March 27, 2008

John Gallant, Network World, Inc. – Buyers Speak: What's on their Minds?

Paul Gillin, Paul Gillin Communications – Marketing in the Age of the Universal Home Page

Tricia Robinson-Pridemore, StrongMail Systems – Tips for Using E-mail to Send Press Releases

Jean Romeo, Research Concepts, LLC – The Interaction Between Print and Online Media

Laura DuBois , IDC – What's Happening in the Storage Software Market?

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Buyers Speak: What's on their Minds?
John Gallant, CEO, Network World, Inc.

If you’ll forgive a moment of pride, I have to say that Network World’s IT Roadmap Conference & Expo series is a juggernaut.

Earlier this month in Denver – the first stop on our eight-city 2008 tour – more than 660 IT Executives joined us to learn about issues and solutions in 10 different technology areas, from application acceleration and virtualization, to security and Web 2.0. The Mile-High City was just the latest in a string of successes for ITR, which has struck a chord with IT pros who find it difficult to travel to distant locations to keep up with the changes in their field. ITR brings the action right to their backyards and enables buyers to learn about new products and services that can meet their needs today. (For more about IT Roadmap opportunities, click here).

At the Denver event, I had the opportunity to host some Q&A with our keynote speaker – the CIO of ProLogis, one of the world’s top warehousing and real estate development firms – and meet with Network World readers from a variety of companies. But the best part of my day was hosting a private roundtable discussion among 16 IT leaders attending the event. I had the opportunity to cover a lot of ground with them, exploring current projects, the top issues keeping them awake at night and their relationships with key vendors, among other things. I wanted to share some of their thoughts with you.

Our 90-minute conversation certainly shouldn’t be construed as an exhaustive overview of the IT landscape, but some major themes were clear nonetheless.

• Virtualization couldn't be much hotter a topic. Many of the roundtable participants attended IT Roadmap for the virtualization track and are currently involved in virtualization projects – from the largest companies to the smallest. It’s clear that IT Executives are eager for information about the benefits of virtualization and the challenges of deploying storage, server and network virtualization technologies.
• Virtualization is really a subset of a bigger concern around optimization and cost reduction. Reducing complexity and cost are major issues for IT leaders, who too often have too few resources to deal with the growing demands they face. We’ve heard many times that a frighteningly high percentage of IT budgets – 60-70% and higher – are eaten up by operational costs, leaving little money for innovation. Our roundtable participants stressed the need to reduce these ongoing costs and optimize their existing environments in order to stretch budgets and find money for new projects. Optimization and cost reduction – especially in the current economic environment – are powerful marketing messages.
• Our participants stressed over and over about the increasing pressure they face to ensure business continuity and IT continuity, and it’s clear that positioning products and services as solutions in these areas is a great way to capture attention.
• No surprise that security continues to be a challenge, with customers seeking help streamlining increasingly complex security environments and dealing with new threats and compliance issues.
• We also spent some time talking about what constitutes a strong vendor relationship for these customers. This is a subject that warrants far more depth than I can provide here, but I did want to cover one specific topic into which we delved – what makes buyers change incumbent vendors. These are the warning signs our roundtable participants posted:
• When the price differential between an incumbent vendor’s offerings and a competing vendor’s gets too big.
• When the capability gap between technologies from the incumbent and competing vendors gets too big.
• When your incumbent starts to take you for granted and stops working hard for the business. This is reflected in things like the speed of response to problems, the quality of sales personnel you are dealing with, how often the sales and support people proactively reach out to you and how often the vendor shakes up its sales and support people. (Customers don’t love those changes). In many cases, it seems vendors forget to attend to – and to communicate regarding – this basic people aspect of the business. If a competitor puts a strong sales person in front of a customer and can prove that it has world-class support, almost any incumbent is at risk.

Our roundtable participants also discuss how they gather information about new products and companies – in particular, the role of print, online and events in this process – and I’ll talk more about that next month.

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Marketing in the Age of the Universal Home Page
Paul Gillin, Social Media Consultant and Author of  The New Influencers

When I meet with corporate marketers and their agencies these days, I'm frequently surprised to learn how little they think about search engine optimization. This is despite the fact that Google alone processes an estimated 750 million queries daily, and that IT professionals are some of the most active and advanced users of search engines

One reason for this, I suspect, is that marketers are trained to be good at “push” marketing.  Their craft has traditionally involved intercepting customers with messages that grab their attention and inspire action. Customers, however, are becoming more resistant to these tactics. Increasingly, they engage with companies and products on their terms when they're ready to make a buying decision. That's a much better time to reach them. The trick is to show up on their radar when they’re in this “pull” mode.

Google is now the universal homepage. Look at your traffic logs and you'll probably see that search engines vastly outperform any other referral source. Yet many marketers devote lots of time and money to creating beautiful homepage designs that are rich in animation and graphics. Not only are these pages rarely seen by today's web site visitors, but images and Flash animations are almost useless at attracting search engine traffic.

Successful IT marketers are learning to reverse the push model. They know that buyers start the research process in a search query box and that the sites that make the first page of results get 10 times the click-throughs of anything else.

You might think search engines favor the big brands, but that's not the case. Try this: Type “router” into Google and look at the results. Note that only four of the top 25 results are vendor sites. Now type “PC.” Note that the only vendor in the top 10 results -- Apple -- doesn't even market its products as PCs! In fact, neither of the top two PC makers in the US market even makes the top 100 results on Google.

Now look at what dominates search results for both terms: sites that provide definitions and helpful how-to advice. This should tell you something. Your search engine performance will be greatest when you deliver content that helps customers make good decisions through practical, impartial guidance from knowledgeable sources.

Search is the great equalizer. The leading engines’ proprietary algorithms are designed to screen out material that their developers consider uninteresting. Your challenge is to match your content to their preferences.

Start by choosing the search terms that really matter. Be specific. Get general agreement that these are the terms you want to dominate in search performance. Marshall all of your internal website contributors to reinforce those terms every time they write.

About Paul Gillin
Paul Gillin is a writer, speaker and content marketing consultant specializing in technology and new media. He specializes in social media and the application of personal publishing to brand awareness and business marketing. Paul is a veteran technology journalist with more than 23 years of editorial leadership experience. His book, The New Influencers, was published in 2007. You can read his blog and sign up for his weekly Social Media Report newsletter at www.paulgillin.com.

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Tips for Using E-mail to Send Press Releases
Tricia Robinson-Pridemore, VP, Market and Product Strategy, StrongMail Systems

As the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Such is the case with e-mail. It is pervasive in all corporations and an often preferred method of contact by editors, reporters and analysts. As with any e-mail program, corporate PR e-mail starts with considering the needs of the audience. These same media magnets are inundated with e-mail press releases every day. If you want your important news to get opened—and, more important, get covered—follow these best practices:

• Stop including the entire press release in the body of the e-mail. Research reports you have less than six seconds to capture attention in the preview pane. Press releases can average five or more paragraphs. Instead, include a teaser of the release and a click-through to a hosted version on your Web site.
• Don’t include attachments. They can be deliverability killers. Corporate e-mail filtering systems are often more stringent in their rules than even the largest ISPs. Attachments from outside sources are often confused with viruses or attacks. Leave data sheets, photos and other release-related attachments to an expected, person-to-person e-mail so you’ll be ensured they get delivered.
• Think carefully about “from” and subject lines. Remember the rule: The “from” line tells the recipient whether or not to delete the e-mail and the subject line tells the recipient whether or not to open the e-mail. If an individual at your company has a relationship with the media, test using that person’s name in the “from” line instead of the company name alone. Write an engaging subject line and include first name personalization. Recipient first name personalization has fallen out of widespread favor in the b-to-c e-mail world, but in b-to-b, it’s still another way to catch the recipients’ attention.

Once the e-mail gets opened, the relevance of your message takes over. Just because the media recipient list may be smaller than your customer retention or acquisition lists doesn’t mean relevancy rules don’t apply. If your message isn’t important to the recipient, you’ve lost their attention today and maybe in the future as well.

Tricia Robinson-Pridemore is VP, market and product strategy for StrongMail Systems (www.strongmail.com), a provider of e-mail marketing solutions.

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MARKET RESEARCH: The Interaction Between Print and Online Media
Jean Romeo, Partner, Research Concepts, LLC

I live in an old farmhouse in New England and while most of the house had been renovated over the years, the kitchen had a brown, checkered linoleum floor, that desperately needed to be replaced. The challenge was a typical, new wood floor would not look right in this house which has wide pine and pumpkin floors from the 1800’s. Reading This Old House one evening, I noticed an ad for a flooring company – it was actually the picture that caught my eye because the floors reminded me of the ones in our house. I pulled the ad out of the magazine and immediately went online to research the company. I called the company, received some marketing materials, talked more with the company and finally, we had a new (but old-looking) floor. In this case, it was the print ad that lead to online research, some personal selling and ultimately a purchase. To what extent is this process occurring among IT professionals? Are technology print publications driving them to go online and do more research? What other activities are they doing online as a result of reading print publications like Network World?

Network World commissioned Research Concepts, LLC to conduct a research study to better understand how IT professionals use the print edition of Network World. The study was fielded in December 2007 among Network World print subscribers. A total of 514 respondents completed the survey and they represented a diversity of job functions, industries, company sizes and ages. The results discussed in this newsletter highlight the findings that show the interaction between print and online. We found three different aspects of the print-online interaction.

# 1: Print Enhances Online Awareness
76% of respondents agree that seeing a product in the print edition of Network World makes them more likely to notice the product online. We know that IT professionals focus or concentrate on information they read in print, so it is not surprising that they remember this information and this translates into the products they notice when online.

#2: Print Encourages Online Actions
IT professionals find new information or information they were not necessarily looking for when reading print and it is evident that print drives them to go online. One online action print encourages is research. We found that 89% of the respondents agreed with the statement, “The articles I read in Network World encourage me to do further research online.” In addition, 68% went right to NetworkWorld.com for more information. 

Print also drives readers to vendor websites. A total of 84% said they have visited a vendor Web site as a direct result of reading Network World.

Another online action print encourages is click-through rates. In this study, 53% of respondents agreed that they are more likely to click on an online ad from an unfamiliar company when they see the ad in the Network World print edition first.

#3: Print Advertising Adds Credibility to Online Advertising
With a much smaller barrier to entry for an Internet presence than in print, is there extra credibility given to vendors who advertise in print? In this research, 58% of the respondents agreed that if they see a vendor advertising in the print edition of Network World, this gives them more credibility than if they just see their ads online. Thus, print can add credibility to an online-only campaign.

In addition, 73% of the respondents agreed that they notice the vendors who are spending on print advertising in Network World. They take note of the expense and the effort that goes into print advertising. One respondent commented on the creation process of print ads, “The limitation of static “print” requires advertisers to more carefully design and edit the information in their ads.” So IT professionals realize the amount of resources that go into a print ad and value the information they receive from ads. In fact, 68% agree that they find the information in Network World print ads useful for understanding vendors and their products.

Print and Online Together = Effective Marketing Strategies
In summary, we found that information in print encourages online actions such as visiting a vendor Web site or doing more research online. Print can also increase the effectiveness of online campaigns since readers are more likely to notice a product online or take an action online if they see the product in print first. The bottom line is that print adds awareness and credibility to online campaigns.

Jean Romeo can be reached at jromeo@research-concepts.com or at 978-443-9042.

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What's Happening in the Storage Software Market?
Laura DuBois, Program Director, IDC Storage Software Practice

Storage-as-a-Service Continues to Fuel M&A Activity:

Storage-as-a-Service offers a new approach to delivering traditional storage software functions such as backup. Storage-as-a-Service, also known as on-demand, online or hosted services, includes the software functions, infrastructure, services and storage capacity to provide the backup, replication and archiving of data over the Internet to a service provider owned infrastructure and data center. What is not included in Storage-as-a-Service are subscription or capacity based pricing models for onsite solutions and storage software.

While still a relatively nascent market, the upside is quite large, in particular with small and medium-size businesses (SMB) and even small office/home office (SOHO) and home and personal storage environments. The industry has seen significant consolidation in the market over the last 24-36 months. Early market movement came from Iron Mountain’s purchase of Connected and LiveVault and Seagate’s acquisition of eVault. More recent activity has been Seagate’s purchase of MetaLINCs, IBM’s purchase of Arsenal Digital, EMC’s acquisition of Berkeley Data Systems and lastly Dell’s intended acquisition of MessageONE. IDC finds that future growth in the data protection, archiving and replication markets will be derived from the availability of online services to reach new customer segments, including consumer, SOHO, remote office/branch office (ROBO), and SMB environments as well as enterprise end points and mobile devices. As a result of this Storage-as-a-Service market activity and user demand, IDC is launching the industry’s first primary research on this emerging segment.

Laura DuBois serves as Program Director for IDC's Storage Software practice. The Storage Software program covers areas such as storage and device management, storage replication, data protection and recovery, storage infrastructure, file systems and archiving software segments. Ms. DuBois is responsible for the research, consulting and client relationships, and she oversees IDC's team of storage software analysts.

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