With more than 50 Million visitors per month and more than 100 million pageviews, slideshare is one of the top websites in the world and should be a key focus of any B2B content marketing program.

According to Comscore, Slideshare is used by business owners and business executives at a rate 5 times any other social network! The top categories in Slideshare are Business and Technology, followed by Education, Travel and Health.

In its own blog, slideshare released an infographic celebrating its 10 millionth uploaded presentation. They even curated a selection of resources to help you understand what to upload to slideshare.

Can marketers create effective slideshare decks?

I think we certainly get lots of practice. If you’re anything like me, you spend a good portion of your time as a marketer either creating slides yourself, helping others create slide decks, or listening to others present . . . (yes you guessed it) . . . slides.

So if we create slide decks as part of our job, why not turn some of those great ideas into something your customers can use? Think about the presentations you attend or create and consider how you can create external versions that answer key customer questions.

If your executives are presenting at conferences, ask them for the slide decks they are using along with a copy of their speaker notes. I have used this effectively for my own presentations as well as for some of our executives.

And if you are interested in additional resources to help you take advantage of the slideshare opportunity, check out some of these best-ever slideshare decks: The Brand Gap, Death by Powerpoint, Mary Meeker’s internet trends report and a Steve Jobs tribute on presentation tips.

If you’re really motivated, you could buy the book, ”The Marketer’s Guide To Slideshare by my friend Todd Wheatland (@ToddWheatland). It’s really very easy to read and presents a solid case for the Slideshare opportunity, especially for B2B Conetnt Marketers, and also presents a roadmap to converting leads.

For something a little easier to digest, Zack Tyler just uploaded these 10 Tips for Landing on the Front Page of SlideShare to help get you started on the path to success with Slideshare.

After clicking through some of these resources and slides, tell me: do you think Slideshare is the biggest opportunity in B2B Content Marketing? If not what is? I’d love to hear your thoughts . . .

The opportunity lies in defining how Big Data can help you better reach your customers with your messages in a way that gets them to act.

And this starts with simple questions like: how did your last campaign perform? Which keywords drive conversions? What websites did my prospects visit before they came to my sites? Which social conversations are spurring the actions that lead to deeper engagement with your brand?

Big Data for Marketing is easy to say but hard to do. So here I will look to a few of the “experts” on how to take advantage of all this data and turn it into real business insights that drive real business value.

Big Data Marketing Is Like Gold Mining

Dean Bedard likens Big Data marketing to gold mining when he says “it’s not enough to know where the precious stuff is. In order to reap the riches, first they have to get it out of the ground and turn it into something they can use.”

He outlines four steps to prioritizing the road to mining Big data insights including:

• Setting up a cross-functional marketing and IT team
• Prioritization of the marketing goals Big Data can help you accomplish
• Mapping the data sources to obtain reporting on key metrics supporting the main objectives (KPIs)
• Creating an “agile marketing” implementation roadmap which develops against the highest priority areas to generate the quickest value.

Big Data For Marketing Requires ‘Destination Thinking’

Matt Ariker from McKinsey had similar thoughts when he suggests marketers start their Big Data projects by thinking of the end goal and then working through all the details. This so-called “destination thinking” will help the strategic marketer avoid the traps of many Big Data Marketing projects where the deliverable becomes the end goal itself instead of the business value imagined at the outset.

The Era of Big Testing

Scott Brinker (@ChiefMarTec) suggested in my own future of marketing interview series that we need to encourage more marketing experimentation and “Big testing.”

He believes marketing needs to take advantage of both new technology and new talent to start creating hypotheses. Then to use Big Testing to prove them out – right or wrong.

For Scott, “the key to scientific marketing is actually the embrace of marketing experimentation as a driver of continuous innovation.”

Marketing Offices As Trading Room Floors

Brian Kardon (@BKardon), CMO of Lattice Engines imagines a day when marketing offices resemble trading desks with screens of real-time data streaming in and marketers yelling “buy, buy.”

But he laments, the effort by most marketing departments to develop real-time dashboards are “dwarfed by countless marketing Powerpoints and never-read marketing plans.” Brian understands the power of questions. In his own office he has dashboards that tell him:

• What was the unsubscribe rate from that new campaign?
• Which version of the email performed better – the one with the orange button or the blue button?
• What deals are stuck in the pipeline for more than 60 days?
• Which reps had the lowest win rates this year to date?
• Is Twitter sentiment for our brand trending up or down?
• What % of our customers at Dell are using Lattice right now? How does this compare to yesterday, last week or last month?
• How many unique visitors came to our site today? Where did they come from?

Big Data Marketing Must Be Illustrative

According to Jon Baron (@TagManJon) the difference between Big Data and Big Data Marketing is found not in the analyses, but in the insights that turn into actions.

Jon define Big Data as “a simplistic term which refers to the automated accumulation and analysis of audience data on a large scale.”

But emphasizes that Big Data for marketing must be illustrative of the target audience the marketer is seeking to understand. It must help us to be more efficient or effective at reaching a target audience and getting them to act on the marketing message.

Big Data Marketng Means You Understand Your Customers’ Questions

Finally in my own Big Data Marketing rant I talk about the need to understand the questions that our customers are asking when they do a Google search, visit a website or participate in a social media conversation.

I believe every marketing plan should start with an analysis of your companies “share of conversations.” This shows you not only how well known your company is in your solution space, but also how likely your customers are to act on that awareness (RT, comment and ultimately convert to a lead and a customer).

My own 4-step plan to Big Data Marketing Insights:

• Define your customers’ top keywords and topics through search analysis. Starting with a simple look at Google Trends.
• Social analytics to show what % of social conversations include mention of your brand. This is where the data gets really big.
• Insights from your Website analytics will help you understand which keywords and referring domains drive conversions.
• Finally, combine these 3 massive big data sets to help to make decisions on marketing plans, tactics and budget.

So here is a curation of thoughts from folks I follow. But let me know what you think in the comments below.

In response to my post defining social selling, I realized that I needed to take a step back and define “What is a social business?”

There is a lot of talk about the social business and too often it involves a discussion of social tools and channels. In this article I’ll offer my own definition as well as plenty of links to other resources you can check out for more ideas on how to help your organization transform into a social business.

A social business is not a business that sends a lot of Tweets or has a ton of Facebook likes. A social business is one that realizes that it operates in a more transparent and social world. And so it makes customers and employees equally as important as its shareholders and profits.

What is a Social Business?

A social business places equal value on the needs of its customers, employees, partners and shareholders.

This is not all that different from the concept behind one of the first posts I wrote 3 years ago this month. In that post, I talked about a book called “The Service Profit Chain” that inspired a lot of my early professional thoughts on marketing strategy.

The basic theory presented in the book was that happier employees generate more customers who create more profit for the business. Makes sense, right? Yet in the race to quarterly profits, many businesses still struggle with the concept.

More recently I talked about the many reasons why social business is important and I presented my own roadmap to become a social business including the need to define a social strategy that empowers social employees, activates effective content strategy and addresses the issue of culture.

Peter Kim from the Dachis Group offers his own definition of the Social Business as well as a Social Business Design. He identifies “culture, connections, participation and analytics” as the main drivers of an effective social business.

Charlene Li from Altimeter Group recently presented on the Evolution of Social Business and talked about the 6 stages of transformation: “Planning, Presence, Engagement, Formalized, Strategic, and Converged.” They surveyed a large swath of companies and found a small minority (28%) have achieved any level of social business maturity.

And then there’s my friend Jeremiah Owyang who not only nailed how to bring content strategy into the social business but also defined the next phase of social business as “the collaborative economy” which he defines as “where brands will rent, lend, provide subscriptions to products and services to customers, or even further, allow customers to lend, trade, or gift branded products or services to each other.”

Edelman’s Michael Brito writes that “social business is not about communication. It’s not about technology or Enterprise 2.0. It’s about change management. I believe this to my core.” And I think he’s absolutely right.

But what is the role of the Marketing leader in this emerging social business and collaborative economy?

In my view, marketing is uniquely positioned to lead this transformation. As more employees become socially active brand ambassadors and build their personal brand, marketing can act as the shepherd guiding the flock with good old fashioned marketing communications techniques that put the customer first, that are aligned to the business strategy and that deliver business outcomes.

Let me know what you think in the comments below. 

Photo Source

Social selling is not just about starting the sales process with social tools like Linkedin, Facebook or Twitter. Social selling is about sales people building a strong personal brand. It is about understanding the role of content and how content can be used to tell a powerful and emotional story. And it is about growing your social connections.

I even predicted that social, content and personal branding would drive the future of business in 2013.

What is Social Selling?

To me, social selling is simply the process of helping social buyers become customers. We are still trying to get our potential customers to know, like and trust us. In order to do this, sales people need to learn new ways to reach prospects through their own social networks, to create and share valuable content and ultimately, to grow their personal brand.

Social Selling is an extension of the Social Business imperative. Social Businesses are transforming their view of the world and their entire operation from an inward focus to a customer focus. Empathy is the key ingredient to the success of business in this increasingly social world.

What is Personal Branding?

To get the best answer, I turned to personal branding expert Dan Schawbel. Dan defines personal branding as:

Those characteristics that make you unique and how you communicate that to the world. The objective of personal branding is professional success and is directly linked to the success of the company we serve.

Personal branding means you are not wasting your time because you are on Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin during company time. It means that your time spent on social networks is helping you to find and nurture your next customers and grow the business.

Social + Content = Personal Branding Success

To be successful in social selling, sales people need to build a strong personal brand. This starts with putting a stop to the overly-promotional content marketing echo chamber. It means our sales people start to grow strong social connections and become effective storytellers. It means they start to pay attention to the factors that help them raise their social influence on platforms like Klout.

5 Steps To Social Selling Success

Social selling success is comprised of both making new connections and sharing great content. You start by identifying your target audience and connecting with their network of influencers. With content, you seek to surround your target audience and those who influence them with content they want to consume.

Social selling success does not need to take hours a day. You can find time for social media by cutting out activities that do not grow help you help your social network. Recently I was asked by one of our sales leaders to define a “day in the life” of a successful social sales person. Here’s my 5 steps to social selling success:

1. Define and “touch” key influencers in your space. Set a goal to engage with a certain number of influencers every day. Create an influencer twitter list, subscribe to their blog or company RSS feeds, comment on and share influencer blogs. Use social platforms to “talk” to your connections. Ask questions like “can you recommend the best websites you go to for helpful information? Or what conferences are you attending this year?
2. Add new connections. Set a goal of adding a specific number of connections every day. On Linkedin, always use personalized email introductions based on something personal. Use Klout to tell you who influences your target and their influencers
3. Check your social inbox: Twitter mentions, Linkedin, RSS feeds.
4. Add RSS feeds to email you share-able content for your network. Go here for a full list.
5. Share at least one story from the sources above with your network on Linkedin, Twitter or Facebook.

Social + Content = Your Personal Brand from Michael Brenner

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Previous interviews covered Social Business, Creativity, Big Data, Customer Experience, Thought Leadership, Content Culture, the Future of Search, the Science of Marketing, Content Brands and much more.

Today’s post comes from Velocidi CMO Margaret Molloy (@MargaretMolloy) and includes her coverage of the discussions at the recent CMO Club Summit.

With more than 100 CMOs in attendance, the agenda was packed with fantastic panels and superb peer-to-peer conversation. Though the lessons from the event were numerous, I believe that the key insights I gleaned were that there are five major mindset shifts that CMOs need to make today, or risk missing opportunities to deliver tangible impact.

1. CMOs must walk in customers’ shoes

Top performing CMOs consistently recognize that customer-centricity is more than a buzz word—they understand that having a first-hand knowledge of the end-to-end customer experience is critical. Katrina Klier (@KatrinaKlier) from Accenture, put it plainly: “Be a user, trier, tester. Don’t rely on the experience of others, get your hands dirty.” The benefits of this field-based approach are manifold. As Sandra Zoratti (@sandraz) from Ricoh pointed out: “The best way to give an idea a sense of urgency is to invoke the voice of the customer.”

As it relates to getting closer to customers, it was clear that big data was top of mind as a means to help marketers “walk in customers’ shoes” at scale. But while big data may serve as a new route to customer insight and behavior, it hasn’t yet fully lived up to that promise. Perhaps data alone is not the answer—intuition and action are required. Jonathan Becher (@jbecher), SAP, spelled it out, “It’s about big decisions, not big data.” I believe CMOs must walk in customers’ shoes (often), ask the right questions, and be guided by experience to deliver the right outcomes for their businesses, and their clients.

2. Firms need to differentiate through brand experience

This was a recurring theme throughout the conference. Cammie Dunaway (@cwd8) of Kidmania took it a step further by linking customer understanding to engagement: “True engagement is about changing customer behavior.” Mary Ann Fitzmaurice of American Express OPEN shared the impact of the Small Business Saturday initiative, a program designed to help small businesses: “Our customers love us because they know we have their backs.”

In addition, Jonathan Becher of SAP underlined the magnitude of this desired shift: “There are now more mobile phones in the world than people.” When we look at mobile and social together, it’s clear we are now in an “always-on” era. Becher emphasized the urgency of the situation: “Business will need to run in real time to facilitate personalized engagement with customers.”

Dunaway also offered a powerful analogy to illustrate the contrast between a customer and an advocate relationship to a brand: “The difference between customers and advocates is like the distinction between tourists and citizens in a country.”

In my view, to motivate customers to that level of devotion requires CMOs to deliver great experience at every customer touchpoint.

3. The CMO role is a great gig, but it requires major skills

The CMOs in attendance engaged in candid discussion on skills and careers. Tom Seclow (@SpencerStuView) of Spencer Stuart presented a case study with the message that CMOs’ tenure continues to climb as they become more entrenched in their roles and expand their influence across their organizations. However, he warned that: “Short-term thinking and focus on quarterly earnings is a big challenge.” Douwe Bergsma (@douwebergsma) of Georgia-Pacific laid out three critical requirements for the role: “CMOs need to be 1) scientists 2) storytellers and 3) army generals.” And if that wasn’t enough ground to cover, Maryam Banikarim (@maryamb) of Gannett told CMOs that they need to “have creative agility, be connectors, [and] use interpersonal skills.”

Despite the heavy responsibility, the mood about the CMO role was upbeat. Mark Wilson of Avaya captured the sentiment when he contended that: “There has never been a better time to be a marketer.” Terri Funk Graham, Chairman of The CMO Club Presidents Circle (formerly of Jack in the Box), made an assessment that resonated with me in particular: “The most important skill of a great CMO is courage.”

I’d like to add curiosity. Without curiosity you don’t ask the great questions that will inform the intuition and insight to fuel that courage—as well as all the other necessary skills listed above.

4. Marketing teams need to behave more like smart startups

The innovation imperative surfaced many times during the Summit. SAP’s Becher hammered home the importance of culture: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch and dinner, so fix your culture to make your strategy work.” Kidmania’s Cammie Dunaway also offered pragmatic analysis: “Changing organizational behavior, is as much about muscle memory as resistance.” Stephanie Anderson of Time Warner Cable, reinforced that point: “We need to continually train and educate internally.”

Nancy Smith of iRobot (@NancyDSmith) also offered practical tips based on iRobot’s rule: “Leave at least 5 percent of your budget for crazy stuff (aka experiments). Why not give everyone on your team an opportunity to do a cool project, to be a part-time intern?” On organization, Denise Incandela of Saks Fifth Avenue advised: “Create an environment that rewards innovation and rapid testing. Don’t say yes to every new thing, focus and do what your firm can do well. Think scalable programs.”

To me, this body of advice can be summed up in a simple idea: marketing departments need to behave more like high-performing startups. CMOs must embrace experimentation, fail fast, get close to the customer, reduce internal approval cycles, and focus on fewer, more actionable metrics.

5. The B2B versus B2C dichotomy is becoming irrelevant

CMOs drawing inspiration from an artist who’s embraced change.
(L-R) Katrina Klier, Stephanie Anderson, Cyndi Lauper and Margaret Molloy.

We had a vigorous debate over dinner about whether the B2B/B2C divide was still meaningful. Jonathan Becher of SAP nailed it with his pithy insight: “Glass buildings don’t buy software, people do.” Although there are differences in tactics in B2B versus B2C models, the need to engage buyers with relevant content, in their vernacular, and in a timely manner is common to both B2B and B2C.  David Newberry (davidnewbs“>@davidnewbs) of Pitney Bowes reasoned that: “The widespread availability of information means that all buyers are more informed than ever before.”

This erosion of asymmetry of information, the consumerization of IT, and the lower entry-point pricing of many products (e.g., freemium models) is compounding the need to think of all buyers as people—whether they are acting in a B2B or B2C capacity. Becher captured the shift well: “Marketing’s job is not to help sales people sell, it’s to help buyers buy.”

I left the Summit inspired, eager for the next opportunity to engage with colleagues, and in awe of the opportunity that we as CMOs have to drive real value for our businesses, and most importantly, our clients.

Did you attend Summit? What mindset shifts do you believe CMOs most urgently take?

For additional perspectives on the Summit, I encourage you to read these great posts by fellow Summit Bloggers Drew Neisser and Lana McGilvray.

Margaret Molloy is CMO at Velocidi, a full-service digital marketing agency. (margaret.molloy@velocidi.com). Follow her on Twitter (@MargaretMolloy) or connect on LinkedIn for additional insights from her CMO conversations.

This was one of the main points on “the art of storytelling” presented by Julie Roehm, Chief Storyteller at SAP at the Inbound Marketing Summit on April 3, 2013.

Julie showed many visual and multimedia examples of how storytelling has been around for as long as humans have walked the earth.

The first TV ad was run by Bulova in 1941. The first political TV spot was run by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Apple’s “1984” helped propel Superbowl advertising to the heights we see today. And Yahoo started the shift to online media when it ran the first banner ad in 1994.

Across the ages, brands have been using the art of storytelling to reach their audience. According to Julie, “Today with digital media and emerging technologies, the challenges, and the opportunities are boundless.”

But, she continued “to break through the clutter, meaningful, one to one conversations with our customer is now more important than ever.”

Bottom line: we need to tell more human stories. We need to touch our audience in a personal way. And we need to tell stories that people want to hear.

One great example Julie showed included one of my favorite commercials for Google Chrome.

She then showed one example of how SAP is telling more human stories through the voice of our customers – showing how we help our customers to help their customers and improve lives.

To read more about Julie’s presentation, check out this summary and enjoy the full presentation below.

You can follow Julie on twitter @jaroehm.

SAP’s Chief Storyteller, Julie Roehm on “The Art of Storytelling.”

I have been asked by the good folks behind the B2B Content 2 Conversion Conference to deliver my view on how to build a content marketing hub. Enclosed here you will find my slides and main speaker notes. Once the video is ready, I will post that too.

Preparing To Build Your Content Hub

Before you can begin building your content marketing destination, you need to understand (and be able to articulate) that your role as a B2B Marketer is not to explain to the world what it is that you sell. But to show the world how what you sell helps your buyers. That’s right, B2B Marketing is not about promotion. It is about telling stories. Stories from your customer’s point of view on how what you sell has helped them.

In my presentation I present a brief history of how the world has changed for marketers. And yet, stories remain a critical component of marketing. Stories present an opportunity for B2B Marketers to not just meet the needs of our buyers, but to delight them as we enable them during the buying journey.

The Content Hub Business Case

The next step is to present your business case. To build a content marketing hub, you need to show how your current content marketing efforts fail to meet the needs of your buyers. A couple of ideas:

• Search metrics: show how your business is missing out on vital conversations happening in the earliest stages of the buying process.
• Web analytics: show how most visitors to your site already know who you are.
• Content analytics: show how the content you create is mostly late stage or isn’t being downloaded by anyone. Calculate the costs of this waste.

Once you’ve presented your business case and gained the approval to move forward, you can take the following steps to build your content hub.

8 Steps to Build A Content Hub That Converts

1. Design: Look at existing market examples to help you design the site. Weigh the pros and cons of building within your existing domain or creating a new one
2. Branding: Define how subtle or prominent the branding will be on the site
3. Keywords: Conduct a ton of keyword research to determine the topics your audience is interested in
4. Content Strategy: Define the content strategy and sources of your content: how much will you create, curate or syndicate the content that meets your buyers’ needs
5. Conversion: define the processes that will pull your visitors into an active relationship that converts down the sales funnel. Focus on creating value for the user and test different approaches.
6. Editorial: Create an editorial board including all your brands’ content resources
7. Goals: Articulate your goals and report on them consistently
8. Test and Learn: dream up new ideas to test, analyze the results, learn and repeat.

How and why to create your content marketing hub from Michael Brenner

Let me know what you think in the comments below. And please follow along on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ or Subscribe to the B2B Marketing Insider Blog for regular updates.

Those are the words SAP Chief Marketing Officer Jonathan Becher (@jbecher) used to open his keynote presentation to the CMO Club during their recent summit meeting in New York City on April 11-12. The event included more than 100 Chief Marketing Officers from some of the world’s leading brands.

In a world of accelerated change, Jonathan highlighted the trends that are causing marketers to rethink the future and make fundamental transformations to their business. He urges CMOs to embrace the changes, which have led to an unprecedented empowerment of people: “the convergence of trends is creating an opportunity for us to rethink the future and embrace change. We are at an inflection point.”

The three types of changes that are converging to create the most profound and rapid changes in our history:

• First, an emerging middle class across geographies will create a new segment of customers that represent extensive growth opportunities for businesses. At the same time, pressure increases on natural resources and social services. Consequently, every aspect of your business strategy and execution – manufacturing, supply chains, and employee base – can become stretched and overloaded.
  Implication: Businesses will need to find a way to manage existing and shared resources better.

• Second, more than one billion people are engaged in social networks today. By 2013, more than 15 billion devices will be capable of connecting to the Internet, from cars, to washing machines, to the clothes we wear. Both factors are resulting in an explosion in the volume of data – creating a phenomenon called Big Data. As a result, more data has been created in the last five years than in the entire history of mankind. Unlocking the secrets inside this data presents breakthrough opportunities for businesses.
  Implication: Businesses will need to find a way to manage Big Data and find ways to use it to their advantage.

• Third, the way the information is created and consuming has changed. There are now more mobile phones in the world than people. Combined with social and device connectivity, we are now in an “always-on” era.
  Implication: Business will need to run in real time to facilitate personalized engagement with customers.

The collective result of these trends is the unprecedented empowerment of people – as consumers, as employees, as citizens, and as societies. Rethinking the future implies making fundamental transformations to your business. This transformation involves getting closer to your customers on a personalized engagement basis – a “segment of one” with more insights, delivering to their needs with speed (in real time), while still maintaining the efficiencies of managing operations and resources better.

Check out the slides below. Watch the SAP Run Like Never Before video Jonathan showed the audience. And follow Jonathan on Twitter @jbecher.

See “Journey To The Future of Marketing” on Slideshare, by @SAP CMO Jonathan Becher (@jbecher)

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

A few years ago I found Tony Zambito online and we became instant friends despite the fact that we have never spoken live or met in person.

And so today, I would like to bring in Tony’s perspective to our Future of Marketing series. We have already covered related topics such as the customer experience, focusing on your customer’s brand, listening and agile marketing.

You can follow Tony @TonyZambito, on Linkedin, Google+ and soon on TonyZambito.com

Tell Us About Yourself

I am best known for founding the concept of buyer personas specifically for marketing and sales. In 2002, I took a chance. I asked – why not buyer personas? What if marketing and sales can benefit from the use of personas and persona research as had product and software design?

That year, I pioneered the concept of buyer personas and a buyer research methodology designed to inform marketing and sales strategies. I had a strong belief by researching and understanding buyers at a deeper level – it was possible to improve decision-making in marketing and sales. I was privileged to work, as Chief Consulting Officer, with Alan Cooper – the founder of personas and user personas – and the brilliant interaction designers who pioneered the original concept of personas.

Prior, I served in a variety of roles including Vice President of Customer Management, Vice President of Sales, and Vice President of Marketing. Today, I am focused on evolving the concepts of buyer personas, buyer insight, and a new capability I call Buyer Foresight™ to help marketing make better informed decisions.

What are the greatest challenges in marketing?

I am going to answer this question through the prism of conducting numerous on-site qualitative interviews with buyers over the past few years. Marketing is in the throes of a buyer revolution and caught flat-footed on what to do about it. New technologies have awakened a sleeping giant who for decades had a longing to control more of the buyer-seller relationship. The simple fact is – now they can.

On a macro level, marketing is challenged in understanding how to cope with the “consumerization” of all things. This has caused monumental shifts in buyer behaviors. And will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. As a result, I am seeing plenty of unhealthy “guessing” going on in marketing departments today. By “guessing” I mean what amounts to hit or miss attempts to reach and connect with buyers. I see a variety of demand generation, lead generation, and content marketing tactical efforts implemented not rooted in sound buyer behavior understanding.

At the micro level buyers desire improved means from marketing to help them make better decisions – without being sold-to in old conventional ways. Expectations are rising on the part of buyers due to consumerization in business. Buyers desire instant accessibility to information and insight. In addition, buyers are evolving their demands to co-create their own solutions as a byproduct of their new empowerment. This is presenting enormous challenges for marketing to adapt when stuck in a product marketing mindset. Where processes are linear and there is little room to co-create.

What I hear from buyers is this actual quote – “don’t force fit me into your view of how I buy.” Which means marketing is challenged to rethink views of commonly held beliefs about buying stages and the buyer’s journey associated with product marketing as well as sales. My qualitative research with buyers tells me this. Buyers are moving at a faster pace away from linear buying processes and stages faster than marketing is able to keep up.

How Does Marketing Overcome These Challenges

To overcome challenges, marketing has to reset the table on how they come to understand buyers. Marketing, and much of corporate America, is stuck in hindsight. Much of what is being labeled insight is really hindsight – it is rooted in the past. The belief data analysis alone can provide all the answers are still a very strong part of business DNA.

We are dealing with the biggest shifts in buyer behaviors in the last 100 years. To understand it, we need to balance quantitative with qualitative understanding. The same resources being afforded to Big Data need to be equally given to qualitative buyer behavior research. Corporations need to make adequate investment in the expertise required.

The expertise I am referring to borrows heavily from the social sciences. Marketing needs to bridge well with the social science professions in order to develop an understanding of how behaviors and cultures are transforming. Just as there has been a call for journalistic expertise for content marketing, there needs to be an equal call for social science expertise to merge with business. The aim is to take the “guesswork” out of marketing and apply real understanding on how to connect with buyers.

What Is Your Prediction for the Future of Marketing?

I have been giving plenty of thought to this question during the past year. Marketing will need to transform into the role of being “oracles” for business. This will require developing skills and capacities to foster foresight internally as well as with buyers.

What do I mean by this? I believe why we are so enamored with the story of Steve Jobs and Apple is because of the genius of foresight. Apple invested in understanding both consumer and buyer behaviors. This investment gave them the foresight capacity to innovate the Apple iPhone and iPad. As we all know, these devices have radically changed our ideas of connectivity and interaction. What Apple marketing did well specifically is paint a world which allowed consumers and buyers to develop their own foresight on how their lives can be changed.

I believe the future of marketing lies in helping their own organizations as well as buyers see a new world of possibilities. Much has been predicted about how marketing will become more like publishing and journalism entities due to the rise of content marketing. This is a short-sighted tactical view in my opinion. This view needs to be balanced with a strategic vision of acquiring new talents associated with buyer behavioral research. Such a balance will create the future capacity for marketing to earn a bigger seat at the table – by delivering strategic foresight and at the same time paint new worlds for buyers to envision.

Now it’s your turn: Let me know what you think in the comments below. 

As I mention in my recap, the best part of the trip was the diversity of the points of view. The conference format and the people that attended made me think in new ways about bigger issues than I would have ever imagined.

And so as we continue our Future of Marketing interview series, I asked the man responsible for putting on the Stream event, Mark Read, CEO of WPP Digital, to get his views on the challenges facing our industry and the impact of digital across the entire business.

Mark can be found on Twitter (@Readmark) or to get in touch with the Stream Team (@WPPStream).

Tell me about yourself?

I’m Mark Read, CEO of WPP Digital. My job is to help to accelerate WPP’s transition to the digital age.

There’s a lot to do. Digital today is around one-third of our $17 billion of revenue, so we’re not doing badly, but our goal is that it should be at least 40% and soon 50% of our business. In time, the distinction between what’s digital and what’s not digital will fade but we’re not there yet. How do we plan to get to 50%?

Above all, we have to be trusted guides for our clients in making the same transition we’re making. We have to find and motivate the best digital talent, people who can inspire clients and help them use all the new channels to reach their customers. And we need to work closely with our technology partners such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft who are really media owners. We also have to find companies at the other end of the spectrum, the smaller start-ups who are changing our industry — the Facebooks and Google of tomorrow. We bring these partners together every year through Stream our digital unconference, where they (not us) set the agenda and work with our people and our clients to understand how marketing is changing.

Finally, I work with the leaders of the digital agencies and technology companies inside WPP Digital, including 24/7 Media, Acceleration, Blue State Digital, F.biz, POSSIBLE, Rockfish and Salmon to help them build their businesses and connect with client and the rest of WPP.

What is the biggest challenge for marketers?

I’d say the biggest challenge for marketers as they tackle the digital transition is getting the right balance between execution and prioritization – the two are inextricably linked.

To me, digital is an execution challenge. Doing well means getting the basics right. There’s not necessarily anything particularly complicated about any one element of execution but pulling this off at the scale that marketers require and seeing it through to results is much more complex.

Then there’s the prioritization problem. There’s always something new coming along. For instance, three years ago it was Twitter. Now it is Pinterest. Should one dive in head first to learn what is going on or is it better to wait until the medium is proved before spending time? And if you spread your efforts too thinly will you see an impact in your marketing? That’s the great advantage of TV, guaranteed cut through if you spend enough money.

What is your prediction on the future of marketing?

Let me answer it another way. It’s clear that digital is changing marketing, but we also see that digital is changing business. That’s a big opportunity for marketers who get this right.

Now it’s your turn: Let me know what you think in the comments below.

I have four lovely children, a demanding job, a wife with a successful career and more. So how do I find the time to tweet, blog, share, and comment?

The answer is simple: I make the time for social media because I think it’s important.

I believe that business people in general, and marketers especially, have an obligation to do more than just consume content or share other people’s content but to become a content creator and to contribute to your work and your life.

Now I am not trying to guilt anyone into this. I realize there are a lot of reasons why people don’t spend the time on social media even though they know they should.

There are also plenty of reasons why people don’t work out, quit smoking or stop eating too much. You know, reasons like: I’m too busy with more important stuff, I don’t know what to say, I don’t understand the tools, I don’t see the value, and my favorite excuse: social media is for kids.

In order to find the time for social media, you need to see why it’s important, how it will change your life, how it will improve your business.

And you need to understand what steps to take to be successful. I call this the Social Business Imperative. I do not think it’s a choice when you accept that we live in a social world and that only the social business will win.

So if you don’t think you have time for social media, let’s find some for you. First you have to consider: How do you spend your day?

According to The Atlantic, we spend more than a quarter (28%) of our day answering email!

According to this infographic, the average worker spends 19% of their time in meetings. And they consider half of those meetings a complete waste of time. The average worker also reported spending another 25% of their day dealing with meaningless distractions.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the problem is even worse for executives, with as much as 33% of their day spent in meetings.

Wow. So when my kids ask me what I do all day at work, maybe I should answer “I do email, sit on conference calls and listen to my colleagues talk about TV shows.” (Disclosure: these examples are purely fictitious. Any similarity to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental.)

So finding the time for social media is simply about making it a priority over emails that aren’t important, meetings that aren’t productive and the daily distractions that come along.

My main tips for making the time to blog, tweet, comment or share:

• Make a small but daily time commitment. You have to find the time to make small “investments” in social every day. Tweet once a day. Blog once a week. Do whatever works for you and be realistic. But it’s amazing what happens after a year. You’ll have sent hundreds of tweets, created dozens of blog posts, connected with lots of great people and learned more than you would have ever imagined.
• Build your content and your audience based on your passion. Write about and share what interests you and you will attract an audience of like-minded people. They will inspire you with questions and theories and unique points of view that will spawn completely new thoughts of your own. This in turn becomes the idea factory you need to consistently generate lots of great share-worthy content.
• Help others. Give-to-get (G2G), “pay it forward,” whatever you want to call it, the bottom line is that “karma” works in the social world. Share the work of people you admire and they will take a second look at your own work. Over time, you will become an authority yourself.

Are you an active social media contributor? Please share your thoughts and tips with us here.

In case you are just catching up, previous interviews have discussed Social Employees, Digital Marketing, Personal Branding, Content Brands, Customer Brands, Creativity, Big Data, Customer Experience, Thought Leadership, the Future of Search, the Science of Marketing and many more…

Today’s interview is with Chris Herbert. Chris is the founder of Mi6 Agency. Mi6 Agency creates B2B social networks & communities that build reputations, generate results and make markets. He is also the founder of ProductCamp Toronto and the Hi-tech community Silicon Halton. He tweets under the handle @B2Bspecialist.

What is the greatest challenge in marketing?

The greatest challenge for any company (small or large) is integrating the discipline of marketing across the company. Whether a company is small (less than 10 employees) or large (thousands of employees) the organization can no longer view marketing as a siloed function. Every employee regardless of their role and department needs to think, act and be accountable for marketing the company. But, before they do, they need to understand what marketing is supposed to do. The meaning of marketing has been diluted since the day when Peter Drucker said:

Marketing is so basic that it is not just enough to have a strong sales department and to entrust marketing to it. Marketing is not only much broader than selling; it is not a specialized activity at all. It encompasses the entire business. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is from the customer’s point of view. Concern and responsibility for marketing must therefore permeate all areas of the enterprise.

Marketing is the responsibility of all employees because it’s purpose is to get and keep customers. It is that simple. Marketing is not a silo, it’s not a department and it’s definitely not supposed to be creating communications materials that buyers consider “fluff”! Marketing is not the group that provide sales reps with “leads” that they never follow up with because they’re “no good”. Marketing covers: Product, Promotion, Place and Pricing. It has and should always be the case. But for some reason sales has been separated from marketing (sales falls under direct promotion) and product management has been severed from marketing.

Another challenge, at the individual level, is the fact that some marketers have no interest and no skills in understanding the underlying technologies that drive interaction, engagement and conversions. This coupled with old age thinking about controlling “the message” and head in sand positions on the use of social media and networks to listen, learn and engage with customers is a very close second place! Today’s marketer must be technologically savvy, integrate marketing across the organization and be taking the company in to new spaces and directions of market and customer engagement. S/he needs to recognize that the brand is no longer only being defined by corporate positioning but is most likely being defined externally. By the way, this has always been the case especially in B2B. How often do you believe an advertisement without validating it with people you know, people you trust and people who are impartial?

What are some best practices/tips for overcoming that challenge?

Marketing must be integrated into the business and those who traditionally didn’t do “marketing stuff” must start doing so. Marketing leaders need to put in place programs that involve other groups who will contribute to the execution of marketing programs that focus on getting and keeping customers. They, ideally should involve those group leaders, in understanding what the needs of the group is and how marketing strategies and tactics can help them achieve their core goals.

From there core marketing and business development programs are developed with product managers, sales, customer support/service and operations that are more relevant, integrated and focused on the needs of the business and core groups that operate within them.

We use a framework that helps us stay on course when helping organizations adopt marketing across their organizations. That framework includes:

• Branding and Offer Development
• Content, Communications & Community Development
• Promotion and Business Development
• Processes
• Principles
• Platforms, Systems & Tools

What is your prediction for the future of marketing?

The future of marketing is bright as long as the organization focuses on integrating it across the business so the day to day marketing activities are shared (and deemed important) by all groups. This will require organizations to collaborate and work together to make it possible for marketing to span across all groups and the day-to-day activities of key members within them.

Now it’s your turn: Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Photo Source

In our previous interviews, we’ve discussed the future of Digital Marketing, Personal Branding, Content Brands, Customer Brands, Creativity, Big Data, Customer Experience, Thought Leadership, the Future of Search, the Science of Marketing and many more…

Today’s interview is with Cheryl Burgess (@ckburgess) who along with her husband Mark Burgess (@mnburgess), has co-founded Blue Focus Marketing, and are also about to release their book on Social Employees.

Tell us: who is Cheryl Burgess?

Let’s start with the future. I am the co-author of the forthcoming book The Social Employee: How Great Companies Make Social Media Work – Success Lessons from IBM, AT&T, Dell, Cisco, Adobe, Southwest Airlines, Acxiom, and Domo, due in late summer 2013 via McGraw-Hill. Blue Focus Marketing co-founder Mark Burgess and I wrote this book after we realized that the current discussion on social business and social branding was heavy on rhetoric and prognostication but alarmingly light on actual real-world examples for other businesses to follow. While many other books have written on either social business or social branding, few combined these topics to explore the real-world success stories of major brands.

Blue Focus Marketing is a social branding consultancy that helps brands become social. We provide education, training and strategic marketing services including employee branding, content marketing and integrated marketing (what we call Brand Choreography^™) to drive brand value. We help unlock the power of Social Employee Empowerment (SEE) or as we call it our blueSEE^™ approach to building your brand from the inside out.

In 2012, Blue Focus Marketing won Marketing Sherpa’s Reader’s Choice Award for “Best Social Media Marketing Blog.” I am also the four-time winner of the Twitter Shorty Award in Marketing, and have been recognized by Fast Company and Huffington Post for my contributions to the social business, social branding, and marketing community. Recently I contributed to Wharton’s Future of Advertising 2020 Project, where I was asked to examine current trends in the marketplace and project them into the future. I also post regularly for the AT&T Networking and Exchange Blog as an external expert blogger.

Tell me about a tough or interesting challenge you/your team faces

The biggest challenge many marketers face today is how to engage and empower their employees to ignite their brands and drive brand value. This is quite a sizable challenge, but for the brands willing to rise to the task, the rewards are equally great.

Today’s businesses need to understand that social technologies aren’t barriers to productivity, but portals to connectivity. To do this, brands need to expand their definition of social media to include the many innovative enterprise systems—such as Salesforce’s Chatter or IBM’s Connections—and learn to harness those platforms to improve internal communication. If a company can do this, it will have taken the first step in a process of building a culture of social employees.

How are you approaching that challenge and what results or achievements has that approach helped you to gain?

The current challenge facing businesses today is this: you can’t communicate externally unless you communicate internally. Sounds simple, right? But, unfortunately, business culture over the last 30 years (or even longer) has tended to prize cutthroat competitiveness and information hoarding as workers attempted to climb over each other in order to get to the top.

So how do we change this? How do we build cultures where transparent internal communication and information sharing is prized above all else?

Real culture change must come from all levels of the organization, but it must be driven and modeled by the executives in the C-Suite. Successful organizations in the new business climate have dynamic, engaging social executives who know exactly how to fuel and empower their employees and show them what it means to be social. Executives must understand that “do as I say, not as I do” won’t cut it among today’s workers. If they expect their employees to adopt new social habits, they must lead the way and model those habits first.

Of course, modeling good behaviors alone won’t be enough. Brands must also empower their employees by not only providing them with the tools they need to thrive, but also by giving them the necessary training to really get how social technology affects business practices. As Michael Brenner points out in my book, The Social Employee, these kinds of oversight and programs may require new champions of change within the organization. Many companies are introducing new job roles such as Chief Content Officer or Social Business Manager to help coordinate social activities throughout the enterprise. With proper training through an incentivized, challenging rewards system, employees will feel empowered to change their own destinies.

One of the brands that really gets it, and which we describe in The Social Employee, is Adobe. Through the company’s Center of Excellence and the skillful leadership of Social Media Director Maria Poveromo, Adobe has implemented a system of “guardrails,” which it uses to help guide—but never dictate—the way employees conduct themselves through social media channels, whether externally or internally. Adobe invests in the social success of its employees from the beginning, and in so doing has been able to build a thriving culture of workers who are perfectly positioned to adapt to the constantly changing business landscape.

All of this leads to a culture of empowerment. As we explain in our book, the social employee must have the tools, training, and confidence necessary to act as brand ambassadors on behalf of their company. If employees are made to second-guess their actions, or if they feel that everything they do must first be approved by a higher-up, then the company as a whole will become a lumbering, inefficient dinosaur in an era where customers expect quick, human responses to their inquiries. Put your employees in the driver’s seat, give them the freedom to act on your brand’s behalf, and reap the benefits of the social employee.

Prediction for the Future of Marketing

The marketers that will win in the future are the ones who are laying the foundation today. The question for many, however, is how they can properly lay that foundation in a time when rapid change seems to be the only constant. Instead of trying to define exactly what the future might look like in terms of tools and toys, and instead of trying to pinpoint which trends will have legs and which ones will prove to be fads, marketers and brands must prepare for the one true inevitability: disruption.

As we explain in The Social Employee, the only thing we can rely on in today’s dynamic landscape is change. The wonderful thing about change is that it’s disruptive. It forces us to challenge our fundamental assumptions and ask how we can better engage our consumer base. If your marketing strategy is not built around the idea of disruption, then every time the landscape changes your firm will be scrambling to catch up.

However, if you’re a champion of change then your firm will drive disruptive innovation. You’ll barely flinch when the marketing environment changes because you will have built change directly into your business model.

And this is why firms must start planning today, so that they’ll never be caught napping in the futures. The potential rewards are great, but marketers must have a plan in place in order to maximize their opportunities and minimize the risks.

———-

Photo Source

In this Future of Marketing series, we have covered topics such as Agile Marketing, Big Data, Customer Experience, Thought Leadership, Culture, Content, and so much more.

Despite all the change in the world and the impact of these changes on our marketing strategy, one thing has never changed. And that is the importance of relationships, and the ability to communicate with people. And so today’s Future of Marketing interview will focus on the importance of the human touch.

I am honored to introduce you to another SAP marketing leader, Dave Hutchison. Dave is the Head of our North American Marketing team. I invite you to continue the conversation with Dave on Twitter (@dave_hutchison) or LinkedIn.

Tell us about yourself?

This is my first, pure marketing job in my career. I graduated college with a marketing degree and spent the next 10 years at IBM in direct sales and channel management. I joined Siebel Systems and helped build the reseller channel there. After Siebel I spent 2 years running sales and marketing for a relatively small ERP and BI system integration firm but soon realized that I enjoyed the dynamic environment of a large company. Given this, I joined SAP in 2004 and haven’t looked back. In my time here, I have been responsible for strategic business development, 3rd-party solution sales and sales operations. Most recently I was Chief of Staff for SAP’s President of Global Sales and Services.

At the end of 2011 I decided to make a change. I had visibility and connections into a lot of areas in the company and decided that running marketing for our North American business would really help me round out my passions and experience. I knew how to manage a P&L, run a large team and I felt like there was a real opportunity to help the marketing organization with a different perspective, a different personality and help people to feel that they are a valuable part of the business. So I become the North American Head of Marketing.

What Is The Biggest Marketing Challenge?

The biggest challenge is how to scale a marketing organization to meet the needs of a growing business, and doing so on a flat or reduced budget year after year. Like almost every large enterprise, we have a relatively finite list of contacts and we hit them pretty hard with traditional marketing. So we need to focus on building new contacts, reaching new audiences. I spent more than 6 months – almost a whole year – thinking about how to organize my team to meet this challenge. We were getting the job done, but we weren’t as efficient as we needed to be. The idea was to build a model that would be sustainable through different management regimes, go to market strategies and external changes.

We also looked at re-defining the relationship with sales because their expectations were keeping us entrenched in old behaviors. This made change difficult. I spent a lot of time with the sales leadership. And what I found was that in the end, most of them agreed with our vision for change. They agreed we could add more value for them. They wanted us to be more strategic but we also needed to feed them the services they have come to rely on such as flawless event execution and creative, relevant demand generation programs.

So what did we do to address that? First we needed to specialize. So we put all the program “build” into one Programs team – Industry, LoB and Market category. our regional teams have become more like Account Directors, gathering strategic requirements from their field stakeholders and bringing those back to the Programs team for build. Then we defined a group called “Growth Marketing” focussed on Digital and Social Marketing, Innovation Portfolio messaging and Events & Sponsorships. Ensuring that these teams work well together and quickly identifying gaps and resolutions is the responsibility of a new role on the team – Head of Strategy.

What is your prediction for the future of marketing?

Marketing will become more traditional before it becomes more transformational. As marketers focus more and more on improving customer experience, human nature will drive us to use conventional methods of communication to create true intimacy. The phone isn’t going away any time soon. People want to do business with people. We need to break through the clutter, establish a connection, build trust and credibility and maintain a relationship over time. I believe this is a lost art that is not gone but rather sleeping. Time to wake up!

———-

Now it’s your turn: Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Imagine the inevitable Future of Marketing with 50 billion connected devices! How will marketing change and what role will brands and consumer play?

In our previous interviews on the future of marketing, we looked touched on topics such as Marketing Fundamentals, Personal Branding, Content Brands, Customer Brands, Creativity, Big Data, Customer Experience, Thought Leadership, the Future of Search, the Science of Marketing and many more…

Today’s interview is with Lee Odden (@LeeOdden). Lee is the author of Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing. He is also a speaker, blogger, consultant and the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, a digital marketing and online PR agency that specializes in a 360 degree approach to growing new business and enriching both brand and community engagement online.

1. How did you get your start in the industry?

This goes waaaay back in the archives of my memory. In 1997 I started working for a company that sold websites specialized for certain vertical markets. There I was able to sell and create more robust websites which required some marketing to drive traffic. Thus began my foray into search engine optimization.

In 2001 I joined with Susan Misukanis to start a digital PR and marketing agency. TopRank started as a product/service that we offered in conjunction with public relations services. The TopRank part of the business eventually grew in popularity and revenue to the point that we renamed the company to TopRank Online Marketing.

With the agency I began as a contractor, then became an employee, then partner and a few years after took on the CEO role. All along that journey, the importance of content and integrating optimization with publicity played a key role in being able to win clients like McKesson, a $100 billion healthcare technology company, CA, HP, Radian6, Marketo, StrongMail and many others. It’s refreshing to see the explosive popularity of the marketing approach and tactics that we’ve been evangelizing for over 10 years.

2. What is the biggest challenge facing your industry?

I guess “my industry” means the digital marketing consulting industry. :)

I think there are a lot of inherent challenges in the marketing field, but one that I see affecting quite a few agencies and their clients is the squeeze by search engines like Google and social media platforms like Facebook to reduce the ability to achieve marketing goals organically. The alternative of course, is to advertise.

Search engines monetize based on ads run next to organic results and a lot of that content comes from companies. But increasingly, Google rates the best content as non-commercial and that moves companies down in favor of sites like Wikipedia and in some cases, some of Google’s own content.

Additionally, the masking of referring keyword data makes it increasingly difficult to use tried and true content optimization tactics to improve marketing performance of pages. When you can’t tell which keyword phrase sent an organic search visitor to your site, how can you modify content to optimize discovery, engagement and conversion? There are workarounds for this, but the fact remains that the only way to get search phrase referring data is if you are an advertiser.

For the social media squeeze, look no further than Facebook where brand fan page messages only reach a fraction of the people that have opted-in to see those messages. Unless of course you pay to promote your Facebook updates.

I think there will always be ways to create valuable content and experiences for customers without buying advertising, but the rules of that game are changing fast and more agencies are being forced by necessity to enter the search and social media advertising game. This challenge can be overcome, but for many digital marketing agencies that have relied on SEO and organic social media, it can be a difficult transition.

3. What is the method to your blogging success? What inspires your blogs?

TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog has been publishing for over 9 years and that’s a lot of time to experiment. The method to our blogging success is to balance content created specifically to attract and engage the audiences we’re after with personality and self expression of our writers. Fortunately we have a great group of marketing smarties at our agency who can contribute from time to time, plus Miranda Miller has been a huge help this year.

An editorial calendar identifies specific topics we know are in demand by the kinds of companies who would hire our marketing consulting agency. That plan also offers flexibility to create opportunistic content from a major industry change to newsjacking to an unplanned interview with a top industry marketing executive.

Optimization as defined in my book, Optimize, is a continuous effort to improve performance. That’s what we’re doing with the blog: optimizing our performance topically to meet the information needs of our readers and at the same time, inspiring new business inquiries, requests for interviews by the media, speaking gigs and employment inquiries.

We layer our content plan to allow for short posts with practical examples that are customized for the vertical markets where our prospects are to longer form opinion and thought leadership posts that resonate with senior executives and industry media.

We look at data and we use intuition based on 12 years of working in the industry and actively participating at conferences and on social networks. We have over 300,000 connections on our networks and that inspires a lot of great ideas.

4. What do you think is the future of social media?

If you want to play, you need to bring your game on the social web. Social media is dynamic in terms of the technologies being developed and in terms of consumer behaviors.

According to a study by Ericsson, by 2020 there will be over 50 billion connected devices. All of those devices from smartphones to tablets to watches will empower consumers to create, collaborate, publish, interact and transact anytime, anywhere. The future of social media is ubiquity in information access, collective wisdom and how people connect with each other. Let’s just hope all that connectivity doesn’t replace the kinds of connections that matter most – in real life.

5. What advice would you give to someone who is just starting out?

First, make a commitment and identify your goals. What do you want to accomplish? Be ambitious or keep it modest, but make a commitment and stick to it.

Identify a “home base” whether it’s a blog, a video channel or some other social network account. Focus on that home base first and develop a profile.

At the same time, pay attention to what others that you look up to are doing. What are they publishing? How do they interact? Learn from observing and experimentation on your own.

At first you may have no engagement, no reactions, comments or re-shares. That’s ok. I didn’t have comments on my blog for months! If I let that discourage me, I would never have seen our business grow the way it has.

6. Where can we find you on the web?

The best places to find me on the web are at my Online Marketing Blog, Check out my book “Optimize,” on Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.

———-

Now it’s your turn: Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Photo Source

We also cannot forget the importance of getting back to the basics of marketing. We need to stay focused on the power of ideas and the creativity required to make a human connection between our brand and our customers.

In today’s Future of Marketing interview I am honored to introduce you to my boss, Costanza Tedesco, the Senior Vice President of Marketing Communications at SAP. I think you will enjoy her unique perspective and I invite you to continue the conversation by following Costanza on Twitter (@CostanzaT) or connecting with her on Linkedin.

Tell us about yourself?

I think part of my success in marketing can be attributed to my (what some might call “unexpected”) combination of science and art. I went to Princeton University to study molecular biology, but ended up being pulled more to the social sciences. I ended up with a degree in microeconomics and econometrics. But at the same time, I’ve always been comfortable in the worlds of art and design. So in my 21-year old mind, it seemed “natural” that after college I’d go to work in the fashion industry as a design assistant.

But after a few years, the business side of my brain left me restless. I went to Harvard Business School to figure it all out, and found my passion in marketing and especially communications. Finally a chance to marry my quantitative skills with my abilities with “words and pictures.” I worked in the agency world on various consumer products, then took a left turn to work on IBM (in the “e-business” days.) Once I started working in technology, I never looked back. I enjoy the challenge of turning complexity into simplicity – and there’s nowhere better to test yourself than in technology. And as a brander, you have to be a black belt. Branding in technology forces you to constantly resolve a seeming paradox – if the impact of branding comes from consistency, how do you accomplish that in an environment and with a product set that is constantly changing?

I’m a proud employee of SAP. Currently, I am the SVP of Marketing Communications which is a group that is responsible for translating business strategies to marketing and brand strategy. I am a member of our Marketing Leadership Team to support our CMO with the transformation of the marketing organization. I am also a member of the SAP global leadership team. I have been at SAP for 11 years and yet it always feels new – with new challenges everyday . I believe my long tenure has helped me to see how to bring together the full power of SAP to drive our future.

What Do You See As The Biggest Challenge In Marketing?

The most interesting challenge is that now, more than ever, companies do not define their brands, customers do. The brand has always existed in the hearts and minds of our customers. That has always been the case but this challenge is amplified by social media, which has put more direct control of the brand in outside forces. Like a boat in the ocean, you do not control the sea, but you can define strategies to guide the brand ship.

In our team, we try to think less about ads and campaigns and websites and more about ideas. David Ogilvy defined advertising as “ideas that sell” and I truly believe that. We try to think of all the ways to get those ideas out but realize that most of those ideas will be spread by others. It’s no longer just about paid media but now, it’s about what your employees say, what your customers say, and what your influencers say about you that matters more. That means that marketers need to work harder than ever to create a coherent and distinct brand that can tie it all together. Simplicity, clarity, differentiation, coherence – that’s what strong branding brings to marketing.

What’s Your Prediction For The Future of Marketing?

The distinction between business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketing is fading really fast. More and more, the tactics that work for both are coming together. We all need to connect with people as individuals. I believe that in the future of marketing, experiences and ideas will become more important than ever. I think many marketers have lost sight of the basics on how to develop a marketing strategy. Who is your target? What do they want? What can you offer them that others can’t? As marketers have increasingly specialized in technology, automation, data or social, in many ways we have lost the ability to develop sound, effective marketing strategy.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the development of our talent and I focus on this area with my team. I challenge them to build strength in the fundamentals of communications and how to take a business strategy and turn it into a marketing strategy. I am really passionate about the history of branding and design because if you are ignorant of what came before you, you cannot interpret what you see today. For a great illustration of this, check out this article on the similarities between Apple’s designs and those from Braun decades before. Apple’s Jony Ives’ admitted to borrowing heavily from the man behind Braun’s design Dieter Rams. There is tremendous value in understanding what has always made great marketing strategy and translating that to the realities of today’s market.

———-

Now it’s your turn: Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Sandra is our honored guest in today’s Future of Marketing interview series where we have covered topics such as Creativity, Big Data, Customer Experience, Thought Leadership, Culture, Technology, and so much more.

Sandra Zoratti is an Author, Speaker and Marketer. She is the Vice President of Marketing, Ricoh in a business created from former IBM and Ricoh companies. Sandra built and launched the data-driven marketing practice called “Precision Marketing” from the ground up and published her book on the topic in June 2012. She was also honored with Business Marketer of the Year in 2012. You can find Sandra on LinkedIn and Twitter @sandraz.

Tell me about yourself?

I love to create. I love challenges and problem-solving. In college, I switched my major from Marketing to Chemical Engineering so that I could solve problems. After graduating, I realized that creating business opportunities is all about problem-solving on a large scale, and with that new perspective, I returned to marketing while pursuing my MBA.

Today, I leverage the critical thinking and problem-solving I learned in engineering and apply it in business to help create new opportunities. It’s perfect for me! Currently, I am the vice president of marketing for Ricoh, as well as an author and speaker.

What is the biggest challenge facing marketers today?

There’s never been a more exciting time to be a marketer! The past decade has completely revolutionized the marketing function. Today, marketers are faced with the complexity and speed of enormous and large-scale transformations – staying flexible, nimble and connected is required to stay sharp and remain relevant. There are three major marketer challenges in our customer-driven economy: improving customer engagement, harnessing data-driven insights, and generating measurable, scalable value and ROI for our business.

What best practices can you identify for dealing with that challenge?

For customer engagement, data-driven marketing and ROI-measured results, the path forward is often unclear, so an “agile development” approach can be immensely helpful. These three challenges are connected: data-driven insights can drive customer engagement which in turn can lead to better and more measurable ROI. In order to adopt different thinking and approaches in these three areas, I suggest:

1. Adopt an agile approach: Software developers have used knowledge-sharing to create a culture of agility in developing solutions quickly to answer complex challenges — and this approach works for marketers too!
2. Use collaboration, connection and community: In marketing, the explosion of peer-to-peer marketing groups allows us to share new approaches and brainstorm, which helps to illuminate a path forward.
3. Listen. Ask. Share. In order to take a new approach this is a simple way to activate. Set a goal and then listen to learn. Ask to get clarity and depth. Share to test and adjust. In engineering, this is known as an iterative approach. Its time has come for marketing.

What’s Your prediction on the future of marketing?

Marketing’s role in business will continue to require extreme agility and undergo expansion of responsibilities — from owning the entire customer experience to managing the data functions that lead to improved customer engagement. In order for marketers to stay relevant and sharp, I believe the cross-functional silos in corporations will be broken down and the idea of agile development will exist both internally in companies and externally for marketers who need the mutual benefit from professional communities in order to be the best that they can be. Marketers will expand participation in peer-to-peer professional communities in order to connect, collaborate and fully realize their potential in an era where “what’s possible” is continually being redefined.

———-

Now it’s your turn: Let me know what you think in the comments below.

In our last interview, Drew Davis offered guidance on how to move from branded content to a content brand. Previous interviews covered the Customer’s brand, Marketing Creativity, Big Data, Big Testing, Customer Experience, Thought Leadership, creating a Content Culture, the roles of Content and Technology, the Future of Search, the Science of Marketing, the rise of Content Brands and we asked whether the customer or the Content is King.

Today’s interview is with Steve Olenski, the content strategist at Responsys. Please follow Steve on Twitter (@SteveOlenski), LinkedIn and Google+.

Tell us about yourself?

I’ve been in my current role of senior creative content strategist at Responsys since October, 2012. How I arrived at Responsys is an interesting story and a great example of content marketing – personal content marketing that is. Ed Henrich, who is the SVP Professional Services at Responsys, saw an article I had written for Forbes back in February, 2012. I had recently been laid off and in my article – specifically my byline, I made reference to the fact that I was looking for a new FT job. Ed reached out to me and the rest, as they say, is history.

You mentioned personal content marketing. Do you think personal branding and content marketing is important and if so, why?

I cannot overstate just how important I think personal branding is for everyone. Whether we realize it or not we are all our own brand and we are marketing our own brand every single day. That may sound melodramatic to some but it’s the truth. Whether we work for a company or as an individual we all market ourselves via our actions and our words. And now, in the digital-social-media-gone-wild world we live in, our personal brands are more often than not, public record. I tell people all the time this – that we are all our brand and that you need to care for that brand just as you would any other – if not more.

What are some of the ways you’ve built your personal brand, Steve?

Well I would like to say I was a visionary who saw the future of social media and blogging but alas I am not that smart – not by a long shot. I merely got swept up in “it’ like millions of others. What I do, however, was start my own blog many years ago and then segued that into writing for publications such as Ad Age and Ad Week. These all led to my becoming a regular contributor to such sites as Forbes, Business Insider, Social Media Today and Business 2 Community. It is on these “stages” if you will, I have been able to create my personal brand as someone who is knowledgeable and experienced and a thought leader in the fields of advertising, marketing, branding and social media.

How do you balance building your personal brand vs. building your company brand?

To me they are often one and the same – your personal brand and your company’s brand. Whether you’re working for someone or yourself, you are, in essence, an ambassador of that brand. You always need to be cognizant that everything you do – be it online or off, is a representation of said brand to a large extent. Now, that is not to say there is no room for individuality. On the contrary, one’s individual personality must be at the root core of his/her personal brand. I know mine surely is. But I am always aware that when I am “out there” I am in fact representing and serving as a de facto ambassador of sorts for both my personal brand as well as my company’s brand.

———-

Now it’s your turn: Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Previous interviews covered Marketing Creativity, Big Data, Big Testing, Customer Experience, Thought Leadership, creating a Content Culture, the roles of Content and Technology, the Future of Search, the Science of Marketing, the rise of Content Brands and we asked whether the customer or the Content is King.

Today’s interview is with Andrew Davis (@tpldrew), the Author of “Brandscaping: Unleashing the Power of Partnerships”. You can also find more about Drew at MonumentalShift.com and on Google+.

What do you see happening in Content Marketing today? How is it changing?

As I’ve watched digital content evolve over the last decade three monumental shifts have occurred that will shape the way we create, distribute, and promote content in the future.

Quality over quantity

First, the most successful content creators are focusing on delivering quality content over a high quantity of content. We all live in a world where we’re overwhelmed by the amount of information available to consume. Smart content marketers are cutting through the clutter by creating high-quality content that builds a valuable repeat audience (think like Gary Vaynerchuk and his Wine Library TV.) http://www.youtube.com/user/WineLibraryTV Cut through the clutter and create content people actually want to build a relationship with.

The power of subscribe

Second, we all have the ability to garner, maintain and grow an audience for the content we create. In the past, magazine publishers, television networks, newspapers and radio stations owned “subscribers.” Today, your fans on Facebook, your followers on Twitter and your subscribers on YouTube or iTunes are a valuable audience. Hell, even your e-mail database is a content subscription opportunity. Smart content creators will start to focus on building highly-valuable subscription-based audiences, instead of just looking for passing readers, listeners or watchers.

Content as an asset instead of an expense

Finally, brands are creating content designed to actually drive revenue, instead of thinking of content as a marketing expense itself. In fact, I heard earlier this year that Red Bull will generate more income from its entertainment properties this year than from selling energy drinks! Other brands are creating content so valuable that consumers are purchasing their content as books on Amazon. The more valuable your content is, the more likely you can transition from seeing your content as a marketing expense to an actual intellectual asset.

What about the longer-term? Do you have a provocative prediction on the future of marketing?

Content Brands instead of Branded Content

I believe that there’s a big difference between treating your content as a marketing asset and treating it like a product. In the future more and more marketers will focus on creating content as brands themselves. Brands that increase demand for the products they sell. Here’s a quick anecdote:

Selling powdered milk…

Defiance, a powdered milk company, was having a really hard time penetrating a crowded market against 300 other brands. They’d tried advertising, but it didn’t seem to sell more dried milk.

The advertisements did spark thousands of consumer inquiries on how to take care of a newborn baby. Instead of ignoring those inquiries, the CEO Joe Nathan hired Nurse Kennedy to answer every consumer inquiry on behalf of the company.

Word got out that Defiance would answer any infant health-related question, and before they knew it, Nurse Kennedy’s staff of 11 nurses answered hundreds of questions a day. They also started selling more and more powdered milk.

That’s when Defiance got smart. They published a book (treating their content like a product) for new mothers that answered every single question they’d been asked. (Only one question was related to powdered milk, by the way.) They scaled their internal knowledge and the people who powered their brand by turning it into a book – a content brand. Powdered milk sales skyrocketed and they distributed millions of copies of their baby book.

That company went on to become Glaxo and that book was first published in 1908. That’s right, Glaxo Smith Kline, the third largest pharmaceutical company in the world (worth more than $73 billion today), owes its century-long success to Nurse Kennedy and the Baby Book.

Treat your content like a product and you’ll cut through information overload, build a valuable audience and create quality content that drives demand for whatever you sell.

Tell us about yourself

As a child actor I wanted to be the next Kirk Cameron. It turns out, I’m not a great actor. Instead, I focused on working behind the scenes, producing, writing and managing everything from local television programming to the Today Show. In the late 1990’s I landed my dream job at the Jim Henson Company in New York working on movies such as Muppets From Space and iconic television programming like Sesame Street.

It’s at the Jim Henson company where I realized how powerful content inspired people to buy stuff. The merchandising and licensing teams at The Jim Henson Company drove millions and millions of dollars in revenue by leveraging the success of the content, characters, and brands they’d created for products ranging from books to lunch boxes (and everything in between.)

In 2001, I co-founded Tippingpoint Labs with Jim Cosco (a television producer himself,) and we built a content marketing firm focused on creating valuable content that drives demand for whatever it is you sell. Last year, I sold Tippingpoint Labs, wrote a book called Brandscaping: Unleashing the Power of Partnerships, and bought a bigger boat.

Today, I travel the world preaching the power of content marketing, teaching marketers to focus on quality over quantity, and helping others embrace the lessons I’ve learned over the last twenty years.

———-

Now it’s your turn: Let me know what you think in the comments below.

In our last interview, Paula Cusati suggested that we will need the ability to adapt and be creative in the rapidly changing world of Future of Marketing.

Previous interviews covered Big Data Marketing and Big Testing, customer experience, thought leadership, , creating a content culture, the roles of content and technology, the future of search, the science of marketing, the rise of Content Brands and we asked whether the customer or the content is king in the future of marketing.

Today’s interview is with List.ly Co-Founder Nick Kellet (@NickKellet). For a great example of a List.ly list (that focuses on potential customer’s brand) check out this list on technology marketing. You can also follow Nick on Facebook and Google+.

Tell us about yourself?

I love the challenge of a new market and decoding the value to the consumer.

Today I’m 100% focused on social content curation market as co-founder of startup, Listly. I’m loving the experience of building a social brand.

I’ve jumped domains in my career from fashion (French Connection – FCUK), to CRM, to Business Intelligence (where I sold my startup to Business Objects now SAP) and on to self-publishing board games with GiftTRAP.

My game won 20+ awards globally and has been translated into 12 languages, giving me awesome exposure to consumer marketing, crowdsourcing and social media.

Tell us about a tough or interesting challenge your team faces

Our challenge is one of alerting people to the possibility of lists.

We are educating content marketing folk to think a little differently about curation and embedding list content inside blogs.

Lists posts outperform just about all other forms of content (30% of posts are lists), yet we believe lists are lagging the social web.

Post with titles like “10 ways to …” are easy reads – info snacks. Lists hook people to skim for insights. We believe the modern reader wants more.

We’ve been busy building the Listly platform to scale to meet business expectations while also building our network and our community.

With thousands of bloggers on board, it’s getting quicker and easier to get new people to sign up. Many people have seen Listly in action. All the embeds are building strong brand awareness.

It all begins by people making and embedding their first list.

It’s a fun challenge and we keep listening and learning.

How are you approaching that challenge?

We have been tackling the problem from two angles.

• Product
• Community

At a product level we’ve been adding depth and scaling features to demonstrate that Listly is a highly performance publishing platform. A lot of this isn’t seen by anyone, but it improves the experience and ensures people come back for more.

We’ve been focusing on the core tasks and honing obvious workflows. We have a big new responsive/mobile re-styling due on the 18th of March 2013.

On a community level we’ve been:

• Reaching out to bloggers in person, online and via events
• Participating in multiple Twitter chat groups to raise visibility
• Celebrating community successes
• Guest blogging (inbound and outbound)
• Monitoring usage and creativity and sharing tips and how to guides

We know all the hard work is paying off. We see people coming back more often. We see more people discovering listly via SEO.

More lists and more embeds lead to more of everything. The long term value of ever changing lists from an SEO perspective is pretty amazing. People often forget that shares offer short term gains compared to embedded content, which keeps on delivering traffic over time.

Our most popular list just passed 300k views. That number is growing organically every day. Its current rate is about 50k hits per month. That’s pretty compelling. That earns people’s attention.

We’ve also released a premium product and that’s proving people want to pay for this kind of service. It’s the ultimate validation of all our hard work.

What is your prediction on the future of marketing?

1. Consumers Like Metrics More than Brands

I’ve overheard too many conversations lately that have stopped me in my tracks. People saying things like ”How many likes will I get for this vs. that?”. Marketing thinks the metrics are for them – wrong! Consumers have become hooked on feedback.

Consumers see social proof as their social power. While we may all be dumping on influence measurement, consumers are seeking influence.

So if you are thinking about your brand, you are busted. You need to be thinking much more about your customer’s brand.

Ask yourself how can your brand be involved in the social actions people take to build their own credibility.

2. Liquid Content

The silos of paid, earned, owned and shared media are merging and morphing.

Promoted content is rising too and could well backfire as consumers get smarter at discerning the origins of content.

Reuse and sharing is on the rise and there’s friction to be removed here. Information has a social life and that’s going to become more trackable and more fluid.

I sense Madison Avenue is playing catch-up relative to the evolution of technology and the mashing up of digital media.

———-

Huge thanks to Nick for participating in our series and offering his view. Now it’s your turn: Let me know what you think in the comments below. And please follow along on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ or Subscribe to the B2B Marketing Insider Blog for regular updates.

The post Focus On Your Customer’s Brand In The Future of Marketing appeared first on B2B Marketing Insider.

In response to these rapid changes in the way everyone on the planet gets and processes information, governments, businesses and individuals are all facing the challenges of adapting to continuous change.

As organizations seek to differentiate themselves, Marketing has taken on a more prominent role in many organizations. Simple advertising campaigns and tactical approaches to gain new customers are no longer enough. CMOs see the need to define the vision and path to real marketing transformation.

Why? Because business innovation cycles have sped up. Communication happens across the globe in milliseconds Customers expect real-time service and support. All while the global, political and economic landscapes have become more complex. As a result, CMOs need new skills.

Earlier this month, Caren Fleit and Brigitte Morel-Curran from Korn-Ferry released “The transformative CMO: Three must-have competencies to meet the growing demands placed on marketing leaders.” (No registration required.)

Caren and Brigitte argue that today’s CMO must move beyond brand-building and even voice of the customer to become strategic leaders who carry the weight of delivering quantifiable business results. They must think more broadly than ever before and need the skills (and the relationships) to drive change across the organization. To become a transformative CMO or marketing executives, they believe you need to acquire 3 new competencies:

3 Competencies Required For Marketing Transformation

The report defines the 3 skills required for marketing transformation as:

• Creating the New and Different: more than just the ability to “create new ideas” this skill requires the acumen to manage the innovation process and implement chang.e

• Focusing on Action and Outcomes: requires the ability to make decisions with “incomplete data” that have the largest potential to impact the bottom line.

• Inspiring Others: transformative marketing leaders understand the importance of “compelling vision, commitment, and superior communication” in a diverse work force.

After seeing the report, I reached out to SAP’s CMO, Jonathan Becher (@jbecher) who is leading the marketing transformation effort here at SAP. Jonathan also speaks and writes quite a bit about the need for marketing transformation. Jonathan agreed with the main points of the report but added “the one thing that might be missing is Culture. You know I believe Culture eats strategy.”

In What Every CEO Should Expect From Their CMO, Jonathan mirrors the need to create “the new and the different” by capitalizing on insights. Jonathan says “For the first time, marketing has the ability to get a view of customers in real time. Jonathan also suggests marketing leaders “inspire others” by not just “representing the voice of the market,” by being “the champion of the overall experience” and the “brand steward” but also by being an “integrator and force multiplier across the company.”

Finally, Jonathan agreed with the need for a “focus on actions and outcomes” in Three Must Dos For The Modern Marketer where he recommends marketers “measure what matters.” Jonathan states “I believe we should track outcome metrics, not activities.”

Now it’s your turn…what skills do you think are required for marketing leaders to drive transformation across our businesses?

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Previous interviews covered customer experience, thought leadership, , creating a content culture, the roles of content and technology, the future of search, the science of marketing, the rise of Content Brands and we asked whether the customer or the content is king in the future of marketing.

Today’s interview is with Telus Communication’s Social Media Marketing Manager Paula Cusati. Please follow Paula online on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

Tell us about yourself?

I am a digital marketing manager at TELUS Communications –a national telecommunications company in Canada. I’ve spend my career (15+ years) at TELUS working primarily in a B2B environment with a strong focus on web, social media and digital activities. I love technology and the potential it represents for individuals and businesses of all size.

What are some tough marketing challenges you face?

Some of the marketing challenges I have faced over the years are not unlike those of other large organizations – a diverse customer base with a variety of needs, the requirement to integrate complex systems, determining the best way to embrace technologies such as sales process automation and social media all while offering meaningful value to our current and future customers. The way we’ve addressed these challenges is by having a focus on the customer – trying to understand their needs and opportunities and how we can support them via our products and channels to market.

What is your prediction for the future of marketing?

The world of marketing has changed a great deal over the past decade with the influx of technology into all aspects of our lives. There are no lack of predictions about how technology will continue to have a large impact on businesses and marketing. My take on the future of marketing is that it will continue to be driven by the customer and technology but I believe the changes will be swifter and more profound than what we have seen to date.

Why will this change be more profound? As we know there are many technology trends in play including the shift to use of mobile technologies , BYOD in the workplace and the impact of the Cloud to name a few. A couple of trends stand out to me that I think will really drive change and ultimately expectations that marketers will have to address:

• The growth of Entrepreneurship and its influence in our economy. In his article Trends for 2013: The Rise of the Entrepreneur, J.D. Meier tells us that 2013 is the Year of the Entrepreneur and due to economic pressures and competition, innovation to find new ways to do things more efficiently is in demand. “With the power of the Cloud and social computing, smart people can spin up businesses that reach around the world in a more cost effective way than ever before,” Meier said. Take a look at Mashable’s Launchpad to see examples of innovative startups already in practice.
• Increased use of technology in the classroom gives a comfort level to up-and-coming employees and customers that we’ve never seen before. We hear a lot about millennials and their comfort with technology largely because of their personal use – but another trend I’ve observed is how technology is being used increasingly in the classroom. As a result we’ll see collaboration, innovation, and crowd sourcing via the leveraging of technology done at all levels of education. These activities will become a natural part of the problem solving process by young millennials coming into the work force. Smart marketers may want to invest in the technical education of young students to guide and learn from this generation.

Innovation via technology is creating opportunities for savvy businesses while customers and employees are highly technically-literate and open to new ways of working and achieving objectives. In this environment it’s likely that organizations will experience intense competition from sources we haven’t even thought of – perhaps from an emerging economy or from a small start-up that creates service that addresses a customer need in a new and innovative way. Whatever this competition ends up looking like, marketers need to understand how customers think, what their challenges are and to be open to supporting customers in different ways. Perhaps by partnering with a startup or even with customers themselves. Marketers must lead the way by staying current with trends and anticipating how these trends can be translated into value for our customers and ourselves.

If we aren’t open to adapt and be creative in how we address our customers’ needs, someone else will.

Thanks to Paula for sharing her thoughts. Now tell me what you think in the comments below? And please follow along on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ or Subscribe to the B2B Marketing Insider Blog for regular updates.

In our last Future of Marketing interview, Daniel Newman proposed that customer experience would drive the future of marketing. Previous topics included thought leadership, Big Data, creating a content culture, the roles of content and technology, the future of search, the science of marketing, the rise of Content Brands and we asked whether the customer or the content is king in the future of marketing.

Today we’re going to hear from Chief Marketing Technology Officer Scott Brinker (@ChiefMarTec), someone who really gets the intersection of marketing and technology.

Tell us about yourself?

I wear two hats at the crossroads of marketing and technology.

I’m the co-founder and CTO of ion interactive, a marketing software company that provides a SaaS platform for creating and testing post-click experiences. Post-click experiences happen when people click through from ads, emails, socially-distributed links, etc. — things like landing pages, microsites, or app-like interactions. Our goal is to let marketers create high-impact experiences that you’d think were crafted by a whole team of expert developers and designers — but any marketer can build them single-handedly in a drag-and-drop interface, without tech or design expertise.

I’m also the author of the Chief Marketing Technologist blog, which focuses on how the intersection of marketing and technology in the digital age is fundamentally changing marketing management and culture. The central thesis of the blog is this: marketing has become a technology-powered discipline, and therefore marketing organizations must infuse technical capabilities into their DNA. More and more people with technical backgrounds and skill sets are now working directly in the marketing department, and it’s changing the very fabric of what marketing is.

Tell us about a tough or interesting challenge you’re involved in?

A major topic that I’m focused on these days is the challenge of extracting value from big data in the marketing department. Clearly there’s tremendous interest in harnessing all the data generated by the digital “vapor trails” of prospects and customers and using that to power more effective marketing programs. New technology and new technical talent are both needed for marketing organizations to tap that potential. It’s become one of the epicenters of disruptive innovation in marketing overall.

However, part of the challenge is that we seem to be overly infatuated with the “analysis” portion of big data. Analysis is important. But to achieve modern marketing alchemy — turning lead (i.e., raw data) into gold (i.e., better and more profitable customer experiences) — you need a process to prove out and operationalize the insights that are unearthed from big data.

After all, most of the interesting patterns that are discovered in big data start out as hypotheses: a relationship that may serve to influence customer behavior. But as everyone who’s taken a Stats 101 class knows, correlation is not necessarily causation. To prove that something will have a meaningful business impact, you usually need to run an experiment. As Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google has said, “Experimentation is the gold standard of causality.” They should know — Google runs around 10,000 experiments in their business each year.

People contend that modern marketing can be a “science.” But that’s often misinterpreted to mean that marketing can become purely quantified. That’s not really accurate though. The key to scientific marketing is actually the embrace of marketing experimentation as a driver of continuous innovation.

How do you suggest we approach that challenge?

The good news is that the digital fabric of modern marketing makes it quite easy — at least from a technical perspective — to engage in marketing experimentation. The difficulty that organizations face here is more operational and cultural. Many marketing teams have a strong legacy of “the yearly marketing plan.” It gets etched in stone by executives based on a mix of data-driven analysis and experience-driven intuition, and then the team proceeds full-steam with execution. What’s missing is a faster feedback loop for experimentation to dynamically adjust that plan along the way.

However, that’s starting to change — thanks in large part to the force of customers in social media. We increasingly hear about agile marketing, real-time marketing, high-metabolism marketing. All of these ideas are helping marketing become more iterative and dynamic. That opens the door for us to incorporate marketing experiments in those shorter iterative cycles.

But marketing also needs to learn how to run good experiments — equipping more marketers with the right tools and training on data-driven decision making and good experimental design.

Perhaps most importantly, senior marketing leadership needs to encourage real experimentation on the front-lines. Not all experiments succeed, and if the culture of an organization punishes people for testing new ideas that fail, you’ll never get any meaningful embrace of marketing experimentation. Executives need to really champion the importance of continuously trying new ideas. Don’t just reward the wins. Reward the process that accelerates innovation through a mix of successes and failures. A well-run experiment that disproves its hypothesis is still valuable.

I recently wrote a piece on the big data bubble in marketing that calls this mission “big testing.” The real revolution in data-driven marketing will be a change in organizational behavior and culture to passionately embrace this kind of marketing experimentation.

What’s your prediction for the future of marketing?

I believe we’re in the middle of five major trends in marketing that are shaping our future. Actually, I call them “meta-trends” because they underly many of the hot topics that are constantly emerging:

1. The great digital migration of marketing, which has really only just begun at scale.
2. A shift from silos of paid, earned, and owned media into more holistically integrated converged media.
3. Marketing increasingly focused on customer experiences, not merely customer communications.
4. The technologification of marketing, where code and data are as elemental as art and copy.
5. The evolution of marketing management from rigid plans to agile iterations.

New approaches and capabilities in marketing, like big data and big testing, arise from these meta-trends.

It’s an incredibly exciting time to be working in marketing. While it’s challenging to keep one’s bearings as our discipline — really our whole world — changes so rapidly around us, it’s also a once-in-a-generation opportunity to help shape the future of what marketing will become.

Let me know what you think in the comments below. And please follow along on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ or Subscribe to the B2B Marketing Insider Blog for regular updates.

In our last Future of Marketing interview, Dr. Liz Alexander discussed thought leadership. Previous topics included Big Data, creating a content culture, the roles of content and technology, the future of search, the science of marketing, the rise of Content Brands and we asked whether the customer or the content is king in the future of marketing.

Today’s interview is with Daniel Newman (@DanielNewmanUV), Daniel serves as the Co-Founder and CEO of EC3. He is also the author of the best selling business book The Millennial CEO.

Tell us about yourself?

I’m on a never ending path to challenge the status quo. I always want people to meet me and feel like they’re just a little bit better for having crossed my path. Currently I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of EC3 a Cloud based communications company that is disrupting the way businesses communicate. The reason I’m here is because I believed that what we did could make businesses run better. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of something like that?

Tell me about a tough marketing challenge your team faces

Our organization is 100% B2B, so we have to constantly figure out how to help companies that need to move toward our solutions figure out how. Businesses rarely stop on a dime, but with the proliferation of tech they can hardly afford to stand still. We have to open their eyes to a better way of doing things while only mildly disrupting what pays their bills today.

How are you approaching that challenge?

Time is enemy number 1 when you are a start-up. With limited resources you have to spend it on things that make the largest impact. So I combat the challenge by giving support and resources to those that “Get it.” I think a lot of businesses spend too much time trying to convince people that don’t want to be convinced. That is out the window for me…

What we do provides tremendous value to businesses. If you don’t see it, I’m certain there are others that will.

What’s Your Prediction For The Future of Marketing?

Perhaps I have to believe this…But I think fast and small businesses will unseat a lot of complacent large companies. They are going to do this by delivering unequaled customer experience which is what the consumer seeks today. Social interactions will allow the entrepreneur to connect to the consumer like never before. It is hard for the big enterprise to make that connection and sometimes I’m not sure that the executives of these big companies want to.

Let me know what you think in the comments below. And please follow along on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ or Subscribe to the B2B Marketing Insider Blog for regular updates.

Photo Source

In our last interview, Steve McKee asked if Big Data was the future of marketing.

In previous interviews, Doug Kessler talked about creating a content culture, Todd Wheatland predicted that content and technology would combine to drive the future of marketing. Mark Schaefer discussed culture and the future of search. Marcus Starke predicted the rise of the science of marketing. Ann Handley called for more brands to become Content Brands. And Alan See reiterated that the customer and the content is king.

Today’s Future of Marketing interview is with Dr. Liz Alexander (@DrLizAlexander). I invite you to connect with Liz on Facebook or LinkedIn. I met Liz thanks to her insightful and constructive comments on my Forbes article “What is Thought Leadership?” So I thought it would be great to get her views here.

Tell us: who is Liz Alexander?

Global hybrid: Born in Scotland, raised in England, US citizen since 2009; in India two months of the year working with clients; my co-author and business partner, Craig Badings, is in Sydney, Australia.

I work with corporate executives and consultants, provoking questions and solutions to help them discover and communicate their unique thought leadership space. My 14^th nonfiction book is #Thought Leadership Tweet: 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign. Favorite word is “why?”

Tell us about a tough or interesting challenge you’re involved in.

Changing the conversation around thought leadership. That term probably inspired groans from readers who feel this is simply the latest contender for Buzzword Bingo. I don’t blame them. You can barely turn a corner without bumping into some self-appointed thought leader or self-labeled thought leadership piece.

When the term was first coined at the end of the 1990s it described “renowned thinkers” focused on “the big questions,” who could “provide profound insights into how today’s managers can go about positioning their companies for ongoing success,” according to Joel Kurtzman’s book Thought Leaders: Insights on the Future of Business.

It’s now being used to describe “proven approaches,” “best practice,” “how to” guides and is commonly considered to be synonymous with content marketing, which it isn’t. Too many articles and blog posts focus on tactics: how and where to position yourself as a thought leader or ways to ensure visibility. Few question the quality of what’s being described as thought leadership.

Fiona Czerniawska of UK-based Source for Consulting, which conducts analyses of thought leadership by leading global consulting firms, recently stated: “An awful lot of thought leadership continues to be really about what other people do.” The challenge is to turn away from short-term mediocrity and “up the ante.”

How do you suggest we approach that challenge?

First, awareness: If what is passed off as “thought leadership” continues to devolve into curated content and tactical approaches then you can forget about leveraging the outcomes that true exemplars experience: like the 600% increase in US sales that Dove reported just two months after launching their Campaign for Real Beauty; or the 20% increase in brand value claimed by IBM in response to its Smarter Planet campaign; or the impact that Blue Dart Express’ is having in India championing corporate social responsibility with their Living Corporate Responsibility campaign.

Second, by asking better questions. The battery market is an illustrative example:

Panasonic’s Any Battery Light is designed to be compatible with four different sized batteries. But how long before some other company makes a flashlight that works with six or eight?

Leyden Energy, an advanced battery startup, is innovating around different materials and battery chemistries in response to faster battery replacement cycles. They’re competing in a crowded marketplace with the likes of Sony, Toyota, Samsung, Amprius, Envia, QuantumScape and others.

WiTricity is by passing batteries or connected power sources altogether, developing ways to charge electronic and other products wirelessly, similar to how computers access Wi-Fi. GravityLight is similarly innovative.

Each of these companies has defined the “problem” differently. Only WiTricity, in my view, is thought leading given that their approach inspires others to think about a world in which products have no need for batteries, plugs or wiring.

Third, by having a strategic thought leadership process and making it part of the culture of the organization. We describe this thoroughly in our book #Thought Leadership Tweet.

What’s your prediction for the future of marketing?

Both of these concern different ways of thinking.

ExactTarget’s Marketers from Mars report and the Hinge Research Institute’s How Buyers Buy study identified considerable differences between marketers and their customers. Hinge found many inaccurate perceptions that marketers hold, including what buyers’ value and their biggest challenges and priorities. In terms of the disparity between the online habits of marketers and customers, ExactTarget concluded that, “When it comes to investing a brand’s marketing time and resources, newer isn’t always better.”

If marketers don’t stop thinking of themselves as “a focus group of one,” as ExactTarget puts it, the chasm will only widen between highly successful, truly client-centric companies and the “also-rans” who imagine they are representative of the people they are presumably trying to serve, and flounder as a result.

My second prediction is an article in and of itself: That as globalization comes of age, the US will shift its inherent short-term orientation and become more long-term focused, as it is in Asia for example. The quality of thought leadership can only benefit as a result.

Let me know what you think in the comments below. And please follow along on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ or Subscribe to the B2B Marketing Insider Blog for regular updates.