re not missing out on much, those who really know me understand I put most of my energy these days into work.)

1. Yoga. As a business tool, a healthy body is essential. As a bonus, somehow twisting, stretching and standing on your head a few times a week really helps your thinking. I discovered yoga as I watched my sweetie blossom by practicing, and now I’m hooked. It has truly given me more energy, more creativity and more perspective.
2. Apple. With my Mac and iPhone, I have complete connectivity and control over my schedule where ever I am during a day. Critical for a consultant, I had no idea how hard I had to work at my Blackberry to get it to work halfway (fine for email, poor at everything else). I was an Apple Business Development Manager in the late 80’s; and was sucked back into the Wintel platform once I got into the Internet startup/telecom world. The iPhone hoopla was lost on me when it came out. It took a stint at a client, Chockstone, who used Macs prolifically around the office, to get me back to the Mac. And the commercials are hilarious.
3. USB Drives. In conjunction with my iPhone, I’m able to be a self-contained unit wherever I go as long as I have my files on my thumb drive. And for someone who has schlepped her laptop around the country, there’s nothing that feels more free than tucking a drive into my purse and walking, hands-free, to the train into a client.
4. RSS. I write about RSS a ton, and have a client, Attensa, who’s developed the most secure enterprise RSS platform available. But as a small consultancy, I’ve found RSS to be an integral tool to keeping up with client coverage, watching trends, and reacting quickly to competitive announcements, etc. News and information comes to me. I’m pretty lazy - so having something with a much greater reach and awareness watch for me is a kick.
5. iGoogle. Having an iGoogle account this year saved my bacon many times. My workaround for getting to my calendar anytime, anywhere (except from my Blackberry - where it was one-way communication only) was Google calendar. It was brilliant - sending alerts and reminders to me (on my Blackberry) of meetings and locations. I was able to log on from any client or Starbucks, and get a full view of my day/week/month. And the Docs and Spreadsheets were fantastic for capturing client meeting notes and sharing information collaboratively with teams of people. I used them regularly for one client, OpenMake, who has people all over the country who need to collaborate and capture information.
6. Smartbrief. Okay, so here’s a bonus - since I wonder how many people will really give me credit for the Yoga tool - I love Smartbriefs. They’re daily compilations of news about a whole bunch of subjects. I subscribe to the IAB Smartbrief to keep up with news about online marketing trends and such. When I worked for Chockstone, they served the restaurant industry - so I found a NRA Smartbrief that served up information about restaurant trends. The quality of the content is excellent, and Smartbriefs are free.

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By 2009, the Radicati Group has predicted that the average knowledgeworker will spend 41% of her time managing email. That’s astounding, but not out of the question in my opinion. One of the side effects of all the social media and “web 2.0″ collaboration tools available to us is a huge increase in email.

In an article a couple weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal, Rebecca Buckman said:

“Email overload is now considered a much bigger workplace problem than traditional email spam. Inboxes are bulging today partly because of what some are calling “colleague spam” — that is, too many people are indiscriminately hitting the “reply to all” button or copying too many people on trivial messages, like inviting 100 colleagues to partake of brownies in the kitchen. A good chunk of today’s emails are also coming from brand new sources, like social- and business-networking sites like Facebook Inc. and LinkedIn Corp., or text messages forwarded from cellphones.”

I am both guilty of spreading the problem to colleagues (I’m a Facebook and LinkedIn user) and often invite them to connect with me. I’m not so worried about that “good chunk” of email sources - since (at least for me) they have high business value.

My issue is with email from within organizations whereby the cc: list wraps names like garlands on a tree. At that point, people - blog it - your subscribers can choose to:

• react by commenting on your post publicly (within your firewall)
• engage in a 1:1 dialogue with you about your post (in email - an appropriate use)
• start a new threaded discussion that could benefit the entire organization

I’m talking not only about banana bread in the lunchroom; I’m talking planning for an upcoming customer visit, product launch, brand discussion, patch release, product enhancement, research project.

As I’ve noted many times before, email is no longer the venue for such collaborations when we have tools like Clearspace, Wordpress, and Attensa’s RSS platform.

Employees can then opt-into discussions they care about, and ignore those they don’t - at their own time, on their own terms, and under their own controls.

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