Where are my customers?

For marketeers it is a daily struggle. Where are my customers, what do they like, how can I reach them? Building a single view of the customer requires knowing a fair bit about them.

Ideally you want to know more then the data points your organisation is able to collect like address, order history and phone number (and please let those be accurate). What would really help effective marketing is knowing your customer’s contact preferences, social demographic, financial health, social network, employment, daily commute, etc. etc.

Keeping your data accurate with people moving, dying and changing jobs all the time is difficult enough as it is. Keeping abreast of your customers social data seems virually impossible. Has anyone experimented with collecting social network data to do this?

Where the heck do we leave the Web2.0?!

With my current company we are looking at a redesign of our web-properties and branding. Now that we are past the conception phase of building top-line identity items like logo, colors and tag-line we will start piecing together the website. In our road map we are also looking at a corporate blog, twitter, wiki, etc. But where do they fit? Does a blog belong within a corporate site or is it a separate domain like mycompany.blog.com? Also, what should we expect in the ratio of people subscribing to a blog’s RSS vs visiting the actual blog site?

Any pointers?

Made to Stick

Recommended reading for everyone and required material for everyone in marketing. “Made to Stick” describes in simple words and lots of examples why some ideas stick and others don’t. How to avoid CEO-speak and ‘facts sharing’ in favour of telling stories, that are Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and Stories (S U C C E S).

The book builds on the ideas shared by Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell who describe the art of story telling (all marketers are liars, Seth Godin) and how small ideas can make a big difference (the tipping point, Malcolm Gladwell).

As IT Marketeers we are often unsuccessful in getting beyond the facts and telling a story. We are cursed by knowledge and try to cover all the details rather then to tell a story that engages the audience.

A video interview with the authors is avaiable on YouTube, you’ll find other related video’s there.

When I read this opening paragraph of a product introduction website it is clear we have a lot to learn: “Product XX drives unparalleled Business and IT alignment through a unified, cross-platform software suite that bridges the gaps between people, processes, applications, and information”.

YouTube marketing

“How do I best use channels like YouTube in my marketing mix” – a question a lot of enterprise IT vendors are asking themselves these days. Lets have a quick look around of what other vendors are doing.

Andrew from Quest reports that their 50+ YouTube videos counted over 60.000 view this summer. They have certainly taken an interesting approach to bring a potentially boring topic of “performance and productivity tools” in an interest way: Quest Channel on YouTube. Andrew also reports: “we have learned in doing this process is to keep them simple and educational”.

Salesforce.com also have a YouTube channel and recently added a video about their SaaS platform The AppExchange. This professional production is counting over 12.000 views within the one month it has been uploaded.

Oracle, Microsoft and IBM are absent from YouTube. A search on Oracle interestingly enough results in a number of videos from other vendors like Quest. IBM has some really great video’s online including a video I personally find very funny “Mainframe – The Art of the Sale” but IBM has not created a channel to bring together the content they have online. Microsoft has been an early explorer of online video’s with MSDN Channel9.

At BEA Systems we have build BEASystemsTV with a mix of corporate messages, customer testimonials and viral video’s promoting new product features.

I would be interested to see other ideas that may have work, leave them as a comment.

Building partner communities

Many enterprise IT software vendors have a multi-tier go-to-market model and strongly depend on their alliances and partners for demand generation and solution delivery. Most companies have a strong seperation between marketing to partners to elevate the marketing position within existing partners and marketing through activities to enable partners to create awareness and generate demand.

Another appoach is to build a Community of partners who have a strong professional interest in your solutions to:

• Facilitate company-to-partner and partner-to-partner communications
• Help partners expand their market coverage and discover new routes-to-market
• Connect partners to improve customer alignment in vertical markets
• Facilitate the sharing of best practices, solutions and knowledge among partners
• Incorporate other business and marketing programs of value to your partners

OpenSocial a platform for Social Computing?

The news has leaked that Google will launch today a project for building web applications that can run on social on any social networks (called “hosts”) that choose to participate. It is Googles aim to create a platform for developers for creating applications using normal javascript and html (flash is possible).

Participating parties at the day of launch include Orkut, Hyves, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle. This group represents a large share of the Internet community traffic (over 100 million users).

OpenSocial was developed with the idea that the internet is a Platform and not a collection of individual websites such as Facebook, MySpace or Hyves. It is already possible to build and run third party applications on each of these platforms but developers have complained about the complexity of maintaining their code on each of the communities all with its own markup language and interface. Google simplifies development and want to in the middle of the network.

OpenSocial (link will go live at day of launch) has a good shot at becoming a new platform for Social Computing, others will surely follow. Google has a first mover advantage and the computing capabilities to host and run these social applications (next move?).

For us marketing people this creates opportunities to develop Web2.0 applications and deploy them across a variety of communities. Just dream away what this will allow you to do. How about running a lead qualification application in your CRM application (Salesforce) that allows your customers to refer your services through their professional network (Linkedin) and then promote it to on their website (Hyves).

User generated content

Lots of talk about User Generated Content, how do you get your communities involved and contributing to your campaign? A new example set by Apple inspires about the possibilities. See this article of last week in The New York Times (‘Student’s Ad Gets a Remake, and Makes the Big Time’).

Apples new commercial for the new iPod was created by their agency TBWA/Chiat/Day but based on a video made by Nick Haley, an 18 year old English student who uploaded his commercial to YouTube.

The final TV ad that is scheduled to air this Sunday can be view here. Very smart of Apply to use UGC but mix it with the touch of a professional agency.

Dilbert and iPhone

This is a “must have” for any internet and iPhone lovers …. look at this …. 

Halo3 and Web2.0?

When Halo3 was released on September 27 it immediately made the record for the highest grossing opening day in entertainment history, making $170 million in its first 24 hours, and $300 million in its first week. More than one million people played Halo 3 on Xbox Live in the first twenty hours, the biggest gaming day in Live’s history. (Wikipedia).

So what drives the enormous success of games like Halo and WOW? There are three factors that make these games different from other games and in fact all movies:

1. The user (player) controls the experience
2. Usage drives development
3. Zero footprint

These happen to be the same success factors that drive Web2.0. Successful sites (web applications?) like Flickr, Youtube, WordPress and Digg allow the users to 1) control the experience 2) they become increasingly interesting when more users participate and 3) have a very low barrier to participate.

So the next time you think about ‘Web2.0′ think about how it applies to more then just websites. How does it apply to your products/services?