Run-time Marketing

Canadian Content Regulations on the Web? Google Says No

2010-03-31T08:38:00.000-07:00

In the 1970s, Canada's cultural industry received a major boost from the Trudeau government's Canadian Content legislation (Can-Con, or Cancon). On March 30, 2010, The Globe and Mail published a report on the Commons Heritage Committee's efforts to come to terms with Can-Con and New Media.

The Heritage Committee invited Jacob Glick, Canada Policy Counsel for Google Inc., to talk to them about new media issues. Glick told the MPs that Can-Con rules should not apply to the Internet:

For decades, Canadian content rules have controlled what programs air on television during prime time and what songs are heard on the radio. Those rules no longer apply to Canadians who increasingly go the web for music and video.

Google’s point man for Canadian policy, Jacob Glick, told MPs that while those measures are needed, Ottawa should not attempt to “roll back the clock” by regulating Canadian content online.

“More Canadian content can be seen, created and enjoyed in ways never before possible,” said Mr. Glick, Canada Policy Counsel for Google Inc.,. He said Canadians can already watch hours upon hours of Canadian content on YouTube (which is owned by Google) without ever watching the same thing twice.

I'm torn by this advice.

On the one hand, I understand that search algorithms determine relevance to searchers' requests using multiple criteria, including geography, so Canadian searchers are somewhat more likely to receive Canadian webpages in search results.

On the other hand, I'm skeptical of any business that claims regulation would be counter-productive in its domain. Many Wall Street firms are trying, with limited success, to make that same claim with regard to their creative financial solutions.

I'm also skeptical because it seems Google's entire business plan can be encapsulated in Benjamin Jowett's words: "Never retreat. Never explain. Just get it done and let them howl."

The case of Google Buzz is illustrative. Instead of consulting with Canada's Office of the Privacy Commissioner, or any other privacy advocates, before launching Google Buzz, Google launched first, then proposed to address privacy concerns afterward.

I guess it's easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission.

Except Google's not begging. Google is a large corporation with political leverage and a business agenda.

Canadian MPs will have to use a case-by-case approach to determine how best to accommodate the anarchy of the Wild-West Internet within the more Canadian ideal of peace, order and good government. The answer may not be regulation, but in any case the answer will never be to act according to ideological purity.

With all this in mind, perhaps we should re-examine Google's recent conflict with the government of China concerning censorship. After all, isn't Can-Con itself a kind of censorship?

We may have different emotional reactions to these stories, but emotions should not blind us to their common denominator: the conflict between a corporate agenda and a nation's sovereignty - a war with many fronts.

Failure of Imagination

2010-03-16T07:09:00.000-07:00

University of Waterloo President David Johnston on the Canadian government's "digital strategy":

Despite the lip service on the digital economy, Johnston said, the government doesn't appear to understand how important broadband and other information communications technology (ICT), such as mobile phones, are to economic development.

…

"There's a lack of understanding that ICT is a transforming set of technologies, as important as the printing press was 500 years ago. Because Western Europe understood the transforming qualities of the printing press, it took off. Chinese society, Islamic society and Indian society did not," he said."

We are at least in that kind of measurable comparison today. Those societies that have a better understanding of the digital economy will prosper very quickly and those that don't will not. We've had a failure of imagination there."

How serious is this "failure of imagination" with regard to a "transforming set of technologies"? Very serious.

We know that Canada is lagging partially due to high cellphone rates and slow smartphone adoption rates.

We also know that our educational system is not preparing the next generation of creative/information workers.

Johnston said the country's university system must shoulder part of the blame for the lag in Canada's technological mindset. The schools haven't done enough to train students to work smarter, he said, which means that few Canadian companies succeed based on innovation. Of Canada's biggest companies, most are banks, while only BlackBerry maker Research In Motion — also based in Waterloo — has succeeded internationally, mainly because it has focused on innovation.

Innovation is the key, and the time is now.

Social Media and Traditional Marketing, Part 2

2010-03-16T05:45:00.000-07:00

I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create. (William Blake, Jerusalem)

As I said in my earlier post, I had a conversation with a marketing educator concerning the role of social media in marketing. I told the educator that I believed social media, as part of an integrated marketing communications strategy, have an important role to play, mostly because they serve to keep marketers honest.

In the educator's reply, he said he agreed with my comment that social media needed to be "part of a total media plan."

The only problem is, that's not what I said.

What's the difference between an "integrated marketing communications strategy" and a "total media plan"?

Night and day. It's frustrating to realize at the end of a conversation that you've been speaking a different language.

"Media planning" is advertising terminology. "Integrated marketing communications" is not. Advertising may be part of a larger marketing communications strategy, but an advertising media plan is only a small part of that strategy.

Whenever there is a paradigm shift in any discipline, a new terminology arises, because, as William Blake said, "I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's." The resulting cognitive dissonance can be both a barrier and a boon.

Social Media and Traditional Marketing, Part 1

2010-03-16T05:42:00.000-07:00

I was recently asked, by a marketing educator, "how a marketer reaches and manages the markets involved with the Twitters and Face Books of the world."

Reaching is one thing, managing quite another. The question itself reveals a much larger question: how does traditional marketing adapt to the new reality of social media?

The first thing the traditional marketer needs to do is give up the idea of control. We can't control social media or the use to which they are put. We can manage our social media efforts, but we can't manage the media themselves.

We have to be very careful about overt commercial use of social media (see the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, 4.2).

Social media have changed marketing radically, but the change is primarily to remove the marketer from direct manipulation of the marketing message and the consumer. Social media can be a great commercial benefit, but you need to let your prospects and customers do the talking.

Marketers have to be aware of the power of social media conversations. They need to monitor these conversations and respond to them in their own publications -- their websites and blogs. They can use other social media to link to their websites and blogs, but they should be careful about engaging directly using social networks.

The one constant in Internet and social media marketing is information. People, regardless of culture, use the Internet and social media to find information that is of value to them. The marketer reaches prospects and customer by providing that information -- by making it easily accessible.

The other aspect of social media that is important, and which marketers have to been keenly aware of, is the power of narrative. They do not just contain information: they structure it within a narrative.

The well documented fact is that people usually believe anecdotal evidence over hard, even overwhelming, empirical evidence. It's not enough that marketers present the facts (though they must definitely do that in the age of social media). They must present the facts in a convincing narrative. Information without narrative is merely data, and data convinces no one. Social media participants can pick up a narrative and broadcast it, or they can formulate their own narrative and broadcast it. Which would you prefer they do?

The only way to manage the reputations of companies, products and services (and by extension to increase sales of those products and services, and improve profitable revenue and the value of the company) is to combine authenticity, information and narrative to present a compelling case.

I told the educator that I believed social media, as part of an integrated marketing communications strategy, have an important role to play, mostly because they serve to keep marketers honest.

The Dark Side of Social Media

2010-03-15T07:20:00.000-07:00

Hamilton Spectator, March 15, 2010:

Teen dead in triple shooting

Two partygoers complained about music at student house, then pulled handguns; two others wounded
...

The party had been advertised on Facebook and other social media. Eyewitnesses said the suspects were acting strange and combative that night.

Seldom do we see a more stark example of how a tool designed to augment our existence may be used to harm us. It seems the two suspects showed up with intentions to celebrate March break in their own manner. This ambiguity is in the nature of all tools. The tool is ethically neutral, but its uses are not. A hammer can be used to build a house, but it can also be used as a weapon.

What this story illustrates is how little we can do to control or manage the ways in which social media are used. We release information into the wild and it mutates like a virus.

As marketers, we have to understand that a social medium is not just another marketing or advertising medium. We can't control the conversation. We can't manage the medium. And we can't determine the uses to which our information is put.

How Not to Preach to the Choir

2010-02-14T09:07:00.000-08:00

I recently published a post on cognitive conservatism and the climate change debate over at one of our other blogs. It got me thinking about the topic of cognitive dissonance in general.

Whereas cognitive conservatism is "People's tendency to retain their beliefs, intellectual as well as religious, in the face of what strike other people as conclusively refuting arguments or clearly disconfirming evidence" (Barbara Herrnstein Smith), cognitive dissonance describes the feeling of discomfort we feel during that confrontation between belief and evidence.

I frequently run in to both among marketing professionals. In general, people prefer having their personal prejudices confirmed over authentic analysis.

Now, cognitive dissonance can be a valuable teaching tool, because when a student overcomes the initial belief set by accepting the incontrovertible evidence, the lesson is generally well learned and has a significant impact.

However, cognitive dissonance only has this beneficial effect on the open-minded. Cognitive conservatism, like Douglas Adams' peril-sensitive sunglasses, blocks rational consideration of empirical evidence. Climate change deniers, for example, may counter hard scientific data with an anecdote about the weather. Phew! Cognitive dissonance averted!

Why is it that we tend to believe anecdotal evidence, often in the face of overhelming scientific evidence to the contrary? Michael Shermer, Scientific American:

"The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition -- thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not."

As James Lovelock says, our brains are belief machines. We form beliefs based on anecdotes quite readily, and those beliefs often remain unshaken despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. That is the power of narrative. It's also the power of conspiracy theory, and also how charismatic leaders have led us astray throughout history.

The reason that narrative has such power is that we make connections instinctively as a product of millennia of experience in the natural world. We create "false positives" (the belief that A and B are connected) from anecdotal evidence.

This mental habit has held us in good stead, because false positives, at least at the personal level, are usually harmless. If you hear a sound (A) outside your cave, and you associate that sound with (B) a sabre-toothed tiger, then this association acts to preserve your life, even if not true on each occasion you hear the sound. A false negative, believing that sound (A) is not a sabre-toothed tiger when it actually is, will likely result in your departure from the gene pool.

Scientific method, on the other hand, has been around for only a few hundreds of years. But if we're going to treat sales and marketing as sciences (which is what lean marketing proposes), we their practitioners must draw on more than just anecdotal evidence. We need to draw on human experience, tell a story, have a conversation with our customers, but we also need to use scientific method to measure our efforts and improve them continuously.

One of the best pieces of advice I've ever received in my life came from an old Steelworkers Union labour negotiator. He said to me: "Never believe your own bullshit."

Or in the words of the ancient proverb: "Trust in Allah, but tie your camels."

The point is that we need narrative to overcome both cognitive dissonance and cognitive conservatism, but we have to back it up with science, and more particularly, with scientific method.

Mr. CEO: Tear Down These Silos

2010-02-13T10:09:00.000-08:00

I frequently meet with executives who think their organizations epitomize lean thinking. However, upon closer examination, it becomes apparent that the implementation of lean thinking applies only to operational functions within the organization. Design is lean. Manufacturing is lean. But what of all the other corporate functions?

Business as usual

A company that adopts lean principles in its design and manufacturing will not be a truly lean organization until it adopts lean principles across all corporate functions, including sales and marketing. In a lean organization, every executive, manager and employee is a stakeholder. Each represents the company. All should speak as one when it comes to describing the company, its mission, and its competitive advantage.

When it's business as usual, corporate functions are silos with limited intercommunication, speaking different languages.

The time is past when companies can afford adversarial relations between marketing and engineering, or between marketing and sales. In a lean organization, we are all marketers and salespeople, and insofar as we use real data and scientific method to achieve predictable results, we are all engineers. We are all engineering the success of our organization.

It may be the role of marketing to formulate the company's message, but the content needed to find, win and keep customers must come from those who design, build, sell, implement and maintain the company's products and services. They need a common language.

Lean is the common language. Any stakeholder from any department can ask the basic lean question of any other stakeholder: how does a proposed course of action take us closer to realizing our strategic objectives? If that course of action was developed using lean thinking, the stakeholder will have an answer.

A Conversation with Your Customers

2010-02-09T07:43:00.000-08:00

With the advent of the Internet and various social media, marketing has become a conversation with your customers. Back in 2000, The Cluetrain Manifesto made it clear that marketers would not succeed in the Internet future without major retooling.

What does this mean? Well, put yourself in the place of your customers: If you want to talk to a vendor about buying products or services, do you call their marketing department?
No, because you don't want to hear how the product slices and dices and does everything but walk your dog.

Do you want to talk to a salesperson? Maybe, but only if you already have the information you need to make an informed buying decision and simply want to negotiate.

So, if you don't yet have enough information to make up your mind, who do you want to talk to? If you're a technical person looking for a technical product or solution, you probably want to talk to one of the vendor's technical people. You want a peer-to-peer conversation with someone who understands their technology and your needs.

If an informed customer is your best friend, then the curiosity of your customers is your best sales tool. Help them help you. Make the information they need accessible, authoritative, concise and complete.

"All Mouth and No Trousers"

2010-02-08T07:56:00.000-08:00

I just ran across this phrase in BNET's coverage of the 2010 Super Bowl ads. It's a British expression that approximates the more common (in North America) "all talk and no action," and BNET used it to describe one of the ads that aired, and the failure of public reaction to live up to the ad's pre-game hype. In other words, the ad was a bust.

How did they figure that out so quickly? Enter Internet technology and social media. Brand Bowl 2010 was created to measure viewer reaction via the "Twittersphere."

Before you get too excited about a new age of accountability in old media advertising, consider this stat from BNET: "while the dollar cost of an ad on the Super Bowl has increased more than 6,900 percent, the effective per-viewer cost has tripled since 1984."

So, in 1984, when 85.5 million people watched the Chicago Bears beat the New England Patriots, a 30-second ad cost $525,000, or roughly 1 cent per set of eyeballs. This year, as approximately 90 million viewers (the "Who Dat" nation) watched the Saints trounce the Colts, a 30-second ad cost about $3 million, or roughly 3 cents per viewer. However, to really make an effective impression, the big brands had to run multiple spots. Doritos, for example, ran at least three different spots.

For the rest of us, who do not have a $9 million advertising budget on any given Sunday, the medium is definitely all mouth and no trousers.

And now for my favorite ad:

The reading glasses hanging from his t-shirt -- great touch.

(Full disclosure: I am a life-long Packers fan, and remain a Brett Favre fan.)

Ascent - Opportunity Meets Planning, Dedication and Determination

2010-02-05T02:14:00.000-08:00

A year ago, my nephew climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, with the assistance of professional guides, and after months of conditioning work with a personal trainer. His stories upon his return were fascinating, but what impressed me most was the planning, dedication and determination with which he pursued his dream.

Dreams are just dreams unless you apply all of your physical, mental and financial resources to achieve them. An inspirational message for dire economic times.

Happy Groundhog Day - Business as Usual?

2010-02-02T11:25:00.000-08:00

Ever since Harold Ramis and Bill Murray got together in 1993 to make Groundhog Day, the day has taken on added cultural significance. This day has always marked the dead of winter, and the hope of spring, but it's also now a reminder of how we can get stuck in a rut, repeating the same old rituals day in and day out, business as usual.

And of course, there's the definition of insanity: repeating the same actions over and over again and expecting a different result.

Well, business as usual isn't good enough any more -- not in this economic climate. If you don't pursue new business aggressively and efficiently, you too can experience Groundhog Day every day, just like Bill Murray did.

Lean marketing requires you to examine the processes by which you aim to achieve your sales & marketing objectives. When you analyze processes, you can make continuous improvements, and achieve more sales opportunities at a lower cost, and thus more profitable revenue, improving both your top and your bottom line.

Website Evolution and Profitable Revenue

2010-01-30T07:16:00.000-08:00

A rather long and complex post to make a simple point, I'm afraid, but process is everything.

I've been reading Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth, which is a powerful presentation of the evidence for evolution, and I've been impressed by his skillful use of analogy in making his case. Analogies are like cars: they all eventually break down (as this one is about to do). Analogies are useful as aids to understanding (as cars are not).

In fact, analogies are not only useful: they are necessary, because our understanding of the world we inhabit is largely figurative. Have you ever wondered why so many things taste like chicken? It's because we cannot express what the taste of something is (except as a chemical reaction, which would be meaningless to the vast majority); instead we have to understand our taste experience by comparison. We don't ask what the taste of a strawberry is. We ask what a strawberry tastes like.

But I digress.

Dawkins externalizes his search for appropriate analogies for evolution. He lets us in on his thought processes and his reservations, which is a good thing, since the audience he is really trying to reach (most likely in vain, I'm afraid) are linguistic literalists, the people who believe in the literal truth of the mythic, and as a result, that the age of the Earth is somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years.

Once more I digress.

One of the analogies that Dawkins tosses aside as inadequate and misleading is the comparison of DNA with a blueprint. When you build a house from a blueprint, you know where the roof trusses are going to go before you lay the foundation. This is top-down design. We can think of DNA as a set of instructions, but in order for DNA to be a top-down blueprint for the born/hatched/germinated instance of life, it would have to contain an exponentially greater number of instructions.

A more fitting analogy for the way that embryologic life develops is the recipe. If you look at a building carefully, you can reverse engineer it and come up with a blueprint. You can't do the same thing with a cake. A recipe does not describe a finished result. It is a set of instructions that sets a process in motion toward a not-completely-predictable result.

But, to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie, that's not what I came here to talk about. I came here to talk about websites, and my point is really quite simple.

Your website should be a living, breathing entity. It is never done developing, so you can't start with a "final" state in mind. Instead, you need to start with a recipe, with a set of ingredients that interact to achieve objectives. You're not building a cathedral, and visitors don't come to your website to worship. Your website is not a one-time investment or a cost of doing business. It is an ongoing budget line and a profit centre. For most businesses, it is the key to more profitable revenue, because it drives down the cost of opportunities.

Think of your website as an ongoing dinner party with your customers, during which you engage in mutually beneficial, sparkling conversation. The courses change, but their purpose remains as a vehicle for that conversation.

When you are developing your website, you primary considerations should be your objectives, a recipe for success, and the ingredients you need to begin the process.

Social Media Breaks Replacing Cigarette Breaks

2009-11-19T13:56:00.000-08:00

Two trends that go together like hand and glove: the rise of smartphones, and the rise of social media. So, if you suspect the person in the next cubicle has started smoking again, think again. There is a growing probability that he or she is sneaking off for a social media break.

Over at Harvard Business School, David Armano has published his Six Social Media Trends for 2010, and the social media break is one of them.

Define Social Media

2009-11-18T05:56:00.000-08:00

Business.com's 2009 Business Social Media Benchmark Study shows that social media adoption for B2B marketing and PR purposes is growing, but I think the usefulness of the study is marred by its overly expansive (though unstated) definition of social media.

Is a podcast a social medium? When I think of people plugged into their iPods and notebooks on commuter trains, my first impulse is to define podcasts as antisocial media, but this of course begs the question:

What are social media?

The most basic definition is that social media is many-to-many as opposed to one-to-many communications. For me this rules out podcasts, because they are a one-way communication, rather than a conversation.

Another defining aspect of social media is that they are peer-to-peer. For me this rules out webinars, because webinars almost always involve a supposed expert lecturing to an audience wishing to learn from that expert's expertise.

Blogs can be considered social media, but they have to be considered on a case-by-case basis, because their status as social media depends on their operating principles. For example, a blog is not much of a conversation if the comments are turned off or heavily censored by moderation.

As always, I welcome your thoughts.

Social Media Marketing and Your Online Marketing Budget

2009-11-17T07:55:00.000-08:00

Bob DeStefano over at SVM E-Business Solutions offers a great checklist that you should go through before deciding to jump into social media marketing. He says you should be able to say yes to all of these statements before you think about using social media to market your products and services:

My Website is my most powerful marketing tool.
My Website generates all of the leads I need to support my business.
My company is on the first page of Google for every popular phrase my customers use.
Email marketing helps my company nurture new customers and generate repeat business
I know that I am generating a strong return on investment for every dollar I spend on marketing.

This checklist covers most everything you should be thinking about when it comes to online marketing. Where I differ with Bob is in timing: There is no reason that you should not work on your website and your social media marketing in parallel, provided your strategic objectives are clear and inform both efforts.

One objection to this line of thought might be budgetary: you want to establish ROI on your website effort before committing more of your marketing budget to extend your online effort. Such an objection indicates a reasonable and cautious attitude, but you need to weigh your caution against the exponential potential of integrating your website, email marketing and social media marketing.

Marketing Is Hard!

2009-11-10T10:41:00.000-08:00

But it doesn't have to be.

As an outsource marketer, my job is to market marketing to marketers. You'd think this would be easy, since we should ostensibly speak the same language. But it's not easy, because I'm trying to sell a new marketing paradigm to people who think traditionally about marketing. Because it's a new way of thinking about marketing, it inevitably requires a new way of talking about marketing.

It's lonely out on the leading edge, but I'm used to it.

In the early 90s, I started a career in technical writing. In the late 90s, I branched out into Internet marketing. What do these two things have in common? Well, for one thing, at the time I started in both of these activities, neither was yet regarded as a discipline in its own right. That is, when I became a technical writer, you couldn't yet go to school to become a technical writer. And when I became an Internet marketer, you could not yet go to school to become an Internet marketer.

All of this has changed, in part because we have entered what has become know as the Information Age. The University of San Francisco, among others is now offering online (of course!) certificates in Internet Marketing. And technical writing degree and certificate programs have been around for quite a while now.

The point is that our educational system is largely reactive: disciplines within academic institutions frequently emerge as a result of practices in the so-called "real world." Marketers in this real world cannot rely solely on history to formulate marketing strategy. They must look laterally to see what the competition is doing, and they must look forward to understand what is possible and to seize the advantage. That is the essence of lean marketing.

By the way, another thing both of these careers have in common is that they are information-based. Internet marketing is different from traditional marketing in that its goal is to sell using information rather than hype. As an Internet marketer, my objective is to target the most highly qualified prospects and help them make an informed buying decision.

Organic SEO or Pay Per Click (PPC)?

2009-11-10T10:38:00.000-08:00

Recently, we had a customer inquire about a Google AdWords campaign.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is not in and of itself a bad decision. We have used Google AdWords as an effective means of delivering traffic to customer websites. But we need to make a key distinction:

PPC is interruption advertising.
Organic SEO is relationship marketing.

As advertising goes, PPC can be more cost-effective than more traditional forms of advertising, but it is better suited to B2C marketing than B2B, which is, of course, why we generally prefer organic SEO for our customers.

Issues that need to be considered:

Keyword Selection
Who chooses the keywords to be used? Here's where the Discovery process comes in. Keyword selection requires an understanding of both the vendor and the customer. Vendors tend to think in terms of features; customers tend to think in terms of benefits. In other words, vendors are thinking about a product, and customers are thinking about a problem. We need to take the vendor's competitive advantages (vendor values) and the customer's needs (customer values) and map them to each other so that the customer sees the vendor's product as a solution to his/her problem. Only then can we decide on which keywords to target. Integration is the key: your keyword strategy is an extension of your strategic business, marketing and sales objectives.

Landing Pages
When a searcher clicks on an ad, he/she is taken to a page on your website, which is known as the landing page, whether its your home page, a product page, or a page written specifically for the ad. A landing page for a paid ad needs to be relevant to that ad. That is, it has to deliver on the ad's promise. Further, if it is to be effective at converting clicks to sales, it must articulate an effective sales argument and present an irresistable call to action. Linking ads to existing pages on your site is often ineffective, because those pages were not written with the ad in mind, and may even be at cross purposes. Searchers are looking for the information they need to make an informed buying decision.

Google AdWords Management
Managing PPC campaigns can be labour-intensive. If you are contracting with a vendor for PPC campaign development and management, you should ensure your contract is clear with regard to deliverables and timing of deliverables. Deliverables should include (but not be limited to):

Bid management (daily to weekly): You need to keep your ads very close to the top of the listings for them to be effective (see User Behaviour below), so you need to manage your bids closely. How often will the PPC vendor review results and adjust bids?
Ad writing and variant testing: Frequent testing of the effectiveness of ads is necessary for peak performance and ROI.
Filtering: It's important that your ad reaches a large audience, but it should be a targeted audience. For example, if you're selling spring hedge plants, you don't want people searching for hedge funds to see your ad. You have to narrow the focus.
Reporting: How often will the PPC vendor report results to you? Will the reports include analysis and recommendations?

Organic SEO
PPC is often a good starting point for organic SEO. In fact, I often use AdWords to do keyword research. You can use AdWord results to refine your organic efforts. However, PPC should always be used in concert with organic SEO, because PPC on its own only reaches a certain percentage of searchers. See User Behaviour below.

User Behaviour
While PPC does deliver traffic, a large percentage of searchers ignore all put the top paid results. In the example below, a large percentage of users would read the "Define Widgets" (though they would not necessarily click on it), but be completely blind to the paid ads in the right column. This is partly an issue of real estate, partly about trust, and partly about limitations to the length of ad copy allowed by Google AdWords. On the other hand, searchers will regularly scan through up to 2 pages of organic results for a page that meets their needs. Click here for more information on user behavior.

Lean Marketing = Business Process Re-engineering

2009-11-10T10:29:00.000-08:00

Marketing is a lot like the weather. We complain about it, but we never seem to do anything to change it. (Climate is another story.) CEOs frequently complain that they can't see the ROI from their marketing budget, but they don't seem willing or able to do anything about it.

It's strange too, because some of these CEOs are the same visionaries who have overseen the implementation of lean manufacturing and lean design principles to eliminate waste and create competitive advantage for their companies.

But sales and marketing are business processes like any others, so if your sales and marketing programs are not achieving their objectives, why not consider re-engineering those processes, just as you would a manufacturing or design process?

Are sales and marketing art or science? In truth, they are a bit of both. But to the extent that they are measurable, they are science, even if your methodology is trial and error. After all, mistakes should be learning experiences, but if you don't understand the dollars-and-cents aspect of your mistakes, you will never learn from them.

You're a high-tech manufacturer boasting the latest and greatest manufacturing technologies and techniques. You use technology to create competitive advantage in your manufacturing products and processes. So why are your sales and marketing people using the 21st Century equivalent of goose quills, ink wells and parchment to market and sell your products?

Business process re-engineering is not about reducing head count. It's about turning those heads into centres of profit. It's about reaching goals more efficiently.

Where is the greatest waste in marketing processes? To identify waste, you first have to define processes. A project plan for a marketing project may contain a hundred tasks divided into the following stages:

Scheduling
Discovery
Project Planning
Research
Design
Implementation
Support -- Review, Revise, Repeat

For each stage in a project, what are the continuous improvement questions we are asking?

Even though marketers are professional communicators, communication is generally where the greatest waste occurs in any marketing project. Bad communication is usually responsible for work flow breakdowns. Nowhere is this more apparent than in approvals.

Approvals are binary milestones: they are the bottlenecks in marketing processes, because they are Go/No Go moments in the project lifecycle. What can be done to smooth the path for approvals?

Lots:

Communicate the importance of approvals to the process clearly. Discovery and Approvals are the most critical nodes in the project lifecycle, and the most frequent source of delays and outright project failure. (This is something good to say -- say it well and say it often.)
Communicate review requirements and objectives clearly. (Why am I reading this document? What is expected of me?)
Agree on a timeframe, and communicate clearly the impact of tardiness on the project plan. (If you don't review this document this week, we will be at least a week late in delivering your website.

In my experience, some marketing deliverables can require up to 3 iterations before approval is achieved. If more than 3 iterations are required, then there are issues besides the deliverable itself that need to be resolved. Are the consultant and client on the same page? Is the customer making decisions? Is the customer postponing decisions? All of these scenarios lead to waste.

Internet Marketing Is Lean Marketing

2009-11-10T08:57:00.000-08:00

Online/Internet marketing is the quintessential lean marketing activity, because it lets you:

React to events and publish with agility
Target audiences with high precision
Provide an interactive means to let prospects educate themselves and make informed buying decisions
Make doing business with your company easy
See results in real time
Use real-time statistics to reduce waste and improve your sales & marketing performance continuously

Using your website as the hub of all your marketing activities lets you manage costs effectively, build market awareness, and grow sales revenues and profitability. And yet, many companies are slow to seize the opportunity presented by Internet marketing. Why do you suppose that is?

The Internet has been likened to a large library with no windows where all the books are on the floor and the lights are out. Your website can only be effective if qualified prospects can find it.

A simple Google search on the term "aerospace kits" reveals that there are 834,000 webpages competing for eyeballs on this term. Does your website have what it takes to cut through the noise and be heard? Do your target markets see your competitive advantage? Will your website deliver not just traffic, but sales?

These are the tasks that search marketers face.

B2B Marketing is BIG Business

2009-11-10T08:26:00.000-08:00

Business-to Business (B2B) marketing is most definitely BIG business any way you slice it. A study by the Business Marketing Association (BMA) revealed that B2B marketers in the US spent about $85 billion dollars in 2003.
There are some key differences between B2C and B2B marketing.

B2C:

Short sales cycle
Small purchases
One/few decision makers
Seeking product satisfaction

B2B:

Long sales cycle
Large purchases
Many decision makers
Seeking ROI

B2B Marketing Activities
The BMA study spending break out, in billions of dollars:

Trade Shows/Events -- $17.3
Internet/Electronic Media -- $12.5
Promotion/Market Support -- $10.9
Magazine Advertising -- $10.8
Publicity/Public Relations -- $10.5
Direct Mail -- $9.4
Dealer/Distributor Materials -- $5.2
Market Research -- $3.8
Telemarketing -- $2.4
Directories -- $1.4
Other -- $5.1

All of these B2B marketing activities are valuable marketing tools, but the one that has climbed close to the top of the list over the last few years is Internet/Electronic Media. In the US, Internet-based B2B marketing investment continues to grow relative more traditional B2B marketing methods.

I haven't found reliable statistics for Canada, but anecdotal evidence indicates that Canadian companies are far behind the curve on Internet marketing.

Different Thinking in Times of Turbulence

2009-11-10T08:21:00.000-08:00

In a time of economic turbulence, we can't afford not to re-examine business as usual and make adjustments that create value, eliminate waste and develop knowledge within our organizations.

This concept applies equally to all parts of your organization, including your marketing and sales teams.

The key to success in turbulent times is agility -- the ability to make operational, portfolio, and strategic adjustments quickly to take advantage of opportunities presented:

Operational - finding opportunities to increase revenues and reduce costs
Portfolio - moving resources to more productive opportunities
Strategic - re-examining objectives and grasping the future

In The Upside of Turbulence: Seizing Opportunities in an Uncertain World, Donald Sull makes the point that such agility cannot be driven from the top down. Mid-level managers need to take the initiative to seize opportunities, and they need to train those around them to turn those opportunities into new revenues.

Agility, creating value, eliminating waste, training within industry -- these are all lean concepts that sales and marketing professionals need to embrace to make a difference in turbulent times.

Different thinking isn't easy, but it is essential to continued prosperity.

Why Net Neutrality Matters to Online Marketers

2009-10-29T16:40:00.000-07:00

Net neutrality is back in the news as the US Federal Communications Commisson (FCC) grapples with the issue. Not surprisingly, the FCC commissioners are polarized along political/ideological lines, with the Democratic commissioners, including chairman Julius Genachowski, committed to writing regulations ensuring net neutrality, and the Republican commissioners committed to keeping government from regulating business in any way, shape or form.

But what is "net neutrality," and why should we care?

Basically, it comes down to quality and equality of service. Net neutrality proponents believe that data streams on the Internet should be treated on a first-come-first-served basis, and that telecom companies should not be allowed to prioritize traffic or discriminate using techniques such as deep packet inspection. What they want, in a nutshell, is for the Internet to continue as it is now.

On the other hand, some opponents to net neutrality regulations think this may be a solution looking for a problem, while other opponents actually believe that such discrimination is a good thing.

Internet marketers should be concerned about net neutrality, because it poses the danger of turning the Internet into a tiered service. In a world without net neutrality, small- to medium-sized businesses could lose the ability to compete cost-effectively against larger companies, because the larger companies could simply buy prioritization for their data streams.

The principle of net neutrality has made the Internet a great leveler. Without net neutrality, the Internet would become just another tiered medium like television, where large corporations and wealthy special interest groups control the messaging, and small- to medium-sized businesses can't afford to compete.

Social Media in the Workplace

2009-10-28T11:23:00.000-07:00

A recent survey by Robert Half Technology asked CIOs about policies regarding the use of social media in the workplace and found that over half (54%) prohibited the use of social media in the workplace completely.

Now, I can understand the impulse to ban the use of social media. It's easy to assume that Twitter and Facebook will cut into worker productivity. I can remember the same thing happening in the early days of the Internet, and there's a lesson to be learned there. Today, the Internet is an extremely important productivity tool in most organizations.

A pleasant memory came back to me when I read the survey. A number of years ago, I was touring a well known European brewery. The tour guide told the story of a policy change concerning workers drinking during their shifts. The old policy: each worker was allowed 6 beers per shift. The new policy: each worker could drink as many beers as they wanted per shift. The result: beer consumption at the brewery went down.

So what's the relevance of this story to social media? Well, of course, beer drinking should be a social activity, but that's not it.

The real relevance is in the empowerment of your employees.

When you ban social media in the workplace, you're telling your employees that you don't trust them. But if you want all your employees to be ambassadors for your company, then you have to empower them to communicate your company's message by all available media. If your customers use social media, so should your employees. If you want to begin a conversation with your customers (because a conversation is exactly what marketing should be), then you need to empower everyone within the company to be part of that conversation, to be a marketer.

Sure, there will likely be abuse, as there still is with Internet use in the office, but that's a question of motivation, not technology. Twenty years ago, people played solitaire on their computers more than they worked. It seemed like a total waste of time, but in reality it was a way for users to become proficient with a mouse. Twitter and Facebook may not seem to have much relevance for your employees' productivity, but the social media skills learned there are transferable to business applications, and if your employees are going to make social media mistakes, it's better that those mistakes are at their personal expense, rather than the company's.

If you don't have any nails, you'll never learn to use a hammer properly.

If You're Not Part of the Solution...

2009-10-08T09:37:00.000-07:00

Marketers are often the butt of jokes, and it's good, maybe essential, to be able to laugh at yourself. I can remember being with a friend in an auto supply store reading flowery product description brochures. My reaction was visceral: "Who writes this s**t." My friend started laughing at me, eyebrows raised, and I realized, oh yeah, I do.

At its best, marketing communicates value; at its worst, it obscures value.

Peter Drucker once wrote that the only things that generate value are innovation and marketing.

Harry Beckwith noted that the typical Japanese company does not have a marketing department, because the whole company has a marketing mindset.

Until your company has achieved such an omnipresent marketing mindset, it's up to your marketing professionals to provide leadership. To paraphrase Drucker, good management is doing things right, but good leadership is doing the right things. Are you managing or leading?

I know some good engineer jokes too.