December 11, 2008

John Gallant, Network World, Inc. – What IT Executives Need Right Now

Elyse Tager, Elymedia, LLC – Making the Best of a Bad Economy

Craig Kerr, iPost – Practical Tips for Holiday Success

Jean Romeo, Research Concepts, LLC – Usage of Approved Vendor Lists for Technology Purchases

Okay, it’s official.

The organization that makes pronouncements on such matters – known as the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee (try getting that on a business card) – announced this week that the U.S. entered into a recession in December, 2007.

Were you wondering? Anyone who owns a home or a 401k account knows that the economy is in bad shape with or without Uncle Sam putting an official stamp of approval on the situation. And anyone running an IT shop knows that the year ahead will be tougher – demands for services will keep growing while budgets will stay flat, decline some or, if you’re lucky, grow by a couple of percentage points. For many, 2009 will be a time for figuring out how to do more with less.

And while it might not seem so, that situation actually creates some powerful opportunities for IT marketers.

At our recent IT Roadmap Conference in San Francisco, I held a roundtable discussion with nearly two dozen top IT executives from companies in the Bay Area. As you’d expect, many lamented the pressure on their budgets and staff, but they were also quite clear about what they need from their IT vendors to succeed in the year ahead.

• Optimization of the existing infrastructure is critical. IT leaders are keenly interested in technologies and services that can help them squeeze more out of their current IT investments and help them run systems and applications more efficiently. Positioning your products toward easing pain points in today’s IT shops will catch the ears of IT pros much more effectively than data on performance, price and features.
• Storage demands continue to ratchet up apace. A recession won’t slow the relentless growth in information generated by internal IT users, customers and applications. Thus, IT managers are very interested in products that help them manage this data overflow, use storage more cost-effectively and secure information across the enterprise. They’re also interested in virtualization options that make more data more easily accessible and manageable.
• Speaking of virtualization, this juggernaut also continues to roll on and customers are looking for help securing and managing their growing dynamic computer resources.
• The increasing demands for mobile access to information also create great opportunities for tools that can help IT shops manage mobile devices and applications, and secure information as it leaves the building.
• New capabilities for managing and automating the control of networks, applications and systems will also be in great demand. While our data centers, applications and infrastructure are changing rapidly, many shops remain mired in the network/systems management past. Show them how they can move into the 21st century and you’ll get their attention.
• The recession also creates a great opportunity for companies to present managed services as a solution to nagging IT problems. More and more companies will be exploring ways to hand over their IT challenges to someone else – whether that’s through software-as-a-service options for key applications or services that handle security, unified communications, video or management functions, among others.

Another point came through loud and clear from customers: Don’t cut back on our support during this tough economic cycle – we’re busy enough! Buyers are fearful that vendors will pare down support staff and help desk resources, and they’re very clear that providers who do cut back will pay the price in lost loyalty. Now’s a good time to do more for your best customers, not less.

As history shows, recessions are the crucible during which the strongest companies are forged for the next growth cycle. Helping IT executives deal with their budget and workload challenges during this downturn will position you very well for the upturn that inevitably follows.

Contact  |  Comment  |  Back to top

Making the Best of a Bad Economy
Elyse Tager, Founder and Principal, Elymedia, LLC

No surprise, but the economy is taking its toll on media of all kinds. The NY Times Media has announced a 51% decline in profits and is teetering at the precipice. That venerable institution has started my Sunday mornings ever since I can remember. It would be a tragedy to see it go, or even cower in a corner. Techcruch is keeping tabs on the layoffs (which seems a bit goulish, but oh well) as VC’s encourage getting lean and mean early. Below are a few tips for all marketing and media professionals to help get through this:

1. Stay positive. I know, sounds like PollyAnna but you can ’t make good decisions, either professionally or personally from a position of negativity or fear.
2. Double down where you are. And prepare in advance. Bill Sanders of RealBranding did a fabulous 2 part post on this. Read it. All of it.
3. From a media buying perspective, think globally. Within the enterprise can you counter the tendency to silo and cluster as many departments together as feasible? Walking across the aisle or cubie, you may find opportunities to consolidate objectives or at least spends and get much better pricing for any media.
4. Also from a media buying perspective, think long term. If you can possibly forecast 2 - 4 quarters out and make even minimal commitments, you can command much better pricing. The market is soft and softening. Take every advantage of it. We are pounding on pricing and not-so-subtly-nudging our clients to make even the most conservative of commitments past a single quarter and have been able to negotiate some great deals with this strategy.
5. Work your customer base, current assets, and tried and true marketing activities. Are you sure you know where past successes have been? I’m amazed at how many companies minimize the analysis of all aspects of past campaigns for the sake of trying something new. Can you put a new headline on previously used email copy, rework the abstract to a white paper so it appears fresh, and save money on creative?Are you contacting your current customers often enough and with cross-buying opps? Are you sure you have captured all of your customer base? Does the training dept, or HR, or tech support have pockets of folks that aren’t consolidated on the main marketing database. Revisit your in-house email strategies, Newsletter schedules – CRM is the cheapest and most responsive marketing method their is.
6. That said, don’t stop marketing, and don’t stop testing – even modest testing. You will still need to find new opportunities when the old successes tire.

Above all stay connected – to your family, your peers, to your boss, your agencies, to your professional network and keep talking. Web 2.0 and social networks were never more important than they are now. Collaboration will trump isolation any day.

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.

Contact  |  Comment  |  Back to top

Practical Tips for Holiday Success
Craig Kerr, Vice President of Marketing, iPost

The best thing you can give yourself and your company for the holidays is the gift of practical segmentation – a gift that keeps on giving, especially when it comes to profits in a tough market.

In the current economic climate, the shrewd email marketer has an opportunity to be the hero who helps the business stay afloat and even thrive. While many email marketers long to be able to segment their lists into thousands of mini-segments to conduct true one-to-one marketing, now is the time to stop dreaming and get practical.

Practical segmentation means a better bottom line for the holidays
Segmentation is necessary: Scattergun emails sent to every email address you can find are a waste of resources and a sure way to lose, rather than gain, customers. Yes, some customers want to receive frequent emails, but others quickly view them as spam.

Recency, Frequency and Monetary value (RFM) analysis has long been a highly successful way to segment customers based on their degree of engagement with a business – and it’s ideally suited to email marketing because it can be automated and conducted daily.

RFM analysis provides invaluable insight into customers by segmenting them according to how recently they have bought (R), how frequently they buy (F), and how much money they spend (M). With this information, you can email more frequently during the holidays and beyond to just the most engaged segment, knowing they are happy to hear from you and are unlikely to opt out. You should email less often to less-engaged customers, offering discounts to reignite their interest. Imagine how nice it will be to start the New Year with a bigger segment of customers who actually want to buy from you!

Learn to say “No” – or at least “Wait” – to discounts
Segmenting by level of engagement enables you to identify which customers are sale shoppers and require larger discounts, and which respond to smaller discounts, or none. One iPost customer, a women’s apparel retailer, has been able to lower the amount of discounts offered by 40 percent and make more money. Furthermore, they have also been able to delay the start of holiday discounts by six weeks, leading to a huge bottom line improvement.

Thriving for the holidays means putting on hold your dream of true one-to-one marketing
Dreams die hard. Many online marketers have fallen in love with the concept of selling those particular socks to the purchaser of those particular shoes. Many marketers want to make segments as fine-grained as possible to make offers more relevant to specific customers. The problem is that this approach is too cumbersome to be practical. A large product line and huge customer list just don’t segment efficiently this way. RFM will yield greater and faster results and is far more scalable and maintainable. Even though it borders on modern marketing heresy to write this, you will fare better this holiday season and next year if you take a more macro approach and segment by level of engagement. Happy RFM segmentation!

About iPost
iPost was designated as a market leader in the 2008 E-Mail Marketing Buyers Guide published by JupiterResearch. iPost helps businesses in a wide range of industries maximize the value of their email channel. Expertise of iPost professionals and innovative iPost technology drive subscriber retention and overall revenue growth for clients of all sizes. iPost offers particular strengths in behavioral analytics, strategic consulting, and online systems integration. iPost partners or integrates with MarketLive, Omniture, Coremetrics, Google Analytics, Omniture and more. iPost clients include Althea Technologies, Bakers Shoes, Bon-Ton, Brocade, Design Within Reach, Dylan's Candy Bars, Foster Farms, Garden Botanika, Kimpton, McNeil Pharmaceuticals, Meridian, NEC, Totes-Isotoner and many more. For more information, please visit www.ipost.com.

Contact  |  Comment  |  Back to top

Usage of Approved Vendor Lists for Technology Purchases
Jean Romeo, Partner, Research Concepts, LLC

Does getting on an approved vendor list (AVL) make a difference in the technology buying process? In order to provide insight into this question, Network World has been asking questions about the usage of AVLs in research studies across a variety of technology areas. The online surveys were conducted with members of Network World’s Technology Opinion Panel in 2008. Respondents were screened for purchase involvement in the particular technology area investigated.

Do Organizations Have AVLs?
We found that the majority of organizations do have an AVL for security, storage and WAN optimization products, the three technology areas studied.

% of Companies with AVL by Technology Area:

• Security = 59%
• Storage = 67%
• WAN Optimization = 76%

The presence of an AVL does vary by company size for security and WAN optimization products, with the largest companies (1,000 or more employees) most likely to have an AVL. Regardless of the size of the company, losing data or problems with storing data can have dire consequences, which makes vendor selection critical. AVL usage is most likely driven by industry or company practices with selecting storage vendors rather than by size of company.

How Often are AVLs Updated?
In the WAN Optimization Study, we asked respondents how often their AVL is updated. Just over half of the organizations (56%) have either no regular time frame or only update their AVL when they do a tech refresh in the area. A total of 18% update their AVL every 6 months and 20% update it annually.

How Do Technology Vendors Get on AVLs?
Respondents in the WAN Optimization Study who are involved with creating an AVL identified the ways a vendor gets on their organization’s AVL. The top mentions were a vendor briefing to the IT team (mentioned by 60% of the respondents) and pilot testing (60%). Another strategy for vendors looking to gain a place on an AVL is to offer a discount. A total of 69% of the respondents indicated that the vendors on their AVL have agreed to a specified discount for purchasing from them. The good news for vendors seeking to gain entry onto an AVL is that only 27% of the respondents said it was very difficult to add a vendor to the AVL.

Respondents offered some additional insights for vendors looking to get on an AVL for the first time:

• “Shortlist is usually composed of #1 & #2 market share leader, plus leading innovators as identified by NWW [Network World] Clear Choice tests or Gartner Magic Quadrant.”

— IT Management, Manufacturing, Large enterprise

• “Advertising the product, working with companies like Network World and Gartner to get their products some face time. I do not like cold calls.”

— IT Management, Aerospace, Large enterprise

• “More marketing exposure and good support track record.”

— IT Management, Financial Services, Large enterprise

• “Ensure that we are aware of the latest information on their products.”

— Corporate Management, Reseller/VAR, Small business

Summary
Approved Vendors Lists are the standard protocol in the majority of organizations. Since most organizations do not have a specific time frame for updating their AVLs and it is generally not difficult getting added to their list, new vendors would benefit from making the effort to be an approved vendor. Vendors should brief the IT Department, offer the opportunity to test pilot the product and be prepared to provide a price discount in order to get a spot on the AVL.

Find out more
For the complete study results to the research mentioned here, contact Sandra Kupiec at skupiec@nww.com or at 415-267-4510. Jean Romeo can be reached at
jromeo@research-concepts.com or at 978-443-9042.

Contact  |  Comment  |  Back to top

Search is the New Circulation
Paul Gillin, Social Media Consultant and Author of  The New Influencers

Recently, I had the chance to speak to two classes of junior and senior public relations majors at Boston-area colleges about changes in the media landscape. I find these sessions to be as enlightening to me as they are to the students because I learn a lot about their preferences and motivations.

With the accelerating collapse of the newspaper industry fresh in my mind, I was particularly interested to understand their news reading habits. "How many of you have read a daily newspaper either in print or online within the past day?" I asked. Nearly every one of the 45 hands in the two classes went up. "How many of you subscribe to a daily newspaper?" I followed up. Only one student raised her hand.

Welcome to Generation Y, the group of people born in the last 30 years who define the future of business and media. Every one of the students in these classes has grown up in a world where information is free and instantly available. The concept of paying for news is as foreign to them as the horse and buggy.

These students will enter the workforce over the next five years and they will shake our assumptions to the core. While they have some brand loyalty, their real affiliation is to information.

What do I mean by that? Well, if you're like most communications professionals, you probably subscribe to several Google Alerts. This service e-mails you whenever the terms you specify – such as your name, your company name or a topic that interests you – turns up in Google's search index. Google Alerts have no concept of brand. An article on an obscure website is as likely to top the list as one in The New York Times. When you use Google Alerts, your loyalty is to the topic, not the source.

If you are a TiVo user, you know that you can subscribe to programs based on actors or even subject matter. You don't care which network carries the program; your loyalty is to the content. These are just two examples of the ways in which attitudes toward media brands are changing.

While trusted sources will always have a special value, we are constantly discovering new sources of trusted information and modifying our assumptions about the value of trust. For some information, we still want to consult the big media brands in order to get the real story, but for less important information we might be satisfied with any source as long as we get the basic facts.

The great equalizer in this equation is search. Computers have no brand loyalty and search engines are tuned to deliver the results that best match our queries, even if the source is unknown to us. Search is, in effect, the new circulation. In the pre-Internet days, we gave publishers permission to get a slice of our attention for a one-year period. This had great value to the publishers because they could be reasonably certain of a known audience for their products.

In the new world, there is no certainty beyond relevance to the terms that an unknown audience may or may not find interesting. This will challenge publishers to reinvent their audience models and present both opportunities and challenges for marketers.

No longer is success simply a matter of placing messages in a few mass media outlets and hoping for the best. Marketers will need to segment their audiences and their media selections much more carefully in the future. That's the bad news. The good news is that they also have the means to influence media more directly and even to become the media, if they so choose.

The rise of super-bloggers like Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble demonstrate that trusted brands can grow quickly online. If you aren't optimizing all of your business communications for search, you aren't doing your job.

Publishers will be challenged to keep their brands prominent in this new world. Search engine optimization, alliances with independent voices and custom web sites are some of the tools they will use. Marketers should look carefully at their publishing partners to be sure they are staying current with their readers' preferences. By aligning themselves with media companies that excel at leveraging all these new channels, marketers can greatly amplify the impact of their own activities.

Google is now people's first stop for information and insight on nearly every imaginable product. Small media brands can gain an unnatural advantage over very big ones by understanding which keywords bring people to a site and then optimizing around those terms. This is tipping the scales of media influence.

New trusted brands are emerging online and those people can also be influenced to drive home your message. Using the right keywords in your communications to these new influencers can help drive your brand's awareness through search. Sometimes you want to drive traffic to your own website, but at other times you may prefer the endorsement of a trusted third party. Again, the key factor is search optimization. Online media rely far more heavily on search visibility and external links than circulation lists. Use the same tools they use and you can piggyback on their success with astonishing speed.

Contact  |  Comment  |  Back to top