At Blog World Expo...

Greetings from Blog World Expo in Las Vegas!

Interesting assortment of people, speakers, and vendors. This morning I attended a really good session on corporate blogging led by Debbie Weil, definitely a voice of authority on the topic. The panel included bloggers from Kodak, Cisco, Southwest Airlines, and HP.

Here’s a question that I asked that I don’t think anybody has a definitive answer to: how do you measure the success or the results of a corporate blog? Is anybody in a large corporation turning to their blog team and asking that? My guess is that before long, having a blog will be an obvious necessity, and no one will be looking for specific ROI measurements... but still, there will likely be some measures that people pay attention to (traffic, links back, etc.).

How do you measure the success of your blog?

What's with the Geico Ads?

First there were the clever little pay-attention ads with the gecko. Geco, Gecko. Get it? Pretty soon a company you may not have heard of was a company you couldn't help but have heard of.

Did this increase Geico's business? I'm guessing it did.

Then there were the cave men...

Not my favorites of all time, but reasonably well done, if you overlook the connection.

Geico. Cavemen. Get it?

Well, no.

And they were still running the gecko ads all along, were they not?

Now there are the retro ads - some in black and white.

Chatty Cathy dolls. Beverly Hillbillies. Cabbage Patch Kids.

And the greeting card for Dear Old Mom. Is that a Geico ad, too?

I don't get it.

Maybe it's just me, and this is way too much for my feeble little beebee brain to take in, but I find these ads a real mish-mosh.

Maybe if, like the cavemen ads, they were somewhat thematic, I would like them better.

Kids toys of the 50s/60s: Chatty Cathy. Mr. Machine. Tony the Pony.

B&W TV Shows: Beverly Hillbillies, Mr Ed, F-Troop.

Cabbage Patch Kids: Why stop with Ben Winkler? Weren't millions of CPK's with unique identities "born" in the 80s? (Arrabelle Louise. Destiny Maude. Gilbert Anton....)

Plus they're still running the gecko ads. (Don't know about the cavemen.)

I get that Geico wants to be known for their clever ads, but this current suite, I think, misses the mark in terms of how well they work together.

The good news is that, now that baseball season is over - having ended in an entirely satisfying way for those of use who live (and die) in Red Sox Nation - I will be watching far less ad-addled television.

Come April, who knows what Geico will be up to. I just hope it hangs together better than the current batch. 

Web 2.0, Web Two Point No, and BlogWorld Expo

I am heading off to the BlogWorld Expo this week; if you're going to be there, let me know. It looks like a good conference and set of vendors, so it should be the center of the world of blogging for a few days.

It's interesting, though, to note that while blogs have become absolutely mainstream, some companies don't get it. Have a look at Mary Schmidt's tale of complaining to American Airlines and mentioning that she'd blogged about her bad experience with them, and how they replied:

We have received your email, however, because of company online security procedures, we do not engage in researching online blogs. However, your perspective has been noted. Ms. Schmidt, thank you for your interest.

Because of security reasons, we can't look at a web site? Oh, okay. That was followed by the ultimate "Please drop dead, you annoying customer, you" closer:

This is an “outgoing only” email address. If you ‘reply’ to this message by simply selecting the reply button, we will not receive your additional comments.

The whole tone is "Look, we really don't want to hear your stupid complaints." It's hard to imagine why airlines like American are in trouble these days, isn't it?

How behind the curve is American Airlines? They still haven't figured out blogging and social media, and others are already getting over it. One of the biggest cheerleaders of all things Web 2.0, Steve Rubel, suddenly announced that he's realized that all these companies doing pointless things in overly complicated ways with no prospects of ever making money are kind of silly:

Let's face it, we're skunk drunk and it's because of money. It's almost like we all need to enter Betty Ford Clinic 2.0 together. This time, it's not stock market money but private equity, M&A, VCs and to some degree the reckless abandonment of logic by some advertisers who are perpetuating what is sure to end badly when the economy turns. Hubris is back my friends.

I don't disagree with Steve, but he's been one of the biggest cheerleaders of everything silly on the web. (And he admits that in the blog post: I give him a lot of credit for that.) He's not alone in this assessment; apparently the money guys at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers have figured it out, too:

"We have absolutely no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies," says Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins. He mentioned this during an after dinner conversation last week. He said he had recently told John Battelle, one of the organizers of the rapidly growing Web 2.0 Summit conference, that the term no longer had the same positive cachet it once had. In the VC community it clearly has a negative one.

But lest this be seen as sudden sanity onset, consider this commentary from Tom Foremski in that same blog post:

Web 2.0 companies will now have to reinvent and redefine themselves. And reprint their business plans. They should also remove any mention of "long tail economics." I have a bad feeling about the longevity of that term in the investment community. It sounds a touch too W2.

Nixing anything "long tail" is an easy way to future-proof a business plan for a few months longer.

"Social graph" is doing great right now, so make sure you pepper your business plan with that term. "Social platform" still has legs. And "attention economy" is a ricochet term with a bullet.

That passage makes my head hurt, mostly because he's right. But it leaves me wondering what ever happened to ideas having some relevance beyond buzzwords. The idea of Web 2.0 has not gone away. The long tail concept is an interesting and valid one, but the term became trendy and started being applied to all kinds of things that weren't particularly "long tail," and now it's pretty much just something to set off our BS detectors. The same is true of all the various social media buzzwords.

There are valid concepts behind all of this, and people will figure out how to make businesses based on them. Of course, for each of those businesses, there will be 99 hopefuls with half baked ideas vomiting out a stream of buzzwords in a sort of dadaist Word Salad 2.0.

Interesting times, anyway. Meanwhile, off to Las Vegas.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #5

This post is the fifth in a series inspired by Pragmatic Marketing's 20 Rules of Product Management rules for technology marketing.

RULE #5: Product management determines the go-to-market strategy; Marcom executes it.

First off, much of my career has been spent in companies where product management/product marketing and marcom were housed under one very small group. Heck, I've been in places where they were all me-myself-and-I. I've also worked in companies, as a product manager, where product management was outward-facing to limited degree - establish requirements, go on sales calls - but leave most of marketing to marcom. These were places in which there was no such thing as a separate, specific product marketing function, and in which much of what product management focused on was project management during the development and roll-out cycle.

But when I worked at Genuity, we had separate product marketing and marcom groups, residing - for much of my tenure there -in separate organizations, connecting up on the org-chart level only at the president box.

This would have worked out fine if someone in the president box, or in the EVP boxes just below, actually agreed that there were two separate functions, with different roles, responsibilities, and expertise. And declared that the two different groups were going to get along.

Well, that never happened and, although the reasons had little to do with marketing, is it any wonder that Genuity went out of business?

Although I had many good friends and colleagues in Marcom, relationships between us (Product Marketing) and them were generally non-productive and rancorous.

Marcom was under sales, and much of what they did was what sales wanted them to do. Now, I'll get into why this is a bad idea at another time, but suffice it to say that sales wanted the short term hit, not the long term build. It never seemed to matter what the overall corporate strategy was, if sales didn't think they could easily sell it tomorrow it didn't get marketed today.

Marcom also owned all the budget, so Product Marketing was always in the position of begging if there was any program we wanted to do.

Sometimes the budget stuff played out in ridiculous ways. At one annual sales conference, there was an exhibit hall for the products. We all had draped tables, signs we made out-of-pocket at Kinko's, photocopied sell sheets, no lights, and lame-o promotional gimmicks to attract the sales guys' interest.

Marcom shipped in trade-show booths - beautiful lighting, nice signage - at which they showcased their new corporate brochures, ad campaigns, web site, and corporate giveaways.

We had the content, they had the stuff.

Shouldn't we have come together on this?

But, no.

The enmity between the two camps was just too great.

The rap on Product Marketing: no sense of the real world, i.e., sales.

The rap on Marcom, content-less big spenders.

Political battles at the EVP and VP levels - characterized by all sorts of sniping and such wonderful endeavors as trying to set up redundant, parallel groups in their own organizations.

Truly, I spent half my life at Genuity just trying to define organizational roles, unruffle feathers, make peace, and just try to make some sense out of things. (For most of my time at Genuity, I headed up Product Marketing across all products.)

I may not be Mahatma Gandhi, but if I couldn't get things to work out, ain't no one was going to.

What a waste!

So, I'd add on a bit to Pragmatic's rule: make sure that the roles are clear, and insist on an environment of mutual trust and respect.

You Have Got to be Kidding Me

Next week I'm heading out to Las Vegas to attend BlogWorld Expo, so tonight I'm looking through the list of exhibitors to decide who I really want to make sure I see. And on the list is a company called Entrecard. I've never heard of them. When you click the link on the event site to find out who they are, this is what you see:

That's it. That's the whole thing. No links, no explanation, just "Hey, give us your email address!" (My first thought was, "Drop this, losers.")

Honestly, there are good landing pages and bad landing pages but there's also another category I can most kindly call "idiotic."

I don't know who these people are are, I don't know what they do, but I'm supposed to give them permission to bug me? I think not. Work with me here, people. I'm going to be there; all you have to do is pique my interest so I'll spend five minutes at your booth, thereby giving you the opportunity to wow me. You're not even trying.

Giving your Marketing Away

Mack Collier has a nice piece in MarketingProfs about show social media changes marketing. It's a nice piece because it doesn't overreach and has some specific examples what companies have done and what you can consider doing yourself in this arena.

He notes:

There are risks involved. Letting your marketing speak in the customer's voice instead of your own can mean that sometimes your intended message isn't communicated as you would prefer. But if your marketing is spoken with the customer's voice, it will be more authentic and will better resonate with your target market.

This is the part that people often forget; give your customers power and tools to talk about you, and they might say things that aren't what you would have chosen. Still, for many marketers, the power of motivated customers outweighs the risks. It also, I think, keeps companies honest; if your customers start saying things you don't like, there's a reason, and you ought to be thinking about that.

Why Doesn't Everyone Do This?

Mobile phones are highly personal objects, and as a result, getting a new one - no matter how great it is - can be traumatic in some ways. You have a lot to relearn. How do I add that person to my contacts? How do I swap calls when I get another call coming in? How does the conference calling work? Whoops, that button hangs up the phone (sorry, whoever I was talking to). What's that button on the side?

And when using an operating system designed to cram information into a tiny screen, and that relies on a couple of multipurpose buttons for input, it's obviously challenging for the developers too. So there are two problems: deciding whether you'll really like a phone, or wind up hating it after using it a couple of months, and learning all that stuff when you get a new phone.

I'm in the "now that I know it I hate it" phase with my phone and am thinking of getting an iPhone. And so I actually sat and watched the twenty-minute "guided tour" video that Apple's got on their web site.

You know what? Not only is it a good sales piece, it's something that I wish I could have watched for every phone I've ever used.

As I watched, I thought about thumbing through a Motorola phone manual once upon a time to figure out how things worked (usually finding that "this service is carrier dependent, so go figure it out yourself" for many of my questions), and thought, Why didn't they do this? (Especially since Motorola generally makes lovely hardware with demented software.)

Yes, it's a sales piece - but it manages to tell you how to do everything. Make a call, take a call, switch calls, conference people together, add people to your contacts, use other applications while talking to somebody, get your email, send a text message, and so on.

It's very handy for a potential buyer because it gives you a real sense of what using the phone will be like - not 100%, of course, but more than you'll get playing with it in the store for ten minutes. And if you've just taken one out of the box, it's the twenty minute "here are all the basics you need" primer that is notably absent from other phones.

I've railed in the past about dumb use of video to present information better communicated in text. This is the opposite; this is an excellent use of video to show you things that would sound complicated in print. If I get an iPhone the first thing I'll do is sit down, phone in hand, and watch it again and follow it along, and I think it will help me avoid the "first week of new phone" issues of hanging up on people, missing calls, and so on.

The thing is... it's so obvious. Why isn't there one of these for every phone that has more than basic calling functions (which is to say, pretty much every phone)?