The past couple of years have changed things in our modern work world quite a bit. Generation X was raised to believe that, if we just get an education and land a corporate job, we’d have security for years to come. Think again my friends, because those days are long gone.

With our economy running on life support, the dollar in the tank, and fast-rising inflation, companies had to pinch pennies wherever possible to keep the ship afloat. The results have been widespread and severe…significant loss of jobs, budgets slashed to levels we haven’t seen in years, and even a slew of companies going belly up during the prolonged recession.

Now we find ourselves with an unemployment rate higher than we’ve seen in at least couple of decades, if not longer. All companies want to do “more with less”. But business must go on, so we have to work within the current constraints placed before us.

As marketers, there comes a time when you have to consider outsourcing some or all of key programs. Let’s look at the most common situations where you should consider an outside consulting resource.

Work Overload

Doing more with less essentially means your company has decided to squeeze lemon juice out of a turnip, and you’re the turnip. Work/Life balance? Fat chance. This is typically a situation where the company has lopped off as many limbs as possible in hopes of surviving, and all of their work either goes away, or more likely, falls squarely on your “to-do” list. If you have been working so many hours that it takes more than a split second to remember your kid’s middle name or birthday, draw a line in the sand and sign up some help.

Missing Skillsets or Experience

I’ve spent a great deal of my career in startup environments, and there always comes a time when you need to do something that no one on the team has done before. There are two answers to this situation – invest your own valuable time and effort into figuring out how to band-aid a solution together, or pony up the dough to hire someone who already knows what they are doing. Having taken both approaches, I can speak from experience on this one. Bring in a consultant for the execution, and spend your valuable time working with them on fitting it into your overall strategy and vision.

Short-Term Needs or Projects

This is the situation where you most need to look outside. It’s one thing to have a new ongoing need, which is the only time you’d really want to invest the time and energy in ramping on a complex new skill. If you have a time-limited project where you need specialized technical or execution resources, save yourself the hassle, and budget for hiring some help. You can do a quick ROI analysis by taking your hourly rate, estimating how long you have to work to learn the skill, calculating how much slower you’d actually do it than an expert would, and comparing that to their quote. If you are still ROI positive, what other non-financial tradeoffs are you making, such as opportunity costs (i.e. other important projects that go into a queue instead of getting done), your stress level (and how that affects your ability to properly address other priorities), and whether you are getting enough time to recharge personally.

Building a “Virtual Support Team”

Maybe you’ve determined you do need to do a large volume of work, you are missing skillsets for managing the work, and you have frequent needs for short-term project assistance. Great! You may not be able to get a permanent job req for hiring new direct reports, but you can likely plan around setting budgets for your extended team. I’ve run entire virtual marketing groups myself by hiring outside professionals for web design, PPC strategy/execution, trade show support, writing, graphic design, etc. This is a valid and proven model, particularly in the startup world where you have to do the work of an army by yourself.

Conclusion

Your company may expect you to do the work of a small army, but is that truly reasonable? You can do financial calculations to justify outsourcing rather simply. Use those numbers as ammo to negotiate funding for outside help or to persuade the company to de-prioritize activities that aren’t worth the investment. After all, if it isn’t worth a few grand to get it right, is it even worth doing in the first place?

________________________________

This work originally appeared as a guest post for the As-Such Communications blog.

Enjoy another fine guest post by Gary Walker of TopSide Media.

___________________________________

Page Load Time: Don't Ignore This Important SEO Requirement

Driving highly targeted traffic to your website is a critical step, but the landing page still has to convert that visitor to a lead or new customer. We recently helped one of our PPC clients whose online business was being adversely affected by slow page loading on their website. Their case could be useful to other business owners.

Web pages that load slowly can be tricky to find. Why? We’ll list just three of the many possible reasons.

For starters, if the slow load is being caused by images or large files, those may be stored in your computer but not in that of a new user to your site, your potential customer. If you have not cleaned your cache recently, you won’t have the same page load experience as a new user — yours will be faster, but deceptively so.

Next, if the problem is intermittent or browser specific, you simply might not run across it unless you or your webmaster test specifically for it.

Third, if you rely on data from PPC ad dashboards or web analytics, but focus on the wrong metric, slow page load problems may not be evident. For example, in search engine advertising, slow page load can “hide” behind normal impressions or click through rate in AdWords. Low bounce rate in your web analytics, which otherwise is a good indicator of user behavior on your website, also will not catch the problem. Why? if the user exits before the page fully loads, the analytics tracking code will not register the visit. However, the lack of results would certainly show up if you were measuring online conversions, incoming phone calls or click to contact or conversion rates in any manner.

In online advertising, if the page load speed problems are significant, they can cause your website to receive a low quality score from the ad provider. This, combined with the other inherent penalties of a slow web page, can trigger a downward spiral: higher click cost, lower page position or even low/no ad impressions. And, of course, low or no conversions.

If you have a webmaster watching your website, page load speed should be part of their normal monitoring. However, It never hurts for you to also know about page loads, and how fast your web pages load compared with those your competitors.

Please enjoy this guest post by Gary Walker, my colleague over at TopSide Media. It recently appeared on the TopSide blog, and it really hit home since I’m the client who put him through all of this! Gary was great with this project, so take a look at his account of what we did and why.

__________________________

Recently we rebuilt and launched a PPC account for an Austin client that had over 3,000 negative keywords. In our 5+ years of search marketing, this was a record at TopSide. The research and collaboration with our client on negative keywords was very productive, and took about as many days as all the other components combined.

A quick definition of negative or excluded keywords is as follows: a filter that prevents ads from showing. They are used to exclude aspects in your business category that you don’t want to trigger an ad for your particular business. Negatives (or NKWs as we call them around the office) increase overall efficiency of online ads. Proper use of negative keywords increases the CTR clickthrough rate, and this an important indicator of efficiency and relevance. The search engine ad programs reward efficiency with a lower CPC cost per click. More relevant ads usually produce a higher conversion rate and lower cost per conversion also.

Although in many ways they are opposite, like “positive” keywords that are used to trigger PPC ads, negative keywords can be single words or phrases. In some PPC ad programs, such as Google AdWords, negative keywords have broad , phrase, and exact matching options. Once an account is built and launched, we use a report called a Search Query report to look for additional negative keywords and topics for additional refinement.

The example we referred to is a Business-to-Business advertiser. B-to-B companies, particularly those in technology, tend to need more advanced negative keywords and tactics. The reason: many enterprise technology products and services have consumer level counterparts. Some of these (a couple of examples would be anti-virus and data backup /storage) are even free. In addition to negative keywords, filtering text in the ads can help filter out individuals who are not good prospects for a specialized or more costly product or service.

In summary, to make the most of your search marketing budget, a significant number of refinements are necessary to the default settings in PPC ad programs. Some of these are done up front, and more need to be done as search and click data comes in.

Surely you have seen the news by now that Google allows certain employees to manually adjust index rankings under special circumstances. Needless to say, the implications are rather widespread.

According to what I’ve read, employees sometimes have to make a judgment call about whether to lower a site’s ranking for a particular keyword or set of keywords.  The main scenario where this is deemed “okay” by Google is when companies vertically integrate to a content-heavy model, using existing “SEO Juice” to enjoy visibility that is not yet deserved. That certainly seems like a good thing, does it not? Particularly since big brands can leverage existing budgets, SEO benefits, etc. much more easily than the smaller outfits or self-employed. In a sense, it can serve to provide a little bit of level to the playing field, whether inconsequential or not.

The issue that this raises is much more concerning, though. If employees can manually adjust rankings based on that situation, what else might be going on “behind the curtain?”

Let’s look at a few spins on this scenario where this is particularly concerning:

1. The employee has a significant portion of his/her nestegg invested in the company in question
2. The employee has relatives or friends employed by or invested heavily in the company
3. The company in question is one of the top advertisers on Google AdWords (i.e. they contribute a rather noticeable amount of revenue to the company’s coffers)

Obviously, you have to presume that Google takes every precaution possible to employ honest, trustworthy individuals.  But even the most stringent interviewing, background checks, and even IQ/Compatibility testing can be fooled or just plain incorrect. In other words, in a company of this magnitude, you can’t hit the bullseye every single time you make a hire.

When you insert human judgment into the equation, everything changes. This mystical and ever-changing Google “Formula” is no longer strictly driven by rules and standards. The whole model comes under question. And, much to Google’s chagrin, they may no longer be able to keep their”secret sauce” so close to the vest, lest the company open itself up to an onslaught of potential legal challenges.

As perplexed as I am about the news, I’m also intrigued to see where this takes us. Will the “new Microsoft” finally take its first big legal smack to the face? Will this blow over without much ado? I don’t know about you, but I want to be sure that they are actually doing everything they say they are. One lie suggests there may be more, so best of luck to the Google PR department on getting some rest over the coming days and weeks.

What do you think? Am I overthinking this, or do you also have issues now with their credibility? Can you afford to bail on AdWords completely, or is it too important to your ongoing operations to bail?

The following article was written by my colleague Julie Hunt, after we had quite a few conversations about the ongoing CMS / WEM evaluation project I’ve mentioned here previously. I really enjoyed the opportunity to exchange ideas with her, particularly given her vast understanding of the global B2B software market as a whole. this post is well worth sharing.

Prior to my syndication of the content here on Return On Now, it has appeared on Highly Competitive and CMS Wire, and it was received very well in both places. Please take some time to consider Julie’s thoughts.

_________________________________

Recently a colleague was exploring options for improving the web marketing capabilities of the company that he works for. He started his efforts by looking at “traditional” Web Content Management (WCM) software, with an eye to Web Experience (Engagement) Management platforms. But since his company is itself a mid-market-sized company, he was very uncomfortable with the options – and not just because of cost and time to implement. As conversations with his company management evolved, my colleague realized that he was not satisfied with a WCM / WEM solution because it didn’t seem to be the right platform for their web marketing strategy and business goals.

These days, companies of all sizes have tired of the expense and complexity of many WCM / WEM solutions, and would dearly love agile alternatives. And, yes, there are lesser expensive options. But what may be the most important factor for a lot of companies, is a strong emphasis on the customer-focused web presence for the company. And this may mean that company web presence will show up on other websites, instead of on the corporate website — which leads to the notion of whether or not the “corporate website” is becoming obsolete for many types of companies.

Web marketing and customer relationship strategies are changing (and improving) – companies need new solutions and practices to manage the new world. More companies have come to understand that first they must build the web marketing / presence strategy that will accomplish their goals. Then they have to figure out how to achieve the goals of the marketing strategy, which will involve preferred practices and processes, as well as technology.  With web presence evolution, marketing strategies should include orchestration of web presence via other sites, and how to integrate with conversations and content from those external sites.

B2C or B2B – Which Organization Needs A Corporate Website?

Whether or not a company should have a corporate website can depend on many factors. For both B2C and B2B companies, content still matters and has to be located somewhere. The B2B company has the greater need for a corporate website, but must now evolve the corporate website to a social / customer hub. B2C sales and marketing goals might be less about content per se and much more about customer conversations and brand awareness that take place anywhere on the web. Jeremiah Owyang points out that the corporate website is less and less the most likely place to connect with customers.

B2C – Time to Get Rid of the Monolithic Corporate Website?

Is the corporate website obsolete? Most corporate websites do not work well for customers. The sites are designed from the corporate POV, with too much useless content that is hard to find anyway. Frequently corporate websites become money pits, requiring too many resources over time compared to the benefits received.

Particularly for B2C businesses, new thinking is that the corporate website might be completely unnecessary for customer interactions and brand promotion.  Going where the customers are, i.e. social sites, seems to be an effective way to better connect. Monitoring web presence and participating in conversations on other sites help companies reach out to current and new customers in ways that matter to these customers and can bring effective results to companies.

Current thinking is that social sites are taking sales endeavors to a new place since customers can now participate in spreading the word to potential customers through forums, communities, ratings, reviews. On the flip side, corporations have the responsibility of finding and responding to concerns, complaints, feedback, and requests posted on social sites, hopefully to resolve problems, to engage and attract customers through answers, and to learn from customer POVs.

B2B Companies Still Benefit from Corporate Websites, With Social Improvements

One approach to introducing more web presence into corporate websites is to add improved social capabilities that interact well with customers and potential buyers. This approach appeals to companies that want a measure of control over customer “conversations” and also makes sense if the company is using social capabilities as part of a customer relationship and support strategy. Content still matters for B2B websites – B2B are customers still looking for a lot of different kinds of content that they want to easily find on the corporate website.  However, many potential B2B customers are also influenced by interactions and content on external social sites – the savvy B2B company had better understand the importance of such sites.  Integration with and monitoring of social sites are key.

Hubspot – inbound marketing and social media advisors:

Your website may very well be the most powerful tool in your marketing kit. Not only is it the place prospects and clients go to learn more about you and your services, but it has a huge impact on their ultimate purchase decision.

The Hubspot post goes on to discuss a survey conducted by RainToday.com that looked at buyers of professional services and the amount of influence that corporate websites exerted on the purchase decision:

According to the survey, 74% of buyers report the service provider’s website holds at least “some influence” over their ultimate decision to buy services from the provider. This is 23 percentage points higher than in 2005 and represents a significant increase in the importance of websites.

B2B corporate websites need web management solutions not only for creating and maintaining more social and interactive experiences for customers visiting the site, but to monitor and participate in the conversations that take place on other sites. Other sorts of off-site social-related analytics need to take place, such as sentiment analysis. The results of monitoring and analytics must be used to fine-tune product and marketing strategies, and to help corporations better serve customers.

Jeremiah Owyang on the Future of Corporate Web Presence

Owyang throws out some compelling assertions: In the not-so-distant future, he states that there will be no “old school” corporate sites. There will only be sites assembled on the fly based on social data, a sort of dynamic personalization mashup of content and social engagement.

Today, I’m pleased to see that the thinking –and technology, has emerged, where we’re finding a variety of companies that are integrating social technologies right into the corporate website, bringing the trusted discussions closer to the corporate site.

Although the highest state of nirvana (seamless integration) doesn’t yet exist, we should expect there to be very little difference between social technologies and corporate websites as content will assemble on the fly.  I predict URLs won’t matter, as content will be dynamically assembled around the buyer and their context in a variety of devices.  Sure, that’s far out thinking now, but that’s why we have several other stage gates that companies must first go through.

Owyang continues on the new social web presence:

1. Although it’s a new and experimental medium, brands should plan a roadmap.
2. The future of web experiences will be based around people – not products.
3. Take inventory of all corporate web assets and identify where they are in the framework.
4. Next, identify the desired state, and then build a plan against it. Start small and slow, and be sure to have a strategy.
5. Don’t arbitrarily jump into the social marketing space without measurable KPIs. Be deliberate in your actions.

Owyang’s thinking is important especially for vendors of WCM / WEM software solutions since he may be pointing the way to future web presence solutions (a future that is not that distant).

Should WCM / WEM Software be The Hub — or one of the components?

Some vendors of “traditional” web content management solutions have been transitioning their offerings to WEM platforms where managing and enhancing the web experience or engagement of the customer is the central purpose. The current WEM platforms focus mainly on customer and social capabilities existing in the corporate website, and are in very early stages of supporting integrations with external social sites.

Those supporting the notion that WCM/WEM Platforms should manage web presence and continuation of corporate websites include:

Brice Dunwoodie of CMSWire is What is Web Engagement Management:
It’s how you create and manage content, including primary web content, multi-device content, blogs, forums and wikis. Your WCM platform is also the hub of your social media integrations and increasingly the dashboard by which you view your brand’s conversational world.

Further expansion on the WEM platform from Barb Mosher, CMSWire: The 5 Pillars of Web Engagement Management

1. Content Optimization: analytics, content and experience personalization, multi-variate testing, optimization and SEO.
2. Multi-channel Management: delivering same message/experience to customers across devices and channels both online and offline – new mobile web
3. Conversational Engagement:  corporate website-based communities, UGC, commenting, trackbacks, micro-blogging, social media integration, analytics, social media monitoring and sentiment analysis.
4. Demand Generation: customer engagement/experience through targeted marketing – increasing the number and quality of relationships, through need recognition, relevancy enhancements and engagement triggers.
5. Sales Automation: two-way CRM integration, social CRM; e-mail or other campaign integration with the content platform.

As described by CMSWire, WEM platforms would provide capabilities and monitoring of brand and customer conversations on corporate websites, as well as bi-directional communication extensions to external social sites.

On the other hand:

If the customer experience of a particular brand is taking place on external social sites, then there is now a distributed model for managing a brand’s web presence; the web experience/engagement for the customer is now remote from the corporate website.  So there is even more need for tools/solutions to monitor, listen, act, engage…for customer-focused purposes, as well as for corporate business goals (which should lean heavily towards the customer).

A WCM/WEM platform may not be the hub for the overall solution, but instead one of the components of a new management framework for all web presence (management of web content is still important but may not be tied to a specific website anymore).  But content is also integral to a lot of web marketing plans and strategies, and content is the meat of most social sites, whether it is a conversation thread, a video, a blog post, and so on. So look for WCM/WEM solutions themselves to continue to evolve as the means of managing and delivering any kind of content for sites anywhere on the web, through any channel.

Future Web Presence Management Solutions – What Could They Look Like?

A Web Presence Management Framework may be the best approach for monitoring and supporting a distributed web presence. With an emphasis on Management: the orchestration of all pertinent activities on social sites external to a corporate site. And the management of: marketing to / connecting with customers, monitoring and listening, responding, acting, analyzing, more acting. The Management Framework would be agile, timely, dynamic, flexible, open.

A starter list (high level) of potential capabilities and attributes for a Distributed Web Presence Management Framework:

• Sophisticated, agile management / orchestration capabilities
• Web presence “mashups”: dynamically creating personalized sites for each customer
• An evolved WCM/WEM component: delivery to external sites, advanced support of corporate site if still in play, handling of relevant content/conversations published on external sites
• Support / interoperability for content curation as well as content management
• Management of all types of “conversations”: Auditing – Listening – Capturing – Integrating
• Multiple kinds of analytics, including convergence with “traditional” data analytics
• Dashboards for different internal roles
• Agile, context-sensitive Search / recommendations-like technology to contextually filter content/search
• Integration is big (lots of API support)
• Orchestration and Integration with multiple kinds of “external solutions” that are in play for distributed web presence
• Usability for business as well as tech teams
• Workflow and automated processes for WCM, CRM, SCRM practices, other corporate systems
• Company roles will also evolve:  we’ll see new marketing technology roles, product marketing and product management roles for “caretakers” of company web presence on external social sites, among the possibilities
• Segmented customer advisory groups will also play much more interactive roles with management of distributed web presence
• Eventual alignment with semantic web, link management – for reach throughout the web. Here is a current view of opening up content to anywhere on the web:

Forget the fancy names of “semantic web” or “linked data.” Associating structured data with your content assets lets you take advantage of Open Graph, Google RichSnippets, Yahoo Search Monkey, and a new generation of agents such as Siri. Disseminating your content with metadata through APIs enables developers to spread the seeds of your brand in a variety of mash-ups and apps. Sharing your data sets in collaborative venues such as Factual and Infochimps helps build relationships with the world of analytic power users, improve your data quality, and turn those dusty data silos into tools for advocating ideas and brands. (from Chief Marketing Technologist blog)

OK, WCM / WEM vendors of all sizes: should your current plans for your solution for corporate websites go forward unchanged, or should you start now to create a Management Framework for distributed web presence?

_________________________________

Related Posts on Highly Competitive:

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors – Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

B2B Social CRM for Software Vendors and the Lifecycle of Customer Experience

Moving beyond WCM – Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished market intelligence analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights for the software industry. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side  to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Market & Competitive Intelligence Services

As I’ve mentioned in this space previously, I have spent a great deal of time of late evaluating various marketing related technologies to build out some efficiencies and adopt some of the newer tricks out there. Last month I dug into my view on the content management space. As it turns out, several of the content management and WEM vendors also include Marketing Automation. So I thought I’d talk a little how to use it to nurture leads.

Marketing Automation: What Is It?

If you already work in Marketing, there’s a good chance you already know what this means. Just to be certain we’re all on the same page, let’s put out there a quick definition to get on common ground.

Marketing Automation is a software-based solution that offers advanced email marketing functionality such as drip marketing, multi-step campaigns, landing page generation, and full analytical tracking. It also can include more advanced message testing and targeting features not commonly found in simple email marketing products.

Essentially, these products exist to help marketing teams better nurture and qualify leads in the early stages of the sales funnel. That way, once a lead makes it to sales, the person is more likely to be qualified, interested, and ready to dig in to consider the product in detail. They likely have a real project and budget, maybe even a desired time line, leading to a true opportunity waiting and ready for your sales team.

Lead Scoring: The Key to Nurturing and Qualifying

In order to achieve that vision just described, it is absolutely critical that you think carefully about how you want to designate what a qualified lead is. This can be done very simply, or it can be quite complicated in larger enterprises or businesses with a broad product portfolio.

Simple Version: Response Indicates Interest

The simplest example of how to implement lead scoring is to start with a multi-step campaign. Let’s say that, once you identify a new lead, they go into an automated campaign that sends the following emails:

1. A welcome email with links to free information about your product and the problems it solves
2. (Two weeks later) A second message including a little more product information, as well as contact info should they wish to demo a product
3. (Four weeks later) A third message leading with a more focused offer centering around a demo
4. (Eight weeks later) A fourth and final message extending a more premium or urgent, time-limited offer that moves them along the sales cycle

Like I said, this is very simple. Basically, you are providing a little more motivation to respond each time. If this does not get a response, then perhaps they are not ready to buy quite yet. Or maybe they haven’t gotten the project approved, even though they will. But one way or the other, they were willing to let you be in touch with them. Unless they unsubscribe, you still have a reason to push on.

Long-Term Plan: Poised For The Right Time

If you try the simple approach above, a certain minority of the contacts added to the database will convert. But you will still have quite a lot of names who did not respond, but who may one day still be a potential customer. For these contacts, you need to have a long-term drip marketing approach in your back pocket.

Drip marketing works similar to multi-step campaigns, except it loops in analytics and progressive profiling. That way, you can build an understanding of who they are, what they care about (particularly content and offers on your website and in emails), and how likely a true purchase is in the future. In most cases, it is absolutely crucial that email open and click data, web site paths and behaviors, and any dripped data fields be aggregated in a single Marketing Automation product.

Going into much more detail here would make this blog post a candidate for splitting into multiple entries, so I may take a moment in the future to dig into specifics. For now, just know who you want to sell to, know how to understand when they are ready to consider your product, and have a concrete set of standards for identifying true opportunities, then build your web content, site map, and email campaigns to “lead the horse to water”, to coin a tired-but -appropriate cliche.

Lead-Scoring Holds It All Together

In case it didn’t jump out at you, lead-scoring is the key to this whole approach. Sales teams have been scoring leads for years, so if you find yourself struggling to figure out how to score prospects, get some face time with whomever it is who does your sales pipeline management. Their model may or may not be ideal for you since it’s focused on actually closing the deals, but seeing how they build from first contact through a closed deal or lost deal is something you can extend out to earlier stages of the life cycle. That’s the part Marketing should be managing on behalf of sales anyway, and if frees up your sales team to generate revenue more quickly once leads and opportunities do make it to them.

Do you use a solid lead-scoring system? What works for you?

Judging by the pageview stats and general response, it is pretty clear that my last post, Social Media is NOT a Strategy, really caught your attention. Since I’m on a roll with the whole “not” thing, let’s come at it from another angle.

Like I said last week, I am a huge proponent of using social media for specific business purposes, particularly when you can measure it.  This is in addition to my “doesn’t have to be said” stance that everyone with an online identity should be using it for personal reasons. But just because it’s a no-brainer for personal use and is a great new tool for business, that doesn’t say it is right for YOUR business.

When is Social Media Not Right for Your Business?

Keep in mind what I said last week about getting your objectives figured out prior to attacking social media without any direction. That’s always the first critical step. However, even if your objectives might suggest that social media could provide value for you, that might not always be the case. Here are 3 situations where you might want to try other avenues first.

Your Target Audience Is Not Online

This is one area where my previous post should ring most relevant to you. Obviously, you want to make sure your customers and prospects can actually be found through whatever mediums you select upon which to execute any of your most critical strategies. For example, Facebook stats show that there are precious few elderly folks with profiles. The same holds true across most platforms.

I had someone approach me a while back about whether they needed to be on Facebook. Guess what they were selling…hearing aids! ["Um, lemme think for a sec, NO!"] In fact, the oldest demographic of our population is least likely to be computer literate at all, let alone actually savvy enough to move beyond games and email to social media. It’s not hard to find them…just rely on the established mass media and direct marketing techniques that they grew up knowing and understanding.

You Have Not Gotten The Basics In Order First

Not to harp on the topic, but the OST (Objectives, Strategies, Tactics) approach can help prioritize what the most important business objectives are. Then you designate the strategies and align against it. The next step, which should most certainly be undertaken prior to experimentation with new technologies and tools, is to get the actual PR, marketing, networking, etc. activities figured out using the tools that you already know and understand.

Granted, some of these don’t work like they once did, but I’m a staunch believer that you need to understand the past to move on into the future. Make sure you establish operating procedures, processes, and other business critical variables first. Then and only then should you start to throw darts at a wall to see what sticks.

Your Team Cannot Commit To It

Regardless what anyone says, social media is in no way free. Sure, you can throw together a profile on the various social media properties at no cost. You can start posting content to a blog or Twitter daily, hourly, whatever you deem appropriate. Is that free? What is your time worth? Who will do it for you?

If you or your team has to spend time on something, it is crucial to consider the opportunity cost associated with that activity. What would you or your marketing team be doing with that time otherwise? Will social media get the level of attention and effort it deserves? I hope so. The worst thing you can do is jump in with a head of steam and then drop it mid-stream, as soon as other priorities start to interfere. Just look at the trail of dead blogs out there and you’ll see what I mean.

If you intend to do it, you simply cannot cut corners. There is a real time and effort “fee” associated with social media. Do the calculation of your expected manhours, the cost for that time investment, and what you are leaving by the wayside to do so. Then decide if that number is large enough to hire someone full-time or as an outside consultant to execute on your behalf. If you aren’t willing to invest in it at some level, you’re better off sticking to your established methods of doing business.

Conclusion

Social media is a major shift in the way we can interact and market ourselves. It finally uses the internet as intended…in a fully interactive and organic fashion. But you simply cannot get so excited about it that you jump in without considering if it is actually relevant to your business. Surely there are other situations where you are better off delaying or ignoring social media as a communication medium, but here are three biggie’s that I see overlooked frequently.

Have you seen any other situations I’m missing? Did you experiment with social media and find that it is not a fit? How did that impact your business? I’d love to hear some real-world accounts of this, so please share your thoughts.

Really got your attention with that headline, didn’t I? It’s not just a ploy to get cheap clicks.

Enough with the Hype

As you are surely aware by now, I’m a huge fan of social media, new media, social networking, sharing/bookmarking, and pretty much every other cool social offering out there. I spend countless hours playing with different services, sites, and techniques on a weekly basis. Heck, I’ve met some good friends and amazing colleagues through various forms of social networking.

Let’s get one thing straight though…most of what is being thrown around as strategic advice is nothing but some good ol’ fashioned hype. Yes, there is a time and place for social networking and social media. Yes, there appears to be a list of actual money-making techniques that can be employed to derive financial value from these services. But a great deal of this yammering about ROI is just that…talk.

I’ve seen a few select examples of how social media can be used for B2B in a measurable fashion, but I’ve also seen many more examples of futile attempts at replicating these successes. And that’s not even to mention the widespread list of social media “gurus” and “experts” who throw around pie-in-the-sky advice about how you should be using social media. My message to them: Show me real world examples.

Social Media is NOT a Strategy

I recall earlier in my career when the Internet and email marketing were the hot trends. We had long conversations about our “email marketing strategy”, right after we finished talking about our “trade show strategy”, “web site strategy”, and “direct mail strategy.” We thought we were cutting edge, until someone who actually knew what they were talking about chimed in.

“Do you understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy?”

No one in the room could give a reasonable answer to that question. Luckily, I was just a couple of years out of school, so I could chalk up my “deer in the headlights” response to inexperience. But today I’m seeing the same trend. I see all of these people talking about social media strategy, content strategy, even Twitter strategy!

Let’ s get one thing straight – a strategy requires high level thinking. A medium is simply a tactic that should support a true strategy. Twitter, my friends, is a tactic, a medium. Plain and simply.

Now, many of the consultants out there will sell you on why you need a “social media strategy.” I agree that you need a plan for how to integrate social media into your business operations. But social media as the strategy itself? What’s the objective behind it…to meet a bunch of cool people and LOL/LMAO/LMFAO our way to the bank? Maybe it is a real and profitable  strategy for the smart entrepreneurs, pundits, and consultants who keep dangling shiny new toys and techniques in front of you. For the rest of us, we need to take a chill pill and think for a second.

Strategic Thinking Should Come BEFORE Tactics and Media!

This is a very important point. You work for a business (or run a business in some of your cases). That business has important metrics to meet in order to succeed. Those metrics might be growing revenue, signing up “n” new customers, reducing business expenses, or even “keeping” the loyal and profitable customers or clients with whom you’ve built valuable relationships.

What do these metrics have to do with the subject of this post? Strategy must be derived from important business objectives. It must also be measured against real business metrics to benchmark success. The metrics should be driving the objectives, which in turn should be driving your strategic decisions. Then, and only then, should you turn your attention to go-to-market tactics.

Simple Process To Think More Strategically

1. Set your high level objective(s) – Well-crafted objectives should also be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-Bound). A good objective will often start with the word “To”, as in “To build a new channel of 20 resellers in the southeast USA by December 31, 2010″. That’s a darn SMART goal, as well.
2. Determine the strategy that will help meet your objective – Cool, so this is where I say “how” I will meet that objective. Is the right answer to “start using social media”? Of course not. There’s no logical connection between the objective and the “strategy” proposed, like that of the underpants gnomes as shown in the image below. The strategy might be to launch a recruitment and qualification program for a very particular type of reseller in the region specified. Notice we haven’t talked about how to execute it yet; just what we are trying to do from a high level to meet the objective.
3. Outline the tactics that will help the strategy meet the designated metrics – Now we are ready to talk about tactics and media. Here you can get into specific messaging, targeting approach, and the exact media you intend to employ to make it happen. It should also indicate how you intend to measure each tactic/medium, and how that rolls up to help meet the overall goal as designated in #1 above.

Conclusion

Strategic thinking is very important, and a simple objectives/strategy/tactics model should prove very helpful in keeping this all in perspective. Let’s start talking about how to fit social media into our existing businesses and our overall media mix in a truly integrated fashion. This argument is not a new one; I was having conversations like this in the mid-90s!

What do you think? Do you view social media as a strategy? Is that a realistic way to look at it? It’s most certainly not just a “fad”, as I’ve heard many baby boomers refer to it. The Internet was tailor made for this sort of interaction, so that narrow viewpoint is extremely naive.

Will you think about it differently now, or did you already manage to sort all this out for yourself amidst the hype?

I’ve spent a lot of time recently researching for a new Web Content Management System to replace the HTML-based static website for Anue Systems. In my extensive research, I learned something rather concerning: this is a diverse, fragmented, and most of all, confusing market!

Luckily, I was able to read enough and pick Julie Hunt‘s brain enough to feel like I finally have a clear grasp of the differences. Since there was no “quick start” guide that was concise and written in language for marketers, I decided to take it upon myself to share some of the key findings to date.

Some of this may seem elementary to you if you are a research analyst type, but this is written for marketing practitioners. The people who often must select just such a product for their (or their clients’) real web marketing needs.

Here is my view of the market:

1. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) – This is a complex workflow-focused software suite that assists with the various internal processes related to generating and managing large volumes of content. The key components seem to be similar across vendors, including Web Content Management, Document Management, Business Process Management, Asset Management, Records Management, and assorted other similar disciplines. This was clearly too much for our 60-person company.
2. Web Content Management System (Web CMS or WCM) – This is a much simpler application, which typically provides WYSIWYG, windows-like content manipulation. It also often offers the ability to manage SEO, navigation, uploads/images, and most of the typical functions. I use an open source CMS for this blog, WordPress, which offers all of these features as either part of the standard install or via plug-in.
3. Web Engagement / Experience Management (WEM) – I included both versions of the “E” in this acronym, because I’ve seen each used to define what WEM is. WEM goes beyond just management of content, all the way to user experience management. In normal deployments, this would either have a recommendation engine included to cross sell to other topics on the website or a full-site personalization capabilities. Also referred to Web Optimization, these systems use advanced analytics of user behavior to react and serve up content that is most likely to enhance the user’s experience of your company.
4. Recommendation / Personalization Engine - There are a handful of vendors who now offer this as a plug-in via existing APIs. It is a nice way to add this capability on top of your traditional CMS if you do not want to move to a more expensive WEM solution.

These are not the gamut of offerings, because I saw other offerings that did some or all of these activities, plus marketing automation or email marketing in many cases. Those which do not offer this capability often partner with email marketing providers to provide a joint offering of services.

If you want to learn more about these technologies, I’ve found CMS Wire to be helpful, albeit a bit incomplete. Hopefully they beef up the content in the near future, because the big analyst firms simply don’t cover this part of the market well.

What are you using to manage your website? Is it working? What are the support challenges and hidden costs? I’d love to hear your thoughts; it will help more than you may know!

We recently went out in search of a partner / vendor for our pay-per-click activities, and we decided to enlist the help of local provider of search engine marketing services, Topside Media.

They keep a nice blog on their site, and they recently posted a nice list of the “Twelve Questions to Ask Providers of Search Engine Marketing.” It’s a great list, and it also shows off a key reason I decided to work with them: transparency. In fact, Topside was forthcoming enough to bring up most of these topics on their own, and the list is a nice one, so it merits sharing here as well for all of you to review.

__

Without further ado…Twelve Questions to Ask Providers of Search Engine Marketing…

“Here are questions to ask any provider of search engine related services

• Are they using an automated search platform for traffic?

If you don’t get a definitive “NO”, ask if they can:

• Let you experience the results month-to-month without having to sign a time based contract (This is a good question to ask all providers…)
• Provide you with written reports that clearly shows the percentage of clicks, conversions and cost of discovery searches (searchers who did not enter your company name and are looking for your type of service or products ) vs. recovery searches (people who searched for your company by name). If not, you may be buying your own goodwill and have no way to know how much. Note: there are some good reasons and best practices re: using your company name in keywords. You can learn more on this topic in our other blogs
• Tell you what percentage of your monthly budget purchased traffic to your website and what percentage was their commission, overhead, etc.
• Provide account structure, budget allocation, and reports that analyze your traffic and conversions by segments of your business (categories of your service or products, profit margins, geographic service areas or targets, etc.)
• Provide keyword and conversion data from PPC advertising that can be used to support your longer term SEO needs?
• Provide a breakdown of the quantity and quality of phone calls, including: duplicates from the same number, hang-ups, missed calls, length of call, recording of call, customized analysis
• Give a breakdown of how much traffic is search traffic from the major search engines and how much is contextual traffic or some other category
• If they are using contextual traffic, what kind of filters or controls are they using to see that your ads are appearing on websites that are a- appropriate for your company’s reputation and b- effective in producing online leads or purchases
• Provide customized geotargeting, such as areas other than DMAs or circle around one point.
• Increase, decrease, or pause your flow of traffic and monthly costs, based on your workflow and budget as they change
• Change the message or offers in your ads upon request. Examples: seasonal ads or different “dollars off” specials
• Include a phone number in your text ad. This works surprisingly well for some business categories”

They indicated on the page linked above that they will do a similar list for providers of customized services, which is what TopSide offers. I’ll share that one as well when it is posted just to be thorough.

Have you used these questions in the past? Any others you see missing?