Tennant Consulting

Salesforce.com: Marketing in the Google Era

Yesterday, I listened to a Salesforce.com seminar, "Marketing in the Google Era", presented by Kraig Swensrud of Salesforce.com's marketing team.  They were good enough to make a recorded version of his presentation available for you to view here (email registration required).

Kraig gave an overview of 7 techniques of effective marketing in the Google era.  I agreed with all of what Kraig presented - companies are still coming to grips with how the world of marketing has changed, and I agree all the suggestions provided are good ideas to consider:

• Invest in Web properties
• Invest in search marketing
• Make your message relevant
• Create landing pages for every program
• Measure everything in real time
• Use the Web for PR
• Engage your community.

What I liked about the presentation was Kraig gave a good overview of all these concepts - some of which are pretty complex.  He also did a good job of describing blogging and RSS - and some of the best graphics I've seen illustrating those concepts.  The presentation was also rich in examples and other online services you could use - in a very short period of time.

8 out of 10 times, Kraig's online concepts will come into play in some form, but the relative level of investment people put into these online initiatives versus other investments will vary widely depending on your business.

While there's little room for improvement, I felt like the presentation was a bit marketing-centric, and online-centric.  Kraig was implying companies should invest in search, blogging, online communities.  I agree these activities make sense for Salesforce.com - but they may or may not make sense for other depending on your industry, business, budget and resources, and prospective or existing customer interactions.  It also didn't help the marketer understand how important it is to link these programs to how your customers actually buy, your competition, and if you have a human salesforce, how to support them more effectively.

For example, someone buying, say, rice has a very different set of needs than someone buying a CRM system, or someone hiring a lawyer.  I would recommend starting with the customer - and what they need to be successful throughout their purchase and use of the company's products or services, and what the sales force needs to be successful.  The consumer rice buyer may not be going to look for "rice" online - but they might want healthy recipes, or ideas on how to make rice more interesting. 

A lawyer needs to show they are knowledgable, experienced, and able to add value in excess of their fees - so speaking or writing a book on their area of specialty may be a more appropriate marketing investment. 

A CRM company - especially if they have an online offering - should absolutely do the things Kraig describes.  And Salesforce is probably at the forefront of those - albeit with messaging that's too company-centric for my tastes, and at a very high sales and marketing spend relative to R&D.

All things considered, though, my feedback is minor relative to the presentation's strengths.  I recommend highly that you check it out!

Strategic Marketing Consultant San Francisco Bay Area Seeks More Hours in Day

I guess in 10 years, we'll have replaced our job titles with the search terms we'd most like to be found by.  Given how much driving I've been doing in the car lately, I wish mine was, Strategic Marketing Consultant - Orinda, CA -- or even Strategic Marketing Consultant - East Bay.   There are some great software companies in Orinda - like Intraware, and Maxis, makers of Sim City started in Orinda.  Down the road in Walnut Creek, CA, Dave Duffield founded PeopleSoft in 1987 and in 2005 Dave and Aneel Bhusri founded their newest startup, Workday.

I've not been posting a lot to the blog lately, thanks to some exciting new client projects.  What few writing cycles I've had have gone to my online newsletter, Tennant Consulting Times.

This month's issue of Tennant Consulting Times talks about sales models -- and the many mistakes entrepreneurs make in putting together the go-to-market section of their business plan.  I also took to the road to interview Joe Blank and Paul Gariboldi from Virsalent, a company offering a sales force-for-hire that may be relevant for many high-tech startups as an alternative to bringing on a VP Sales and entire team.  Joe and Paul offer 10 common mistakes entreprenuers make - and I highly recommend you tap into their experience if you're starting your own company, launching a product in an existing company, or are in a sales or marketing role.

To subscribe, just enter your name and email on my home page, www.tennantconsulting.com.  I only use the information for the newsletter, which currently comes once a month.  You'll get  a confirmation email back, click a link and - presto! - you'll  immediately receive this month's issue.

I've used the most conservative email list building approach - double-opt-in - which results in a smaller email list, but a more enthusiastic audience because they're all people who explicity choose to hear from me.  That means better delivery rates long term.  I believe one can be successful marketing to people without SPAMMING them, and I plan to use my newsletter as a one small business data point to prove it. 

In the Tennant Consulting Times newsletter, I'm committed to printing free articles from me and interviews of smart people I know to add value to my clients.  Don't worry, it won't be hogwash about me which you could care less about, or pitching you my services.

BusinessWeek: The Power of Us

Business Week has an interesting technology article on participatory networks - empowered by the Internet.  Just when you thought we'd gotten over that high-tech Internet bubble-bursting, it turns out there are a variety of applications that the Internet has made possible. 

Even our PeopleSoft Alumni/LinkedIn relationship gets a plug in their slideshow.

Socialtext - Pretty Cool!

Ross Mayfield has generously offered the use of a Socialtext Wiki (online workspace) to the PeopleSoft Alumni Network leadership team.  I've just been playing around with it and it's pretty cool.  You can use a Wiki as a team collaboration area - where everyone can edit a collection of private web pages.  We're using it to figure out what do to for the next PeopleSoft Alumni Network event, sometime in the late April/early May timeframe...  If you've got a team that needs to create documents or work on projects together and have been futzing around with file folders and email, it's definitely worth checking out.

The Power of a Compelling Vision

Having spent the weekend learning about elements of power, one of my takeaways was that a compelling vision is one of the most important ways to influence a group of people to move, and take action.  This was definitely my experience at PeopleSoft, and I see it every day in varying degress with my clients.

If you would like to experience this firsthand, imagine you're in the media industry, and watch this from the museum of media history.

It makes me want to spend the time to re-develop the vision for my life, my family, my company...but why stop there - what about my community, my country, the planet...

What's your vision?

Fortune: Why There's No Escaping the Blog

Fortune's January 10 issue has a good introductory article on Blogs, for business executives wondering what the blog hype is all about.  Especially the marketing function cannot ignore blogs!

Think Scoble's going to be fired for his critical comments about Microsoft's new blogging service?  I'm betting against it.

Excuse me now, while I go set up more alerts on my company and my clients' companies!

Blogs: Another Tool in the Arsenal

At this evening's Ebig.org blogging & RSS special interest group, Elisa Camahort talked about the value of the corporate blogger.

Elisa's session went behind the hype of blogging and focused on the idea that Blogs are another tool that marketers in companies can use, in areas companies are already familiar with, like marketing & pr, investor relations, customer outreach, and project management. 

Some of the companies mentioned in the discussion included:

www.workerbees.biz - Elisa's company

iBlog - http://www.lifli.com/Products/iBlog/main.htm  - where she started blogging

www.audioblog.com  - Eric Rice's company, to enable audio blogging

www.blogsnob.com – now go to www.pheedo.com – traffic exchange for bloggers

www.technorati.com  - to search for blogging entries and feeds; Technorati 100 "most popular"

www.feedster.com - blog search

www.pubsub.com - blogging alerts

www.blogdigger.com

www.kinja.com

www.bloglines.com - aggregator

http://channel9.msdn.com/  - Microsoft's developer blogs

http://www.blogmaverick.com/  - Mark Cuban's CEO blog

http://www.stonyfield.com/weblog/ - Stonyfield dairy blogs

http://42stmoon.blogspot.com/  - Alisa's theatre blog

http://ranchero.com/ - Customer outreach, support blog

http://feedstersupport.blogspot.com/ - support blog

http://lockergnome.com  - getting started in blogging resource

I have attached my notes:

Word (URL links work): Download another_tool_in_arsenal.doc

PDF (URL links don't work): Download tool_in_arsenal.pdf

If you can tell me how to create a Adobe Acrobat PDF without having to manually go through the arduous task of draw boxes around links and specifying URLs for every link, I would be grateful!)

Again, thanks to Elisa for a great presentation.

Mitch Kertzman interview on IT Conversations

Alan Kaye's IT Conversations program with the Gilmour Gang interviews guest Mitch Kertzman from VC software sector specialist Hummer Winblad.  Mitch shares his perspective on the trends in  software and venture capital as we wind down 2004 and look to next year.  The Gang looks at the recent flurry of BigCo M&A activity, the commoditization of computing at various levels in the hardware/software stack, tech CEOs as bloggers, collaboration, and the good and lame predictions for 2005.

How is a blog different than a website?

I received a question from Don in my email this morning, apparently from today's article on the Contra Costa Times.  Dan asks, "How is a blog (short for "web log") different than a website?"  Here's my take:

- A blog is a way to publish to the Internet frequently, without technical skills.  If you can send an email, you can blog.  Most websites require technical skills.

- A blog is updated frequently, with chronologically-ordered, dated posts.  A website is frequently static information, and the order and sequence depends on the purpose of the site.

- A blog is written in a personal voice - like if you were having a conversation with me over coffee.  I didn't slave over this text, and sure, it could have been buffed and polished better.  It just came out that way, and it's that way in my blog.  Conversational.  From one person.  To you.  A website's text has the whole teams in the marketing department analyzing every word and link on the home page.  Tweaking and testing here, graphics over there - more expensive, requiring more specialized technical skills.

- A blog allows the audience to interact - so they can post comments to your individual posts, and link from their blog to your posts.  This allows a conversation to occur between the writer and the audience.  If someone in the audience also has a blog, or several do, the conversation can get very interesting.  They can ask questions.  I wouldn't be writing to you now had this not happened...

- As a publisher, your content is distributed much more broadly than on a website.  A blog decouples the "content" from the "presentation".  If I did an HTML page, the content and presentation would be coded all together.  In a blog, the content is separate from the formatting.  Even better, it's encapsulated in its own message envelope that can be read by other sites on the Internet.  This envelope is an extension of XML, an open standard for Internet messages, called RSS.  RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication".  So what?  This means, for example, if I'm a software company doing a press release, I can publish my press release using a tool that supports RSS, and anyone else who is watching for "software industry news" can automatically receive and display my press release on their site.  If you've used newswires, it's like that, but on an open standards platform instead of a proprietary and expensive newswire platform.  So anyone with an Internet connection can receive it - not just newswire subscribers.  So this applies not just to "press releases", but to every update you do, for any kind of content - it is automatically updated everywhere.  On a traditional website, I have to wait for Google to come and crawl my site before anyone will know I've done something new....2-3 weeks could pass by then!  On a blog, it's a few minutes.

- You tend to get better search engine results with a blog.  In fact, some people joke that "Blog" stands for "Better Listings on Google".  Many of the features listed above - content syndication, frequent posts, linking from other sites - play to Google's algorithms to get your better listings.

- You can keep up with hundreds of blogs much more efficiently than hundreds of websites.  Because of the RSS feature, you can monitor many blogs by syndicating them, and automatically receive updates whenever their website changes on your PC.  The updates come to you, you don't have to go look to find out which websites were updated last night.  Muuuuch more efficient.  How do you do that on a website? You have to go each day and check to see what's new.  If you use an RSS aggregator, the updates are sent to you each day, much like an email.

- You become part what's happening right now.  Curious what people are blogging about?  Visit www.technorati.com.  Check out their news, books and Top 100 links.  This is what people are posting about right now.  They do searches across these RSS-enabled sites only.  Your posts, in RSS format, will appear there also.

But in many other respects, a blog is no different than a website.  My mom might not know the difference between my website and my blog.  (Do you, mom?)  You still access it in a browser, it uses regular URLs, there might or might not be advertising, some have good content and some have bad. 

What blogging does do is make publishing on the web something mere mortals can do.  And therefore, they can do it more frequently.  This allows staying in touch and enhancing relationships. 

If you have a family, a blog can improve your relationships by staying connected and letting your family know what's on your mind -- or your camera.  You can also password-protect some blogs, so the pictures of the kids won't fall into enemy hands.  Even soldiers in Iraq are blogging about their first-hand experiences in war, and letting their families know they're OK.  If you run a small business, a blog can help your customers find you online, help you listen to them, and be more responsive than your larger competitors.

Could websites do that?  Sure.  You'd have to pay someone to develop a tool that does all this.  A blog does it out of the gate, is available right now, and all you have to do is sign up.  You can do it or a fraction of the cost - from "free" for some blogs (advertising supported -- which means ads from others will appear next to your content) to $5-15 a month for others (with no advertising showing up on your blog).

Does a blog replace your website?  No.  You still need a way to introduce yourself and your company.  For example, I still want people to know I do consulting to help build software startups - that's what you get when you go to my website.  If you come to my website, you hopefully learn more about my personality, how I think, if I have a clue, and how I might help you.

Do blogs work?  I believe they do, and they're here to stay.  But don't take my word for it, ask Don!

Blogs connecting small firms to their clients

Dan Laidman has a nice article about blogs today in the Contra Costa Times.  Eric Rice, Bill Flitter and others (moi?!) from the EBig Blogging SIG are mentioned.

Dan also mentioned the PeopleSoft Alumni Network, whose website was built on a blog overnight and we continue to update regularly.

Looking for that perfect holiday project for a rainy day?  Might be time to start your blog!