Ollie Ollie In Come Free

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As my kids get older, I am amazed that they use the  same expressions in their games and daily play that I did when I was their age. I did not tell them any of these but they have picked them up on their own, somewhere. It made me think about how powerful it would be if you could create your own slogan or brand reputation that is passed from user to user or even generation to generation. There are certainly examples:

• Have a Coke and a Smile
• Good to the last drop
• Snap, crackle and pop!
• I'm a Toys R Us kid
• A diamond is forever
• Got Milk?

And then there are famous characters from Ronald McDonald, the Donut Man, Burger lady, Marlboro man, Flo, and the Geico Gecko as well as  iconic firms like Coke, IBM, Apple, and others that have enjoyed a long held brand respect in the market they serve.

I am wondering with the noise of all the social media platforms if it will be easier or harder to have a long lasting  impact in the marketplace like the ones referenced above. The item that was "it" yesterday can be torn down and replaced extremely easily now and that has huge implications on developing brand equity. Given the power that has been transferred from marketing departments and media agency's to the end user we may see the consumer become the generator of the next great brand or slogan. The hard part will be giving up the control over the message, but that is already happening so the sooner you can embrace it the better off you will be.

Ollie Ollie in come free - who will be next?

Integrate Social Media activities into your CRM/MAP systems

The power of a CRM system and a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) is that you are able to see a comprehensive view into the activities around your customers. The lense gets even stronger when you integrate your CRM and MAP so you can see both offline and online activities for your customers. The inability to integrate social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogging into your CRM/MAP systems is a negative but it also represents a great opportunity for the vendor that can figure out how we can do this.

Imagine if you looked up a customer in your CRM system and you had a view of all offline activities such as show attendance and phone calls along with all marketing campaigns from your MAP and all interactions with your various social media sites (retweets, blog visits and comments, FaceBook fan, LinkedIn groups). That would be a true Digital ID. I know Eloqua and Hubspot have done some things for tracking social media activity but I do not think anyone has been able to integrate it all into one view. I am not even sure this is possible, but it would make life a lot easier!

Very Good Slideshow

I am also trying to figure out the impact of social media on the b2b buyer. It is not nearly as clear as it is in B2C land. Here is a good slideshow that reviews the potential of social media for B2B firms.

B2B Social Media Marketing: Building the B2B Business Case for Social Media

How many handles should you have on Twitter?

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I just came from a meeting where the topic of how many Twitter handles should we have to message out to our customers. This particular unit currently has five different handles and different parts of the business are approaching the social media group to ask for a handle so they too can tweet.

I believe that there is a danger in diluting your overall messaging with too many people tweeting. While the theory is you should tweet more to get your message out, that does not, in my mind, mean that you should have multiple handles tweeting the same or different ideas. To me, that sounds like Twitter spam.

Additionally, the more people you have the greater the risk of someone tweeting something inappropriate.  Everyone has a different ideas of what "Do not post anything stupid" means. A 20-something may think it is ok to tweet anything as that is they the way they have been brought up. An older worker who has not grown up with these technologies may not understand the reach that they have and the impact an off-hand comment could have on your firm and brand.

Your marketing message needs to be clear and concise and the more people voicing that message the greater risk there is in being tuned out.

An integrated approach to technology and market strategy is critical to success

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The firm I work for has several new products being released over the coming months that will require a technology acumen that we are not currently best suited to handle. As a result,  we need to develop a long term technology strategy to support the release of these products. Additionally, our marketing needs to be aligned with the technology road map to ensure that we are messaging our new capabilities in a cohesive manner. If you are a technology company, you can no longer think of your technology and market strategy as mutually exclusive.

SaaS firms like Salesforce.com understand that there is no difference between its technology infrastructure and go to market planning and messaging. However, some firms, in particular mine, do not view technology and marketing as related to one another. An approach like this will dilute our overall messaging and branding and could lead to confusion about who you are in the marketplace. Additionally, if you do not implement a strategy road map that looks at technology and marketing strategy as an integrated unit then you will end up supporting multiple one-off technologies and have to craft multiple messages.

In the past, the positioning of my firm was one as a content provider or publisher. However, we are releasing a new platform that will make us more of a service provider that delivers content, with as much if not more focus on the technology than the content. Our approach to date has been to explore individual technologies like vcms and mobile, an approach that only addresses weaknesses and is not an overall road map. The goal now is to work with the technology group as they map out their needs so we can also adapt our messaging to fit this new world order.

So my advice is to integrate your technology and market planning to make sure each one knows what the other is doing so there is no disconnect.

Utilizing Financial Formulas to Determine the Value of Community Equity

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A very interesting post by Radian6's David Alston entitled: Can We Calculate “Community Equity?”

David states that: Community equity refers to the marketing, public relations, sales, recruitment and customer service effects and outcomes that accrue to company that engages in community building compared to what would accrue if the same brand did not invest in efforts to find, build & care for their community.

His premise is that Community Equity is much more valuable than buying eyeballs as your community is much more involved and engaged. They are there because they want to be not because they were coerce. How to calculate this equity is an interesting dilemma.

David further states, It becomes clear why 500 passionate community members on Facebook or Twitter are no comparison to the 500 eyeballs or even 1 million eyeballs purchased in a media buy. It becomes evident that community building goes in the investment column while buying media buy goes in the expense side.  

So if this is an investment, I would propose utilizing existing financial calculations such as Net Present Value (NPV) or Internal Rate of Return (IRR) to calculate the value of a community. NPV is a common calculation done to determine if you should invest in a project or not. NPV is the defined as the difference between Initial Cost Outlay and present value of expected cash inflows. A positive NPV value is acceptable where as an NPV of zero yields the internal rate of return. A negative value for NPV suggests that investment is not worthy of the money we are about to invest.

Like NPV, the IRR is a rate of return used in capital budgeting to measure and compare the profitability of investments.

Instead of using a dollar amount, could you use number of people in the community you would like to capture over a certain time period? What would be the initial outlay - possibly the total amount of people you want in that community? What about the discount rate - 10%?

Using IRR, I did a calculation as follows:

Year	0	1	2	3	4	5
Amount	-10000	1000	1500	2000	5000	7500

Discount rate of 10%
IRR was 15%

Not by any stretch perfect but I hope it starts some discussions and other ideas.

Sequencing Change

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It used to be that technology was adopted first at the corporate level and then by consumers. That sequence has now changed. It is the consumer who is driving the adoption of technology by corporations. Social Media and mobile are prime examples of this switch.

According to Web measurement firm Compete Inc., Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites. I would bet that this traffic is primarily consumer driven. That said, what does this mean for corporations, especially in the B2B space, as it has been shown that the Internet is one of the top places buyers begin their research on a product. Will they now be shifting from Google searches and SEO to FaceBook Fan pages? Searching Twitter for end users or stories? Mining LinkedIn for Groups and people that can help them with their decision? Yes, they will be.

The ramifications for corporations is that they must have a presence on all these sites, regardless if they are B2B or B2C. At my firm, we are really just ramping up the use of FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn to support the launch of our next generation product, Harvard ManageMentor. I am the primary person updating all these sites, as well as contributing to our new blog, and I know that it takes a lot of time and effort. As the use of these mediums becomes more prevalent in buying decisions, the need for a full time person in the marketing department will be mandatory.

Additionally, marketers will need to rethink which marketing automation platform they use and your messaging to fit to these sites. Can you explain your value proposition in 140 characters or less? Firms such as HubSpot are going to become even more important to help analyze the new inbound marketing results. It will be interesting to watch VC investment in this area of analytic's.

It has been interesting to see the new traffic being referred by these sites and I hope it only increases.