Back in September!

First of all, a pet peeve. It’s still about reaching your target audience. It really bothers me to read articles that rave about social media for marketing, written in a way that makes me think the author is 25 years old and truly believes that everyone texts or tweets. I have a client who sells to a demographic dominated by male managers of near-retirement age, guys who prefer to print out their emails. Social media would be irrelevant to this target audience. However, this also means that in five or six years, a younger generation of managers will step into those shoes, and there may be good reason for this client to review their online marketing strategy.

Here’s my personal take on what works, and in order of effectiveness:

Customer Reviews – a ton of studies from sites such as Bazaarvoice have shown that when customers read positive recommendations about a product or company, their trust level goes up, conversion rates go up, value of each purchase goes up. So add a feedback mechanism to your website, and make sure your product or service lives up to its billing. If you receive a nice note from a customer, ask permission to quote. Challenge: collecting a good sample of reviews and keeping current. Be prepared to deal with negative comments.

Question and Answer tools – this doesn’t get rid of the old FAQ page, but Q&A tools allow for interactive feedback from your customer community. When questions get answered by another user, the customer gives it more credence. Challenge: unless your company has a large and active user community, it could take a while for questions to get answered and answers could be inaccurate, depending on the knowledge level of the person replying. You may need to moderate and reply in a timely manner. If so, always identify yourself as a company employee.

Twitter – this is the 21st century version of word of mouth, and word of mouth is still the consumer’s number one choice when it comes to trusted information sources. Challenge: not to be approached lightly. Many are the tales of companies who made one bad tweet, and caused their reputation to plummet. There is more to Twitter than just monitoring tweets and contributing to discussions. This needs a marketing plan, consistent messaging, and some dedicated resource to monitor the discussion.

Facebook – many companies have launched Facebook pages. The most successful have managed to create a community of “fans” around their products and keep things lively. Challenge: if you’re just starting out, you have to work to build up your fan base. As with Twitter, needs a marketing plan, consistent messaging, and some dedicated resource to monitor the discussion.

Blogging – the best blogs provide information or entertainment (think new product news, views, jokes) and do so on a regular and consistent basis. If your blog allows comments, it’s a good way to interact with customers. Done right, blogs can attract links, enhance your brand, and position you as an expert in your industry. Challenge: as with Twitter and Facebook, a company/retail blog needs to be launched with a marketing plan that defines goals, frequency of update, an editorial calendar or similar concept; and also you will need someone who is churning out content. It’s a lot of work because nothing looks sadder than an out-of-date blog – looks like you’ve given up on the business.

It’s no coincidence I seem to have ranked these with a lot of consideration for the amount of work involved. Customer Reviews are at the top. This is the most forgiving tactic for small companies. You can gradually build up your collection of customer comments, publish them when you can. Go lower down the list, and the workload increases. You need to dedicate resources and respond in real time – really make the commitment.

I take a cautious approach towards social media as marketing tools. They seem so light hearted and spontaneous at first glance, but in practice they need a lot of nurturing, monitoring, and fresh content if they are to contribute effectively to your overall marketing plan. That is still the main goal of any marketing professional: to execute on a marketing plan that reaches the right target audience. In this context, social media would be just one element of an integrated marketing plan, which could include traditional print, trade show attendance, news releases, or contributed articles to consumer or trade publications. Whatever gets to your target audience.

When we first took his company to market several years ago, he had just bought the business. For long-term planning purposes, I asked him about his exit strategy, and he replied that there were two options: build up the business to a point where revenues from a large installed base allowed him to cruise into retirement, or to sell the business one day.

In order to maximize resale value, it was key for the company to build brand awareness – superior technology doesn’t promote itself, I don’t care what engineers say. As a new player, another challenge was credibility. Plus, the company had a small marketing budget. When you run into this situation, the client has to be willing to commit a fixed budget every year so that even if the marketing campaign is low-key, it’s consistent every year. When there are good years, you can bump up the marketing activities, but the baseline remains consistent.

We allocated the major part of the company’s marketing budget to placing ads in the premier publication for his industry. Not full page ads, and not in every issue, but decent size ads running in every other issue to create a consistent, credible presence and to get across the key messages.

Nothing gets a message across as well as quotes from happy customers, so we also ran a case study campaign, pitching ideas for contributed articles to the editor of the publication and building a relationship so that we could have some influence on the timing of the stories; the goal was to have the contributed articles run in issues where the ads didn’t. We didn’t make this happen in every issue, but on the whole, the strategy was successful, nearly every issue contained something about the company, and the market noticed.

Over the next few years, the company got tangible proof these activities were making a difference: from the number of enquiries through the company’s website to the number of attendees at trade shows who came to see the product. The client came back from one show and told me, with a big grin, that one of the major players had been heard to ask “Who ARE these guys?”

Now a competitor has approached them about buying the company. The client is convinced that a consistent approach to marketing has helped establish brand value, making the company a valuable target for acquisition.  Love it when good things happen to good clients.

One of the highlights of the month for me was writing a feature story for the Microsoft Research website about the amazing work their Natural Language Processing (NLP) group did for the aid effort in Haiti.

Ever wonder how disaster relief workers communicate with victims who speak a different language? How many translators can they make available to the various humanitarian agencies?

It turns out that between translation technology and cellular broadband wireless coverage, some of the aid workers can get access to smart phone apps and translation web sites. Web sites such as CrisisCommons have volunteers who leverage technology to support aid efforts, and some have built mobile applications that make use of translation tools or websites.

However, Haitian Creole is not on the list of major languages supported by the online translation services. When a Microsoft employee who was involved in the aid effort approached the NLP about solving this problem, the research group pulled together a Haitian Creole translation system in five, you heard me, five days.

Translator Fast-Tracks Haitian Creole

Why post this on a blog? Because the research group hopes that the word gets out so that more people make use of the system — and that includes developers who build applications that benefit the aid effort. See the “What You Can Do to Help” section at the end of the article, and pass it on.

When a company wants a really effective sales tool, there are not many kinds of collateral that deliver as much impact as a well-written case study. A case study contains so many positive elements: it’s a customer testimonial; it helps prospects relate to a real-life situation; it can be used as content for a website; it can be content for a company or customer newsletter; it can be pitched to publications as a feature article. If published, the magazine reprints make an even stronger selling piece, since it implies editorial approval.

Despite the high value of case studies, there have been very few times in my career where a case study assignment has been a smooth, uninterrupted process. Why is it so difficult to actually write a case study? Because the stars that need to be in alignment are mostly outside your control. So before you hire a writer to work on “a bunch of case studies”, only to have this resource sitting and waiting for the go-ahead, here is the project workflow. In an ideal world, of course.

Communicate your plan to Sales. Salespeople are always eager to promote their successes. Have them nominate customers who would make good case study candidates. Unless Marketing has a direct relationship with the customer contact, ask Sales to sell the case study idea to the customer and provide you with an introduction to the contact who will work with you on the story. You want to avoid situations where you build plans around a customer who turns out to be ‘not ready’.

Confirm that the customer’s company policy allows case studies. Companies are more wary than ever of talking about their operations or recommending vendors in public. If their industry or company is under scrutiny, PR activities come to a standstill (except for damage control) and only the highest priority activities get any attention. Helping to promote a vendor does not come under the list of priorities, even at the best of times. But if the company is open to a case study, find out what the parameters are. Sometimes there are no guidelines, it’s a “let’s see what you come up with” situation, and the story goes to their Marketing and Legal departments for review on a case by case basis.

Communicate your plans to the Customer. It’s good to prepare briefing notes for your customer contact, to make his/her job easier if the idea needs to be sold to the customer’s organization. Include the general intent of the story – the classic is to describe a challenge, the solution requirements, the solution deliverables and implementation, the happy situation afterwards. Include how the story will be used: in a data sheet, on the website, as a contributed article to a certain publication.

Build in lead time for customer reviews. You may have pre-sold the story idea to a publication, and your friendly editor is on deadline and waiting for your story. Legal and Marketing approval from a customer can take longer than writing the story, and you want the friendly editor to stay friendly, so avoid making deadline promises you can’t keep.

Project manage the process. Your writer has to develop the case study with help from various subject matter experts (SME). The salesperson provides some background on the before and after, Marketing provides messaging and the benefits to highlight, the systems engineer outlines the implementation challenges, the customer contact provides their view of how your product has vastly improved productivity and delivered on cost savings. The customer is only one SME; the others are from your own organization and probably very busy. You need to help make the connections happen. Then, once the story goes to the customer for review, you or someone with job title clout needs to track the review and approval process. Nudge things along in a professional, courteous way.

Follow up and get more case studies. I can pretty much guarantee that if you started out with a list of ten case study candidates, that even if you do everything right, a few will opt out along the way. Or get too busy to work with you. No problem. Maintain a list of case study candidates, both new customers and the existing ones who opt out. Follow up to find out if their situation has changed. The goal is to have an ongoing case study program so you can freshen up your website and collaterals with new stories. Ping Sales regularly to find out if they have any customers who would make good case studies.

When to work on case studies. I recommend initiating a case study with the customer shortly after your solution has been installed. The project will still be top-of-mind with the customer and you’ll get more attention. Their implementation team will still be there for a few months after it goes live, their impressions will be fresh, and they are going to be as eager as you to promote their success. It’s still honeymoon time. Wait a year and that team or manager may have been transferred to another project and you’ll be speaking to a newcomer who lacks knowledge about the original reasons for bringing in the solution, and who may not be as positive.

Perhaps you are both writer and project manager for some case studies. Well, as you can see, writing the story is the least of your challenges.

For those struggling in war-torn and impoverished countries, a “good” day means being able to fill a bucket with clean water or sending a child to school.  Over the past two years, a group of friends have been giving donations to charities in lieu of gifts to each other. After all, we have everything we need, and more stuff won’t improve our lives significantly. But a small donation can make the difference between hope and despair for someone in a third-world country.  So before you allocate your Christmas budget, consider these organizations and be truly thankful for your bad year:

Kiva.com: This micro-finance organization uses lending to alleviate poverty.  Kiva works through established local microfinance partners around the world, focusing on low income entrepreneurs. They disburse small loans –ranging from hundreds to a few thousand dollars – that traditional banks are not set up to deal with. For as little as $25 you can pitch in to help a small business. Their website allows you to select the entrepreneur, making this a person-to-person micro-lending arrangement. Once your loan is repaid, you can re-invest in another worthy small business.

Women for Women International:  This organization helps women rebuild their lives after war has taken away their homes, families, community and self-confidence.  They operate in truly desperate locations: Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Kosovo, Nigeria, Rwanda, and the Sudan. During and after conflict, women are the most vulnerable to violence and bear a disproportionate burden of poverty. WWI educates women, typically in a one-year program where women learn an income-earning skill, literacy and about their rights. Donate $27 a month for 12 months to sponsor a woman, and the money goes to supporting her basic needs while she attends classes.

Doctors Without Borders: No political or religious affiliations, just some modern-day heroes going into situations even the Red Cross hesitates to enter. Armed conflict, natural disasters, disease, or famine are all part of their mandate for humanitarian action. Enough said.

• Cut out program elements altogether: stop advertising completely or stop attending all shows.
• Do more with less skilled staff: push junior team members to fill the roles that that senior people used to perform.
• Do less of the same: fewer webinars, fewer trade shows, less advertising.

What’s the impact of such decisions? There’s financial expediency and then there is perception.  Who was it that said “Perception is reality”?

Stopping completely. One client has a competitor who has vanished completely from trade shows and magazine print ads. This has generated speculation about the financial viability of that company, an extremely negative perception to contend with, especially in an industry where customers count on long-term supplier relationships.

Doing less of the same would have been a better decision for this competitor.  Tightening the belt is a responsible decision that people can understand, but vanishing from the scene only confirms their worst suspicions and create concerns even for loyal customers. You still need to reach out and convey your message; no communications means you have no way of exercising control over market perceptions. Bump up other means of communication: do more cost-effective online/email promotions, drop some postcards in the mail, submit case studies to those magazines to get some free publicity (and make sure they are well-written).

Using less skilled people. I’ve known start-ups who tried to economize by hiring inexperienced (cheap) programmers, marketing staff, or salespeople.  This is a false economy: think about the ultimate cost of poor code or product being late-to-market; think about untrained salespeople ruining your reputation with customers.

And as for marketing, anyone can spend a lot of money and make it look good, but when you have a severely constrained budget, that is the time you most need experienced, effective marketing professionals; otherwise the risk is a “marketing plan” that is just a list of things-to-do that don’t deliver results – in the end, a waste.  In my opinion, start-ups are the ones that need experienced people the most.  They can’t afford to be training staff on-the-job; they have a critical window in which to deliver results.  Senior marketing professionals are the ones who can analyze results, review goals, and re-tool campaigns to support your business goals. You want people who can draw from a deep well of experience, assess what will and won’t work for your situation, and execute on plans with no fuss. If you are unable to hire, at least bring in an experienced consultant to develop a plan for you. Your junior staff will do a far better job of executing on a good marketing plan with some guidance.

Doing less of the same. Of the three typical responses I’ve dealt with, this would seem to be the best option, but even this merits some re-thinking. When your budget gets cut and even when it doesn’t, it’s always good to review the effectiveness of past activities and consider whether those same campaigns would be effective under current conditions. Get creative with less resources rather than just doing less.

Trade shows are expensive, and often the first to go.  But are there other ways of achieving presence at a particularly important show? Frankly I’ve never thought of booth presence as the reason for attending a show. Your best ROI comes from setting up meetings before the show, and using the event as a convenient place to meet. If your company has a culture of using trade shows as a venue for holding pre-scheduled meetings with customers, prospects, or editors, then you are in a good position to achieve good results without a booth by going ahead and scheduling those meetings as usual before the show; but rather than meet at the booth, meet elsewhere at the show.  I’ve known companies who rented hotel suites and used them very effectively as private meeting rooms. It’s all in the pre-show preparation.

As for print ads, you may want to run them less frequently or go from full-page to half-page.  But don’t just cut back, think of ways to continue maintaining visibility: can you increase the frequency of email newsletters? Create some inexpensive postcard mail outs? Is this a good time to launch some web seminars to educate prospects and nudge them along the sales cycle?

I don’t consider any of these observations to be original or brilliant.  But at times like these when the economy is bad, clients seem to freeze up and forget the lessons of the past.  Consider this blog entry as a gentle reminder that there are always creative ways to maintain visibility and a strong message – even with a reduced budget. Just don’t vanish from the horizon – it could cost you more in the long run.

I started remembering how, after a few of these workshops, it became easy to tell whether the attendees were just going through the motions as prescribed by senior management or truly committed to a successful deployment.

Stakeholder attendance: for me this is the single most telling indication of senior management commitment and interest, also known as, imperative to succeed. If there are VPs or CXO level managers at the table, it’s a good sign.  It sends the message down the ranks that this is a serious, strategic undertaking that the executives are monitoring closely.  If there is a cross-section of departments represented, it’s also a good sign because process change rarely happens in a vacuum and you want to be dealing with people who recognize this.

For example, if a field service group changes the way they troubleshoot on-site, there are implications for the technical support people who take the trouble call; there may be a requirement for product development to include or invent new features that support the new procedures; product management may need to review pricing structure for both product and support; sales may need to learn about the new service offering.  These groups need to be part of the discussion; quite often, they are the ones to contribute the most effective issues and solutions by filling in the missing pieces of the knowledge puzzle.

Workshop size: I’d rather have a small, focused group than a classroom size group of managers. The dynamics of a large group tend to turn it from a workshop to a lecture; people are less inclined to join in the conversation and more self-conscious about offering up ideas.  If the workshop is made up of decision-makers from each affected department, the ones who normally phone each other when glitches happen, it works much better.

Leadership, not cost savings: companies often use cost savings to justify the purchase because there is a pro forma to go through.  This happens even when the decision-makers can see that the technology will allow their business to take a leadership position and leap ahead of the competition.  When this is the case, it always comes out during the workshops.  Then I know that there is a champion or two who will drive adoption of the technology and come up with creative new solutions that get everyone so excited that the group will come to consensus on how to implement the basics (cost-savings, efficiency) just to get to a point where they are able to make that big leap.

Follow-up: During a workshop, I like to document the tasks that need follow-up after the workshop, and have members of the workshop volunteer or be volunteered for those tasks.  I don’t even need to check back 30 days later.  The responsiveness of the group says it all, as does the enthusiasm of the person who owns the project – how will he/she drive the process to execute on the plans?

If there is consensus on goals, priorities and requirements, then technical and operational planning become simple; which features to deploy and when, what are the logistics that need to happen, what are the internal and external communications programmes?

Sales carries a quota: in cases where the technology will impact the end-customer, and there are benefits to the company in having high customer adoption (of the new technology or service offering), if the sales executive is willing to have his/her team carry a quota or get bonuses based on adoption, it’s one of the best omens for success.

In conclusion:

The title of this blog is somewhat tongue-in-cheek because is it really possible 100% of the time to use a workshop to gauge the success of a new program or technology?  After all, a lukewarm campaign can find new life and a sizzling start can fizzle out.

With a technical audience, it’s hard to bill a workshop as “process change management”.  It can be technology deployment, it can be project planning, it can be road map prioritization, anything but those dread words “process change”.  So when the right people show up, play nice, and figure this out for themselves – it’s a good omen for project success.  It’s not a substitute for formal change management procedures, but it starts things down the right path because the most important ingredient for project success isn’t the technology, it’s the people.

It’s an uneasy time for the industry, and we know that manufacturers are hurting.  This is an opportunity to show the market that despite the downturn, Dynacore is solid, doing well, and even acquiring major new customers; oh and by the way — if you want to visit a reference site, there’s now one in Hawaii.

Before Dynacore shipped out the hollowcore extruders to Hawaii, we dressed them up in (admittedly tacky) Hawaiian decorations and did a photo shoot.  My favorite design team at Honeycomb Creative made up a post card we are mailing out to conference attendees.  “We can’t send you to Hawaii, but we can send Hawaii to you”.  The offer is: come to the Dynacore booth for a chance to win a Hawaiian gift basket worth more than $100, shipped to your home.  Dynacore has even agreed to ship the tacky Hawaiian decorations with the trade show booth, to continue the theme while we are there.  Fun, but making a point.

I especially want to point out my favorite mention of the article, from a blog by Mary Jo Foley, industry pundit and Microsoft-watcher.  In it she says:

I’ve had Gazelle (the project which started out as “MashupOS”) explained to me a couple of times, but I never quite understood it. The new Microsoft-authored article, however, actually helped me understand more about where Microsoft is going with this project.

Yes! This is exactly the sort of response I want from clients and readers – complex subjects rendered easy to understand.