Marketing to the "Inner Animal"

Posted on April 28, 2010 by tpltx70

: Good marketing or old and dated?

It amazes me to see so much dry, ineffective marketing out there, much of it brought to market with large budgets and huge teams of professionals executing on it. And really, it’s quite easy to fall into groupthink when so many cooks are at play in the proverbial kitchen.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying you can’t execute effective marketing messaging, campaigns, etc. with a team-based approach. Quite the contrary, I’m actually saying a couple of things.

First, marketers simply fall into bad habits, at least those of us who are well-trained in the first place. Probably the worst bad habit is sitting on your laurels while new techniques and media emerge, assuming that you know “enough” based on experience and gut. With the pace of change and availability of unprecedented communications vehicles, that is, at best, naive.

Second, to quote Rodney Dangerfield, “marketers don’t get no respect” in a lot of cases. With tight budgets, a prevalence of micromanaging executives, and the folks I mentioned in the previous paragraph all playing roles in our success or failure, it’s easy to just agree to a bad idea in the sake of meeting a dreadline or getting another arduous piece of busy work off your plate.

You could just say, “Well, said marketers just need to get ‘back to the basics’.” But what the heck are the basics? The Four P’s, which were already outdated when I last took a Marketing course in the late 90s? Mass media driven advertising? What is this, 1975?

And don’t tell me the answer is to put in more hours, because quantity has always been and is still inferior to quality.

We need a better way to manage all this. As much as humans like to elevate themselves to some superior level to other living organisms on this planet, the hard truth is that we’re just another species of animal. Sure, we can talk, walk upright, surf the internet, and do a slew of other things that are only possible with our advanced brain structure. But we all still have basic needs like safety, food, shelter…y’know, all that stuff at the bottom of Maslow’s Triangle.

I just spent the better part of three days in Las Vegas, NV for Interop 2010, managing the set up for Anue Systems and then manning the booth for most of the first day. In my career, I’ve managed many dozens of trade shows. Most of those were for small companies, and across the various companies we consistently struggled to drive sufficient booth traffic with various giveaways, in-booth talent, live demos, contests…you name it; we probably tried it.

: Not quite what I had in mind, but it’s a cool image, so here it is for your viewing pleasure.

This time, we decided to try one of the few things that I’ve seen work in the past: Free Coffee. I must say, the results were overwhelming through the first day. Why did it work? We marketed to the “Inner Animal”, as I like to call it.

I’ve been reading a wonderful book lately, Neuromarketing: Understanding the Buy Buttons in your Customer’s Brain (kudos to @AustinGunter, Community Manager for Tech Ranch Austin, for turning me onto it). In it, the authors expound at length about how to identify the differences between the new brain, which is logical, the middle brain, which is emotional, and the old brain, which is what breaks the ties between the other two subconsciously, so to say. I liken the old brain to what you might call “going with your gut”, where you don’t make a decision for either emotional or logical reasons, but something else.

In the past, I’ve talked about how to reach the “Inner Animal”, and this publication comes the closest I’ve seen to providing an actionable approach to it. This isn’t another how-to about social media or similar topics. It’s a great strategic approach to how you speak to your target audience, regardless of where you speak to them. Some of it’s content is old news if you’ve been in the marketing game for 10+ years, but even with my 20 years of experience, I’ve been pulling some valuable nuggets out.

So go pick up the book, give it a read, and start talking to the “Inner Animal”. For many of you, your long term success very well may depend on it. Let me know if you also find it useful, or have seen other similar materials that are worth all of our time.

Have you tried anything like this? Did it work? What do you call it? Are there any books you’ve read in the past two years that have impacted how you operate in a major way? Please share!

Levels of Social – and Integration – Cut Across Enterprises

Posted on April 16, 2010 by tpltx70

This week, enjoy another compelling guest post by fellow Austin-ite and colleague Julie Hunt of the Highly Competitive blog.

_____________

When I started writing articles for my blog Highly Competitive, I had in the back of my mind the “classic” advice for professional blogging: pick one main area to cover and as such, show my SME-ness for that area. So I should have selected a particular software solution space and stuck to it.

Well that doesn’t really work for me and isn’t even realistic for anyone analyzing today’s software infrastructures in most companies. As such, I find myself covering multiple software topics, largely due to my diverse software tech background, and it all makes sense as we see more and more overt overlap and interconnection between the different applications of any-size enterprises, and between the activities and processes of how enterprises do business. As enterprises become more customer-focused (outside-in), what has become especially interesting is the evolution of change that eventually will produce Social businesses.

Starting with systems infrastructure, many enterprises have multiple points of integration and interoperability. It is this interrelatedness of systems that increases the business value to the enterprise. Integrations and interconnections are happening at multiple levels in businesses: their IT/application infrastructures, the applications themselves, how teams function in the enterprise interacting with systems and people, and how companies are evolving for doing business and engaging buyers. To become an effective Social Business, enterprises will have to nurture integrated internal systems and processes, as well as social strategies and practices for external and internal collaboration and communication.

Enterprises Can’t be Built on Silos – First, a Look at Internal Interoperability

It has become more and more clear that enterprises work better with overtly interconnected systems and business processes. Silos within enterprises both for systems and internal processes have caused a lot of problems. Enterprises, no matter the size, cannot have teams, or systems, operating in vacuums. Where too many silos persist, businesses are doomed, whether the silos are technology or human based.

Understanding how to reduce duplication in systems infrastructure, business processes, team activities, and strategy implementation does much to improve the health of the enterprise. Enterprises want to achieve efficiencies of operation and want to do more with fewer resources, so the elimination of duplications in systems and teams, and the increase of integration (systems) and collaboration (people) is essential.

Since we’re talking about the integrated enterprise, I see enterprise data integration as an illustrative “metaphor”. In most cases data integration endeavors to cut through almost everything in systems infrastructure and involves multiple teams, both IT and Business. Building really good DI processes requires the involvement and collaboration of many teams. Data integration solutions cannot be built in a vacuum to be effective; DI initiatives embody a metaphoric sense of interrelationships and interoperability: process, collaboration, disparate data feeds (information sources) coming together, business rules, business needs. People, business process and technology have worked together to achieve the right results.

Social Capabilities and Strategies Appearing in Many Enterprise Software Solutions

Increasingly, enterprises are introducing and integrating social media for internal and external applications. And now many “traditional” enterprise solutions are adding / integrating social capabilities, to enhance the usability and relevance of these solutions.

Business cases for social media include: internal implementations for enhanced collaboration and communication purposes for employees; external initiatives for better engagement and support of customers/buyers. Many social media guidelines rightly advise that introducing social practices and technology into an enterprise should come after a thorough understanding of what is to be accomplished, and then after an articulation of the strategy. Additionally, businesses have to figure out what cultural changes need to take place internally, for social to make a big difference. Business social process is something that people have to do authentically. Technology and tools do matter as a means of enacting and managing social business processes, but they are no substitute for strategic planning, best practices, real goals, and serious consideration for the human participants.

Beyond the social media technology that is being adopted by enterprises, many “traditional” enterprise applications are becoming more “social”. This is reasonable considering that software solutions are for use by people, whether employees, customers/buyers, or partners. Most software solutions are components of people-oriented processes. These “socializing” solutions include: BPM, BI, CRM, ERP, internal collaboration / intranet, and content management.

Recently Forrester’s Connie Moore – @cmooreforrester – commented on Twitter: “social computing has become the tipping point for businesses and vendors finally marrying collaboration and process” and then “Collaboration between business and business and business and IT is core to any successful #bpm effort.” Connie Moore has extended her coverage of BPM to include social capabilities that will transform BPM solutions.

For many software industry analysts and writers, there are no longer clear demarcations between software solution spaces. The “classic” approach of separate software solution categories being covered by SME writers is giving way to analysis that acknowledges the interdependencies of different kinds of software solutions. We are seeing more collaborative work across solutions, with social computing as a common thread of discussion. Analyst firms like Altimeter Group and Forrester are working with more collaborative efforts from their staff analysts across formerly separate software solution spaces to reflect the realities of how enterprises operate.

And People Complete the Integrated Social Business

My tech background has a markedly strong emphasis on people since software companies are very people-intensive enterprises. Many teams need to collaborate to accomplish company goals and customer needs, with the result that most teams are customer-oriented. If you have a career in software technology, it is essential to recognize the value of people, especially customers. Not surprisingly, many customers of software technology are driving the change to Social Business where the focus is more on people and less on tech.

It’s not just about why people buy or make technology decisions but about respecting people who are trying to accomplish business tasks and solve real problems, and who just want their software to work as advertised without a lot of pain to get there. Software technology ultimately is a product to be sold, so the focus must be on the purpose and real value the technology provides customers.

On the software vendor side, people collaboration should be a top priority: collaborations to sell solutions, collaborations to contribute to customer/buyer success, collaboration with partners and customers for success. Businesses can be very successful if they encourage and engender internal cross-team collaborations focused on customer needs. The growing interest in Social CRM addresses how businesses develop customer relationships to contribute to customer success.

Social is partly about tapping into the connectedness that people are building with the web as a platform. Social Business adoption by software vendors must be based on the fact that people and relationships are what really drive success and longevity. The lesson to enterprise management: Social media adoption has been driven by the people who want to use it to communicate and work efficiently, no matter the purpose. Social media invaded enterprises because people really want to use it – because it is effective for what they are tasked to accomplish.

“Social Business” practices have been around for years

The essentials of Social Business have been around for years in many software enterprises – frequently as a “shadow” culture. A lot of employees in the software industry have intuitively understood and practiced aspects of the “social business”, recognizing the importance of the customer and of collaboration. The process of selling software solutions to enterprises involves a lot of people working with many other people, for internal and external purposes, no matter the sales model.

Ironically employees, customers, partners have been open to adopting social capabilities as part of doing business; the executive level, however, is the laggard for authentic adoption of social collaboration culture and processes. Upper management often has impeded real efforts for social business and has also contributed to creating silos within the company and chasms between teams. Many software companies have been poorly structured for many years to be able to nurture “social business”. Usually not enough people and not enough budget have been allocated for fully supporting strong customer-centric processes and initiatives.

It’s very important that executive and other management levels formalize strategies for Social Business and better empower the many employees who already intuitively know how to find and keep customers/buyers through social relationships and support for customer success.

Fully empowered collaboration with customers and partners will improve sales, product offerings, long-lasting relationships, and will lead to fewer problems. Enterprise teams will be better connected to customers, and to one another. And upper management may finally get real perspective on employee motivations as well as customer desires.

Social Media: Simplify to Reignite Your Social Network

Posted on April 14, 2010 by tpltx70

It finally happened to me. I never thought it would, but it sure did.

What am I talking about? Information Overload

We’ve seen a slew of blog posts, studies, articles, and general commentary about this phenomenon. There are even psychological analyses and studies on this topic. Surely you’ve seen the various viewpoints…those who think our newly adopted, manic multi-tasking culture is a natural evolution, and those who think we were never meant to operate in this fashion. The Millennials / Net Generation / whatever you want to call the folks born from 1980 forward are experts at it. They operate differently, and they seem to have no problem with hopping from topic-to-topic, conversation-to-conversation, rapidly absorbing, filtering, and interpreting as many data points as they can possibly access.

Personally, I think it’s a natural evolution in behavior. As a species, we have always evolved to take advantage of new innovations. In fact, there’s a little concept we call Darwinism that explains why certain members of each species manage to survive over the long term, and why others do not. If you can’t keep up, you get left behind, as sad as that reality may be.

But there’s another issue here. That model of evolution makes a lot of sense, but it has historically conspired over extended periods of time, decades, centuries, even millenniums. But now we are making large-scale advancements between generations and even decades. Many Baby Boomers simply don’t understand or condone the younger sect’s way of operating. That doesn’t make them superior or more right. After all, they were raised in a different time where mass media was the primary form of communications. That medium, by its very nature, is a single stream of content on which you need to focus.

I find myself in an odd between state, where I can often be much more productive via focusing, but where my normal mode of operation is fragmented like the younger group.

A couple of things changed that put me over the tipping point.

First, I decided to dabble with foursquare over the course of several months. My initial reaction to the service was negative. Thoughts of an Orwellian future filled my head on first glance. Why do I want to advertise where I am? And as we’ve seen, why advertise where I am not? Well, the repeated advice from social media “gurus” that I needed to get on the Geolocation train finally broke me down and I started to play the game. Those of you who know me personally have already likely heard about my concerns, even while I was using it (probably a mad effort to rationalize it for myself, actually).

Second, my job changed a bit and became significantly more busy. Like 14 trade shows in 4 months busy, on top of my existing messaging, social media, and other responsibilities. I also inherited all of MarCom for Anue Systems.

Of course, sooner or later, something had to give. I was already juggling a full time job, family, blogging, and a list of other items. But a couple of weeks ago, I got this mad feeling to go hide under a rock. Yep, it was full-on Information Overload.

So I had to make a very important choice: Simplify.

Go cold turkey on foursquare.

Start removing those I follow on Twitter with whom I have no relationship to speak of or who provide no value to me. If they stop following, oh well. Quality over quantity, right?

Focus more on conversations rather than content. And strongly focus on real people in my locale who I can meet and engage with offline. This was the most refreshing of all of these changes!

Now I feel much better. Call it a social media spring cleaning. It’s something we should make a habit.

How is social media treating you? Are you still getting the same value out of it? Could your activities use a fresh spring cleaning? Have you ever experienced Information Overload? Tell me your story in the comments. If I get some good enough conversation going, I’ll assemble them into a post for my Posterous page to share with the world!

Fantasy Sports: Why I Love Opening Weekend

Posted on April 3, 2010 by tpltx70

: We’re baaaack!

In honor of the Major League Baseball opening weekend, I decided to take a moment today to reflect on why I love the start of the season in each of the sports that has a fantasy game I enjoy.

By this point in time, the vast majority of fantasy leagues have completed their drafts and are waiting in anticipation of the first pitch. While this may seem like the time that fantasy sports games start to the casual observer, that is far from the truth.

You see, fantasy games can be a year-round activity for the hard core player. I know many a fan who follows nothing but football or baseball every single month on the calendar. On the other hand, there are players like me. These are folks who play every major fantasy sport, which conveniently enough, just happens to touch on every month of the year.

Typically, depending on just how interested you are in a particular fantasy game, you may put in a couple of days researching who to pick, or you may be preparing for months. Some of us even continuously prepare for future seasons while we aren’t even finished with the one under way!

The most competitive and savvy players will spend at least a few weeks doing their research for the season. Many of them keep their own projections or download these stats from one of many websites that offers their take on prognosticating actual numbers. They spend time debating and splitting hairs between whether to take a rookie second baseman with a new starting job or an established shortstop with a track record but minimal upside.

Finally, at some point within the last few weeks heading up to opening weekend, they draft their team or teams. Believe it or not, the date of the draft is a HUGE event for the fantasy sports aficionado! You spend all this time preparing, figuring out when you have to draft certain guys to get them before someone else does, and mapping out how you want to approach the draft itself, and this is the day when you finally know what you’re going to battle with.

But it’s not over there. You spend the next week(s) until the season starts re-evaluating the selections you made. Oftentimes, your last pick or two are expendable if someone else better comes along. So you have to watch new developments and react in a way that will best position you to compete.

: Fantasy Sports: Like Christmas Morning?

Obviously, with all this prep and hard work, the anticipation heading up to the first day of games can be nearly unbearable some years. I know I completed all of my serious drafts by last weekend, and the last week has been great, but there’s nothing like the games actually starting.

Anti-fantasy sports naysayers may call this a waste off time, but many a fantasy player has compared either the draft itself or opening weekend to Christmas morning. Y’know, that excited feeling you got when you were a kid when you walked into whatever room “Santa Claus” left his gifts in? It’s a lot like that.

So in honor of the first round of a long 162 game season, I’ll take this chance to say it for myself…”Play Ball!”

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Monthly Archives: April 2010

Fantasy Sports: Why I Love Opening Weekend