Rolling Boulders and Social Media

If you are a marketer, it's time to face a hard truth.....the world has changed and you have close to zero control over your online brands. This is a big contrast to the good old days of advertising and communications, circa 1998, when you could still exert tremendous brand control through advertising, promotions and PR.

Am I exaggerating? Maybe a bit, but let me use a rolling boulder analogy to explain. Here are two scenarios:

1. Flat Ground - image a big boulder sitting in the middle of a nice flat lawn. To move it, you simply push that rock in the direction that you want. The more people (or $) you throw behind the effort, the further and faster you can get the boulder to move.
2. A Hill - now imaging the same boulder perched on the side of a hill. Once you get the boulder rolling, gravity is in charge. You can maybe guide this big rock with a nudge here and a push there, but as it gains momentum you lose true control.

Controlling rolling boulders is not too different from trying to control brands and your online image in today's social media world. With the gravity of  bloggers, tweeters and all the other social media options, it is practically impossible to maintain control over your brand, there are just too many possible alternative viewpoints and inputs.  So, your brand is no longer just what you say it is, your brand is what the social media crowd influences your brand to be. All is not lost.....being a part of the online conversation is good and you can still guide it.

The Bottom Line: If corporations, agencies, marketing / communications execs have no true control of their  online brands, what can they do? Well, that's a billion $ question and the answer is "5"... as in come back soon to read my next post on the Five Rules For Steering Rolling Boulders (....and guiding your Social Media programs).

The Grass Is Pretty Green ....

I recently helped a "Green" manufacturing company launch their website. It sure was fun to deal with marketing issues outside of the technology industry for a while.

Let me give some background here - his company is about a $20m manufacturer of on-site chemical generation machinery that has no full-time marketing staff, no full-time IT staff and a budget for marketing slightly more than zero. They had a website that was done about 3 years ago and had not been updated since then - it showed. Without a CRM tool, website lead capture, analytics, outbound marketing campaigns or advertising programs (they do some trade shows) it is an absolute testament to their product and sales abilities that they have gotten to the revenues that they have.

They recently won a number of major deals and had gotten a lot of interest in their products. The management team felt that the time had come to build-out their web-presence and marketing programs. That's where I come into the picture - as the "brother that runs marketing for a SW company" I was asked to help-out and provide guidance.

I agreed to coordinate the activities and took the project on as a "consulting hobby". In under 2 months (part-time) we accomplished:

1. Selecting the Content Management System (Joomla)
2. Contracting a joomla engineer to do the development
3. Coordinating flash and graphics work with a freelance designer
4. Selecting their new hosting site
5. Managing the process
6. Editing the content
7. Implementing an online advertising program (Google AdWords)
8. Implementing the analytics package (Google Analytics)
9. Selecting the CRM package for web-to-lead capture (Appitas CRM - http://www.appitas.com/)
10. Successfully launched the site

While it is always fun to get into the trenches (it helps me to better understand some of the tasks that my team does) the greatest reward is seeing the results.

Since launching the new site (with a rebranded domain name), a limited advertising budget and some guerrilla marketing, the traffic has gone from 10 users per day to hundreds per day [yes not a huge number but remember the segment and budget] with global visitors and leads being captured in their CRM system. They now have a platform for expanding their marketing activities with tracking and analysis.

Pretty cool to be able to help-out and see the results so quickly.

A Marketing Geek's Fantasy - the be all, do all Marketing Engine

Do a search on Google for "marketing software" and you will get about 385,000,000 results; "marketing saas" gets over 2,000,000. With all these results, I still can't find my ideal "Marketing Engine". Let me explain this be-all-does-all "application": put simply, it is an application that ties all of my team's strategic and tactical marketing information together in one place, across products, projects and processes. The underlying value proposition is that it can help repeatably drive our marketing activities from start to finish with lower costs and higher success rates.

The requirements list isn't that long or difficult to deliver on:

1. the engine must support the sequential steps of marketing strategy creation through tactical execution: Plan > Segment > Revise Plan > Create > Execute > Measure > Improve > Plan
   
   
   
   
2. it should be possible to manage individual segments, mediums and product lines - or roll them up for consolidated management
   
   
   
   
3. Processes (planning, budgeting, SEO, lead scoring, etc.) and Projects (product launches, events, individual campaigns, etc.) must both be supported
   
   
   
   
4. real-time with reporting, dashboards and decision support from 50,000 feet down to ground level
   
   
   
   
5. a pro-active recommendation and optimization capability that can statistically evaluate all campaigns, segments and outcomes to provide the optimal future spend structure with what-if decision making
   
   
   
   
6. Lead scoring before hand offs to sales
   
   
   
   
7. 
   
   100% web based
   
   
   
   
8. able to integrate with CRM tools (gotta bring the sales team to the party)
   
   
   

It's not asking too much is it? As a consumer it would be Nirvana. As a marketing team responsible for defining and rolling it out, it would be pretty awesome as well. You could create some really interesting UI, logos, collateral and revenue generation campaigns ? As far as I know there is nothing out there that does what I want my Marketing Engine to do. Until one comes to market, I will have to make do with the five or six stand-alone applications that I have come to rely on: IQ's project / process automation platform, planning spreadsheets, our CRM package (SugarCRM), website analytics reports, adword reports and finances budgeting reports. If anybody knows of something like the Marketing Engine that I have described, let me know - I would love to check it out.