In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell posits that success is a much about good timing as it is hard work and raw talent.  Perhaps there is no greater evidence of this theory than the Shorty Awards, which launched in December 2008 just as “Twitter was on the cusp of getting really big,” noted co-founder Greg Galant. But to attribute the success of the Shorty Awards to timing alone would be shortsighted, missing one of the most instructive cases for entrepreneurs in the brave new world of Social Media 3.0.   Here are seven insights I gleaned from my interview with Galant:

1. Identify an Unmet Need

Back in late 2008, Greg Galant and his partner Lee Semel at Sawhorse Media, a small web dev shop, recognized both the potential of Twitter and an inherent shortcoming.  Noted Galant, “The thing which made it unique was that all the content was public and people were creating media but there was no easy way to figure out who’s doing good stuff on Twitter by topic.”  Added Galant, “So we had this wacky idea we would create the first ever directory of Twitter and what better way than to crowd source an awards program.”  Wacky or not, within 24 hours of its launch on December 10^th, 2008, Shorty was one of the top trending terms on Twitter, a position it held for the next two months.  And as a result of the Shortys, all the Twitterverse had a real source for the best of the best.

2. Build it Fast AND Build it Smart

Often software entrepreneurs are faced with tradeoffs between speed to market and quality of performance.  Offered Galant, “We came up with the name Shorty Awards, registered the domain and built the whole system in two weekends.”  Despite the speed, it was brilliant in its use of the very medium it was acknowledging and according to Galant was “the first system ever to use public nominees.” The entry form was literally just a tweet like “I nominate @DrewNeisser for #Shorty for marketing brilliance…” and the Shorty site according to Galant, “Would just automatically suck that in, parse it, and figure out what the nomination is for, and then create a leader board out of all the nominees.” That would be like a movie actress nominating herself for an Oscar in the middle of the film!

3. Make it Competitive and Transparent

Awards by their very nature are competitive but part of the genius of the Shorty Awards is that nominees could see how they were doing in real time.  This level of transparency set the Shorty Awards apart from its advertising brethren.  Explained Galant, “there was tons of campaigning, people were tweeting to get people to vote for them, the leader boards were really a strong thing in that people want to be on a top ten list.”  The leader board also had the added value of giving people a reason to constantly come back to ShortyAwards.com.  In fact and most notably, traffic to the Shorty Awards.com website according to Compete.com (see chart) during its first two years was higher than the better known Effies, Clios and the even the coveted Cannes Lions.

4. Bake the Marketing Into the Product

One of the more remarkably aspects of the Shorty Awards case, is that the brand was built according to Galant with “zero marketing dollars.“  A true social media phenomenon, the Shorty Awards garnered 50,000 nominees year 1 and over 300,000 year 2 without spending a single dollar on advertising.   As Galant explained it, “We thought about marketing at the product design stage, focusing on every little angle, how it would market itself, what kind of viral actions will it create, what’s the viral loop, what about it’s really going to resonate with users—that matters far more than how hard you pitch it and everything like that.”  Entrepreneurs out there would be well advised to embrace Galant’s conjecture, “That much of marketing today is done before the launch, it’s in product design.

5. React to the Road not the Map

Every entrepreneur will tell of the importance of reacting to “the road not the map” when rolling out a new product or service.  But few in my experience were as good at observing the changes in the road and reacting accordingly as Galant and Semel.  First, there was the matter of the award ceremony.  Launched without a real business plan, Galant noted “ We hadn’t yet lined up any plans to actually have the ceremony, we didn’t have a sponsor, we didn’t have a venue, we didn’t have a host yet two months later, we pulled the whole thing off.”   Then there were the awards themselves.  Allowing people to make up any category they wanted, when seeing a particular user generated category achieve critical mass, they’d make it official.  Noted Galant, “It never occurred to us to have a video game category for example.”

6. Deliver Genuine Value Across the Board

Before the Shorty Awards became a real business, Galant and his partner had the simple goal of delivering value by “showing the who’s who of social media.”  Once it became clear that there were a lot of people who shared Galant’s desire to “know who’s actually good, who the stars are, who’s mastered the media,” then the challenge shifted to creating value for potential sponsors.  This value came in multiple ways depending on the sponsor.  During the nomination periods, traffic to the website and PR about the awards reached millions.  At the events, sponsors were able to mingle with top tweeters from around the world, the first of which was the largest gathering of its kind.  And because Galant had the foresight to video tape the event, live streams (+20k) and subsequent plays on YouTube (+100k) increased the value for sponsors even further.

7. Learn from Other’s Mistakes (not included in the FastCompany.com post that ran earlier this week)

They say that most entrepreneurs learn from their own mistakes but the great ones learn from the mistakes of others.  Such is the case with Galant and the Shorty Awards.  Noted Galant, “There was one attempt before us to do a Twitter awards thing, but we heard stories where they promised the winner 100 bucks but they couldn’t deliver on that—so we really wanted to do it right.”  So Galant found some sponsors to help cover the costs of the event and charged for attendance, thus ensuring sufficient funding to pull off a NYC-caliber program in their first year.  Year 2 they upped the ante, hosting the event in Manhattan instead of Brooklyn, allowing for greater attendance and more polished experience.

Final Note

The Shorty Awards were profitable in both its first two years, enough so that Galant is now talking to investors about expansion plans. Not bad for a couple of guys who just wanted to figure out who to follow on Twitter.

Add a comment

del.icio.us | digg

How American Express turned its OPEN Forum into the quintessential example of Marketing as Service

Lots of companies talk about being of service to their customers. Unfortunately, in most cases it is just talk.  American Express, on the other hand, has been walking the walk for many years, whether it’s providing access to exclusive tickets for special events or offering free radios at the US Open to listen while you watch.  These kinds of programs have helped AmEx maintain “cardmember” loyalty as well as attract new customers who want the same privileges.

The OPEN Forum, which originally launched in 2007, is AmEx’s latest and greatest example, a program designed to help small business owners grow their businesses by providing both insights and resources online. This is not a case of altruism but rather enlightened self-interest.  Noted Mary Ann Fitzmaurice Reilly, American Express OPEN, SVP of Partnerships & Business Development, “We already have a large part of the pie so our biggest opportunity is with small business growth—if they grow, we grow.”

This enlightened perspective has made OpenForum.com a runaway success.  According to Compete.com (see chart), monthly traffic has grown from a trickle 24 months ago to rivaling established small biz resources like FastCompany.com and Inc.com.  Over 11,000 small businesses have added their names to Connectodex, a combination social network and Rolodex for entrepreneurs that became part of the program in 2009.

The program has had the added benefit of pulling giant American Express into the forefront of social media marketing.  OPEN Forum was their first foray into Twitter and has nearly 10,000 followers.  It also provides some of the best social media marketing advice content available through its “partner” bloggers.  Recognizing that OPEN Forum is indeed the quintessential example of Marketing as Service, here are six key insights to charge up your brand’s social media marketing.

1. Research: Build off a Target Need

Given the expense of building a Marketing as Service program like the OPEN Forum, you best start with a solid foundation of research.  When explaining the origins of the OPEN Forum, Mary Ann revealed that, “Through our semi-annual Small Business Monitor survey, nearly 60% of customers told us that they found this new social media world really challenging.”  She added that, “Only 13% were tapping into social networking because they didn’t know how,” a need that the OPEN Forum has truly fulfilled.

2. Commit: Stay in it For the Long Haul

Embarking on a Marketing as Service program like this is not for those looking for an instant ROI.  “This is a commitment that we made and are going to continue to make,” noted Mary Ann, when I asked her about the program ROI.  “We didn’t go into this lightly and we didn’t go into this as a test,” she added, noting, “We leveraged insight and took a leap of faith.”  For other marketers considering such an approach, Mary Ann advised, “Don’t just dip your toe into the water, stick to your commitment.”

3. Partner: Don’t Try to Do it All Yourself

Now in its third year, the program “takes a small army, both internal and external,” offered Mary Ann, who mentioned a litany of external partners who help with site development, article content, online media and related live events. When discussing why AmEx sought outside help like Federated Media for bloggers, Mary Ann pointed out that, “You can’t do it alone, there are a lot of experts—leverage them to make the most robust solution you can.”

4. Evolve: Adapt with Changing Social Mores

Originally designed exclusively for cardmembers, in 2010 AmEx made the adventurous decision to open up the OPEN Forum to members of LinkedIn.  Noted Mary Ann, “when we saw that LinkedIn was opening up its platform, it made us think about the direction social media was going in.”  Walking the tightrope between exclusivity and social media’s openness, AmEx quickly discovered that “it allowed us to broaden the conversation beyond cardmembers which has really enriched the site for everyone.”

5. Extend: Social Means Face-to-Face Too

Once embarking on an ambitious online program like OPEN Forum, marketers sometimes forget about the importance of face-to-face interactions.  AmEx, on the other hand, has used the OPEN Forum to broaden its approach to trade shows, and according to Mary Ann they found, “A cross pollination of the physical and online social media worlds.” She added, “With bloggers at trade shows actually having live discussions that we film and put on OPEN Forum,” they were able to complete the marketing circle, working seamlessly between the offline and online channels.

6. Involve: Tap Into Your Community

One of the many positive by-products of building a community like OPEN Forum, is that you then have an opportunity for instant feedback including input on new products and services.  Noted Mary Ann, “When we launched AcceptPay (e-billing and payment acceptance), we put a video out there and got feedback that said, ‘great, we understand how it works, but what’s in it for me?’”  Responding with a new video that used a customer to explain how it works, Mary Ann acknowledged learning an important social media lesson, “It’s not about us telling you what you should do.”

Final Note:  While all of this may seem a bit altruistic, it is not in the least.  American Express is committed to being the brand of choice for small businesses, a business that is highly lucrative.  By helping small business owners grow their businesses with valuable content and networking opportunities, AmEx is essentially insuring its own future.

This article first appeared in edited form on FastCompany.com

Add a comment

del.icio.us | digg

The great patriot and social media enthusiast Benjamin Franklin would surely enjoy the communications revolution that has swept our fair industry and would have plenty of good advice for modern day practitioners.  Advice well earned.  At 15, he adopted the pseudonym Mrs. Silence Dogood just to get his articles published in his brother’s newspaper.  This ruse pissed off his brother to no end and ultimately forced young Ben to flee to Philly where at the age of 21 he formed an early social network called Junto, a group of “like minded aspiring artisans and tradesmen who hoped to improve themselves while they improved their community.”

Once in Philadelphia, Franklin quickly distinguished himself as an agent of change, a man Malcolm Gladwell might be forced to describe as connector, maven AND salesman. At 22, he established The Pennsylvania Gazette, essentially a printed blog of his essays and observations, a vehicle that earned him tremendous social currency.  Shortly thereafter, he set up the city’s first library, the Wikipedia of its day, complete with America’s first librarian.  A noted scientist, perhaps his least known invention is the concept of paying it forward, freely sharing his ideas, inventions and on occasion his cash all with the hope that “it may thus go thro’ many hands.”  Clearly, without Franklin there are no open source API’s on Facebook and certainly no #good tweets on Twitter.

Having established his bona fides as social media pioneer let me now call upon the ever-humble B. Franklin to offer us instruction on how modern day marketing patriots can declare their independence from social media silliness.  And while this piece is no Poor Richard’s Almanac, it will approach the topic at hand with a similar clarity of purpose and simplicity in language.  It will also do so knowing Franklin would have supported this author, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”  Finally, it will encourage marketers to take AIM, a simply acronym that befits a Franklinian approach to social media.

1.  A is for Audit

All too often, marketers take the “Ready, Fire, Aim” approach to social media.  The numerous social media pundits who prescribe dabbling over diligence encourage this philosophy.  Back in 1748, Franklin would have warned you of the risks of this approach, noting, “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.”  Instead, Franklin would have encouraged a rigorous social media audit, offering, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”

Hardly revolutionary, a social media audit lays the groundwork for a successful campaign, fulfilling Franklin’s prognostication that, “Diligence is the mother of good luck.”  These audits can be done in-house but as Franklin warned, “Those that won’t be counseled can’t be helped.”  Kinaxis, a supply chain management company, sought the help of Forrester before it went on to triple its leads and double its site traffic via a rigorously planned social media program (see detailed case history http://bit.ly/cNOgPz .)

2. I is for Implementation

A great communicator himself, Franklin would have been undaunted by all the new options, evaluating each carefully in order to “Never confuse motion with action.”   When it comes to content creation, Franklin’s remarkably timeless advice to, “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing,” is as true for Twitter and YouTube in 2010 as it was for patriotic pamphlets back in 1775.  Anticipating the transparency that enlightened marketers now seek, his proverb “honesty is the best policy,” is truer today than ever before.

Franklin inherently understood social media implementation, and the critical roles of likability, entertainment and patience.  For brands that want to build fans on Facebook and the like, Franklin offered, “If you would be loved, love, and be loveable.” For brands afraid of having a little fun with their audience, Franklin encouraged, “Games lubricate the body and the mind.” And for brands in an unrealistic hurry to gain traction in social media, Franklin noted, “He that can have patience can have what he will.”

3. M is for Monitoring

As Postmaster General in 1768, Franklin monitored the routes of British mail ships to discover why it took them two weeks longer to reach US ports than private merchant ships.   Conducting his own focus groups with merchant captains and whalers, Franklin ultimately charted and named the Gulf Stream, which was acting like a firewall, slowing the movement of data from East to West across the Atlantic.  Not new to the idea of monitoring, Franklin approached even minute details with earnest, noting, “A small leak will sink a great ship.”

So too must social media marketers monitor their activities with rigor and respond accordingly.  While lots of free tools are available to monitor everything from conversations to web traffic, organic search performance to lead generation, Franklin reminded us that, “Lost time is never found again,” thus the anticipating the use of time-saving paid services like Radian6.  With such a disciplined approach to social media, marketers can, in Franklin’s words, “Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.”

Even 220 years after his death, Benjamin Franklin remains a beloved character bestowing a treasure trove of wisdom for good citizens and good brands.  In fact, among the 12 virtues that he drafted when only 20 years old, you will find the single best guidance for any brand I’ve ever read, “Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.”  (This article originally appeared on MediaPost.com)

Show Comment (1) | hide comment | Add comment

del.icio.us | digg

While most B2B marketers are scratching the surface, Kirsten Watson and her team at Kinaxis, a Supply Chain Management solutions provider based in Ottawa, are digging deep into the rich veins of social media and finding gold. And while my metaphor may be tired, the 2009 versus 2008 results are anything but:

• 2.7 times increase in website traffic
• 3.2 times increase in conversion
• 5.3 times increase in blog traffic
• 6.0 times increase in registration of community members

How Kinaxis did all this and more is both instructive and inspiring especially given the extraordinary humility with which Watson shared her story. After I reassured her that Kinaxis was way ahead of the pack, Watson noted, “When you’re in the trenches, head down at the desk, you always feel like you’re playing catch up.” From my perspective, the only catching up to do here is for my readers, who I hope will see this as the definitive case for B2B social media marketing.

1. Innovation Rolls Down Hill

Perhaps the theme I hear most often is the importance of the CEO in inspiring marketing innovation.  Well guess what?  It’s true for our Canadian neighbors too. “It started in late 2007, when our CEO Doug Colbeth came to us,” noted Watson, adding, “He is the visionary type and was noticing all the social media stuff on the rise and wanted to know if there was an opportunity there for us.”  Thinking that social media was mainly Facebook and not seeing a fit, Watson and her team started reading all they could including Groundswell, the seminal book that according to Watson, “Sets the stage for what all the social media stuff really means.”

2. Experts are Worth the Investment

Knowing what you don’t know is tough and knowing when to pay for outside expertise is even tougher.  Noted Watson on the decision to spend $70,000 with Forrester on research, “Our company isn’t big enough, so we needed outside help and engaged Forrester to help us understand our audience.”  Added Watson, “if we don’t understand the audience we’re trying to reach, how in the world could we build an infrastructure to engage them?”  Forrester’s recommendation to build a community was unexpected but the data was quite strong. Offered Watson, “So we executed on all of their recommendations, the biggest being the community.”

3. Patience is Rewarded Especially When it Comes to Blogging

“Our blog is a huge part of our social media strategy but that’s been going on since 2005,” noted Watson, who added “We were banging our heads against the wall, questioning if it was worth the investment of time.”  That is no longer the case, noted Watson, “Our blog today is one of the industry’s leading blogs; we get a lot of leadership points off our blog because we’re quite careful about the quality of the content.”  This sensitivity to their readers provided a strong foundation for their newer social media activities, added Watson, “We’re never trying to be over-promotional and we’re always talking about real issues.”

4.  SEO is More than a Side Benefit of Social Media

“The biggest thing for us has been about finding ‘religion’ in SEO,” noted Watson when explaining her top lessons learned.  “Start with really understanding the keywords that are important to your marketplace and then build your campaign in as integrated way as possible,” she added.  Kinaxis has an editorial calendar based on key industry topics, writes a monthly whitepaper and then extends that content to Slideshare (PowerPoint presentations), YouTube (videos of the author), blogs, LinkedIn groups and newsletters. Offered Watson, “We understand things like keyword density, interlinking, back-linking,” thus helping to turn social media content into gold.

5. Building Community Means Letting the People Speak

In July 2009, Kinaxis launched a community for supply chain management enthusiasts with a hope and a prayer.  The hope was that they would get a few hundred members and a prayer that it would attract new customers as well as their current.  One year later, the community now has over 2760 members, 75% of whom are not current Kinaxis customers.  Watson advised avoiding any kind of corporate messaging in the community, “When you understand the social media revolution; it’s owned by the people and not us. “ She added, “You have to be open, be honest, encompass all ideas and let people communicate how they like.”

6. Holy Hockey Player Batman; Even Supply Chain Experts are People Too

All too often, B2B marketing efforts are restrained by a deadly seriousness that simply ignores the humanity of the target.  Not so for Kinaxis.  Comedy content has been a long-standing component of their web efforts and it became an important part of the community when it launched. “Comedy has been a great draw, since at the end of the day, it gets back to the whole notion that people are people,” she chuckled. “Our business world and personal world do intersect,” noted Watson. “I don’t think there’s anything but good things that come from a company showing its personality and that it has a sense of humor,” concluded Watson.

7. Keep it Fresh by Taking Calculated Risks

In early 2010, Kinaxis opened its blog up to outside bloggers, a calculated risk that has already paid off.  5 leading industry experts are now posting content along with 18 Kinaxis employees, helping to drive site traffic and improve organic search performance.  “These bloggers can even go on and post a contrary view to the way we see things which adds more credibility to the blog,” noted Watson, who also added, “None of our posts are preapproved—it’s all or nothing.”  Understanding the need for experimentation, Watson acknowledged, “We don’t expect to get it right every time and there’s still so much learning to do,” revealing the refreshing humility I mentioned upfront.

8.  Track Everything and Revel in the Love of Your Sales Force

Though measurement is still considered a work in progress, how Kinaxis monitors its social media progress is first rate.  Noted Watson, “We’re tracking all of the traditional stuff like keyword searches, website hits and conversions but its hard to track what created what.”  Taking things a step further, Kinaxis uses a scoring system to monitor qualified leads against a number of criteria including industry, revenue range and title.   She added that leads, “Hit a threshold value of points that then tells us this is a market qualified lead; they’re all tracked by SalesForce, so we can look back and see where our best qualified leads came from,” thus generating the on-going love and appreciation of the Kinaxis sales force.

Final note: While Kinaxis is far from a household name, if you are in the Supply Chain Management business there is a pretty good chance you’ve heard of them, laughed with them or even given them a piece of your mind. And if you haven’t, they just added a “community manager” to increase the odds that you will soon and that this fast-growing privately-held Canadian company will continue to lead the way in social media marketing.

Add a comment

del.icio.us | digg

Just after the Marketing VP set the bar at 20,000 downloads in the first six months, Petra Neiger and the myPlanNet game team at Cisco wondered, “How the heck are we going to do that?” The marketing budget was well under $50,000, her team was tiny and each of them had other marketing responsibilities. Nonetheless, when I met Petra this May, the program was already a stunning success and being honored with BtoB’s Social Media Marketing Award for Best Integrated Campaign.

In fact, myPlanNet, a simulation game that “puts you in the shoes of a service provider CEO,” exceeded expectations at every turn. Launched in October 2009, the game surpassed the download goal by 3,200 the end of January and has gained at least 20,000 more players since then. The game has attracted over 60,000 fans on Facebook with players from at least 2500 different companies and over 130 different countries. With 5,000 new fans joining between mid May and mid June, myPlanNet is a case worth studying, revealing six game-changing steps to social media innovation.

1. Get Management Blessing

It’s a fundamental truth that innovation requires support in the highest offices of any company. Not surprisingly, the myPlanNet game concept was “formed out of an internal innovation contest,” noted Ms.Neiger. “The idea was to find an untraditional way to engage our customer and teach them about Cisco,” she added. “Cisco is very big on innovation, wanting to show the human network in action,” offered Petra. That said, management did not write a blank check and instead put a cap on financial resources, limiting the development budget to $200,000 thus requiring the team to make the most of every dollar. This hedging approach to innovation is not unusual and can inspire further creativity as it did with this program.

2. Channel Internal Energy

Often companies overlook the importance of encouraging widespread employee involvement in their innovative initiatives, particularly in social media. This was not the case with myPlanNet. First, noted Ms. Neiger, “we had an internal group that tested the game every step of the way.” This helped keep the program on budget. Then, added Ms. Neiger, “We launched the game internally 2-3 weeks before external launch because it’s a very robust game so we didn’t know how it would work once a lot of people started playing.” This had the added benefits of enhancing morale and as Petra noted, “started a trend inside the company where other groups are starting to play the game and are inspired to try more innovative approaches.”

3. Create Something Innovative

Admittedly, this sub-head may seem a little obvious, but the key word here is “Create” and you’d be amazed how often marketers seek social media success without actually creating something of genuine value for their target. In Cisco’s case, they created a simulation game that according to Petra, was “easy to play but difficult to master; you can play five minutes or you can play for an hour.” One sure sign of success that you’ve created something innovative is unplanned press attention. “We had no PR outreach whatsoever,” added Ms.Neiger, yet the Washington Post, The SF Chronicle, numerous magazines and blogs all reported on the game, which in turn fueled social media engagement.

4. Seed Your Efforts

Bestselling author Doug Ruskoff recently suggested that all a company needed to do was to create a superior product and, in the new world of social media communications, consumers would find out about it and beat a virtual trail to their door. This idealistic viewpoint may ultimately prove to be true but few marketers can or should take this chance right now. At a minimum, marketers need to jump-start the conversation, as was the case with myPlanNet. The game demoed at a big tradeshow in Geneva last October where, noted Ms. Neiger, “We had a camera to record people’s experiences and put these videos and images on our Game Support and Facebook fan pages.” Judiciously allocating their $30k launch budget to demos, welcome ads and content syndication, Cisco also spent $100 per day on Facebook to bring people to their fan page all of which helped spark interest in the game.

5. Keep on Experimenting

Given the dynamic nature of social media, it is essential that once you get started you keep adapting to consumer feedback and experiment as the opportunities present themselves. Noted Ms. Neiger, “six weeks after launch we started doing social media even more and experimenting a lot.” When they started seeing comments in foreign languages, they responded with a monthly report of fans by country. “People have national pride and are very into it so they passed along the link,” offered Petra who noted enthusiastically that users could be traced back to 130 different countries, thus fulfilling an important objective for this unique marketing initiative. Later on they added a holiday challenge, mini-online games and even a multiple choice quiz about the game, all of which increased fan engagement.

6. Think Small

Unfortunately, a lot of innovative programs, especially ambitious ones in the social media arena never see the light of day because their initial funding requirements are deemed to be too large by management. myPlanNet, the game, was built in 13 months with the help of external experts at a budget cap of $200,000. Though previous gaming efforts by Cisco had achieved some success, management still asked, “Why would this be different from what we’ve done before and how do we get the word out?” Petra and her team were quick with answers, having baked in a more “inclusive gaming experience” and social media-friendly elements like in-game testimonials and a dynamic leader board that allows players to see top scores by week, month and all-time. At the same time, Petra noted that “We would have loved to do more personalization within the game and to include a multiplayer aspect,” but that would have required more time and money, changes that might have prevented this winning game from launching in the first place.

Final note: Petra was quick to remind me that myPlanNet, “started as a side project.” Since then, she added, “The company realizes that the game is really good and really successful,” but she “still has a day job” as does the rest of her team–so much for award-winning marketing being all fun and games!

Add a comment

del.icio.us | digg

Four years ago, Shelly Palmer was asked to stop pushing an “advanced media agenda” by the Emmy® Awards Board of Governors after writing a book called “Television Disrupted” that anticipated the transformation of network TV.  The son of Julliard-trained musicians and a composer/producer himself, Shelly was not one to mope over a blown recital.  Instead, he gathered his instruments; forty email addresses, some fellow digital enthusiasts, a lifetime of technical innovations and started a project that focused on emerging media and what they call a “digital life.”

900 business days later, the Shelly Palmer brand is nearly ubiquitous.   He is on practically every media platform from daily newsletters to radio, taxis to Facebook, websites to books and a broadcast TV deal is in the works. His consulting practice is highly lucrative and he gets paid to speak all over the world.  Shelly will tell you he’s been very lucky, but after spending on hour on the phone interviewing him, I can assure you luck has nothing to do with it.  In fact, the success of Shelly Palmer is a beautifully conducted symphony of marketing savvy, revealing a six-movement composition on how to orchestrate a personal brand.

1. Give Away the Melody

The marketing cornerstone of the Shelly Palmer brand is a daily email newsletter that now goes to a whopping 575,000 subscribers.  Noted Palmer, “We take the 3-5 most interesting stories every day, distill them down, contextualize them and try to add value.” Initially, these stories were just provided as headlines, which encouraged readers to visit ShellyPalmer.com to get the whole story and of course learn all about Shelly’s other “products.”  This marketing as service approach led readers to sing Shelly’s praises, for in a world of information overload, he helped them “look like a genius to their bosses and less-informed colleagues every day.”  By “relentlessly putting something of value in people’s mailboxes,” Palmer stayed top of mind as a potential speaker or consultant, like a pop tune you simply can’t shake.

2. Beat Your Measures

Well aware of the need to acquire a steady stream of “customers” cost-effectively, Palmer and Co “took all the available technology to promote a marketing circle.”  Email drove web traffic which drove video plays which led to speaking engagements which led to consulting gigs and so on. But unlike most start-ups, Palmer assigned dollar value metrics to all the things you could do on his website even those without an immediate return.  For example, a newsletter subscriber with a corporate email address was assigned a value of $4 since it would have cost them that much to buy such a name.  By carefully tracking everything from email open-rates, to website loyalty and recency, to conversions, Palmer was also able to make informed improvements over time.  On a side note, Palmer castigated the use of website hits, calling them “how idiots track success.”

3. Try New Tunes

As a small company, Palmer noted that “it was easy for us to test things and we tried a dozen different experiments with radio, all of which we screwed up.”  Eventually they got it right, partnering with the United States Radio Network, providing a daily Shelly Palmer Digital Life minute to 218 stations across the country.  They also continued to refine their newsletter approach and recently started providing the whole story instead of just headlines.  Added Palmer, “our website traffic dropped off 50%, however, our conversion against product sales, speaking engagements and email opens went double digit through the roof.”  This new approach also reflected Palmer’s preference to “follow the road, not the map” by adjusting to changing circumstances with savvy, speed and flexibility.

4. Every Instrument is its Own Art Form

Shelly Palmer cranks out a remarkable 46 different pieces of content on a daily basis.  Knowing that his target expects a consistent level of excellence regardless of the medium, very little of the content is cookie cutter.  Palmer offered, “You can’t repurpose physical media, you need to rebuild it for what it is, radio can’t just be the audio from a video.”  The terse newsletter wouldn’t work as a video nor could it translate into the longer-form thought leadership pieces Shelly writes weekly.  And this level of customization continued with the emergence of social media. Added Palmer, “We were there instantly, putting all our content in the form of questions in order to inspire conversation.”  Since the Shelly Palmer brand is only as strong as each individual communications, he and his team take the time to make each component stand alone, an effort that other marketers would be wise to emulate.

5. Find Your Voice

At one point when Palmer was traveling, a substitute performed on his daily MediaBytes video.  The fans were not amused and hundreds complained.  Thinking that his brand was only about the high quality content that he and his team worked so hard to deliver, Palmer suddenly realized that, “a huge part of what the Shelly Palmer brand is–is Shelly Palmer.”  He doesn’t say this as an egotist but rather with amused resignation that he and the brand are one.  Fortunately this role fits him like the fine suits he wears.  “I love to perform and I get a kick out of it when people tell me that I’m a good speaker,” notes Palmer who is called to the lectern over 50 times a year.  He also noted that as a personal brand, “You gotta be in uniform and always assume you are being watched—so I try to comport myself that way.”

6. Don’t Play Every House

When offering advice to other small businesses, Palmer noted “I don’t take every consulting job–I only take the ones that I can do great, make a lot of money for me and my clients and when people learn that I did that, they say ‘Wow’.”  This approach sings volumes about Palmer’s commitment to delivering a product that is of genuine value, whether free or paid.  For his weekly thought leadership article, Palmer imagines that he is writing it for a media maven like Jeff Zucker, making sure he keeps it interesting and “wastes as little time as possible.”  And though Palmer acknowledges that his articles may be “superficially useful for the less digitally literate,” there is always “code” for important digital issues that will spark interest among his more sophisticated consulting clients.

Final note:  Shelly Palmer has been training for this role all his life, writing music since he was four, filing for his first patent in his teens, attending NYU film school, producing EMMY-award winning TV shows and composing over a thousand pieces of music (including “Let’s Go Mets”) that are currently in use on TV or radio.  Like every great musician, Palmer knows that he is only as good as his last performance, an understanding that is sure to keep his brand pitch perfect for many years to come.

Add a comment

del.icio.us | digg

With the Great Recession looming on the horizon, Catherine Davis, then the SVP of Marketing Services at Diageo, knew it was not a time for the usual, and called for an entire re-distillation of her online marketing program. Noting that, “In 2008, we saw a big shift to home consumption,” Catherine and her team at the world’s largest spirits company set the bar high, aspiring to “own cocktails” and to “preempt the competition” in order to gain share. When the program rolled out in the latter part of 2008, it soon achieved all its goals providing a “top-shelf” example of the power of Marketing as Service.

With the totally reconceived microsite TheBar.com at the core along with a paid search program and partnerships with leading recipe sites feeding it, Diageo effectively dominated the online cocktail recipe search and fulfillment during the all-important holiday seasons in both 2008 and 2009. Traffic to TheBar.com, according to compete.com, was four times that of any of the leading brand sites, peaking at a whopping 286,621 visitors in December 2009, thus allowing this punctilious author to outline for you seven key ingredients to icing your competition.

1. Turn Lemons into Lemonade

Catherine reflects upon her efforts at Diageo with a matter of fact tone that minimizes the true nature of her challenge, stating simply, “The economy had gone south and we needed to grow share.” Easier said than done. Many marketers saw the storm clouds but most just closed the windows on their efforts, choosing inactivity over new initiatives. Catherine, on the other hand, planned out a fully integrated online program that had real scale in the market in order to take advantage of the shift to home consumption. “We looked around and we saw a lot of programs, but they weren’t generating a lot of scale,” offered Catherine, whose three-pronged approach turned economic lemons into share-gaining lemonade.

2. Know Your Patrons

Prior to the re-concepting of TheBar.com, Diageo conducted extensive qualitative research to understand the needs of their target. “Our research showed that consumers lacked a lot of confidence about how to make a cocktail,” offered Catherine who used these and other insights to guide the makeover. Noting that “rum and Coke is the 9th most searched recipe,” Catherine and her team focused on content that was easy to grasp even for novices. Instructional videos and hundreds of simple recipes made it easy for “consumers to see what they really wanted,” added Catherine. “We understood the purchase decision process and what they needed to do to feel good serving cocktails,” thus insuring that TheBar.com fulfilled a real consumer need.

3. Shake Things Up

Marketing at its best is a mutually beneficial exchange of value between brand and consumer. The original TheBar.com sought that exchange as entertainment, trying to replicate a genuine bar experience complete with a chatty bartender named Jack. Turns out, even the hardiest of spirits lovers aren’t seeking that online experience and instead visit brand sites primarily for recipes. “We went from being a combination of entertainment and service to really being 100% focused on service that consumers wanted,” noted Catherine who also hired a new agency, Tribal DDB, to help with the transformation.

4. Find the Right Mix

Knowing the critical role of search in consumer’s quests to find recipes, Catherine and her team sought to “own search,” both of the organic and paid variety. By ditching the flash-based content in the old site, improving key word tagging and adding a lot more recipes, Diageo saw significant gains in organic search performance. Adds Catherine, “We developed a multifaceted search program around drink types, spirits categories and brands, particularly around the holiday season – our period of higher volume.” Without revealing any confidential information, Catherine assured me that these activities were among the most cost effective she’d ever seen, driving qualified traffic to the site by the caseload.

5. Flavor it with Partners

Wanting a program with true scale, Catherine told of partnering with “the top 4 recipes sites, which represented 70% of all recipe volume.” These were not typical ad buys, but rather true partnership deals in which sites like AllRecipes.com and Delish.com focused on recipes that featured Diageo brands. “We know that about 1.6 million people search the word margarita each month,” offered Catherine as further evidence of the need to be everywhere the consumer searched. “The whole strategy was about going where people already were and intercepting them at the right point in the decision making process,” she concluded.

6. Measure the Right Things

Because spirits has a complex distribution system, it is very difficult to directly correlate marketing and sales. ‘Since we couldn’t tie it directly to sales, we had to develop proxies like number of page views and the number of brand views as a better proxy of success for cross sell and up sell.” As usual, this was grounded in a consumer insight as well. Offered Catherine, “When you’re planning a party you’re not thinking about a single brand or a single spirits category,” so monitoring page views and brand views by individual visitors along with number of recipes printed were simply the best means of measuring site performance.

7. Trust a Proven Recipe

Acknowledging that a recipe-focused program was hardly a new idea, Catherine laughed, chalking it up to the benefit of good training. “I worked on Pillsbury for 5 years at Leo Burnett and had seen the power of recipe campaigns and what they can do to drive a brand,” added Catherine. Knowing full well that “about 50% of people who are looking for drink recipes are looking for them online,” she pursued this approach with the clarity of purpose that only comes from experience. Catherine notes, “we knew what role we wanted to play and aimed to do so in a sophisticated and polished way that still enhanced all the Diageo brands.” Cheers to that.

Final Note: Though Catherine has since moved on, she considered this program to be one of the major highlights of her three years at Diageo. She also delighted in the fact that this premium example of Marketing as Service lives on, adding more content via a recent mobile edition and thus continuing to “fulfill a need and dominate the competition on recipe search.”

Add a comment

del.icio.us | digg

Just in case you missed it, this article ran on MediaPost today.

A seasoned marketing veteran said to me recently that social media is simply “what we used to call buzz marketing.”  I bristled at this and mentioned that Donny Deutsch had also tried to categorize social media at the recent NYC I40 Character conference as “just another new & sexy media channel” like cable TV 20 years ago or the Internet 10 years ago.   In my humble opinion, to look at social media through the lens of a previous communication channel is an old-school approach that is inherently self-limiting.

Instead, I would encourage marketers to graduate to Social Media 3.0, an entirely new dynamic that requires a high degree professionalism, new strategic platforms, new metrics for success, new monitoring tools, cross-disciplined planning and an open-mindedness to social media in just about any business category.  To that end, here are four courses of action marketers should consider to really make the grade in social media.

Enough with the Interns

Because a lot of marketers consider social media experimental and/or the exclusive domain of Millennials, they fail to staff this relatively young field with experienced professionals.  The result is a self-fulfilling mishmash of tactics that rarely yield sustainable results.  Because social media can have an impact on everything from search results to PR coverage, lead generation to customer loyalty, marketers need to acknowledge its critical role and staff it accordingly.

Just a couple of weeks ago I met with a publisher of a major print mag that was way behind its publishing peers in social media.  When I asked how he planned to attack this challenge, his response was, “We just hired a summer intern to outline our social media strategy.”  Are you kidding me?  I couldn’t help but wonder if this same publisher would put interns on the phone with his most important customers or ask an intern to figure out his long-term business plan. No wonder print is in trouble.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love interns.  Just don’t put them in charge of anything customer facing – especially social media. Take this stuff seriously folks. Hire professionals, or your competition will eat you for lunch.

Align with Business Goals

Social Media 2.0 was mainly “ready, fire, aim.” Marketers set up Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, YouTube videos and blogs  when the spirit arose, all in the name of experimentation.  Some succeeded but more ended up with a disparate array of content that languished, raising serious questions in the C-Suite about the ROI of social media.

Social Media 3.0 is about aligning your efforts clearly and directly with your company’s principal objectives of increasing revenue and/or lowering costs.   If the emphasis is on the revenue side, then you can further break this down into customer acquisition and/or revenue per customer.  A number of companies like Dell and e.l.f. cosmetics are using social media to drive revenue, pushing out offers to their networks of fans that translate into immediate sales and repeat purchases.

If the emphasis is on cost reduction, then consider how social media can lower call center costs and/or cost per lead.  Best Buy’s Twelpforce has responded to 28,000 customer inquiries via Twitter, dramatically lowering cost per response vis-à-vis its call center.  A well-designed social media program can radically improve natural search results, which in turn will lower your cost per lead.

Get Serious about Metrics

Once your business goals are clear, establishing KPIs (key performance indices) and related social media benchmarks is a relatively simple task regardless of your business category.  To that point, one of the most interesting social media cases I’ve seen lately was about a Canadian supply chain management company named Kinaxis, a company that is so serious about metrics for success that they hired Forrester to guide their strategy while making the business case for social media.

In 2008, Kinaxis set out to engage the greater supply chain community with the hopes of increasing website traffic, driving sales leads, generating positive word of mouth all with the underlying goal of improving natural search results.  Using a multi-pronged online approach that included blogging, community building, video distribution and Twitter, Kinaxis was able to build and sustain an active community and triple their number of web-based sales leads to 42,000 in 2009.

Though I can’t do justice to the Kinaxis case here, suffice it to say that they monitored a wide range of metrics including page views, impressions, referrals, email open-rates, conversion rates, word of mouth mentions, and more, all of which went up dramatically due to a well planned and executed program of engagement.

Conduct a Social Media Audit

As I stated at the beginning of this diatribe, social media is far more complex than a traditional media channel in which a marketer can simply buy some time and push out a message.  Social media touches just about every aspect of your business from customer service to corporate compliance, lead generation to public relations, advertising to corporate social responsibility and then some.

As such, marketers would be smart to conduct a thorough social media audit internally or better yet with the help of outside experts who can take an impartial look at both the issues and the opportunities.  This audit requires the attention and participation of multiple department heads, since a well-conceived and well-executed program is inherently cross-disciplined, and turf wars must be avoided.

A thorough social media audit (see Renegade Social Media Audit slideshow here) examines the competitive environment, defines an overall strategy in the context of business goals, outlines tactical opportunities and identifies any organizational and cultural changes required to support implementation.  This highly disciplined approach will save countless hours of wheel spinning, helping to insure that your investment will be rewarded and you’ll be graduating to the next level of social media success.

So instead of just toasting Dads and grads on Facebook this June, give some serious thought to how your social media program can graduate to a new level of professionalism and accomplishment.

Show Comment (1) | hide comment | Add comment

del.icio.us | digg

Two days after resigning from his position as Chief Marketing Officer, Jeffrey Hayzlett was still saying “we” when referring to Kodak, a habit I suspect will take some time to break. Speaking with understandable pride after four years of remarkable accomplishments, Jeff answered my questions with an authority that at first left me baffled. Then it hit me. This is not your typical marketing maven. Jeff Hayzlett actually puts the Chief in Chief Marketing Officer.

Instead of talking about ad campaigns, we talked about products and value propositions. Instead of talking ideas, we discussed what a marketing chief needs to do to succeed in a rapidly changing media landscape. Its not that Jeff doesn’t care about ideas, its just that he knows those are by products of performing the CMO job as a true leader, a practice that I have broken down into seven bite-sized morsels for your immediate consumption.

1. Align Goals

Making sure your marketing goals align with the goals of the company seems like a fairly basic place to start but it is amazing how many senior marketers forget this important first step. “A lot of CMOs fail because they forget to get conditions of satisfaction,” offered Hayzlett, who spends a lot of time setting the goals and won’t move forward until he knows what will make his customer (in this case, his boss) happy. Jeff acknowledges that “a lot of CMO’s aren’t even in the C-suite,” which can make nailing down the goals quite a bit tougher.

2. Create Tension

Once your marching orders are clear, Jeff believes the next priority of the CMO is “to create tension in order to encourage more innovative activity.” When reviewing the launch of a new video camera, Jeff created tension “by asking questions no one thought to ask before,” even going so far as to publicly ridicule an alphanumeric product name. “That made some of my people cringe,” acknowledged Hayzlett, whose questions led to a public search for a new name that generated millions of free PR impressions, thousands of entries and one winning name—PlaySport.

3. Act Fast

As we jumped from topic to topic, it was clear to me that Jeff is nothing if not a man of action, and his biggest lament, “wasting time on things that didn’t materialize.” In a period of four years, he was able to launch several successful new products in both B2C and B2B segments, all of which were able to achieve 1st, 2nd or 3rd positions in their respective categories. Jeff noted with glee that 60% of Kodak’s revenue now comes from products that didn’t exist when he started there. When talking about the launch of the naming promotion for Play Sport, Jeff sounded more like the head of racing pit crew, having jumped from concept to execution in two weeks flat!

4. Stretch Budget

It is no secret that Jeff is a huge fan of social media noting that, “It’s a great way to launch a new product and gave us an extreme amount of credibility in the video camera category.” Targeting “every blogger and thought leader,” Hayzlett and his team were able to make Play Sport a strong alternative to category leader Flip without spending a dime on traditional media. As he points out in his new book, The Mirror Test, Hayzlett sees social media as an extraordinary way to connect with consumers and stretch a budget under an umbrella notion he celebrates as OPM, or “Other People’s Money.” Given the low costs, even the smallest businesses can see very tangible returns from social media,” offers Hayzlett.

5. Breakdown Silos

Recalling the extraordinary success that Kodak has had in the ink jet category, Jeff zeros in on how Kodak changed the value proposition in the category, offering reasonably priced ink cartridges to go along with a reasonably priced printer. “When the printing of a recipe is more expensive that the actual ingredients, the consumer knows there is a problem,” noted Hayzlett. Because marketing had a “seat at the table” and participated in the product development process, Hayzlett was able ensure that a strong value proposition was baked into the product, offering a point of difference that made marketing a far simpler task. With the silos broken down, Kodak ink jet printers, according to Hayzlett, “achieved #1 share in some countries.”

6. Take Risks

“No one is going to die in marketing,” offered Hayzlett when discussing the justification for taking risks like playing a video featuring a gray-haired spokesman shouting “booyah” about how Kodak was changing. He went on to note that, “if you want to grow, you’re going to have to take risks. It’s not that Hayzlett is out to offend but as he cautions, “sometimes you don’t know ‘til you try it.” He prescribes “doing it in such a way to minimize the backlash,” and if things don’t work as planned, “its okay to say we screwed up.” Jeff recalls with bravado that his group was fined $500 for not filing a promotional contest in time, a calculated risk that ended up saving his team irreplaceable weeks in program development time.

7. Listen Up

After talking for a good bit, Hayzlett circled back to the importance of listening to the consumer and being “completely transparent.” During his tenure at Kodak, he brought “voice of the customer” to the forefront establishing the position of Chief Listening Officer “to bring scale” to all of Kodak’s social media activities. With a CLO in place, Hayzlett ensured that complaints were heard, questions were answered, comments were responded to and even more PR was generated. “When a consumer tweets ‘they are thinking about buying,’ then we listen and point them in the right direction,” added Hayzlett, whose innovative and authoritative approach to the CMO position at Kodak leaves some pretty big shoes to fill.

Final Note: During his tenure at Kodak, Hayzlett established himself as one of the first “celebrity CMOs,”gaining notoriety on Celebrity Apprentice and extending it with a well publicized book tour. With an army-sized following on Twitter, and a well-established presence in every form of media, I have no doubt we’ll be hearing a lot more from Jeff in the near future.

Add a comment

del.icio.us | digg

“It’s marketing that isn’t marketing,” said John Bernier, the social media maven at Best Buy whose dev team brought the stunningly effective Twelpforce to market in July of 2009. Since then Twelpforce has responded to near 28,000 customer inquiries via Twitter, enlisted 2600 employees to share their knowledge, and paid for itself many times over via extensive PR coverage, enhanced brand perceptions, and potential savings to the call center.

Setting a new standard for Marketing as Service, Twelpforce is worth studying, both for its lightning quick development process and for the surprise benefits of this highly innovative program. While this article is based on two extensive interviews with Mr. Bernier, one at the New York 140 Characters Conference and the other by phone last week, he is quick to note that this was “clearly a team effort” that went well beyond the marketing department. In fact, it is the cross-disciplined nature of this effort that makes the following 7 insights all the more instructive.

1. Recognize the Need

Most marketers know to look for an unmet needs but few find them, especially in the chaos that was Twitter in 2008. “We saw widespread use of Twitter among employees,” noted Bernier, “and our customers were talking about us on Twitter.” Putting two and two together, the Best Buy development project team created spy.appspot.com to monitor the conversation online and to formulate an engagement plan. This was a critical first step on the road to meeting “a need in a time and place when customers were asking for it,” as Mr. Bernier so aptly put it.

2. Follow the Leader

At about this time, Barry Judge, CMO of BestBuy was emerging as a major voice on Twitter. “Our leadership started to get very visible with customers, and that set the tone for the rest of the department,” noted Bernier. “Barry was the catalyst, giving us the green light to go experiment, so we had the luxury of leadership buy-in,” Bernier gratefully added. All that said, Barry Judge alone couldn’t answer all the customer questions himself, and it quickly became clear that they needed to find a way to tap into the tech expertise across the organization.

3. Build it Fast

Around April 2009, Bernier’s team was told that Twelpforce was a go and would even be featured in a TV spot in July. They essentially had two months to build a system that could monitor customer inquiries on Twitter and allow multiple employees to respond from one account. The risks were huge and “not a day went by that I didn’t think this might not work,” sighed Bernier. Nonetheless, using open source software and “the cloud,” they were ready for a “soft launch” in June by which time 600 eager employees had already volunteered to test the system.

4. Unleash your Employees

Unlike traditional customer support services, employee access to Twelpforce was not restricted to a select group of highly trained agents. In fact, the genius of Twelpforce is that it tapped into an existing talent pool that welcomed the chance to share their knowledge in their spare time! “A geek squad guy might have a break between sessions or it could be a ‘Blue Shirt’ in-store at a slow moment, either way,” noted Bernier, “this talent was ready, willing and able to help out. Because the system was designed to tie each response to an individual employee, each Twelpforce rep could feel a personal sense of pride in their participation.”

5. Expect the Unexpected

After the initial 600 Twelpforce testers, an additional 2000 signed on, and while not all are active, those that are have found some extraordinary side benefits. First, it helped create a new internal network, “broadening their relationship with other employees who shared a common interest,” beamed Bernier. Second, it served as on-going training program as Twelpforce reps researched questions and read the range of answers. Because it became clear that some questions couldn’t be answered in 140 characters, the development project team also went to work on a tool that enabled longer, more sophisticated answers.

6. Support the Big Picture

Though it could have been a big risk to feature Twelpforce before its merits were established, BestBuy took the chance with good reason. Seeking the well wishes of early adopters and tech influencers, you can’t simply talk the talk. You have to walk the walk, demonstrating your passion for technology and leading edge know-how by applying innovations like Twitter, innovations favored by the technorati. Being able to translate this passion into better, faster service as BestBuy did with Twelpforce is an even bigger coup since this is clearly a weak spot for discount-driven competitors like Wal-Mart, who are far less in tune with the latest innovations.

7. Reap the Rewards

While on the surface, Twelpforce could be perceived as a short-term marketing ploy, it is in truth more like a vein of gold that has just barely been tapped. Twelpforce offers “real time pulse measurement” noted Bernier, “so we could use the feed to adjust banner ad copy”, to reflect trending topics like iPad accessories, new game releases or localized out-of-stocks. In order to help Best Buy “Examine the past to predict the future,” Bernier and the dev team are currently creating an even more robust monitoring system, once again in a highly transparent manner and which you can see in its infancy at bbyfeed.com. As Bernier puts it, “The evolution of Twelpforce involves the story of data.”

Final note: Customer satisfaction among users of Twelpforce is actually higher than c-sat ratings of Best Buy among the general population. These higher ratings translate into increased purchase intent as well as the likelihood to spend more per purchase. Not bad for a program that was built in two months under the premise that “If we were going to fail, we wanted to fail fast.”

Add a comment

del.icio.us | digg

The argument raged until 2am when the guy stormed out. The guy, an MBA student at UNC insisted that “games are for kids and IBM isn’t going to buy it,” while the demure Phaedra Boinodiris, also a first year MBA candidate, stuck to her guns, knowing the case challenge posted by IBM “screamed for a business SIM.”  Just a few hours later, Sandy Carter of IBM was asking Phaedra to build a prototype of her idea, an idea that became Innov8, a highly successful “serious game” that explains business process management to non-technical people and is my new favorite example of Marketing as Service.

In retrospect, it wasn’t really a fair fight. Phaedra was not your typical MBA student with ten years of entrepreneurial experience under her belt, having founded two companies including WomenGamers.com, now a popular portal for female gamers.  Thus, her expertise on the gaming world was substantial and while Sandy Carter’s request would have tripped up most students, Phaedra was up to the challenge.  In my interview with Phaedra at Impact 2010, IBM Software’s annual conference, her experience with IBM over the last two years provides a gripping playbook for innovators, especially “intrapreneurs” seeking to build “start ups” within large companies.

1.     Pursue your Passions

Phaedra got into the gaming business back in 1999 because she was a gamer, her sister was a gamer but not one of the industry publications addressed the category from a female perspective.  Knowing that 35% of women play video and computer games, she leapt into the void by setting up WomenGamers.com. She became an activist for the cause, starting the first scholarship program for women to get degrees in game design and development in the US, helping to share her passion with others.  After two years full-time with IBM, her passion for the power of games remains strong, adding that, “through self-discovery and experience consumers can better understand what you’re selling.”

2.    Find a Champion

When Sandy Carter first approached her at the Case Competition, Phaedra wasn’t sure what to make of her prototype request.  Now she knows that Sandy is the kind of internal champion that every “intrapreneur” dreams about finding.  “What amazed me is that Sandy attends the Case Competition’s herself instead of delegating this to a junior person,” marveled Phaedra.  “That takes real cajones and reflects Sandy’s commitment to find innovative ideas,” added Phaedra.  After the Case Competition, Sandy offered Phaedra an internship that lasted the rest of her time at business school and led the way to the now successful Serious Gaming group at IBM.

3.     Partner with Pros

Given only three months to build a prototype, Phaedra and her team at IBM knew they needed great partners and aligned with Centerline.”  “There are so many bad games out there,” noted Phaedra, “you really have to find a developer with a light touch,” to create an engaging experience.  In fact, Phaedra notes that of the three key ingredients of entrepreneurial success; people, process and ideas, people is by far the most important.  “A great idea without the right people will fail, whereas even an okay idea could succeed with great people,” she added.   Phaedra’s confidence in Centerline was thoroughly justified as they turned the initial idea first into a prototype and later into a simulation game played now played at over 1000 colleges and business schools around the world.

4.     Start with the Low Hanging Fruit

Once Innov8 was produced, it was quickly adopted and lauded by teachers, students and the press.  USC’s Marshall School of Business soon required every student to play Innov8.  Phaedra noted with understandable pride, “One class at a Turkish University uses Innov8 for its final exam!”  Teachers thanked Phaedra because “BPM is not an easy thing to teach.”  “We took something that was highly technical and made it more intuitive,” added Phaedra.  “Students were the low hanging fruit but they also represented future business opportunity,” which would eventually help to get Business Process Management software adopted by more and more companies.

5.     Build from Success

Once Innov8 had gained traction with graduate schools, Phaedra got approval to develop a flash-based online version of the game that could reach and engage a wider audience.  Adding social networking elements like a leader board, the online version soon became a lead machine.  Currently thossands of potential and current customers play Innov8 2.0 Online per month generating thousands of leads, many of which have been converted into sales.  In fact, Innov8 online generates many times more leads for IBM’s BPM software than any other source, creating an ROI that even “VCs would love.” “We took baby steps, building our case internally, showing ROI of each subsequent project, just like we would have to external investors,” offered Ms. Boinodiris.

6.     Don’t Sell Chocolate Broccoli

One of the happy by-products of the online Innov8 game was that it introduced the idea of serious gaming to a broader audience.  Soon IBM’s business partners were asking if they could customize Innov8 for their customers.  And eventually a new group within IBM Global Business Services was set up to do just that!  This speaks to the power of selling by educating as well as the quality of the game itself.  As Phaedra opined, “people can smell chocolate broccoli from a mile away,” so even educational games have to be extremely well crafted.  This insight is a truth for all such marketing as service programs, if the experience isn’t top notch, the customer or prospect simply won’t engage.  On the other hand, if the experience is rich and educational, there is simply no better way to sell.

7.     Revel in the Naysayers

Since her late night argument with a fellow MBA, Phaedra has reveled in the challenge of selling games as a serious business tool and formidable marketing weapon.  Some have resisted the idea, calling games “fluff” and “kids stuff.”  When I asked her about sales force adoption, she noted that there has been some resistance there too. “Sales has their lucky underwear and don’t like to change it,” she winked. Fortunately, her continued emphasis on proving ROI internally has been rewarded with the green lighting of a next gen simulation game called CityOne that will launch Fall 2010.  CityOne is already being lauded by the press, with Gizmodo saying “if SimCity introduced legions of gamers to the world of urban planning, then IBM’s upcoming CityOne game looks to take that education to the next level.”

Final note: I consider myself lucky to have met Phaedra.  As proud as she is of her accomplishments thus far, she remains humble.  She states with realistic clarity that “games won’t displace anything; they will supplement other sales tool, driving people down the purchase funnel.”  My guess—the potential for games as educational sales tools for highly technical products is truly unlimited and Phaedra will remain on the forefront for quite some time.

Show Comment (1) | hide comment | Add comment

del.icio.us | digg

April was a remarkable month with both Facebook and Apple making game changing introductions while gatherings of characters, developers and CMO’s provided glimpses into the goodness ahead.

1. Learn to Love the Like Button

Make no mistake about it; the Like button from Facebook is a stroke of genius for them and most likely for the online publishing world.  Just in case you missed this momentous land grab, on April 21^st Facebook made its Like button available to all publishers and in the blink of an eye changed how content is shared on the internet. Over 50,000 sites jumped at the opportunity because it is a smart and easy thing to do–so easy that even I could add it to this blog in a matter of minutes.  Facebook is expecting a billion Like buttons to sprout shortly and I’m hard to pressed to think of a site that wouldn’t benefit from this simply yet powerful means of encouraging content sharing.

2. Keep Your Eyes on the iPad

I was at party for iPad developers a few weeks ago and it felt like the late ‘90s again. The party was sponsored by the HR department of Barnes & Noble, who was there trolling for developers – no doubt looking for ways to leverage this new media channel.   The energy and excitement over this new platform is akin to the early days of the Internet.  Simply whip out an iPad and people will flock to you like moths to a flame. A friend of mine recently used an iPad during a sales call and got an hour of quality time with a previously recalcitrant prospect.  Even when the novelty wears off, assuming that happens in the next 12 months, the uses of this device go well beyond gaming as the true business applications are just beginning to be explored.  Sure other “tablets” that promised a B2B revolution have been released before, but none have had the dazzling elegance and enthralling simplicity that Apple brings to the iPad.

3. Tap into the Goodness of Tweeters

Among the many things I gained from the 140 Characters conference in New York last month was a profound sense of hope.  For those of you not aligned with the Twitterverse, the 140 Characters conference assembles 140 interesting people on stage and another 1000+ in the audience to share the good, the bad and the ugly of all things Twitter.  With no PowerPoint crutches, many speakers bared their souls, enlightening us about the good deeds enabled by Twitter, from raising money for Haiti to putting prayers into the Western Wall.  Celebrity tweeters like Anne Curry and Ivanka Trump engaged with the hoi polloi in a remarkably open manner reflecting their belief that “people are inherently good.”  Maybe it’s the “retweet” function that attracts good people to Twitter, but regardless there’s a very strong Pay It Forward substrate embedded into this particular social medium.

4. Follow Twelpforce into Customer Service

As most of the marketing world is contemplating how social media fits into customer service, BestBuy is out there doing it and doing it well via TwelpForce (and I’m not just saying that because I won an iPad courtesy of BestBuy at the 140 Conference!).  Set up over a year ago, Twelpforce is “a collective force of Best Buy technology pros offering tech advice in Tweet form.”  Enter a question on Twitter about technology referencing BestBuy or Twelpforce and you’ll get a well-conceived response in short order.  They even set up their own monitoring/response tool that allows the hundreds of BestBuy employees that make up Twelpforce to respond with answers longer than 140 characters.  It is no wonder that over 25,000 twitterers are following Twelpforce.  If your company hasn’t integrated social media into customer service yet, Twelpforce offers a pretty darn good road map.

5. Channel your Chutzpah

I’ve spent a lot of time with marketers lately, interviewing them for articles and at conferences like The CMO Club Leadership Summit.  Marketers come from all walks of life, many starting in disciplines other than marketing, and the range of approaches to their positions is startling diverse.  Some are heavily analytic, others more prone to shoot from the hip.  That said the one thing that the most successful ones have in common is chutzpah.  They simply aren’t afraid to bend the rules or challenge convention or beg forgiveness in order to get an innovative program out in the market.  When the CEO of Kodak asked his CMO, Jeff Hayzlett, about the ROI of a Kodak social media initiative, Jeff’s response was, “I’ll answer you if you can tell me what’s the Return on Ignoring our customers.”  Now that’s chutzpah!  What Jeff is doing with the Kodak brand is a veritable album of innovation.

Hopefully, the shower of stimuli I absorbed in April will help your ideas bloom in May.

Add a comment

del.icio.us | digg

Now VP of Strategic Marketing Consulting at Experian, Sunnie Giles tells the story of her efforts to help transform Samsung Life Insurance from a sleepy giant to a national juggernaut with both pride and awe. Listening to the story, I couldn’t help but think of her as an intrepid tugboat artfully turning around a recalcitrant yet enterprising aircraft carrier. Though her journey with Samsung Life began in late 2003 and ended in late 2006, her 7-step approach is timelessly instructive to any marketer as it helped part the waters for the biggest IPO in Korean history just last week.

1. Know thy Enemy

When Sunnie first started at Samsung Life, the company was essentially in dry dock, resting on its #1 market position and requiring much more than a fresh coat of paint.  Noted Giles, “it needed rejuvenation from the lack of clarity on what it stood for and a lack of relevance to important segments.” Foreign competitors like MetLife and Prudential were stealing share by offering new services like estate planning, and according to Sunnie, “cherry picking our best, most affluent customers.” To overcome these new forces in the market place, Sunnie realized that marketing was going to have to find a new tack, one based in the findings of objective research. “We knew we were losing share,” noted Ms. Giles, “but we didn’t know which direction to take.”

2. Beware the Prevailing Winds

Implementing a carefully charted course of both quantitative and qualitative research, Sunnie was able to confront the prevailing wisdom at her company that the “image of stability” was the single most important purchase driver. Using the qualitative research to identify 106 possible drivers, the quantitative results served up the astounding possibility that “hair style” and “how agents dress” could be the beacons of success. Knowing that management might scoff at such findings, Sunnie dived deeper and discovered that these attributes pooled together into the new wave of “professionalism” brought on by Samsung’s foreign rivals.

3. Coordinate with the Captain

Back in 2003, Sunnie waited outside her CEO’s office armed with case studies, hoping to gain his support for a transformative marketing program. A passionate man himself, Mr. Bae Joong Chung, listened for an hour and then asked what Sunnie would need to be successful. Her three wishes, “people, budget and the CEO’s support,” were granted after Sunnie offered her own extraordinary commitment. “I bet my career, offering to resign without severance if I failed,” noted Ms. Giles with a hint of pride. She was also able to secure support of other key senior executives such as Mr. Park Chun Hyun, the astute EVP of Strategic Planning, who shared her vision. From then on, Ms. Giles had the wind at her back and the confidence that dissenting currents from other departments could be over-powered.

4. Set the Course

Once Sunnie’s research revealed that a one-point lift in perception of professionalism correlated to a double digit revenue increase, the course was fairly clear for Samsung Life. “On a scale of 1 to 5, we were quite low which meant we had a lot of upside,” added Ms. Giles. “I wanted to make sure that marketing was aligned with the goals of the CEO,” said Ms. Giles, offering up one of the true secrets to her success. The focus on improving professionalism across the organization began with a simple yet profound promise, “A Partner for Life.” Establishing the brand platform, defining the brand essence and brand attributes on both emotional and rational levels and developing communication architecture, Ms. Giles mapped out how Samsung Life would transform itself over coming years.

5. Train the Troops

While marketers have a tendency to focus on managing perceptions, Sunnie also had her eye on what she calls “reality management.” “We needed to make sure that the idea of professionalism permeated the organization,” and this meant training all 35,000 of their independent sales reps to ensure perception communicated with the new brand strategy aligned with the reality of what customers experienced at various touch points. Channel partners established mandatory training courses on estate and financial planning. Noting that the sales reps were perceived as “too casual,” the company also suggested new standards for appearance, going so far as to arrange for discounts at appropriate clothing stores. Similar deals were set up with beauty salons that coincided with a “make-over” contest, challenging sales reps to get their appearance in ship shape.

6. From Bow to Stern

This brand transformation didn’t stop with the sales reps. “A Partner for Life” imagery appeared in 2,000 Samsung Life offices and on all the company buses. Employee uniforms included the campaign line and the new brand colors. Internal seminars broadcast over satellite ran for 20 minutes every day for three months, ensuring every employee understood and could live up to this new standard of professionalism. Brand champions were identified and encouraged to advocate the new position across the organization. Even the HR department joined the effort, being asked to recruit with an eye towards “professionalism” and train with a new sense of passion.

7. A 360° Turnaround

In early 2006, Samsung Life introduced its new campaign by wrapping the outside of its corporate headquarters in Seoul with pictures provided by 9000 customers. The banner proclaimed “A Partner for Life” and launched an ad campaign that reintroduced Samsung Life to Koreans with a marketing tsunami. Within a year, purchase intent rose nine basis points, coinciding with a jump to the number one spot in customer satisfaction – a position they’ve maintained over the last four years. Sales also rose significantly, reflecting the depth and breadth of this 360° marketing campaign, enterprise-wide efforts of all the employees and independent agents as well as the incredible passion of the extraordinary “tugboat” behind this deft brand transformation. Added Ms. Giles with notably humility, “I couldn’t have done it without the support and vision of the senior leaders and the strong teamwork culture of the entire company.”

Final note: I met Sunnie recently at The CMO Club’s Leadership Summit where she told me this story. Sunnie continues to apply her “analytics-based approach” in her capacity as VP Strategic Marketing Consulting at Experian, helping her clients to use the power of analytics and quantitative decision making to develop powerful marketing strategies and improve ROI. Small in stature, have no doubt, she is a marketing powerhouse.

Add a comment

del.icio.us | digg

An online friend and I use ”friend” loosely since I have no idea who she really is other than a helpful sharer, sent me this link.  She knows that I am always on the hunt for interesting examples of Marketing as Service and true to form, this one qualified.  Carte Noire, a brand of coffee sold in the UK by Kraft, has assembled a hunky cadre of actors who read delicious bits of novels on camera under the promise “For a more seductive coffee break.”

The readings are quite well done and they leave you thirsty for more.  I’ve now watched actor Joseph Fiennes read a few pages from Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, and Greg Wise liven up Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray.   Other readers include Dominic West and Dan Stevens. All told, there are 37 of these luscious treats waiting for you on the website.  Clearly Kraft has gone to a lot of trouble to make this online effort pleasing, offering free samples of their coffee and a sweepstakes for the “spa” inclined.  And partner Penguin Books is just a link away, ready to sell you the complete novels sampled on the site.

As an example of Marketing as Service, this one is reasonably fresh.  The sales pitch is gentle, as long as it doesn’t bother you that the reader is holding a cup of coffee much of the time or is sitting so close to a mug that he risks scalding himself on the steam.  In truth, the product information is so scant, that about all I could learn about Carte Noire is that it’s made from a “100% Arabica bean blend.”  And don’t ask me what “Arabica” is because I’m too busy watching my next chapter.

After a bit of sleuthing, I did find at two offline extensions of this idea.  At some point last year, Carte Noire hosted a major sampling event at which fresh coffee was served, stories were read, and everyone left with a bookmark that had a sample of the freeze-dried product attached.  It looked like a rich experience from the video, but I can’t tell if this was a “one-off” or an ongoing program.  There was also a blog post about  some Carte Noire sponsored readings at The Cheltenham Literature Festival.

What I didn’t find was much in the way of social media or grass roots activities. Perhaps they are going on in England as I write, but I couldn’t find a word about them online.  So let me take a coffee break of my own and imagine how they could brew up a truly special 360° campaign at just about any budget level.  Hopefully, if I’ve got the wrong flavor here, the kind folks at Kraft UK will set me straight.

Again in full ignorance I ask, why isn’t Carte Noire sponsoring “seductive book clubs” all over England?  Take a look at what e.l.f. did with their “make-up parties” and you’ll see an easy formula for grass roots efforts that could certainly connect the brand with their target.  Provide a pot full of product, gift certificates from Penguin and reader notes prepared by a worthy scholar and you’ve got the recipe for trial-generating, loyalty-building revelry. Then imagine if Joseph Fiennes showed up unannounced at one of these parties to read for a bit.  Surely that would be a piping hot story for the local press.

Carte Noire also seems to be going light on the social media front.  Sure they have links to FB, Twitter, digg and delicious at the bottom of each page but why not share more of this beautifully produced readings on YouTube and Facebook?  Your fans are far more likely to spend time with you on social media that on your website.  I did find that some of the actors are sharing their Carte Noire readings via podcasts, which is a nice touch, but again, I really had to dig to find these.  How about becoming a major advocate of “seductive book clubs” on Twitter, following your target and sharing your unique POV on having a “seductive coffee break?”

Of course, I may be all wet here.  Carte Noire is marketed across the pond and for all I know, this campaign is more than a coffee break, and instead is a full course meal of integrated marketing applying the latest techniques in guerrilla and social media.   If so, roast away Kraft UK.  I promise not to be bitter.

Add a comment

del.icio.us | digg

Business Insider ran a feature today on guerrilla marketing which included a couple of quotes from yours truly.  Here are my notes from my interview with reporter Bianca Male.

What is the best way to define guerrilla marketing? And what is it most definitely not?

Guerrilla marketing is a state of mind not a particular channel. Guerrilla marketing is about making more out of less, combining innovation and elbow grease to cut through. Guerrilla marketing can also be defined by what it isn’t. It isn’t traditional media like TV and print. Today’s guerrilla marketers capitalize on social media with a vengeance; listening, researching, conversing, engaging, supporting and ultimately selling. That said, just using social media channels like Facebook doesn’t make you a guerrilla. Using Facebook in a fresh way like Burger King did with Whopper Sacrafice is guerrilla. It simply isn’t guerrilla if it isn’t newsworthy.

How can a business decide if a guerilla marketing campaign is right for them?

There are a few highly regulated industries like financial services and insurance that make considering guerrilla approaches a risky proposition. That said, just about every other marketer big or small can benefit from guerrilla, its just a question of risk tolerance. Guerrilla marketing typically carries some risk since it requires a brand to step outside its comfort zone and do something they’ve never done before. Guerrilla marketing done right is newsworthy. As I said earlier, It isn’t guerrilla marketing if it isn’t newsworthy. One of the risks of guerrilla marketing is that it simply won’t cut through as planned simply because it wasn’t original or it was just a dumb idea. Another risk is that the guerrilla idea was a mere moment in time and didn’t include sustaining elements. One of my favorites: Renegade launched the HSBC BankCab in 2003 with a search for the “most knowledgeable cabbie in New York” which got tons of PR and concluded with a one-year contract for Johnnie Morello. Seven years later Johnnie is still on the road providing free rides to delighted HSBC customers in a vintage 1982 Checker Cab.

How does a business develop a guerrilla campaign? Any guidelines?

The article I just wrote for my blog on Fast Company provides several relevant guidelines. Generally, its best to start by setting clear objectives followed quickly by doing your homework, really thinking through your category, brand and consumer. Ideally, this process will yield a true insight that can be transformed into a big idea. Then its time to think 360°, imagining all the ways your idea can come to life, online, offline and in-between. It often helps at this point to imagine the story headline you’d like to see, the tweets you’d like to read, the photos you’d like to be taken and YouTube videos that you’d want to view. Talk to some PR professionals you trust to make sure these story ideas might in fact find purchase in your ideal media outlets. Google your idea to make sure it hasn’t been done the same way you’re planning to do it. Guerrilla programs usually start when a client says to us, “we don’t have any money but we’d really like to get some media attention.”

One of my favorites: A few years ago, Panasonic was introducing a new line of alkaline batteries called Oxyride that were far more powerful than Energizer. Since they didn’t have the budget to compete directly, Renegade came up with a truly guerrilla program called “Neuter your Bunny.” This tongue-in-cheek “public service” effort focused on heightening awareness of the benefits of bunny neutering. Turns out it calms the male bunnies down and prevents female bunnies from getting cervical cancer, a disease that otherwise strikes them with remarkably frequency. So Panasonic Oxyride batteries established Neuter Your Bunny day, donating 5 free neuterings and $10,000 to the House Rabbit Society. And despite the fact that PETA gave Panasonic an award for caring, the American press thought this was veiled yet hilarious competitive campaign writing headlines like “Panasonic Wants to Neuter Energizer” in over 30 publications from Time Magazine to Newsday.

Is there anything a business should NEVER do when it comes to guerrilla marketing?

It is generally not a good idea to do something that will cause someone on the team to go to jail. If you have to break the law to get attention then you probably need a different business model. Try not to annoy your target. A street team performer once shoved a donut in my face in order to get me to stop and go into a bank branch—this was not a fun experience for me or productive for the bank who would never ever get my business after that. Try not to think of guerrilla as a moment in time or as a simple street stunt. This will limit your horizons and the potential impact. And never tell the boss that your guerrilla program is going to be a hit before it becomes one. Its always better to under-promise and over-deliver especially with often unpredictable guerrilla endeavors.

Add a comment

del.icio.us | digg

When Ted Rubin grabbed the reins as CMO of e.l.f. cosmetics in 2008, he knew he was going to have to be inventive.  “There’s not a lot of margin in a $1.00 cosmetic,” he noted in my interview with him last week.  “I simply didn’t have a budget for paid media,” he added.  Yet despite this limitation, in just under two years Ted was able to help the company significantly increase its sales in one of the worst recessions in history, providing a textbook case for any aspiring guerrilla marketer.

1. Listen Up

Anyone who’s ever met Ted knows he’s a great talker who prides himself in responding to any query from any person as fast as humanly possible. BUT what they might not know is that he’s also a great listener, and he made listening his first priority when he arrived at e.l.f.  What he learned in his first 90 days provided the foundation for his subsequent success.  Scouring the web, Ted found hundreds of fans across multiple channels, many of whom provided invaluable feedback — feedback that he continued to seek as ideas began to percolate.

2. Sniff Out an Insight

Up until recently, e.l.f. cosmetics were sold mainly online, direct to consumers at an unbelievably low price point. Therein lay the challenge.  Even bargain hunters asked, “How could a one dollar cosmetic be any good?”  Ted realized that this rampant skepticism could not be overcome by any company messaging, and in fact would require extensive word of mouth in which one consumer reassured another that e.l.f. is indeed a high quality product.  Fortunately, during Ted’s listening period, he had found hundreds of delightfully chatty fans dispersed all over the web.

3. Hug Your Fans

Though e.l.f. had been early to the blogosphere, in late 2008 they had almost no presence on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.  So this is where Ted started, zealously responding to any mention of e.l.f. and engaging customers with instructional content that emphasized conversation over sales pitches.  In the process, Ted discovered hundreds of consumer-generated videos that featured e.l.f. products and consolidated these on a branded YouTube channel and created a hub for them on the distinct AskELF.com url.  During the course of 2009, e.l.f. became a social media powerhouse, accumulating in excess of 50,000 Facebook fans, over 50,000 Twitter followers (including Ted’s presence), and an astonishing 2.3 million+ views of user-generated videos!

4. Hold the Right Hands

Lots of brands pay lip service to the influential blogging/micro-blogging community by parsing out chunks of content they hope will be repurposed.  Ted took a far more personal approach, “nurturing each relationship” to the point that many became his close friends.  They also became a sounding board for ideas, one of which became the “Make Up at Home Parties,” a program that delighted the targeted bloggers so much that after 70 such parties, there is a waiting list of 250, and a galaxy of party-related content including text, pictures, Whrrls, and video that has been shared and shared again by thousands upon thousands of e.l.f. fans.

5. Tap into Metrics

As e.l.f.’s social media efforts were starting to take hold, Ted realized that “just building a large base of fans was insufficient.”  He needed to understand who was really engaged and if/how this was affecting sales.  Fortunately, the news was good.  As the fan base grew, so too did traffic to their online commerce site from social media sites, 75% of whom ended up being new visitors.  These new visitors demonstrated their commitment by buying product and signing up for the e.l.f. newsletter.  In fact, the e.l.f. database nearly doubled to 2.3 million by the end of 2009, a metric that was music to the ears of the company’s owners AND prospective marketing partners.

6. Reach for Partners

One of the ways Ted was able to stretch every precious marketing penny was by partnering with a host of brands with shared interests.  Conde Nast’s Allure Magazine provided content and gifts for the House Parties while the SheSpeaks.com network of product testers and bloggers helped find party hosts that would spread the word.  ExploreModeling.com was the perfect partner for a marketing contest called the “New Face of e.l.f” which sought out 4 models of various ages. Viral by design, contestants garnered over 800,000 votes supported by 40,000 pictures that in turn gained 35,000 comments.  With results like these, it is little wonder marketers like Virgin Mobile and Warner’s Bra along with J.C. Penney reached out to e.l.f. for more cross-promotions, most of which cost e.l.f. next to nothing.

7. Kiss and Tell

In the 4^th quarter of 2009, e.l.f. was suddenly in 1700+ Target stores with a 4 foot end-cap. For a primarily online brand this was a huge retail expansion. “Target was totally enamored with our social media presence,” noted Ted, who suddenly had a “currency” he could exchange not just with other marketers but also retailers eager to share e.l.f.’s social media cache.  Marveling at how quickly the product sold once in Target, Ted noted, “A good part of what we built in social media enabled that to happen.”  With over 400 blog posts about e.l.f. entering Target, 2000 retweets of the new retail presence and customers snapping photos of product flying off the shelf, Target was so thrilled with the results it helped e.l.f. secure a permanent in-line presence in a significantly larger percentage of stores in early 2010 than originally planned.

Final Note: Early in his career, Ted worked for “America’s Greatest Marketer” Seth Godin, who by then had already co-authored The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook. Clearly Ted learned at the feet of a master, one who instilled the guerrilla credo that inventiveness and elbow grease can make up for a small budget every time.  Ted is taking that same spirit of inventiveness to OpenSky, introducing Relationship Commerce, and something he says “will change the face of e-tailing.” Ted is also a proud member of The CMO Club.

Add a comment

del.icio.us | digg

In October 2008, Barbara Goodstein, Chief Marketing Officer of AXA Equitable was only slightly nervous as her company launched an unprecedented customer retention program called MyRetirementShop.com.  Creating a “retirement portal” more focused on “value add” than lead generation, Ms. Goodstein was moving her company into unchartered territory, delivering a “marketing as service” program that became far more successful than even she had anticipated.

Since its inception, MyRetirementShop.com has attracted over ½ million visitors who spend a whopping 11 minutes browsing highly relevant content from top experts like Kiplingers, Service Magic and MyRecipes.com.  Current customers were quick to thank AXA for this resource with not just words of praise but also by buying more AXA products, generating revenue far beyond the program’s cost. The press responded to this innovative marketing approach with over 200 stories that yielded an equivalent of $4.0mm in paid media coverage.

Since the old proverb “success has many fathers but failure is an orphan” also applies to marketing, it is often difficult to get the real story on what it takes for innovations like MyRetirementShop.com to come into being.  In this case, however, after an extensive interview with Ms. Goodstein in which she reviewed the development process, it became very clear that her journey has provided a textbook case on innovation, yielding the following seven critical elements of success.

1. Innovation Starts at the Top

Ms. Goodstein is no stranger to innovation.   Having guided the highly effective 800-Pound Gorilla advertising campaign for AXA into being four years ago, she knows a big idea when she sees one and she knows how to stretch a budget for maximum impact.  But she is also the first to acknowledge that “innovation more than anything starts at the top” and that if her CEO, Kip Condron, didn’t encourage and support innovation, her efforts would never see the light of day.  With senior management saying, “We should try multiple creative options and see what’s going to work,” and encouraging innovation with financial incentives, the virulent skepticism that typically inhibits new idea development is diffused if not silenced.

2. Listen to Your Customers

The impetus for MyRetirementShop.com sprung from an annual study AXA conducts among its customers. According to Ms. Goodstein, “We built MyRetirementShop.com on years of data that revealed the topics that were most relevant to pre-retirees, so we just had to take all of this content and make it accessible.”  Pre-retirees noted their interest in everything from home and family to health and fitness, from travel to finance, from self-improvement to entertainment.  So it came as no surprise to Ms. Goodstein that these topics gained traction with their target.  The only surprise was divergence between the expressed interest in volunteering and concierge services in the research versus the actual behavior on the site.  Ms. Goodstein speculates that disinterest in these areas may be more a reflection of current economic realities than the ultimate value of the content.

3. Make Sure It’s Truly Innovative

Before developing MyRetirementShop.com, Ms. Goodstein and her team did an extensive review of retirement portals and competitor’s websites.  When it was clear there was nothing like it out there, the AXA team then “did our own screening to find the best possible content providers.” According to Ms. Goodstein, “It took over a year to line up all the partners, and an internal SWAT team dedicated to every area of the site” to pull it all together. To insure relevance, they insisted that all the content had national reach and users could even “drill down by zipcode.”  And though much of MyRetirementShop.com content exists on other sites, AXA is the first to aggregate it all in one place, and is the only retirement portal without highly intrusive advertising.

4. Service First, Then Branding

The intention of MyRetirementShop.com from the beginning was to be a service – not an advertisement, a service that would help retain existing customers, and one that would reflect the deep expertise of AXA Equitable and its sincere commitment to help consumers with retirement planning.  “We wanted the site to be value add” noted Ms. Goodstein, “and we didn’t want it to be a commercial for us.” This commitment to service had a strong influence on the design of the site, which has almost no AXA ID other than their 800-pound gorilla who serves as “branding anchor and host.” The now familiar gorilla sits on top of each section and offers a “pithy audio message” that Ms. Goodstein anticipated “would create more of a connection” with site visitors.

5. Service First, Then Sales

Once the site was launched, AXA representatives were provided with a number of tools to share it with existing customers.  Direct mail, email and brochures described the content and invited customers to visit the site.  Then the unexpected happened, this so-called retention program started generating sales. “For $40 worth of DM, our reps generated an incremental $60,000 in sales,” added Ms. Goodstein with glee.  Suddenly the sales team that usually put the kibosh on programs considered “non-revenue generating,” embraced the site, acknowledging its power to increase sales among existing customers and even to attract new ones.  By providing a genuine service to its customers and prospects, AXA found a friendly way to break the ice and renew the conversation about retirement with a now receptive target.

6. Innovation Requires Perseverance

MyRetirementShop.com took over two years from conception to launch, with multiple hiccups along the way.  Getting the technology right was challenging and the site, which was developed by internal IT resources, went through several iterations.  “It took us a while to get it right,” acknowledged Ms. Goodstein and of course, she did not have “universal support initially.”  Importantly, AXA Global and top management voiced their confidence in the project, which Ms. Goodstein gained by outlining a clear vision, defining the content with crisp wireframes and by providing prototypes that fueled expectations.  By demonstrating what it would look like and never wavering from the quest, Ms. Goodstein and her team were able to build consensus from top to bottom, setting the stage for its ultimate success.

7. Don’t Rest on Your Laurels

Despite exceeding expectations on every metric, Ms Goodstein and her team continue to seek ways to improve MyRetirementShop.com.  New original content is in the works that will simultaneous enhance the visitor experience and increase the natural page rankings on the search engines. New content partners that could increase consumer appeal are being evaluated.   “We are also going to change the enroll button so interested visitors can reach us more easily” added Ms. Goodstein who marveled at the unexpected benefits of a true “value add” program, “Because we are willing to work so hard, people want to connect with us.”

Bottom line: Marketing innovation is neither easy nor linear, requiring support from the top, a clear vision from the start, steadfast determination along the way and ultimately a desire to do right by the consumer, a consumer that will thank you many times over with not just words of praise but also their pocketbooks.

Add a comment

del.icio.us | digg

What I love about the concept of Marketing as Service is that when done correctly it is a win win all the way around.  The consumer wins because they get something of real value and the marketer wins because they get something of real value too, not the least of which is a meaningful consumer interaction.  Done correctly, marketing as service can increase loyalty, attract new customers, generate favorable PR and even increase your fanbase on Facebook.

Which brings me to Pepsi’s Refresh Project.  If you haven’t seen it yet, stop reading this and click here.  In their words, “Pepsi is giving away millions of dollars  to fund great ideas.” Here’s a quick recap from MediaPost:

PepsiCo introduced the Pepsi Refresh Project to a large audience during the Super Bowl. The yearlong project, whose mission is to fund entrepreneurial projects with “a positive impact,” encourages fans to submit ideas — as well as vote online to decide who will be monthly winners of multiple grants ranging from $5K to $250K apiece.

At first you might ask what does saving the world have to do with Pepsi but the simple answer is in the program tagline, “every Pepsi refreshes the world.”  The reality is that Pepsi is finding a deeper way to connect with its youthful target, a target that is indeed keen on saving the world or at least making sure that young artists find an audience or that an eco-friendly play gets produced in NYC. If the target believes Pepsi actually cares, Pepsi moves from soda to soul mate.  The project has been gaining momentum over the last several months according to MediaPost:

Using no broadcast media to publicize the contest in December, Pepsi closed the submission period for ideas in 72 hours. Then the company added a little media to the mix in February and closed submissions within 24 hours. By March, as the project became more well-known, Pepsi closed submissions in less than 12 hours. There have been millions of votes, more than a billion media impressions and hundreds of thousands of new Facebook Fans.

This program is worth studying in further detail for its state-of-the-are use of social media, crowd sourcing and good old CSR (corporate social responsibility.)  But alas, I can’t do that for you right this second as I need to take a Pepsi break.

Add a comment

del.icio.us | digg