October 30, 2008
John Gallant, Network World, Inc. – In Sickness and in Health
Paul Gillin, Paul Gillin Communications – What Most People Don't Get About Links
Elyse Tager, Elymedia, LLC – Behavioral and Web 2.0
Ann Roskey, Accela Communications – Using Online Video to Thrive in a Challenging Economy
Anne Holland, MarketingSherpa, com – Recession as Marketing Bonanza – a Contrarian
(Yet Realistic) View
George F. Colony, Forrester Research – CIO Best Practices for Thriving in a Recession
In Sickness and in Health
Network World's commitment to you during tough times
John Gallant, CEO, Network World, Inc.
On December 31, 1979, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at just under 840.
On September 29, 2008, the DJIA dropped by nearly that amount (777 points) in a single day! Just two weeks later, it rose by a stunning 936 points in one crazy day to nearly 9,400 – only to drop again in the ensuing days to near 8,100. (As of this writing, we’d bounced back up again to just over 9,000, still well below the Dow’s peak of 14,164 points one year ago on October 9.)
To say that we’re living in volatile and unsettling times might be the biggest understatement ever. Consumer sentiment, house prices, credit markets and the global economy have been battered by a wave of bad news. Every one of us is left wondering what the next few months and few years will hold. We’re all uncertain and wondering what are the right moves to make with for our organizations and our personal finances. As someone paying for a college education right now, I’m wondering how I’m going to fund the ‘missing semester’ – the hole left in our family finances by the past months’ market madness.
Recent studies show that the financial stresses have caused corporations to be more cautious regarding IT spending for 2009. In Network World’s own budget survey, fielded between October 7 and 14, shows a mixed bag of sentiment about the coming year. About a third of respondents expect to see a decline in budgets. But half expect budgets to grow or remain constant – split evenly between those two options. (However, we know from speaking to IT executives that even in shops where budgets are being trimmed spending on key areas like virtualization, storage, security and technologies for optimizing IT and business will stay strong.)
We understand that topsy-turvy markets create uncertainty among IT buyers and marketers alike. We hear that uncertainly in our discussions with IT leaders and technology sellers.
So allow me to offer some assurance: Network World is here to help you and we’re creating the kinds of innovative media programs that will enable you to weather the tough times and come out ahead on the other side – whenever that might be.
We’ve maintained a strong investment in creating original content – news, testing, features, blogs, video, podcasts, conferences and more – to provide insight and answers to help IT buyers get through this challenging period. (Actually, life’s always challenging in today’s IT world.) We’re helping readers and event attendees understand how to optimize IT and squeeze the most out of their budgets. We’re giving them the tools to make the right choices when it comes to strategic vendor partners.
And we’re just as deeply committed to helping our IT marketing partners make hay even while the clouds are in the sky. We’re creating new media packages that help you secure leads and build brand identity. We’ve made a significant investment in custom publishing resources to help you develop media solutions tailored to your specific goals. We offer both reach and targeting. Our IT Roadmap events are perfectly designed for the times – we bring the event to major cities around the country so that IT pros who face travel budget cuts can still get out to learn about the latest developments and meet your company face-to-face.
Most important, we know what’s on the minds of IT buyers and we can help you craft your messages for the greatest impact. IT buying may not be growing as fast as it was a year ago, but corporations are still spending billions on IT and we can work with you on the messaging and themes that will engage buyers.
Yes, it’s a little scary out there right now. But you’re not alone. Please turn to us for answers and brainstorming about ways to stretch your budget and maintain your visibility. With more than 22 years in the market, we’ve been through a few storms and we can help you weather this one.
We’re here for you in good times and bad.
Best, JGWhat Most People Don't Get About Links
Paul Gillin, Social Media Consultant and Author of The New Influencers
I got a press release recently from a PR pro whose client has an interesting story to tell. The company makes a security product that combines cellular and global positioning technologies to alert people when valuable items have moved beyond a specified location. This particular pitch told about a customer who had recovered an expensive motorcycle just 20 minutes after it was stolen, thanks to the clever technology.
I have a half-dozen blogs, including one that deals with location-awareness, and I thought this would be a nice item to mention. I searched for the headline on Google, but came up empty. So I contacted the PR person directly. He responded that the press release actually wasn't posted online anywhere. "It's a media alert that I distribute to generate press," he said. "I was definitely not trying to get blog coverage."
There are a few questionable assumptions in that statement, including the fact that 95 of the top 100 newspapers in America now have blogs. For the purposes of this newsletter, though, I want to address the importance of having a Web copy of anything you send out for media consumption.
The Web is Different
The reason I searched for an online version of the press release was because Web publishing differs from print publishing in some fundamental ways. Look at any prolific blogger and you'll see that their entries are full of hyperlinks. This practice may look strange to someone who doesn't write principally for online consumption. Is the blogger being lazy by linking to source material instead of summarizing it?
Actually, quite the opposite is true. The comment-and-link approach leverages the strength of online media to minimize wasted time for the reader while making the blogger more productive.
To understand this phenomenon, look at the way we used to publish. In the print world, journalists typically have to excerpt or summarize any material they reference because they have no choice. The only way to convey information is to include it in the story. This makes articles longer and creates more work for the reporter, who has to guess what source information is relevant. It also means that good information is more likely to be left on the cutting room floor.
Online, the dynamic is very different. By linking to source material, the writer minimizes the amount of background information that has to be summarized. If the reader wants that information, he or she can click through to the source document. There's less time spent creating extraneous content and less time spent reading it.
This tactic is a core reason why some bloggers appear to be so prolific. Instead of wasting time reinventing the wheel, they can focus on the most relevant information. You need to understand this practice if you want to play fully in the online publishing world.
I personally maintain four blogs — paulgillin.com, geocachesecrets.com, mediablather.com and newspaperdeathwatch.com — and manage to post to all of them frequently. I use comment-and-link combined with some clever online tools to keep the content up-to-date. For example, if I see something interesting online, I can easily bookmark it, type a brief summary or comment and save everything online. My bookmark service knows to gather up these entries every day and post them to my blog automatically (here's an example of the result). My time expenditure is minimal and I focus only on the material that I think is most important. For audio or video content, there's practically no other way to do this.
Marketers who want to incorporate online journalists into their communication plans need to understand this tactic and build it into their strategy. Link-and-comment isn't a copout or a shortcut. It's a tactic for minimizing waste. By posting every press release online, you not only make it easier for bloggers to reference the information, but you also make sure it's you who tells the story and not some third party. Why would you have it any other way?
As for the press release about the security system and the motorcycle, I didn't end up running anything. Had the information been available online, I would have linked to it and recommended it to my readers. But reprint the whole thing? That's just too much trouble.
Author Profile
Paul Gillin is a writer, speaker and content marketing consultant specializing in technology and new media. He has been a technology journalist for 25 years. His next book, Secrets of Social Media Marketing, will be published in the fall of 2008.
Behavioral and Web 2.0
Elyse Tager, Founder and Principal, Elymedia, LLC
MySpace announced the launch of MyADs earlier this month. It’s described as “a new advertising platform designed to create relevant, targeted promotional business campaigns within one of the largest social media environment. MySpace MyAds is a do-it-yourself advertising platform that democratizes the landscape of online advertising, enabling anyone to create customized banner ads, target to specific audiences using MySpace’s HyperTargeting technology, and analyze campaign performance tracked throughout the MySpace ecosystem.
To recap, MyAds put the whole advertising process into the hands of any advertiser to build a customized, targeted, and measurable campaign 5 steps:
STEP 1: Visit https://advertise.myspace.com or click the “Advertise” link located at the bottom of any MySpace page
STEP 2: Create a display ad using the MyAds Builder Tool
STEP 3: Select a variable ad spend anywhere from $25 to $10,000
STEP 4: HyperTarget to customers
STEP 5: Measure ad performance with MyAds analytics reporting
(The above is from Myspace press release date 10/13/08)
The “hypertargeting” was what caught my attention, and where I got stopped.
As is true with all Behavioral Targeting, MySpace’s HyperTargeting ad technology enables the advertisers to serve their ad campaign to the “right” customers. HyperTargeting enables marketers to connect with specific user groups on a massive scale based on self-expressed interests available on MySpace profiles. The technology allows any MyAds user access to targeting parameters such as age, sex, geographical location, all in combination with thousands of user interest categories including specific keywords within each category. For example, within the ‘videogame’ enthusiast category, a further targeting keyword or phrase might include ‘Call of Duty 5’ if relevant to an advertiser’s campaign.
According to ReadWriteWeb (one of my favorite blogs) http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_myspace_advertising_platfo.php,
with MyAds, MySpace offers familiar demographics to advertisers interested in using its service. Among the targeting selections are gender, a range of ages from 14 to 65+, geographic targeting for the United States, and a series of highly targeted interests.
Unlike traditional online advertising demographics, however, the MySpace targeting includes some very MySpace-specific options, including "drinking," "partying," and professional wrestling, and RWWeb went on to say that this could be the major cause for success.
And there’s the rub, and my concern. The demos appear to be culled from the MySpace profiles. MySpace says that only 1% choose to opt out of receiving ads. (reference: http://seekingalpha.com/article/99864-myspace-s-myads-transitional-advertising-way-of-the-future). But I wonder if that 99% knows what type of info is being gathered from their profiles. And once they have opted in, (or not opted out) who is to say how much and what kind of additional info will be gathered to that end? And as these major players start partnering with others, such as MySpace partnering with Amazon on streaming free music (reference: http://www.switched.com/2008/09/26/myspace-partners-with-amazon-to-stream-free-music/) the lines are blurred and the definition of what was opted into up for grabs, or at least re-definition.
The social networks are seeking a way to monetize their existence – understood. But advertising by mining the information provided by participants seems so counter to the general culture of social networks themselves. The Facebook Beacon advertising service is certainly a different model, but does utilize members profile information. Multiple lawsuits have given FB pause. One of the more recent, in August of this year, alleges that Facebook never sought user approval before collecting personal information, and was also keeping tabs on people who weren’t even signed up for Facebook. The class action lawsuit was filed on August 12 in the California Northern District Court, and includes the following passages (you can see the full text below
“The Beacon program sent information regarding specific user transactions on Facebook Beacon Activated Affiliates’ websites to Facebook regardless of whether the user was a Facebook member or not. Thus, no consent was sought, nor was any consent obtained from persons who utilize the Facebook Beacon Activated Affiiliate’s website who were not Facebook members…”
“It was deceptive because, in almost every instance, the information sharing was contrary to the stated privacy policies of the Facebook website and every other Facebook Beacon Activated Affiliate that had signed up for the program.”
More pause. So even thought changes to the privacy policies had been put in place, they may not have been followed.
I’m still quite the proponent of behavioral targeting and behavioral marketing, but with several caveats. It must be done at the aggregated level, as most of the sophisticated behavior profiles and predictive modeling companies are doing. None of this is done at the personal level. Social networks are all about personal information. That’s why they exist, for the most part. I’m not sure that this kind of advertising model has any place in Web 2.0.
Author Profile
Elyse Tager is founder and principal of Elymedia, an online and traditional media agency that has worked with many of the world's most recognizable brands, from Microsoft to PowerBar. With 20 years of executive marketing experience in direct response and 10 years of Internet marketing experience, Elyse has gained a thorough understanding of both types of media and how they interact. This depth of experience and knowledge has benefited her clients as they strategize marketing objectives in both on- and offline worlds. Contact her at info@elymedia.com.
Using Online Video to Thrive in a Challenging Economy
Ann Roskey, Vice President, Marketing & Audience Development, Accela Communications
The poor economic conditions that together we face will require more business discipline than ever in 2009. In order to truly thrive, the coming year will be one that calls for a laser sharp focus in three areas:
- Clear measurement of ROI
- Keeping your executives and key opinion leaders in front of prospects and customers
- Getting maximum utility from every dollar spent
If well planned and executed, interactive video and multimedia programs are a truly resourceful way to effectively address all three of these goals. The inherent ability of video and multimedia to convey the personality of your organization, support your brand’s identity, reinforce customer relationships in a one-to-many manner, and generate actionable lead data, provides the springboard needed to rise above your competition.
Clear measurement of ROI
If a B2B online video program is not measurable, it’s rarely worth doing. Be sure to choose a multimedia platform that provides advanced metrics, and establish the benchmarks beforehand to assess engagement quality and determine viewer interests. Number of registrations or leads, and average viewing length are basic statistics that can be used to measure the success of a video campaign. However, a platform that includes further tracking metrics will give you deeper insight that greatly enhances ROI including: registrations by classification, engagement time for non-reigstered viewers, segment view times, click and download activity, aggregate audience demographics, platform interactions, or polling feedback.
All of these data points can feed into an engagement formula. This information is very important to determining the effectiveness of your program and can be used to rank leads, guide follow-up communications, conduct virtual market research, support product planning, and much more.
Lastly, the data that you do capture should easily integrate with your CRM and/or SFA system. Choosing an multimedia platform that allows for easy integration of the collected data into these systems is critical for timely follow-up and future use. Make sure that the captured information from the video campaign reporting, especially the basics regarding registration contact information, can be seamlessly passed into your SFA system. This will ensure that your sales reps can get immediate notification when a prospect has viewed your multimedia program and requests more information. As you are well aware, a timely follow-up call at the point of interest can lead to a dramatic increase in sales, turning your online video into a “lead machine” for your company.
Keep your executives and key opinion leaders in front of customers
In a struggling economy, putting your company executive and thought leaders in front of customers is arguably one of the most effective ways to stay connected with customers, and convey the uniqueness, personality and stability of your organization. Delivering your presenters online with video and multimedia offers a multitude of cost-saving advantages over one-to-one communications. Travel and meeting expenses are virtually eliminated since participants can view the program at their desk. Programs are professionally produced and edited, so the same high quality content is delivered to everyone regardless of time or location. Because the program is available on-demand, it is more convenient to attend and viewers can search program content for the segment that applies to them, fulfilling their information needs more quickly. Some examples of meetings that could be easily delivered online include strategic positioning, product announcements, or market education, or market research presentations.
Get maximum utility from every dollar spent
Before setting up a video taping session, think about how to shoot the media so it can be redistributed in multiple venues to increase the value of the content and ROI of your investment. Think of the broadest number of applications: What is the goal of this video? What discrete audiences do I want to reach? Are there different messages for each? Are there some shared messages? How do I want to distribute this?
As an example you might want to produce a corporate identity video. In one video taping session you could capture a few different things 1) a welcome message from your CEO that can also be used on your company homepage, 2) your top customers talking about why your company is great to do business with, 3) and a product demonstration. These can be “packaged” into different videos. A corporate identity video can be featured from your website homepage which might include pieces of the video. Excerpts can be used for a banner advertisement that gets run in purchased ad inventory on relevant websites. An alternative introduction could be planned for use on another web site, such as a channel or strategic partner. The customer video interviews can be featured on the Customer Success Stories section of your website. You could release one customer video interview per month in your company’s e-newsletter. Or, a video clip could be sent to the press for a new product introduction.
Author Profile
Ann Roskey is VP of Marketing & Audience Development for Accela Communications, an interactive marketing firm that provides online video production, streaming media and data management services. Ann can be reached at ann_roskey@accelacommunications.com, or (508) 303-9704.
Recession as Marketing Bonanza – a Contrarian (Yet Realistic) View
Anne Holland, Content Director, MarketingSherpa.com
For marketing-lead companies, a recession can be seen as a golden opportunity. Your competitors are slashing their budgets, pulling back on brand marketing in particular.
At the same time, ad costs are dropping. Media companies, used to the fat of good times, slash prices and extend special offers (i.e., get three ezine ads tossed free in with every 12x drive-time radio spot) to keep their bookings stable.
It’s the perfect time to build market share at lower cost. When the economy comes out of its funk, your bigger slice of the market pie grows more profitable daily.
If your CEO doesn’t see a recession as an advertising-buying bonanza, try explaining it to him or her with a stock market metaphor. To succeed on Wall Street, you buy as much of blue-chip stocks as you can when their prices are unusually low. Then, when prices invariably rise again someday, you’re suddenly wealthy.
2008 could be your brand’s year to “buy low” for future wealth. How can you know if this will work for you? Four qualifiers:
- If you work for a public company — or one that’s focused solely on revenues for this particular quarter, future thinking be damned — then this strategy is not for you.
- If your lead generation or direct sales are driven heavily by search PPC advertising, expanding your other brand marketing in a recession can help raise PPC results by up to 40%. People recognize your brand, so they are more likely to click on your ad and more likely to convert. Your branding investment pays off both now and in the future.
- If you are in a highly competitive field, jostling with dozens or even hundreds of competitors, a recession can be a golden opportunity to rise to the top of the pack. Prospects can probably only remember and consider three to five brands in your niche. If you advertise heavily now when it’s getting cheaper every day, you may wind up being one of those three to five brands who automatically make everyone’s shortlist for years to come.
- If you are a new brand or start-up, a recession can provide unusually fertile marketing ground. While the major brands cut back on their ad presence to ride the storm out, you can make a bigger launch impression on the marketplace than you would in good times when too many brands are fighting for prospect’s attention. Have you ever wondered how so many brands, such as Apple's iPod, Wikipedia, Sirius Satellite Radio and, yes, MarketingSherpa, could be successful when they launched during bad recessions or depressions?
Success, as with every marketing tactic, starts with initial measurements. You need to know three things about your brand … and be able to measure them on an ongoing basis to prove your worth to the CEO and management:
#1. Market share
What’s your slice of the pie? Where do you stand in relation to other brands in terms of accounts or sales within the market? What’s the total market size currently? How about the projected market size for three years? If your marketing efforts can win a percentage point of share, how much will that be worth to the bottom line?
You may want to break this out by market segment. Data is available from industry associations, industry analysts and researchers, and via surveys conducted by media. Start with a baseline measurement now and update quarterly if possible, annually at least.
#2. Brand perception
How well known is your brand name now? Do prospects recognize it? Do they think of it as being “The best?" Do your PPC ads do better with your brand name in the copy or URL or better with it removed?
Data is available via third party surveys — talk to your marketing partners (perhaps other brands who target the same segments for complimentary products) to see if they’ll run a survey for you if you run a survey for them. Media and research firms will also run surveys if you ask (and pay.) Consider measuring every quarter or six months, depending on how heavy your branding investment is and how much your management team need to see “pay off” via results data.
#3. Media costs
In a recession, media rate cards may not change much officially, but there’s often a lot more room for negotiation. Start your research by gathering the rate cards, or estimated costs, for all relevant media buys for your segments now including list rental, print ads, exhibit booths, radio, TV, white paper syndication, etc. Your goal is to establish a baseline.
Then as you negotiate media buys through the next year, report on real-life costs per impression versus official or old costs. This way you can show the management team that you are getting more for your money from the same marketing dollar.
In the end, even if your brand’s overall sales and/or profits are not growing as quickly as they used to, the marketing department can look like heroes because they are increasing market share and brand value – setting up the company to be a huge winner in better times to come – all while saving money.
You can be a recession rock star.
CIO Best Practices for Thriving in a Recession
George F. Colony, Chairman of the Board and CEO, Forrester Research
I hosted a dinner last night at Forrester's Business and Technology Leadership Forum here in Orlando. Great discussion with 12 CIOs, several CMOs, and a vendor CEO. When we weren't passionately debating politics, we spent time compiling recession strategies — the best ways of riding out a potential economic slowdown.
First of all, many in the room have no plans to slow down their technology budgets for 2009. While the low was a -6% plan for next year and the high was a 30% increase, the average was a 6.5% increase — almost dead on the Forrester estimate for 2009 tech spending increase. Many CIOs are in the middle of re-building infrastructure, implementing new applications, and modernizing data centers — projects that are hard to stop on a dime. That said, there was a lot of wisdom in the room about best practices for a recession. Here are some highlights:
1) Outsourcing is not a silver bullet. Use the recession to build internal skills.
2) Use a slowdown to improve the team — look to bring in great people who have been laid off elsewhere.
3) Avoid the "Dead Sea effect." As IT consultant Bruce Webster has noted, the Dead Sea has an inlet, but no outlet, so most of the pure water evaporates, leaving brine. Don't let your best people evaporate in a recession.
4) Cut training and development last. That resource is critical to success in the post-recession period.
5) Use a recession to make tough decisions — to get rid of redundant and non-performing vendors, and to cut low-performing employees.
6) Accelerate virtualization and other IT/BT efficiency measures.
7) Re-double efforts to add value. Sharpen ROI metrics, publicize IT/BT victories, honor and award great performers, intensify collaboration between technology and business. Use this time to be more visible with the CEO, not less.
8) Hire the great MBAs that would have gone to Wall Street.
9) Look for vendor discounts and re-negotiate contracts when possible.
How will the financial crisis affect these companies? Most need credit to expand — to build new hotels, new hospitals, new stores — they will be adversely impacted if that credit doesn't start to flow again. But that said, these executives, most of whom navigated the 2001-2003 recession, felt prepared and planful as they look to uncertain economic times.
Any other recession best practices out there? I'd love to get your ideas and thoughts.
Author Profile
As founder and CEO of Forrester Research, George is one of the most influential thought leaders in the world of business and technology. During his 25-year career, George has become a trusted advisor to CEOs of leading global companies by providing forward-looking and pragmatic analysis on the impact of technology change on business.