When the folks at ITSMA asked me to take up the blogging reins of my predecessors, my boss, Julie Schwartz, our senior vice president of thought leadership, suggested that I start my own blog rather than an ITSMA-hosted blog. Her suggestion stemmed in part from her knowledge that blogs are a lot of work and that the people doing them deserve some personal recognition for their efforts. She also knew that having a personal blog would motivate me more than doing one hosted by the company.
Julie's had many smart ideas, but this one really intrigued me. And when I thought about it for a while, I realized that this is where the corporate blog is headed. For a corporate blog to be effective there needs to be a layer of separation between the corporation and the blogger or bloggers.
Readers won't ever trust the typical corporate blog. The defining quality of blogs is that they are personal. That's why corporations can't do them well. As an employee of the company, you would never want to take a controversial stand on something in the corporate blog without first figuring out whether it accurately represents the opinion of your company and your bosses. That's why corporate blogs will never be risk-taking enterprises. They will be press releases for broader consumption. Readers understand this and operate from the assumption that corporations are going to have a bias toward making themselves look good and getting out their agreed-upon message.
Blogging from an independent position benefits everyone involved. My new blog (http://chriskoch.wordpress.com) lets me feel more emboldened to be personal and opinionated, and it gives ITSMA the ability to rightfully point out that stupid or incorrect things I might say are not necessarily reflections of ITSMA's opinions. (That was a shameless disclaimer, in case you didn't notice.) I mean, let's be real here. The folks at ITSMA don't have the time to look over my shoulder while I blog through a corporate vehicle, so why not make that clear to everyone from the start?
The layer of separation gives the blogger and the corporation an out. One of the models for my blog is Paul Dunay's "Buzz Marketing for Technology" blog (http://buzzmarketingfortech.blogspot.com). Paul is a marketer for consulting company BearingPoint, but his blog is his own. He blogs on topics that interest him and his fellow B2B technology marketers. It's hard to discern any BearingPoint influence on his blog, and he puts a disclaimer on the front page absolving the company of any link to what he says. As a result, my work as a reader is lessened. Sure, Paul may be somehow advancing the corporate goals of BearingPoint through his blog, but as a reader, I know he can't hide behind the corporation or suddenly give way to someone else to do the talking. The result is that he looks smart and genuine, and, by extension, so does BearingPoint.
And that's all corporations can ask for from a corporate blog. The point is not to get a message across anymore; it is to engage people who are, or may someday be, customers, peers, or partners in a dialogue—not with the amorphous corporation, but with smart individuals who want to help. I hope you will read my new blog and join the conversation.
How are you engaging customers with your corporate blog? Email me at ckoch@itsma.com
The avalanche of recession advice has begun. Everyone has ideas about how to protect the marketing budget from the business bandits. We at ITSMA decided to try to look beyond the standard advice-refocus marketing strategy on the highest revenue opportunities, renegotiate contracts with suffering contractors, and so on-and come up with ideas we haven't seen everywhere else. Like these:
Reevaluate vertical strategy. A recession hits some verticals harder than others. Marketing strategies that don't take into account these differences will waste dollars on declining areas and miss opportunities in more recession-proof verticals, says Ajit Maira, senior vice president of ITSMA. For example, services marketers have focused heavily on the financial services vertical for the last six or seven years. But expansion in that vertical is clearly over. Meanwhile, healthcare is less likely to suffer and may actually increase spending; a declining economy has a consistent, unfortunate correlation to increased demand for healthcare. This is the time to reexamine your vertical marketing strategy, which may require a bigger investment in research to get beneath the macroeconomic trends to discover the real impact of a recession in particular verticals.
Unfortunately, history tells us that investments in research are among the first areas of marketing to take a hit during a recession. When ITSMA surveyed members in late 2001, 71% said they cut investments in competitive analysis and market research, with only 10% saying they increased spending. Cutting research spending is a quick and easy way to take spending off the books, but a better approach would be to increase the effectiveness of the investment.
Make happy customers even happier. Common wisdom says that in general, 80% of profits come from 20% of customers. In a recession, the 80/20 rule is replaced by the 95/5 rule, says Maira. It's time to redouble marketing efforts with the best customers to make sure that you don't lose share but rather, at a minimum, hold steady and perhaps even grow share. Cooperate with sales to offer benefits and incentives that build goodwill with good customers during lean times. They will remember those efforts (or you can remind them) when times improve. The worst thing companies can do is take the short-term view: focusing marketing efforts solely on seeking out new customers or retaining opportunistic customers who threaten to bolt or demand heavy price cuts, while ignoring loyal customers.
Yet past ITSMA research shows that this is exactly what marketers tend to do when times turn sour. In 2001, a whopping 94% of marketers surveyed said they cut spending on customer satisfaction and loyalty programs and research-more than any other marketing spending category. Marketers need to fight harder for their right to keep customers satisfied in tough times.
Exploit competitors' (relative) weaknesses. If you are lucky enough to have a stronger financial position than your competitors, then a recession is a time to invest in marketing that increases mindshare among competitors' customers. But these campaigns should not be ham-fisted competitor bashing. That could alienate potential customers and make them even more loyal to their existing providers, who start to look like sympathetic underdogs compared to the aggressive interloper. Rather, a recession is a time to educate competitors' customers about products and solutions designed to reduce spending-preferably in areas that competitors cannot serve. It's also the time to develop a clear roadmap for replacing competitors' products and services with your own-in ways that reduce overall costs.
Increase opportunities to show short-term payback. In a recession, marketing will have to defend its budget. That is easier to do when payback from programs is not buried within long-term timelines. Rather than cutting or scaling back these longer-term programs, it makes sense to reexamine them to see if they can be broken up into chunks that show payback sooner than originally planned. "Look for marketing programs where you can see potential revenue coming in a three- to six-month horizon," says Bob Baginski, senior vice president of ITSMA.
Start permanent cost-cutting programs. One of the worst aspects of recessions is the sudden emotional responses they elicit. Stockholders sell in a panic and business leaders demand unthinking, across-the-board cuts in spending. The suddenness of these edicts eliminates the opportunity to make changes in a more thoughtful, rational way. They force marketers to cut good programs along with the under-performing parts of the portfolio to meet the short-term demand for reductions.
Marketers could bring more rationality to the process if they identified areas for reduction on an ongoing basis without affecting overall marketing effectiveness. Business leaders never get tired of seeing cost cutting, even in good times. Having such a program in place gives marketing cover for its most effective (though perhaps most expensive) programs.
For example, consider a program to reduce spending on printed materials by 10% per year, replacing them with lower-cost digital versions. With the overarching trend toward digital that is occurring independently of economic fortunes, the goal should be easy to achieve. Another example: Reduce the travel budget by 10% per year by investing in virtual meeting technologies.
By establishing clear goals and making the programs permanent, marketing can fend off the emotional responses in bad times and burnish its image in good times.
Collaborate with partners and customers. Before cutting programs or headcount, consider whether those costs could be partially underwritten by partners or even customers with a shared interest in success, says Julie Schwartz, senior vice president of thought leadership at ITSMA. Partners and customers may be facing the same need to reduce costs, yet a shared program could enable everyone involved to save staff and perhaps even add new capabilities. It's also a great way to build customer loyalty by institutionalizing the need to work closely together. "Such programs could have impact beyond the partnership," adds Dave Munn, president and CEO of ITSMA, "by reinforcing your reputation as a collaborative company, a company that is flexible and open with its customers."
How are you approaching new customers in a down economy? Do you have best practices to share? Contact me at ckoch@itsma.com.
New
Thinking
SAP’s Steve Mann: How to Get Started in Social Media
Steve Mann is creating and implementing a social media strategy for B2B software giant SAP. He agreed to talk to ITSMA about how B2B marketers should approach getting started in social media. With his personal interest in science and sociology, Steve has some insightful views on the human side of implementing a social media strategy. To learn more about Steve and his opinions on social media, visit his blog at http://ablebrains.typepad.com.
ITSMA:
Steve, what do you think should be driving B2B companies' strategies in social media today?
Steve Mann: The dynamics of most markets have changed dramatically over the last few years. We have gone from being a supplier-centric economy where the supplier is in control to a buyer-centric economy where the buyer is in control. And these buyers are demanding transparency from their suppliers.
One of the best ways to drive that transparency is with social media. It has become a conversational economy where customers expect to be able to talk to suppliers and they are really turned off when suppliers talk at them. Social media is what enables that conversation between the suppliers and buyers.
ITSMA: There are so many different things that marketers could be doing with social media today. What's the first thing they should do to get started?
Mann: It's been our experience that there are many things happening in companies around social media which organizations don't even know about. So, one of the first places to start is actually to take an audit of what's happening in your organization.
Through our audit at SAP, we found that there are a number of grassroots initiatives around social media that we are really happy that we know about, for two reasons: number one, we can take advantage of synergies in those efforts, and number two, we can use the enthusiasm and the passion around these grassroots initiatives to drive an overall social media strategy.
So, for example, SAP has an internal social networking project that launched a couple of months ago called Harmony, which has over 5,000 SAP employees involved.
And another good opportunity is our SAP Developer Network and Business Process Expert community platforms, which, combined, have over 1 million community members already.
ITSMA: What prerequisites do you need to have internally in terms of social media before going externally?
Mann: Number one, do you have a culture where you allow experimentation and have a high tolerance for failure? Frankly, failure is big part of social media and social networking initiatives because we are still so early in the evolution of strategies and technologies.
For example, if you are a very strong command-and-control type of organization, it may be much more difficult for you to implement either an internal or external social media strategy. It's difficult to maintain that traditional sense of control in an organization that truly implements a 360-degree social media strategy for both internal collaboration as well as for external collaboration with the market.
Second, do you also have tolerance for negative commentary about your organization in the market? If not, you should stay away from social media because customers will see through any efforts to control them or their messages.
The third assessment factor is to discover the real pain points that can be addressed with a social media strategy. Is it my communication strategy? Do I need to be closer to the market? Is it around co-innovation? Am I not being innovative enough in my products and services, or is there not enough uptake of my products and services, and if so, why?
ITSMA: How do you know whether your existing customer service infrastructure is ready to handle all the communications that occur in social media-such as a customer posting a complaint on a blog, for example?
Mann: The first issue is don't do social media if you are not willing to hear negative things about your company. It's a conversation, and in any conversation there are positives and negatives and you have to take the good with the bad.
Second, when an individual gives feedback to a company-no matter whether that feedback is negative or positive-that individual deserves to be engaged with. So the people, the processes, and the tools need to be in place to engage with that individual and not only say, "Hey, we heard you," but also "Here is what we are going to do about it."
It's critical that organizations realize that social media drive a greater degree of customer intimacy than ever before. You are much closer to your customers and they are much closer to you, which is a good thing and a bad thing. It's a bad thing in that if you don't manage it well, it can hurt your brand. It's a great thing in that customer intimacy promotes greater customer loyalty; customer loyalty promotes more repeat business, which in turn promotes greater satisfaction with the brand.
To read the full interview with Steve Mann, go to Chris Koch's blog at http://chriskoch.wordpress.com.
If you know the people behind BI Radio, the series of thematic podcasts from Cognos, the maker of business intelligence and performance management software, the name should come as no surprise. Two of the three producers have radio backgrounds.
But there is a lot more behind the metaphor than that. BI Radio is a series of "programs," each with a theme, that contain three segments offering different views on the overall theme. For example, a program about leadership contained a segment with a leadership book author, another with a leadership consultant, and a case study segment about supply chain leadership.
All of the programs have one thing in common, however: high production values. There is a professional announcer, smooth mixing of sound elements like music, and quick-cut voice clips-even commercials. Though this all may seem anathema to the casual DIY heritage of the Internet, the slick production serves everyone's needs. Listeners get consistency and a certain sense of comfort that the podcasts will meet the kinds of basic expectations that they have had for decades from radio and television productions. For Cognos, it is a way to further the company's quality brand image and do a little targeted marketing through the commercials. This high-quality strategy is a real departure from conventional thinking about podcasting-one that all marketers should consider.
When Commercials Seem Natural
Indeed, the production values are so high that listeners almost expect commercials. Whereas in a typical rough-cut podcast a commercial would seem out of place and jarring, when mixed with the skills of a professionally trained radio engineer and musician like Cognos' Derek Schraner, it all fits and doesn't test listeners' patience. Nor does the length of the individual segment: None is more than 9 minutes, and the packaged show (which is more popular among downloaders than the individual segments) is never longer than 30 minutes.
Gaining listeners' permission to market directly in a podcast is important because hard ROI is difficult to prove for Web 2.0 in general and for podcasts in particular. BI Radio has more than 80,000 RSS subscribers and has seen more than 2,000 downloads of programs since it launched in early 2007. Although RSS feeds are next to impossible to link directly to sales, the benefits of BI Radio are real, says Delaney Turner, manager of Product and Solutions Communications for Cognos and one of the show's contributing producers. It increases brand awareness, demonstrates industry innovation and thought leadership, and increases visits to the company's main Website. "BI Radio is very influential in keeping people in the conversation with Cognos," says Turner. "It's another tool that business development representatives can use to move a prospect to the next stage and keep people engaged."
Cheaper Than Video
The professionally produced program does not require a huge investment from Cognos. The show's minimal equipment is in a converted storage closet at Cognos headquarters and is produced by three staffers who have other primary responsibilities.
Furthermore, it leverages work that Turner and Kelsey Howarth, another contributing producer and manager of Content and Multimedia at Cognos, were already doing: interviewing internal and external authors, consultants, and customers to develop thought leadership articles, case studies, and other marketing materials for Cognos. BI Radio also requires much less investment than the next step up in interactive media: videocasts.
Planning Is Critical
But it does require investments in planning-and passion. "BI Radio is a labor of love for us," says Howarth. "Companies don't have to spend a lot of money to do this well, but they do need to do good thinking about content and presentation." The team holds weekly meetings during which they post potential content on a "big wall of ideas" that is loosely organized under three main topics: IT, Finance, and Industries. The team moves sticky notes around on the wall until a theme emerges. Or it lets themes emerge from within the organization-an upcoming user conference, for example.
Pacing and Variety
Though the team strives for high quality in the podcast production, it does not want the shows to be perfect. "Listeners know instinctively when something is overly produced," says Schraner. "When speakers hear their own voice they can become self conscious and they want it cleaned up and made perfect. But if you pull everything out of it-every breath, every little break or flaw in their voice-it becomes too perfect and it's uncomfortable to listen to. When I was in school they would say, 'If you have no breathing in your voice, people will lose their breath as they listen.'"
Pacing is also extremely important to a successful podcast, says Schraner. "When I look at the waveforms in my audio editing software, if I see too much of a certain tone or style, I start cutting, because I have this thing about variety," he says. "I want the listener to keep hearing something different fairly frequently. Whether it's mixing up male and female voices, music versus voice, or bringing in different speakers, I really feel there's a kind of innate need to keep things changing."
Indeed, that is the challenge facing all marketing podcasters: keeping things fresh over the long haul. "It's difficult to maintain consistency after something is no longer new and bright and shiny," says Howarth. "A good podcast isn't just two people talking on the phone. You really need to think about the content, the message, the length, and you really need to plan ahead."
To read a Q&A interview with the BI Radio team about the secrets of good podcasting, please visit Chris Koch's blog at http://chriskoch.wordpress.com.
Research Desk
Ask ITSMA: Do you have any data points that substantiate the fact that CIOs influence
the telecom purchasing decision?
The discrete function of a "telecom/networking executive" in large enterprises has all but disappeared (and was generally rolling up under the CIO prior to its demise, anyway). This is happening for three reasons:
As telecom has become more Internet-based inside organizations, the purchase has become a data/IP-centric decision.
The CIO has evolved into the master of not just information systems but network systems as well.
The CIO has become a real business executive-at the table with other C-level peers-not a support manager. With that elevation in role, the telecom/network decisions have risen to the CIO level because they tend to have firmwide implications.
Do you have a services marketing question? Visit Ask ITSMA to access
our experience, insight, and research results.
Recently Published ITSMA Thought Leadership
The Software Gap: How Emerging Generations and Markets Will Impact Marketers—An Interview with Bruce Richardson
Bruce Richardson, Chief Research Officer at AMR Research, has been studying the software industry for over 20 years. His latest passion is talking about how deeply the software market will be transformed by the emergence of technology native generations and new global markets. In this Viewpoint, Richardson shares his thoughts on what exactly will be different and gives some examples of how some companies are already embracing these changes.
In this ITSMA Online Briefing, marketing veteran Jeff Sands shares the latest ITSMA research and his many years of accumulated wisdom on the key issues in finding and keeping new customers. Issues covered include:
Understand the processes your customers and prospects use to select their services and solutions providers
Pick the sales enablement tools that are most effective at supporting the new account acquisition process
Develop messages and value propositions that will be heard and understood
Collateral Damage: Why B2B Marketers Need to Stop Writing Brochures and Get Customers Talking—An Interview with Larry Weber
Larry Weber is outspoken about the impact of the Web on the world in general and on marketers in particular. Drawing upon his early introduction to the Web and his experience building a number of interactive marketing agencies since his Weber Shandwick/Interpublic Group days, Weber outlines how marketers must reinvent themselves and their discipline in this Viewpoint.
News & Notes
Marketing Excellence Awards
Share your services and solutions marketing successes with ITSMA by submitting an entry to our 2008 Marketing Excellence Awards program. Learn more at http://www.itsma.com/News/mea/default.htm.
Coming Up
Beyond Marketing Metrics: Tying Marketing's Impact to Business and Client Results
Breakfast and Lunch Briefings Free for ITSMA members
In these Briefings, ITSMA's Bob Baginski will share what companies are measuring today, and why; discuss tips for creating an effective marketing portfolio and ROI table; review results of recent ITSMA research; and highlight case studies of companies that are doing it right.
Positioning Yourself to Win: Strategies for Outsmarting the Competition
With senior marketers contributing as guest speakers from two industry sectors, the evening promises to spark some interesting debate. In particular, we will explore the lessons learned from organisations in building strong, differentiated positions in brand marketing and customer satisfaction.
ITSMA's Marketing Leadership Forum
Elevating Demand in a Crowded World: Moving from Quantity to Quality
Generating demand has become a top priority in today’s slowing economy. Learn how to improve your demand-generation activities with keynote speaker Brian Carroll, CEO of InTouch, Inc., and author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale. There will also be case study presentations from top-level marketers including John Aiello, Co-Founder and CEO of SAVO Group; Paul Dunay from BearingPoint; Janis Fratamico from IBM; Julie Meyers of Xerox; Jean Ostvall of Accenture; and Dana Prestigiacomo of CA. (This Forum is designed for senior-level marketing and sales professionals only, please.)
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News & Notes