A: First draft of 2012 marketing plans are due in two weeks.

On October 12th, I had a blast sharing the stage with several other marketing experts and practitioners at Potomac Tech Wire’s event called “The Future of Marketing.”  The packed room of about 200 attendees appeared to be engaged and the feedback afterwards was very positive on both the substance and style (there were several light moments that punctuated the substance).

My co-panelists were M att Goddard, CEO, R2integrated, Eric Ludwig, Senior Director of Online Marketing, Rosetta Stone, Erin (Mack) McKelvey, SVP of Marketing, Milennial Media and Simon Owens, Director of PR, JESS3.  Potomac Tech Wire’s Paul Sherman did his usual excellent job of keeping the conversation moving and drilling down on the most salient points.

See the tweets from the audience here:  http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23M Future

The quote that has been ringing in my ears came from the wicked-smart Matt Goddard:

“We have not found a scalable way to influence conversation layer.” 

In other words, using paid promotional tactics on the social web is a waste of money.

My rejoinder to this–which the audience may have gotten tired of me repeating–is that the only scalable way to influence the social layer is by investing in product innovation and customer experience–which leads to more positive “conversation” online.   Marketers seem to forget that the product is the most important part of the marketing mix.  I said that “the best way to kill a mediocre product is with a great promotional campaign.”  (That point was tweeted and reteweeted online numerous times, although I have no idea whether this will help my business in any meaningful way.)

Here are a few more observations:

• QR codes appear to be pre-occupying marketers’ brains at a level disproportionate to their impact and importance.  Perhaps we are chasing the next cool (free) parlor trick.  My point was that a QR code is only as good as the content it points to.
• Mommy Bloggers took a huge swat from Simon Owens of JESS3 in answer to the question of what marketing areas were over-hyped.  (I think his comment caused at least one shamed MB’er to exit the room immediately.)
• Video only came up once towards the end of the event (courtesy of experienced marketer Duncan Moss).  There should have been more discussion about video given that it is a format that–perhaps because it actually requires an investment in production and therefore content–has a much higher impact than text as well as a 10 - 100x greater value in terms of SEO rankings.
• Steve Jobs : I don’t remember his name coming up except perhaps in passing (no pun intended). This is too bad since he, probably moreso than anyone else in the last 50 years, showed us that the product and customer experience is king when it comes to driving growth and insane profit margins. His products were great and made us feel better about ourselves.  Maybe that’s why empty MacBook Pro boxes are going for $15 on CraigsList.

If you missed the event, here are perspectives from other attendees who took the time to summarize the event online:

• Shashi Bellamkonda (Network Solutions): http://ow.ly/6WaB0
  • Shashi’s Flickr Photostream http://ow.ly/6Wkpg
• Capital Communicator: http://ow.ly/6WhZo
• Raj Khera: The Value of a Golden Nugget: http://ow.ly/6Wtup
• Davidson Group CPA: http://ow.ly/6WivG

See Shashi Bellamkonda’s Flickr Photostream here.

Just a few days after the Technology Marketing Alliance(on whose board I sit) hosted HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan for an evening of Inbound Marketing evangelism (When Marketing Dinosaurs Roamed the Earth: An Evening with HubSpot’s Brian Halligan), the TMA had another thought-provoking event: A panel of CIOs discussing what kind of information they consider in making purchase decisions.

The event, What Tech Buyers Want from Marketing, was notable for the candor of the panelists, which included senior executives with the Carlyle Group and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (Janelia Farm)  as well as a serial tech entrepreneur.

While Halligan emphasized the importance of publishing content to “get found” online, it may be no surprise that the CIO panelists’ leading source of information, by far, was the experiences and opinions of peers.  This channel of dialogue is so critical that in some cases they have established informal private industry peer groups (on their own–no sponsors, no media, no tweeting).

Farther down their spectrum of trusted, useful information were blogs and social media channels.  The perception is that, while there may be useful needles in these digital haystacks, most of the information has to be taken with a giant grain of salt due to the (mostly) biased sources.

So how does this feedback square with the Halligan/HubSpot/Inbound Marketing approach, which says you should focus the vast majority of your resources on publishing content that gets you found online.  What if your site gets found but it isn’t considered a trusted source by the seekers?  Is it worth the significant investment on content development and publishing?

The beauty of this dichotomy is that both approaches hinge on the most important part of the marketing mix: having an outstanding product or service (that’s right, “product” is one of 4 P’s of marketing).  Understanding the market and delivering an outstanding customer experience will then:

Cause peers to generate positive word of mouth; and

Generate great reviews by the target audience and/or trusted advisors (independent research firms, technical reviewers, trade media), which you can publish in your site and via your social media channels to help you get found in a positive light.

So, while Inbound Marketing and peer information appear on the surface to be wildly different aspects of the purchase cycle, they have something critical in common: an outstanding positive customer experience.

Bob London is President of London, Ink, a marketing and communications consulting firm based in the Washington, DC area. He can be reached at bob@londonink.com. His business humor writing, Bobservations, can be seen at www.bob-servati ons.com and is now a monthly column in SmartCEO DC magazine (www.smartceo.com)

HubSpot’s Brian Halligan gives marketers a good-natured slap in the face

By Bob London, President of London, Ink

Brian Halligan is CEO of HubSpot, and he has biz cred.  He’s one of the current “it guys” of the start-up world, and it’s hard to ignore his pitch after you hear how his company is crushing it.

HubSpot, an online software company that “gives (businesses) all the tools you need to make marketing that people will actually love,” has seen revenues grow more than 6,000% since 2007.  HubSpot is the second fastest growing software company on the widely admired Inc. 500 list.   The company has raised money from, among others, Google Ventures and Salesforce.com.

Last night, while in town to attend the Inc. 500 gala, Halligan spoke at an event sponsored by the Technology Marketing Alliance (on whose board I sit) and FounderCorps at the Deloitte Executive Briefing Center in Tysons Corner, Virginia.

Halligan raved about the future of marketing, and he is a stitch: at one point he bent over and mimed the act of shoveling in order to demonstrate how old school marketers (including most of the audience) are just dumping their freshly minted VC investments into a furnace—essentially renting rather than owning their own marketing assets.

What marketers should focus on, according to Halligan, is getting found.  How do you get found? Here’s his prescription:

• Have a smart web site that personalizes the experience based on the visitors.
• Create a blog and use it and your site to publish a high volume of content to drive visitors, generate inbound links and improve your SEO.
• Syndicate that content around the web to various high-traffic sites and channels (i.e. SlideShare, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
• Use real words and thoughts instead of business-speak.
• Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.
• Hire young, hungry and cheap digital citizens.
• Measure and analyze everything and refine consistently.

Stephanie Wonderlick of SpeakerBox PR, which put together the event, encapsulated Halligan’s points in this blog post.

Woven into almost every part of his pitch is that the era of money-wasting marketing dinosaurs is over.  Marketers need to stop using the traditional marketing playbook, which includes buying lists, spamming them, cold calling your brains out and going to tradeshows.

(By the way, Halligan told us that HubSpot just spent $700,000 to sponsor Salesforce.com’s DreamForce event and that if the ROI doesn’t prove its value they will not do that again.)

In general terms, Halligan is spot on.  The typical marketing approach needs to be reinvented.  His pitch is reminiscent of the seminal 2008 New Yorker article by Ken Auletta, which chronicled the meeting between Google’s co-founders and Mel Karmazin, an old-line broadcast ad sales guy who was then CEO of Viacom.  Here’s part of their exchange:

“You buy a commercial on the Super Bowl, you’re going to pay two and a half million dollars for the spot,” Karmazin told the Google team. “I have no idea if it’s going to work. You pay your money, you take your chances.” To turn this lucrative system over to a mechanized auction posed a serious threat. “I want a salesperson in the process, taking that buyer out for drinks, getting an order he shouldn’t have gotten.”

(Larry) Page and (Sergey) Brin thought Karmazin’s method manipulated emotions and cheated advertisers. Just as egregious, it wasn’t measurable and was therefore inefficient. They were convinced that they could engineer a better system. 

Karmazin looked at his Google hosts and proclaimed, only half in jest, “You’re f@%ing with the magic!”

So Halligan and HubSpot are clearly on to something big and game-changing. The cringes and nervous laughs from last night’s audience indicates the type of old vs. new tension that usually precedes a tectonic shift.

But his evangelistic fervor seemed to suggest that the marketing dinosaurs who are doing it all wrong today have only a few short moments left on earth.  They need to evolve now.  Today.  Yesterday.  Run out and re-staff your marketing departments with fresh-faced, recently graduated digital natives who shun email, hate rules and love Wilco.  Turn them loose on the web and don’t edit them too much, if at all.  Stop wasting money on trying to find your audience; let them find you.

This is the right idea, and hopefully the companies that are buying (actually renting) HubSpot’s software will adopt Halligan’s Inbound Marketing strategies to make the software live up to its potential.  Then the world can see proof that the vision is taking place now—not in ten years.

But there is the question of timing.  How quickly will or should the marketing world evolve.  It is already unrecognizable from just five or certainly 15 years ago.  How soon and how fully will the HubSpot view of the world take hold?

As the event ended, the over-riding feeling I was left with was one of feeling refreshed.  Marketers should appreciate Halligan’s good-natured slap in the face. To dismiss his point is to risk becoming extinct—if not next year then perhaps the year after.

Bob London is President of London, Ink, a marketing and communications consulting firm based in the Washington, DC area. He can be reached at bob@londonink.com. His business humor writing, Bobservations, can be seen at www.bob-servati ons.com and is now a monthly column in SmartCEO DC magazine (www.smartceo.com)

I have found that, when it comes to marketing automation platforms, if a user/marketer sees an interesting (potentially powerful) capability, they assume it is a benefit.

For example, just because a marketer knows I was on his software company’s web site yesterday and visited the pricing page, is it a benefit to me to get an email from him or a sales person saying,

“Hi, Bob, I noticed you were on our pricing page yesterday. Can I answer any questions for you?”

No, of course this isn’t a benefit to me, yet that is exactly what happened.

Whether the email I received was automated (which would be a big policy mistake) or one-off (poor judgement), it was not a value add to me, in fact, it was a big turnoff.  Yet the sales person or marketer assumed that because he/she had the capability, they should use it.

There is a really interesting footnote to this story: the software company in the anecdote above is a top 3 provider of marketing automation software. So much for using their own best practices.

Bob London is President of London, Ink, a marketing and communications consulting firm based in the Washington, DC area. He can be reached at bob@londonink.com.

The lessons learned from my 9-year tenure at MCI–2 in sales, 7 in advertising/marketing–are many.

As an aside, I recently had the pleasure of explaining what MCI was to a Gen-Y (or perhaps Gen-Z or AAA or whatever comes next) business professional who had never heard of the company–and perhaps had never used a landline.

One of my favorite MCI lessons, which I still use with clients today, was “management by press release.”  I call it the “Headline Test.”  When developing a new product, offer, line of business,  start-up company, or even refining an existing offering, try writing the press release FIRST.  This process will force you to take a market-focused view at the beginning of the product development cycle, which achieves several important benefits:

• Requires you to crisply articulate the market problem you are solving, which I call the Customer Elevator Rant (i.e. “To address the rising challenge of XXXXXX in the XXXXX marketplace, NewCo today announced…”)
• Forces you to think about and define the high level messaging and distill it into succinct language (i.e. the headline, subhead and lead paragraph).  (i.e. NewCo today announced the first XXXXXX product that delivers XXXXXX”)
• Enables you to clarify the positioning of the product or business vs. competitors, substitutes and alternatives in the marketplace. (i.e. “Unlike other products, NewCo’s solution enables…”)
• Perhaps most importantly, the Headline Test is a tool for eliciting feedback and, ultimately, gaining consensus among the executive team–based on their understanding of the market, research, customer interviews, etc.–before the major investments are made in product development.

Of course, the Headline Test doesn’t in an of itself validate a new product or business idea.  But when you sit down to write your press release, if it “writes itself,” then the product or business has a good starting point: some intuitive appeal and the ability to be quickly understood by the target audience.

I’ve used the Headline Test in client engagements many times over the years, and it has achieved the above benefits every time.  Clients have appreciated the test as an exercise that helps them refine their initiative.

Next time you’re starting the process of launching a new business or product, don’t wait until you’re ready to launch to write the press release.  Try the Headline Test at the beginning.  It shouldn’t take more than an hour; if it does, you might have to revisit the core value proposition and positioning.

Bob London is President of London, Ink, a marketing and communications consulting firm based in the Washington, DC area.  He can be reached at bob@londonink.com.

There are a number of social media/marketing trends fads bubbles that have already come and gone.  OK, they’re still around, but they have not turned out to be “the next big things” that these tools or platforms were touted to be by the grand marshals thought leaders of the social media parade.

Their value, relative to the level of effort required (strategy, planning, execution, measurement and optimization), has proven to be too low for most marketers.

In the best cases these trends/tools have become decent marketing vehicles for a handful of organizations.  In the worst, not only is there no ROI/adoption case for most marketers, there is no business model behind these tools–so even if they were valuable there are major questions about their viability.

Here’s the list of six social media/marketing fads that have fallen far short of the hype:

1)     Blogs

• Glowing things said at the time: Everyone and every business needs a blog. If you don’t blog you don’t exist. Personal branding is critical and blogs can help. Blogging is good for SEO. Blogging is easy; you can just post links to articles you think will be relevant to your prospects. Setting up a blog is free so it must be worthwhile.
• As it turns out: You can have a blog or a life but not both. Meaning that running a blog basically requires you to be an editor and publisher…in addition to your day job…which, let’s say is being a busy consultant or multi-tasking corporate marketing director. The blogosphere is littered with those who underestimated the level of effort required to have a great blog that accomplishes actual marketing/communications goals: keeping customers engaged, showing off your expertise, getting feedback (see #2 below), not to mention the business goals of increasing revenue and reducing costs.
• Who made any $$ on this: As far as content providers, TechCrunch (even though they are basically a vertical, online newspaper, not a blog) and a few others. Platforms: Blogger, which was bought by Google in 2003.

2)     Sponsored/Private Online Communities

• Glowing things said at the time: Every business should invest in building an online community of its “raving fans.” There are great platforms (i.e. Ning, Xing, KickApps) that provide all of the social networking functionality-some of them for free. Imagine the customers of your plumbing supply company (those would be plumbers) being able to interact with you and each other in their very own community-in real-time. Setting up a blog is cheap so it must be worthwhile.
• As it turns out: 95% of businesses don’t have engaged, “raving fans”-they have customers that value boring attributes like customer service, fair prices, quality products and overall a good experience. If your business has a raving fan or two, take them to lunch, interview them and write some really compelling case studies for your web site.
• Who made any $$ on this: No one.

3)     Podcasting

• Glowing things said at the time: See all those people at the gym with iPods and MP3 players? Imagine them all listening to your podcast series on FISMA-Compliant Data Centers. You just use your laptop to record, say, your VP of Engineering reading a white paper, post it on iTunes and you’re done. You can attract millions of listeners. Setting up and distributing a podcast is essentially free so it must be worthwhile.
• As it turns out: People would actually rather listen to music at the gym than your in-depth manifesto on nuclear treaty ratification during the Reagan era. You need to have pretty compelling content for someone to go to the trouble of downloading your podcast, much less subscribing to it on iTunes. That’s why successful podcasters tend to be successful content companies, for example National Public Radio, ESPN and Nickelodeon.
• Who made any $$ on this: No one.

4)     Widgets

• Glowing things said at the time: People can grab your content, in the form of some simple software code, and put it on their site. You can inexpensively create a widget that showcases your product (i.e. a mortgage calculator) and distribute it to millions of web publishers who will plug it into their home pages. The Saturday Night Live widget of Tina Fey doing Sara Palin got over 5 million views in the last 36 hours.
• As it turns out: Widgets are not cheap to create and require numerous formats to meet the requirements of various web sites. There is no “worldwide widget distribution network” where publishers are trolling for widgets like yours, so expect to spend a lot of time pitching your widget to site-when you should be pitching your product to prospects.
• Who made any $$ on this: Web/software developers.

5)     Facebook Apps

• Glowing things said at the time: Facebook offers a built-in audience of 350 million (now upwards of 600 million) users who can put your interactive app on their page-with just a couple clicks. This is a great way to “enhance your brand” and/or generate click-through’s to your site.
• As it turns out: The ranks of Facebook apps quickly swelled to the millions, meaning that the chances of a user finding your app-or that your app will break through and “go viral” (See #6) went down to nil.
• Who made any $$ on this: Web/software developers.

6)     Viral Video

• Glowing things said at the time: Organizations should create funny, outrageous and offbeat videos promoting their product or service, and viewers will forward it to their contacts, who will forward to their contacts and so on until you achieve “viral” status (in the millions of views). The great part is that the more home made and authentic looking the video is, the better chance it has of going viral, so you don’t have to spend “commercial quality” dollars on production.
• As it turns out: When everyone is trying to be funny, outrageous and offbeat, it becomes harder for your clever video to break through. Millions of dollars have been spent on production-ironically much of which was to achieve a faux-home made effect-only to be perceived as
• Who made any $$ on this: Commercial video directors and producers. Some ad agencies.

What we’ve learned is that, more than ever, is that great products and services, properly positioned and promoted, are an organization’s best marketing tools.  And that even the most interesting, widespread social media trend in the world can’t help a mediocre product or service.

What we have also learned is that, as in life, there is no free social media/marketing lunch: It is very rare for a marketing initiative to succeed without the requisite level of effort and expertise in these areas: strategy, planning, execution, measurement and optimization.

What will be the next “next big things” that will turn out to be not so hot?

Also see this video interview, courtesy of Vocus, where I discuss the “Blog Bubble.”

Bob London is President of London, Ink, a marketing and communications consulting firm based in the Washington, DC metro area. He serves as a Virtual VP of Marketing for technology and professional services firms that need engagement-based marketing experience and leadership. For more information, please visit www.londonink.com.

Apple CEO’s narcissistic perspective is a ‘tell’ on Apple’s single point of failure.

By Bob London

I was reading the Steve Jobs interview in the wrap up edition of the Wall Street Journal’s “AllThingsD” conference (http://bit.ly/cfJLdq) when something struck me.  It was the culmination of a nagging feeling I’ve had about Apple for awhile-that despite its glorious success, it’s string of home runs and triples, there was something fundamentally short-term or un-scalable about the company.

I went back and reread the article.  And then I started counting…how many times did Steve Jobs use the first-person singular (”I”), when he could have said, “Apple,” “our team,” “we,” or “our”?

Let me save you the trouble of counting: While answering 11 questions, Mr. Jobs used the first-person singular (I, I’ll, I’m or my) a total of 30 times.  Granted he did say, “we” another 34 times–but it was the “I’s” that struck me.  Here are some excerpts:

• “I actually started on the tablet first.”
• “I had this idea to get rid of the keyboard.”
• “I asked our folks, ‘Could we come up with a multitouch display that we could type on?’”
• “I thought, ‘My God, we can build a phone out of this.’”
• “I put the tablet project on the shelf, because the phone was more important.”

So he makes no effort to conceal what we all know (but also know he should be fixing): that he is the chief decider, designer, prioritizer, and probably executive chef of the Apple employee cafeteria.  He’s the end all be all…the man with the golden touch when it comes to smooth, rounded electronics.

Now this may not be a pressing emergency as long as all systems–that would include Mr. Jobs’ recently transplanted liver–are working just fine.   But shouldn’t investors be concerned when Mr. Jobs’ narcissism and arrogance-the same traits by the way that help his company deliver stunning products-come across so blatantly while there is no visible succession plan?  Isn’t it alarming that he doesn’t have the “ear” to hear himself saying I, me, my over and over?  It goes without saying that no one else will point this out to him.

Just to make sure I wasn’t judging Mr. Jobs in a vacuum, I compared his Narcissism Index (# of first person, singular references divided by number of questions answered) to that of three other AllThingsD interviewees: James Cameron, film director and media force extraordinaire; Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg; and the tag team of Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie who were interviewed together.  Here are the results:

My careful analysis shows that Mr. Jobs’ Narcissism Index is the highest (worst).  The only person who comes close is Cameron, who can rightly claim that he is the show, the whole show and nothing but the show in his epic productions-not to mention that he arguably needs a monstrously self-important worldview to stay on top in Hollywood’s notorious 24 x 7 ego-fest.

So, Mr. Jobs, your dangerously I-me-my complex is larger (worse) than that of the biggest Hollywood player.  Not a great thing for a company like Apple that will rely on collaboration and bench strength to succeed into the next decade and beyond.

Bob London is President of London, Ink, a marketing and communicatonis consulting firm based in the Washington, DC area.  He can be reached at bob@londonink.com.

Here’s a link to the Twitter activity during my panel discussion: http://twitter.com/ #search?q=londonink%20growsmartbiz

And here’s an archive of the live feed of the panel discussion:

http://growsmartbusiness.com/small-business-news/2009/09/growsmartbiz-video-p anel-1-driving-small-business-performance-w-marketing-and-innovation/

Enjoy!

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