Archive for August 2009

It’s as easy as A-B-C.

August 19 2009

You won’t learn much by reading a new BNET piece by Geoffrey James, but you’ll feel smarter.

Mr James is well intentioned and does lay out the clever A) Always, B) Be, C) Closing mnemonic. He explains the “Ultimate Prospect Qualification Tool” in 17 easy-to-follow steps. Yes, 17, but you’ll need a roadmap and a compass to find your way. I was thinking tool like screw driver, Ohmmeter, or something a little more utilitarian than what he’s serving up.

Maybe I’m being harsh. For example, take this piece of advice once you get prospects to reveal the buy-decision makers. “Carefully record any names that come up and the roles those individuals play.” That’s a good idea. Who isn’t doing this?

Here’s a link to the article. I don’t have an editorial filter, so I rely on our readers to keep me honest. Maybe the article is great and I’ve lost it.
Selling is as easy as this.
We do agree on one point. Disqualifying a prospect is as valuable as finding a quality prospect. Rooting out bad prospects is win-win. You don’t waste your time or the prospects’ time. This is counter to how many of our past clients view the lead qualification process. Our current customers understand the value of personalized marketing as a means to funnel the best opportunities to sales.

We believe your marketing should do three things. D) Demonstrate, E) Excite, and F) Flush. Demonstrate your understanding of the customers’ pain points, get them excited about your solution, and flush out the best opportunities.That’s def. It’s not boring.

Sales, once you get those opportunities just remember Always Be Closing. A company can’t have too much revenue.

You should follow us on Twitter. If you’d rather not, then become a fan on Facebook. That’ll help get you through the day a little smarter.

(Quick tip: be skeptical of advice given by someone with two first names.)

Bookmark and Share

Don’t jump, yet.

August 17 2009

Consider becoming a Twitter quitter. You wouldn’t be alone, but don’t pull the trigger until you’ve read this blog post. The true value of Twitter might be hidden from plain view. Luckily you have us to keep you in the loop.
Everybody Knows About The Bird
Before you jump off the bandwagon, consider tinkering with a few Twitter-based applications. These tools help leverage the functionality of Twitter in a variety of ways. We found five must-have Twitter apps that deserve your attention. If you’re still not convinced, become a Twitter quitter. Maybe no one will notice.

Twtpoll
Twtpoll is a feedback tool that helps you to create and distribute polls/surveys on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed or on any other social media site. More…

CoTweet
CoTweet is how “business” does Twitter. Their words, not ours. CoTweet allows multiple people to communicate through corporate Twitter accounts and stay in sync while doing so, which is nice. No dropped balls, no stepping on each other’s toes. Think of it as social CRM — with an emphasis on the “social”. More…

TweetStats
Graph your Twitter Stats including, Tweets per hour, Tweets per month, Tweet timeline, Reply statistics. The app is in use by over 100,000 Twitter-folk, so they are doing something right. We graph ours and find visual trends easier to swallow. More…

Twendz
Twendz uses the power of Twitter search for data mining, highlighting conversation themes and sentiment of the tweets that talk about topics you are interested in. As the conversation changes, so does twendz by evaluating up to 70 tweets at a time. When new tweets are posted, the app is updated. We wouldn’t get too married to this “must-have” app that could be best used to jump into a conversation mid-stream. More…

Twitterfeed
Feed your blog to Twitter. It’s that easy. More…

Good luck in your quest to join the twitterati.

Follow us on Twitter. We’re not leaving…yet.

Bookmark and Share

What changed?

August 14 2009

Roll back the clock to August 2008, dial up the marketing spend and ignore any signs of an economic slowdown while riding a padded sales pipeline. Fast forward to August 2009. Compare notes.

What were we doing before? If effective, metric-driven marketing is the new catchphrase that would mean we weren’t measuring and weren’t effective. No wonder so many had a devil of a time defending wasteful budgets.

Are you left scratching your head? Even the most green of marketing professionals knows that an economic slowdown spells trouble. Marketing is a cost center. Even product development slips when cash dries up.

VLG has the benefit of a different perspective as an interactive solutions provider. We get to hear different strategies, different pain points, and different challenges faced by our customers. Our catbird seat makes for great trend spotting.

Although marketing challenges appear unchanged, marketers are changing. Some are changing quickly, some slowly, but I’m not sure who wins. Take a look at the top three trends spotted by VLG.

1. Don’t go it alone.
2. Measure everything and sift through the numbers later.
3. Experiment with social media.

Creative Commons: Project Gutenberg

Creative Commons: Project Gutenberg

You can’t go it alone and we’re seeing a heavy reliance on channel partner and VAR relationships this year and going forward. Remember, VLG spends most of its time in the B2B space. Shared, co-branded marketing programs are on the rise, but the coordination costs of turning those efforts into quantifiable results is a massive hurdle for most.

Get all the data you can, but don’t forget to take action. In the airline business they have cockpit distractions. They are those little things that distract you from “flying” the plane, which may cause you to fly way, way off course. Intuition tells you that the more data you have the easier to chart your course, but the trend seems to point in a different direction. Grab behavior stats, find pain points, qualify decision makers and close deals. Get numbers, but don’t get bogged down in them.

Finally, folks playing around with social media walk a fine line between acquired knowledge and wasted time. You have to learn how to apply one and you can’t get the other back. You should follow us on Twitter. We walk the line.

We need to maximize the impact of our marketing spend today, tomorrow and the next day. If the measure of marketings effectiveness is budget, in 2009 companies had little faith in marketing. Budget cuts do not 100% correlate to marketing effectiveness, but it gives the CFO an easy target.

When working your way through this recession take notes. You’ll need them for the next downturn.

Bookmark and Share

My (Company’s) Tribe

August 13 2009

We are the lucky ones.

There is a quick and dirty way to measure the success of a company. Two questions. Do you love getting up in the morning? Do others envy you because of where you work, or what you do?

These very unscientific questions cover a lot of ground. If you answered ‘No’ to the first and ‘No’ to the second it may be time for a career change. Conversely, a ‘Yes’ and ‘Yes’ response, I’d argue, would mean that you work for a very successful company. It’s a shallow measure, true, but I did say dirty and quick. (How we define success will be completely ignored in this post.)

Courtesy: Red Onion Saloon

Courtesy: Red Onion Saloon

Take a look at the top 100 companies to work for according to a survey conducted by Fortune magazine. Familiar faces in the crowd include Google, Starbucks and Goldman Sachs. I’d argue that the majority of people at the companies on this list answered yes-yes to our qualifying questions.

We talk a lot about creating and nurturing brand evangelists. When you hear the words brand evangelist the first thought that pops into our heads fanatical customers that preach the gospel to any that will listen. Rarely does my attention turn to an internal army of brand evangelist–my company’s tribe.

What does your company do to foster, define and grow the tribe? Are you employees brand evangelists? Do they answer no-no or yes-yes? What gets ‘em fired up?

All rights reserved. Brian Kurtz Photography.

All rights reserved. Brian Kurtz Photography.

Marketing plays an important, but often underutilized role in growing tribes. How often are internal audiences the target of direct marketing campaigns? Regardless of the answer, we could all do more.

Spend time and money developing a tribe. If our people don’t believe and aren’t passionate about the company we expect our customers to feel the same way.

As advocates of personalized direct marketing–Dialog Marketing in VLG terms–we believe it important to deliver one-to-one marketing campaign that fire up the troops, define our identity and get our people answering yes-yes to those all important questions.

Want to know how we do it? It involves a red stapler, money tree and my wife’s cakes, but we should do more.

Bookmark and Share

Boris is listening

August 7 2009

During the Cold War the Armed Forces Television Network ran these great propaganda ads in Europe that highlighted the need to keep military activity in the region on the down low. One in particular was very memorable. The military spouse on the phone with another military spouse catches herself before revealing the location of a military training exercise. She says, “Hello, Boris.” The commercial ends with the all important message, “Remember, Boris is always listening.”

Not this Boris.

It stands to reason that with Facebook and Twitter adoption on the rise keeping military secrets might be a little harder than it was in 1989.

Earlier this week the U.S. Marine Corps announced a ban on social media tools on all government owned computers. The feeling in Washington is that government hardware should not be exposed to “malicious actors” that lurk on sites dependent on user generated content. I assume MySpace is also subject to the ban, but after the beating Newscorp took in Q4 I don’t think anyone cares.

No access

In stark contrast the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) decided this week to allow its troops to use Facebook and Twitter without consent from the chain of command, as was the previous edict. Heck, the MoD even offers to sponsor blogs for willing volunteers.

When we civilians use Facebook to post pictures of our kids, there is little risk of injury to ourselves or others. I’ll promote this blog post on Twitter in a couple minutes and Bin Laden won’t bat an eye. I really don’t think Boris is listening to much these days.

We don’t have an opinion on this blog one way or the other when it comes to military freedom of tweet. There should be some interesting debate on this topic as the newly enlisted become increasingly tech savvy.

It does make you stop and think about how much and how personal the information is that we throw around today. Remember, Boris is listening.

Bookmark and Share

Diversity

August 4 2009

“Please don’t write another blog post about the economy,” says I, but it can’t be helped. Diversification, failure and opportunity suggest changes in the advertising industry according to a recent article in The Economist.

It seems that like consumables, houses, and cars, this would be a great time to buy advertising. Not just media, but also services.

credit: pensionriskmatters.com

For bargain hunters this may not be the case. It turns out this “little” recession proves to be a great opportunity for the ad industry to reinvent itself, diversify and roll out new products and services. Agencies might find equal or greater value in home-grown projects. So clients’ projects must offer agencies at least the same value without overlooking relationships and LCV.

If left to our own devices, agencies actually do better work when the client is not involved. Sounds bad, but it’s true. To be fair, our clients face pressure from above, below and beside. Internal audiences, gatekeepers and self-proclaimed experts make marketers’ jobs a beat down. We take away the pain.

However, economic downturns allow agencies opportunities to use their skills as brand builders to assign value to commodities. When idle, with no client work, we look for ways to avoid the advertising roller coaster with diversity. Some agencies have fired clients all together, opting to become their own customer.

The peaks and valleys

Social media, you want it. Twitter, you got it. Brand evangelist, you need them. Despite all that, media media–the old school kind–still delivers customers to the store.

Don’t get me wrong, social media is not a flash in the pan, but agencies that get locked into the old school business model with new media will miss the boat.

Agencies need to push themselves to do what we do best, be creative. Our clients should demand more and better solutions with better cost structures based on results not billable hours and intangibles.

I encourage you to read the article “Nothing to shout about“. A sidebar entitled “Stretching the accordion” is not a bad read either.

As always, you should follow VLG on Twitter.

Bookmark and Share