Exploring Marketing Technology

Opinions are all my own

  • Majority of CMOs are leaving customer money on the table

    We’ve all seen surveys of C-level executives that seem to be little more than corporate puffery. But when survey results sound more like confessions than boasts, you tend to pay attention. That’s what I did this morning.

    The CMO Council has released its Routes to Revenue Study, two days before its annual CMO Summit in Monterey, California. The results are sobering, especially in this down economy.

    Three out of every four senior marketers surveyed (76% ), say they aren’t realizing the full revenue potential of their current customers. More interesting, half of these CMOs (46.5%), say they do not have clear insights into customer retention, profitability and their lifetime value as a customer. Does this seem too high to you? Me too.

    Others agree. A quote from the Council’s press release:

    “It is inexplicable that the vast majority of marketers are still struggling to source and extract meaningful insights from customer data at a behavioral, transactional and account value level,” noted CMO Council executive director Donovan Neale-May.

    “Marketing must assert its role as the owner of both customer experience and information and apply this to devising growth strategies that leverage better knowledge of customer opportunity and potential.”

    Tell Me Something I Don’t Already Know

    The report goes on to talk about how CMOs are working to fill these gaps. Here are some of the priorities discussed:

    • Migrating more marketing dollars to Internet and mobile channels (38.7%)
    • Improving effectiveness of ads and online marketing initiatives through behavioral targeting (33.3%)
    • Pushing for better adoption and use of customer relationship management (CRM) and sales automation systems (31.5%)
    • Trying new customized communications technologies (40.9%)

    All of this is a tall order, but the global economic slow-down may just create the pressure necessary to get the job done.

  • CNN’s Rick Sanchez on a social media adventure? For real.

    Last night I was at a business event. During my mingling, I found myself attempting to convince the PR director of a major not-for-profit organization why she should care about social media. I thought I gave good and relavant arguments, but realized I’d only been partially successful.

    She agreed that she’d have her organization join our local interactive marketing association, but said she would delegate attending the meetings: “I’ll send our web guy to them. He’ll understand all that stuff.” The problem is, if you don’t take the calculated plunge into social media, you cannot possibly grasp why it is such a game changer — for both the discipline of PR, and for marketing in general.

    I wanted to tell her, “Considering your leadership position, delegating an education in online marketing to someone else is not a wise move, for either the organization or your own career.”

    Just ask Rick Sanchez, co-anchor of CNN Newsroom. His newscast has lately included a real-time Twitter display, and tie-ins with Facebook and MySpace. I guarantee you that regardless of how carefully he and his producers planned this adventure in social media, they could not have planned for what would be thrown at them, and how they might respond.

    Still thinking about my conversation with that PR director, I came home to read this update on a criticism that social media and marketing strategist David Berkowitz had posted about Rick’s show. David noted that Rick Sanchez had responded quickly and thoughtfully to his disappointments with the way social media were handled:

    Rick managed to change my opinion of him the hard way – by taking the time to listen and respond to my comments, and to go above and beyond. He was authentic, personal, and immediately responsive, all important characteristics for any person or marketer determining how to respond to customer feedback.

    This authenticity cannot be faked, and cannot be experienced at arm’s length.

    I wish I could have pointed to this sequence of events — David’s post, Rick’s response, and the resulting good will and positive buzz — as a perfect example of good PR in a Web 2.0 world.

    Regardless, she and others will be seeing other adventures in social media by broadcast journalists yet to come.

    None of us have to climb up and try to surf a given wave that’s passing by. But as for this wave, if we’re in the communication industry, we will all most certainly be getting very wet, very soon.

  • Are widgets today’s ad specialties?

    In a prior life I worked in direct response. My clients were mostly healthcare organizations — hospitals, physician groups and health plans. They used magnets. Lots of them. Not in their MRI devices, mind you. I worked with healthcare marketing departments.

    No, these were refrigerator magnets. Magnets such as these:

    Not very sexy, huh? Believe me, I tried to break my clients’ addiction to the things. I mean really!

    Keeping Your Brand Top-of-mind

    But I finally conceded that if you are selling a service that on any given day no one wants (no one, that is, except independently wealthy hypochondriacs), you need to have your brand nearby. Should the need suddenly arise, you want your brand to be the one consumers think about.

    It’s not such a bad idea to be somewhere hard to ignore … such as on the door people swing open several times a day.

    I eventually resigned myself to my career as a peddler of refrigerator magnets. My project managers were in frequent contact with our fridge magnet vendor, Magnets, LLC (above are examples pulled from their online catalog). Post cards we bulk mailed to targeted regions around our clients crackled with magnetism and hackneyed slogans.

    Back then I would quip that if the physical law of magnetism was repealed, all of healthcare marketing would grind to a halt.

    Then I joined the online world and mostly forgot all about these give-aways. Until yesterday.

    This week Bob Garfield, in an Ad Age piece, compared online widgets to these lowly trinkets. Here’s an excerpt (emphasis mine):

    For the past half-century (and for about five more minutes) TV advertising has been at the apex of marketing communications. Then, in no particular order, newspapers, magazines, radio, out of home, direct mail, point of purchase, collateral (brochures, for example) and — in the murky, mucky darkness at the very bottom of the deepest abyss of marketing prestige — advertising specialties.

    For example, a ballpoint pen emblazoned with your insurance agent’s logo. Or a wall calendar, fridge magnet, coffee mug, yardstick, foam beer-can sleeve, ashtray, key fob, emery board, pocket diary — any cheap giveaway item meant to remind the consumer of you every single time she measures fabric or swigs a Pabst or files her nails …

    In a digital world, advertising specialties are as analog as you can possibly get. Until they go digital.

    Branded widgets are the refrigerator magnets of the Brave New World.

    Say it ain’t so! Is someone playing a cruel joke?

    Describing widgets, Garfield puts a finer point on his argument: “These compact, portable little software apps — from video players to countdown clocks to makeup simulators — are inexpensive to distribute, free to the user and (often enough) distinctly useful.”

    That’s true. Just like ad specialties. They also remain, often, in front of a consumer until a need for the brand arises. “At a minimum,” Garfield states, “they carry an ad message wherever they go.”

    He said “At a minimum.” There’s my loophole. This is what will restore me to respectability! Although Garfield says they are “distinctly useful,” he neglects to say just how useful. No one can argue that a fridge magnet can hold up a parent permission slip or shopping list, but did one ever report back to the advertiser about consumers’ aggregate kitchen behavior?

    The best widgets, like the ones my team produces (either the freestanding web apps, or the Facebook games and calculators that are deep into our development queue now), do far more than simply justify their existence on a social media profile page or blog entry.

    Because a widget can interact with consumers, and since we can attach precise web metrics to them, widgets can do valuable marketing work such as:

    • Pre-qualify prospects through calculators and configurators
    • Enlist customers in sharing your message with others who may also be prospects
    • Display and play user-generated content appealing to long tail interests
    • Entertain!

    This last one is a biggy. Because, unlike refrigerator magnets, people actually want to pass along widgets. This may seem like a small thing to you, but this morning, it’s causing me to hold my head a little higher. I am no mere peddler of digital chochkees.

  • Social media powers fundraising for an African classroom

    This morning I contributed to TweetsGiving, and I urge you to as well. It’s an excellent cause, and it can give you a first-hand experience in the power of social media. As the name implies, what is propeling this two-day fundraising effort is the micro-blogging platform Twitter.

    As of this post, the total raised is ,182. Here is what the TweetsGiving web site has to say about the effort:

    Tweetsgiving is a project of Epic Change that seeks to demonstrate the power of twitter and the social web by spreading gratitude and raising $10,000 in 48 hours to build a classroom at the school in Tanzania. The project was inspired by the TrickorTweet campaign organized around Halloween by @TheGrok and @ChrisBrogan and by this “thank you” post.

    Giving Thanks

    Follow @TweetsGiving on Twitter. Then, as the site suggests, you can “Tweet thanks. Share something you’re thankful for with all your twitter followers. Your tweets can be touching or silly, poignant or fun. Just tweet from the heart and be sure to include the #TweetsGiving tag and a link to http://tinyurl.com/4thanks.”

    And of course, be sure to give!

  • iPhone voice recognition app presages a new mobile interface

    A newly-launched iPhone application allows Google searches through voice alone. This brings us closer to when non-computing types can work and play in a Web 2.0 world. Imagine: If this future comes to pass, productivity increases in many industries would be huge.

    More significant to us marketers, large swaths of the workforce will no longer consider the computing world to be hostile — or at the very least, impenetrable. As I speculated two years ago many workers simply will not make portable computing a habit until it is easy enough to do through speech alone.

    You might consider this Part II of a two-part post. Last week I reported on Powerset, Microsoft’s acquisition in semantic search. Now, here is an exciting stride in the the voice-recognition half of the hands-free computing equation.

    Below is how the New York Times characterized the voice recognition arms race (at least, the race for the juicy prize of mobile search dominance):

    Both Yahoo and Microsoft already offer voice services for cellphones. The Microsoft Tellme service returns information in specific categories like directions, maps and movies. Yahoo’s oneSearch with Voice is more flexible but does not appear to be as accurate as Google’s offering. The Google system is far from perfect, and it can return queries that appear as gibberish. Google executives declined to estimate how often the service gets it right, but they said they believed it was easily accurate enough to be useful to people who wanted to avoid tapping out their queries on the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard.

    The service can be used to get restaurant recommendations and driving directions, look up contacts in the iPhone’s address book or just settle arguments in bars. The query “What is the best pizza restaurant in Noe Valley?” returns a list of three restaurants in that San Francisco neighborhood, each with starred reviews from Google users and links to click for phone numbers and directions.

    The emphasis above is mine. Here’s a demo of the new Google app for the iPhone:

    This is going to get very interesting, very fast.

    As Raj Reddy, an artificial intelligence researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, reported in the NY Time’s piece: “Whatever [Google] introduces now, it will greatly increase in accuracy in three or six months.”

    The semantic search problem, when solved, will help computers understand what people are saying based on their wording and a phrase’s context. On the other hand, voice recognition requires something at least as daunting: Penetrating regional accents. The most visible flaw in this first full week of the iPhone app’s release is it is baffled by British accents.