It usually starts with someone’s bright idea: “We need to disrupt this market…fast. How about we just give away our product. It will go viral and kill .”

In theory it sounds great. It’s such a simple way to kick your mortal enemy in their revenue stream by giving away your product for free.

In my world, there are many examples like Solarwinds and Splunk, where the free products were key awareness builders and growth drivers. It seems pretty straightforward… however, launching and growing a free product is hard work and the “overnight sensations” are often high-profile exceptions rather than the rule. Over the past 10 years I’ve marketed a number of different free offerings and here some things that I have learned:

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Before I close the books on Novell, I have a bunch of people to thank and great memories from the last two years.

• Thanks to my marketing communications people Ian Bruce, Kelley Johnson and my boss Phil Juliano for showing me what super high quality branding and marcom looks like.
• My peeps at PJA Advertising (Mike O’Toole, Matt Magee and Amanda Bird) for creative and moral support as well as donuts every Thursday morning.
• My content marketing mafia (Brian Singer, Todd Harris, Kyle Woodruff, Michele Hudnall, Ron Miller and my social media utilityman, Jeff Cutler) who helped me figure out how to get to page one on Google in 90 days.
• The maximum leader Dr. Matthew T. Grant.  I never knew cloud computing could be so entertaining.
• Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier who reminded me that bloggers need to live up to higher standards.
• Ben Grubin for providing the most entertaining story from the acquisition which I can not repeat in public.
• Ryan Smith for being there when I needed to vent.
• And finally the smartest man in the room, Justin Steinman for running away from  Novell when he did which got me thinking about my future…..

And finally, best wishes to everyone at Attachmate, Novell, SUSE, and NetIQ. There is a great opportunity ahead of you to make things happen.  Good luck and I’m sure our paths will cross!  Until then, enjoy your summer and stay tangy my friends.

Most recently I was discussing effective metrics and the role of benchmarks with a friend when it was then it dawned on me that one could reasonably argue that, like in baseball, “benchmarks are for losers”.

Don’t get me wrong. I am a numbers geek and love meticulously calculated points of reference. They are very useful as a sanity check to make sure you are in the right zip code when launching a new marketing program or trying something completely different.

My main complaints with benchmarks are as follows:

1. Specificity – In the B2B technology marketing, many benchmarks are aggregated across wide range of categories and in the end I can never seem to get that elusive number for my specific market segment or market leading competitor.
2. Mediocrity – Benchmarks are often stated as industry averages. Sorry, but I am not interested in being average.
3. Local optimization – Great, your PPC clickthrough rate is between your industry benchmark of 1-2%. Your part of the world is “meeting expectations”. So what. That number is directionally interesting but your CEO wants to know what revenue and pipeline you are driving. How are you contributing to the overall results of the business?
4. Laziness – Calculating marketing influenced revenue and pipeline is a hassle. It often requires some CRM alchemy and (gasp) assumptions about attribution. Worse yet, enterprise CRM systems make it virtually impossible for the average marketer to scrape, match and join the tables to connect leads to revenue. Those who can make this work have a huge advantage and can avoid the benchmark-based metrics trap.
5. Expectations – Winners look to set the standard of performance rather than measure themselves against the average. The choice is yours – you can use benchmarks to measure yourself against average performers or you can strive to set the standard. In my opinion, comparing yourself to benchmarks will never make you a winner. Only continuous improvement and pushing programs beyond worn performance assumptions will.

Winners disregard old assumptions about the way things are done and try new things to reach new performance levels. Unless you have firm comparables from industry leaders then you are likely comparing yourself to the middling your market and are destined to be average at best. I’ve ranted about ruthlessness before and without true results-driven metrics and benchmarks how can we truly hold people accountable and make the hard decisions about where to spend our increasingly scarce marketing dollars?

How are you avoiding the benchmarking trap?

1. Find people who are willing to speak in the first person and aren’t afraid to have a personal point of view. You need people who are passionate about a given topic and have the domain expertise to add value to the conversation.
2. Be ruthless. Help your team find time for social marketing activities. What will they stop doing to make time to join the emerging conversations?  Find the bottom 10% of activities and stop doing them – life is a zero sum game and something has to give.
3. Think small and simple. Social media can be overwhelming so people need to get started in simple ways and scale from there.
4. Use agile project management. Social media is still quite speculative and you will need to test things before making bigger investments. Agile provides an adaptive approach that helps accelerate learning.
5. Need to create an open, principle-based policy to provide guidance to the team. It is impossible to create rules for every possible scenario so you need to give people baseline behavioral guidance.

There is much more to the conversation if you have the time to listen.

Are there any other things we should add to the list?

One last ask: I could also use your support for my panel on Agile for Social Media at the SXSW conference.  Vote early and vote often my friends.  And as always, thanks for your support.

Identify your top influencers and/or sources of information – If you are like most people, you know your top 5 to 10 off the top of your head.  What are the sites you visit everyday?  What sites do you feel guilty about not visiting more frequently?  What does your boss read daily? You get the idea.  My suggestion is find 30-40 sources.  I know that sounds like alot but we’ll talk more later about how to deal with the deluge of content.
Setup a Google Reader account - I know there are many ways to read RSS feeds but I like the Reader’s ability to share feeds and connect with people on Google.  I also regularly use my feed reader as a convenient time waster on my new HTC Incredible. Just scrape the RSS feeds from your source and add to the reader.
Create Google Alerts – In my world, there are granular things that I want to watch daily.  I know it is vain but I watch my own name and “personal brand”.  Some other obvious things include your company, brand, or competitors.  You can decide on a comprehensive vs. blog search depending on traffic – one approach is starting with comprehensive and then refine if necessary.  I also suggest setting it up for immediate notification by RSS rather than email.   If it has more than 10 alerts per day then you are either too popular (yeah, right) or need to refine your search.  You can track these through your Google Reader like any other feed.
Setup a Twitter search – I think this is the hidden gem of Twitter’s offerings.  Just go to search.twitter.com and create searches on your keywords (use the same keywords from your Google Alerts if you want).  The best part is you can create RSS feeds for these search and then dump them into your Reader.  More advanced tweeters can add a search column in Tweetdeck.
Create lists on Twitter – I “follow” over 1,000 people on Twitter.  In reality, I probably care about 150 of them (sorry).  The best way to keep your signal-to-noise ratio high is to build a list important friends.  For example, I have on two lists on my personal Twitter account – Fresh Followers for new followers I’d like to get to “know” better and Friends of the Slice for people I really know or have met.  On the corporate Novell account, I created lists by our focus areas to reflect our most important press and analysts.  You can also easily find all of our Novell people on Twitter through a list.
Facebook - What to do about Facebook? I don’t have any simple answers here other than log in to read or get the Facebook app for your mobile device.  You can change your notifications but there aren’t many things you can do here.
Add an appointment to your calendar daily – This is where I often fall down.  I try for 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes after lunch.  This is your social time – no excuses.  If you don’t dedicate time to being social, you are not going to be social.

By now you probably noticed that I didn’t mention “go out and drop a few grand a month on a commercial social media monitoring tool”.  There are plenty of posts about these products and if I had a dollar for every cold call I get from someone trying to sell me one, I’d have enough money for a Main Event buy-in at the World Series of Poker.  I have tested a few and am about to pull the trigger on one but am not still ready for an endorsement.  The fact is that very few people need the power of these tools and the dominant design just hasn’t emerged.  Also, as I have often tweeted, I am holding out for Google Analytics adding social media monitoring.

Did I miss any other obvious ones?  What is your listening strategy?  Any tips for streamlining things?