Chief Marketing Officer Points of Focus for 2012

Consider this check list:
1) Enhance your value proposition.
2) Listen to customers in new and creative ways.
3) Aggressively identify and pursue new opportunities for growth.
4) Create stronger relationships with key customers, suppliers and channel partnerships.
5) Capitalize on emerging markets.
6) Segment your customer base to focus more efforts on the most profitable target market. Don’t try to be everything to everyone.
7) Create quality content online – don’t sell, inform.
8) Increase your online marketing budget, especially social media.
9) Tap into mobile marketing as it grows.
10) Create targeted, local marketing campaigns.
11) Create greater perceived value by co-marketing with businesses that complement your services.

Curation

Should trade show budgets have a strong social media component?

The Social Media Marketing Campaign News
By Howard Oliver, CEO, What If What Next, whatifwhatnext@on.aibn.com

I started this discussion in the Enterprise Software Community group on LinkedIn:

Should trade show budgets have a strong social media component?

If you are attending a big fall technology show are you allocating funds to reach out via social media to prospects and customers? Are you going to use internal resources or outsource the task to your social media agency?

Here is an excellent reply that was added:
Social media is a great marketing tool and should be worked into your overall marketing strategy. Tradeshows are part of your marketing campaign, and should be integrated with your social media campaigns as well. Its all interconnected. You use your email campaign to reach out to customers about your tradeshow. You use direct mail to notifiy your prospects and customers about your tradeshow (on the direct mail, you will refer them to your twitter and FB as well). You reach out to your twitter and facebook followers/fans to tell them about your tradeshow. Post something about it to your Linkedin contacts, and in your Linkedin groups. You should use all of the media you have at your disposal…social media being an important link in that chain.

Thanks Marilou and Mel Cades!

We can continue the discussion here. Any suggestions?

Business Books on Social Media, Enterprise 2.0, and Strategic Marketing to Read in July

I’m reading these three books in July to prepare for an upcoming presentation entitled LEVERAGING WEB 2.0 IN YOUR BRANDING STRATEGY sponsored by Federated Press:
- Andrew McAfee, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges (Harvard Business Press, 2009)
- W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Place and Make Competition Irrelevant (Harvard Business Press: 2005)
- Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are you Indespensable? (The Penguin Group, 2010)

Here is the published outline of the talk:

LEVERAGING WEB 2.0 IN YOUR BRANDING STRATEGY
This session will examine what is being done by leading companies to capitalize on the power and capabilities of Web 2.0 and social media to enliven your corporate brand.
· Creating a dynamic and interactive web experience for customers
· Building online branding campaigns
· Using emerging PR tools
· Building a global community of brand enthusiasts
· Social networking and community building tools and technologies
· Techniques for enhancing brand relationships and corporate reputation
· Using interactive technology to provide a customizable experience
· Tactics for measuring the effectiveness of e-branding activities

There is much to discuss about the intersection of Social Media, Enterprise 2.0, and Strategic Marketing. When you see I am on Skype, ping me at howard.o and I’d love to exchange ideas with you.

Top Social Media for Technology Companies

Scanning what is being said recently about the use of social media campaigns by technology companies both large and small, we would propose the following list by order of importance:
- Industry Forums
- Company Blog
- Wikis
- Open Social Networks eg LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, SlideShare
- Podcasts (Downloadable Media, Audio & Video)
- Ratings & Reviews (Digg, Delicious etc)
- Private Online Community Sites
- Virtual Trade Shows, Interactive or 3D Demonstrations

Things to think about:
- Use social monitoring tools to track your brand (http://www.viralheat.com/?r=4727)
- Use a variety of social media in a deliberate focused campaign lasting 3 months
- Forums are important to pay attention to
- Reduce your trade show budget in favor of social media campaigns
- Technical buyers prefer collaborating on wikis and forums.
- Get your company’s key thinkers involved with wikis and blogs. Be warned – it takes effort to rope in contributors.
- Integrate your online ads with social media outreach to reach potential buyers and drive them to your landing pages.
- Identifying key buyer segments (or personas) and determine how these customers accomplish their purchase decision-making. Use the appropriate social media channels where your different vertical markets and persona’s prefer to hang out in.
- Content Engineering – great content generation tied to organic natural search optimization will build your sales funnel.

Viralheat

Viralheat is a social media metrics platform that delivers real-time data on over several different video, microblogging platforms and millions of websites. Their goal is to make data simple and understandable to empower consumers and professionals to navigate the complex world of social media.

What If What Next has a strong alliance with Viralheat. We are actively use Viralheat to add significant value to the Social Media Campaigns we conduct with our clients.

To find our more visit: http://www.viralheat.com/?r=4727

New Workshop by Howard Oliver, CEO What If What Next

Inspiring Market Responsiveness Through Social Media
Setting your companies Social Media Goals, Strategies and Campaigns

This NEW workshop discusses what major companies are doing with interactive social media to clearly hear the voice of the customer and to use social networking to get the most from customer interaction, engagement and consultation.
• Comparing social media strategic options for customer engagement
• Encouraging customer responsiveness: optimizing the interface and support
• Engagement and commitment: making the most of the sense of community
• Tips for avoiding confusion over communication content and interpretation
• Overcoming the challenges in online engagement and consultation
• Addressing concerns about information quantity over quality
• Eliciting greater responsiveness through search engine optimization
• Setting your companies Social Media Goals, Strategies and Campaigns

BIO:
Howard Oliver is the CEO and founder of What If What Next™, a firm that specializes in Web 2.0 PR and prides itself on delivering strong results in brand recognition, social media coverage and lead generation. For more than 25 years, he has been an entrepreneur, writer, thought leader, PR Guru, business development strategist, technology evangelist, manager and consultant for numerous service, industrial and high technology companies.

Social Search Engines

Several social search web services are available:
- SocialMention searching Technorati, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Youare, Rejaw, Friendfeed, Jaiku, Brightkite, Diigo, Clipmarks, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Mixx.
- Whostalkin searching Facebook, Friendster, Last.FM, MySpace, Linkedin, Netblog, Ning, bebo, Xanga, hi5, Delicious, Blinklist, Reddit, Metafilter, MyWeb and more.
- Spy searching Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, BackType
- SamePoint searching FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, Twitter, Blogger, WordPress.com, Diigo, Digg and more.
-VeryRecent searching Twitter, Ask.com Big News, Blog Pulse, Google News, Flickr, Wikio, YouTube, Digg,
Bloglines.
- Yauba This is a generic search engine that allows to specify the media: Real-Time, Blogs, Social Networks.

We have been trying out all of these over the past week. www.whostalkin.com is the clear winner for business users. We have also taken a subscription on Viralheat.

End of the Month Sales Crunch

Question for the universe: How do you use social media to push some last minute sales through to attain your quota. Do social media have a place as a tactical sales tool?

Very Large Complex Project Management

I left a comment on an interesting blog site that dealt with the issue of social project management in large projects (http://www.liquidplanner.c what is this om/blog/2008/06/23/social-project-management-in-large-projects-2).

The author maintains that large projects are not significantly harder to manage than smaller ones, with the tools in place to scale and facilitate. Not true! Very large projects have parameters, mostly around bottlenecks stemming from sorely underestimated scope and scale of coordination, that makes them a different beast entirely.

Traditional project management tools do not deal effectively with these coordination issues issues. Heroic managers brought in to save the day cannot either when they are not addressed.

You might want to look more sophisticated approach to very large project management that I found on a white paper from ePM: http://www.epm.cc/downloads/other/CIFE%20Working%20Paper%20073.pdf.

The company has a product called SimVision® that is very intriguing. SimVision® is ePM’s patented organization modeling and simulation technology. They use it to optimize the fit between an organization and its work, similar to the way engineers use a wind tunnel to optimize aircraft designs:
Measure how well the organization will perform
Uncover and fix design flaws prior to implementation
Explore ways to improve reliability and performance
Maximize the client’s return on capital employed.

The tool is very powerful for midlevel managers in dealing with the extra coordination required for very large, complex projects. It is a highly evolved social management simulation that goes well beyond typical project management tools. It’s just not enough to say let’s use the small is beautiful approach when you’re spending $1 billion.

Scalability and roadblocks are two issues that I’m interested in. The white paper was an interesting read for a day where thunderstorms threaten sailing activities. I know I could incorporate some of the ePM thinking into our WebVoyaging® process