Posts Tagged “Innovative Marketing Management”

Early in my graduate school experience I learned a valuable lesson.  We had six classes each with a theoretical two hours of homework per class hour.  This added up to something like 60 hours of class and homework excluding the team meetings to coordinate group projects.  After a futile effort to “do it all”, I discovered the joys of “selective neglect”. I learned to make the hard decisions about what not to do ahead of time and living with the consequences.  This doesn’t necessarily mean slacking but instead spending time upfront making and communicating your priorities. It is better to make the decisions than to have them make themselves.

If you are like me, January was a month of unbridled optimism with great things in mind for the new year.  All of those programs that never quite got done last year are now on your 2009 marketing plan, right?  Well, February’s reality has set.  Your resources haven’t changed much (if at all) yet you have made commitments you need to keep.

So what can you do?  Working every weekend is a real option but in the long run it isn’t sustainable. My answer is ruthless prioritization and clear communication. It isn’t always straightforward.  As I often say to my teammates, it is easier to decide what you will do than what you will stop doing.

So what are you going to stop doing?

Here are some of the reasons that came into my head:

• Shiny new object: It is where the action is today even with the bursting of the Web 2.0 bubble
• My favorite four letter word: Most of the channels are free (or almost free)
• Good listeners: There is always someone you can talk with since the conversations are going 24/7
• Easy to try: There are low-cost/no-cost ways to test most media
• Accountable: It is easy to track referrers from these media
• (Almost) Famous: With so many sites, you can be a legend somewhere (besides your own mind)
• Branding building: You can enhance your personal brand as you do your day job
• Accessible tools: A quick trip to Mashable.com shows the hundreds of free, easy-to-use tools to make you look like a social media rockstar.
• Agile marketing: You don’t need to wait for your agency to make changes to your blog or Facebook page.

Why do you use social media?

Here are a couple of things that stuck in my head a day after the event.

1. It seems like mainstream corporate types (ie enterprise customers like EMC) are taking it slow with social media.  Like other new technologies, they are carefully evaluating it (in this case inside the firewall first) as another tool to help them improve their business.
2. Absent a  a clearly articulated ROI, there will still be alot of testing with social media before acceptance in the enterprise C-suite.
3. I heard my first fear-based argument for social media engagement.  David Alston of Radian6 used an analogy of someone standing in front of your company shout bad things about you at the top of his lungs.  If this were about your company would your PR team ignore them?  I enjoyed the demo of his their platform but it probably makes him nuts when people say “why can’t you just use a Google alert to track these things”.
4. As Peter Kim reminded us, CMOs are general managers typically with short tenure.  They need to think about ROI first and coolness second.
5. There are still more vendors and consultants at these events than prospective clients or end user types.  The irony is that I’m a potential customer looking for solutions and no one even tried to sell to me.

For more from SMB9 Boston, check out Twitter with hashtag #smb9.  Twitter may have jumped the shark but it is still the medium of choice for real-time sharing.  And you can still follow me at @tangyslice…

My desire to treat all things in an agile way is creating internal discomfort.  Over the weekend I was reflecting on how to develop a new or refreshed brand using an agile approach.  Given the need for consistency and repetition in building a brand, it seems that this may be one part of the marketing universe that that truly needs a waterfall approach.

So how can we make the brand development process more agile?  Here are some ideas.

• Start with a straw list of ideas to test
• Dedicate one wall in your office to post these ideas and your competitive landscape
• Use less expensive, faster-to-deploy exploratory research techniques like online focus groups to supplement your traditional customer outreach
• Continuously adapt, test and kill concepts as you acquire data from the market
• Get your team to use Digg or Delicious to share competitive marketing
• Brainstorm frequently to make sure you are innovating and expanding your list
• Share the ideas with your team on a regular basis
• Concept test final idea using email surveys as a sanity check
• And last but not least, trust your gut as this a creative process not a geometric proof

Did I miss anything?  I would welcome your thoughts and experiences.

The issue of trust seems to be everywhere today.

• Can we trust our politicians when they say we need a massive bank bailout?
• Can I trust that this charity will spend my money wisely?
• Can I trust this online business is not some elaborate phishing scheme to clean out my bank account?

Over the years, some of the brightest marketing minds have explored ways to build trust between a customer and business. In 2003, Glen Urban, former Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management (and my grad school research adviser) published a paper titled “The Trust Imperative” which shares things you can do to build trust. It highlights specific ideas like “being transparent in all you do” and “helping customers help themselves”.

Even though this research was performed almost 10 years ago, I marvel at how the key points of it are still relevant today for online businesses. You can find the full paper here.