Chapter 5 - CIO to Marketing Person

This will be my final posting on this journey topic, not because it's done but because I am now getting into the tree's of this, what I learn will refine and change, part of that I want to keep private, other parts aren't germain to this story.

As a wrap up here are some of the other things I learned along the way so far.

- CRM is important to support this type of initiative. We choose a Canadian provider Luxor CRM instead of the market leader Salesforce.com or the others we short listed. You will have your important factors to judge which is best for you, Luxor was our winner.

- Social Marketing is not about selling, it's about being part of the conversation.

- Social Marketing is not about Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, My Space, etc. although those tools may be used as part of your social marketing efforts. For the record Yes people do business on facebook.

- Finding a strong network to help you shape your idea's and perhaps filter what you want to do versus what you should do is necessary.  I found The Community Roundtable as an unbelievable source not only for social marketing and community management but also a great depth of experience regarding other marketing efforts also.

- Don't under estimate the effort required to formalize a sales/marketing process. Going from an ad hoc approach to a focused and strategic approach is taken a  lot of effort, getting it right is the difference between being dismissed by a future customer, or engaging in a conversation that enters the sales cycle.

- One of the ways we have learned to be better at our approach is engage an expert and friend of the organization. We found that with Engaged Innovations.  If you want to make sales/marketing strategic these folks do it right..

- While there are many folks that I like and trust and wish to engage in helping me learn, one thing is clear. Some providers believe that what they know is "national security" and they believe that by doing it for you is the value they deliver.  It is clear to me that by sharing and allowing me to decide what part of the process I wish to own, I can decide when I am able to spend money, who I will spend it with.  This does NOT mean I want to learn for free but I use our own principles in approaching a customer to win their trust before the meter starts ticking.

I hope those of you reading this series have enjoyed it, I have had little feedback so unless I get anything further, I will continue to post occassionaly updates but not a large focus on the journey story.

Thanks for listening . . . .

Chapter 4 - CIO to Marketing Person

Chapter 4 is all about my first lesson on social marketing.

When I began this journey I thought there were 2 types of marketing; email and social

Reality there are numerous, commonly divided into;

• Email Marketing (Push)
• Adword Marketing (Pull)
• Social Marketing (Pull)

We are all familiar with email, or the spam it creates in some cases. There are many sub lessons to be learned but here are a few;

1. Don't send mail as XYZ User name, Send it as organization name where your business has name clout in your industry
2. Business messages are primarily text based (not images) so focus on a good, SHORT, message with links or attchments to other materials.  Links are better because you can track who went to it.
3. There are many types of campaigns you can run, the more high value the contact information you have, the more you should use a permission based approach to sending emails.

The next category is truly a science unto itself,  Ad-word advertising. I don't claim t know enough except to be dangerous in this space. Here are some things you should think about when considering a campaign like this.

1. Does your audience search for what you are offering on teh web. General assumption is everyone "Googles" or whatever you favorite search engine is for everything these days, reality is Adword engines can tell you what is being searched in order to achieve better results.
2. You can control your time of day and geography of when your ads appear. It could be all of Great Britain, but more so if within 150KMS of London as an example.
3. You can control how mush you spend, but be prepared to put serious money to this if you get good at it.

 Final category is social marketing, not really marketing as you would suspect because nobody wants to be sold to, and on a social community where you interact with members they can revolt against you very quickly if you too aggressively sell to them, so here are few tips.

1. Remember that it is you they want to buy from not your company so create a level of interaction where you are focused over the organization, ie: you act on teh organizations behalf but they interact with you
2. Cappy Popp shared a real killer line re use of branding, unless you are a lifestyle product, a passion, or a cause don't use your brand as the community, focus on your industry as the community. eg: lifestyle product is Harley Davidson so they can create a community around their name.  My company isn't a world wide known brand so I should focus on my industry, International Trade.
3. Start small and manageable. If you try and start initiatives across too many social technologies you divide your audience and risk losing focus too easily.

My final lesson I believe is this, today we talk in terms of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter as top of mind social technologies, this market moves fast and  what these are today could become the myspace of yesterday, so don't focus on the technology as much as the strategy.

Thanks for listening...

Chapter 3 - CIO to Marketing Person

It has been a while since I posted my last installment in this story, sorry to all that may be following it.

In the first installment in this series I introduced the concept and how I was brought into this evolving role as Marketing Guy. Just for clarity I have not abandoned my role as CIO type, I have added the marketing to it.

The second posting I shared with you the 3 major challenges as CIO I felt I had to overcome.

• Learn to be open to social networks versus my typical IT thought process that all social is bad, block it.



• Marketing is not always an obvious skill, it goes way beyond know your customer and create the next selling pitch.



• IT and Marketing have nothing in common

This edition I will share with you my first lessons. Like real estate which is all about location, location, location. Marketing shares a similar type of mantra; know your client.......

So who is our client, did we have a definition, do we define our ideal client by any sort of measurable metrics?

Long and Short of this story was there is a general definition, nothing in writing, and it was at best a gut feel more than any scientific model on which to judge or base and measurement upon. It must work, the company is 108 years old after all!

The issue here isn't a definition of who our client is, but rather the development of understanding WHO in the organizations we want to market to as our ideal audience, i.e.: the message we wish to share is targeted to whom in the future client's organization? I can't tell you what the answer was but a lot of sole searching and asking the question, if my firm was to buy this service, who would the message be targeted at. In our case the answer changed from who we thought it was to who it should be, a new audience that we typically never speak to.

So now we had a goal, to develop a way to talk to an audience about a service we wanted to sell them, do it in a way that attracted them to take action, even if that action resulted in them asking the first person (our perceived normal contact) to follow it up. At least the decision to follow it up came from a C suite role, we had their attention and it was perceived as possibly important, a good first start. But if that strategy works then the follow up was easy, getting our foot in the door was the hard part.

One way to answer this question that I used throughout this process was to put myself in the buyers seat and think about how I did do business. So how do I handle the questions that we may be asking of our future client's, and when I had that answered I also had my new audience. It worked in most cases when thinking about the way my wife and handle decision making as well, who makes what part of the decision process when we go to evaluate or buy something of value.

This was a hard process to go through because I was learning the marketing language as well as living the marketing development role, in the end we are satisfied that who we want to sell to is the right audience for this new service we are launching. By the way, the audience changes depending upon what service/product we are selling. A technically oriented product/service is more suited for the operational oriented folks than the compliance/risk management product/service which is more suited to corporate risk managers who tend to be finance related.

So now I knew who we wanted to sell to, the next part of the puzzle is how, that's another story...

Thanks for listening...

A quick observation in education

My daughter in grade 7 came home this past Canadian long weekend with a map project to complete. She did have a text book from school but it was dated 1992.  Now I don't know about you but the world boundaries have changed since 1992, especially in eastern Europe which was part of her homework.

Without asking me for help about the mapping and country names, she asked me to help install Google earth, which provided her with a perfectly useful and updated map for her to use.

I would never have thought of that use for Google earth, but she did...  These Gen Y and younger folks do think differently than we do, we can learn from them if we just watch and learn.

Thanks for listening....

Today makes me think of . . . .

My Wife's Grandmother who was a spirited lady who shared this little ditty at 85 years old. At 85 she used to go to the local seniors club to help the "old folks" with cards and games. She lived to a ripe old age of 98 and almost made 99.

Her ditty that she shared re when to plan a family that I am reminded of this morning;

" When the waether is hot and sticky, now is not the time for dunking dicky;
When the frost is on the pumpkin, now is the time for dicky dunking"

Thanks for listening . . .

United Breaks Guitars - Understanding Social Customer Service

I have been on this quest to understand Social Marketing and Business and how the two meet.

I had a slight epiphany tonight while re watching the Dave Carroll video, "United Breaks Guitars".

While we know that Dave was approached after the fact by United to try and make amends, what caught me of guard tonight is the video I found by Bob Taylor of Talyor Guitars. See it here

While the original video has over 5.6 million views the Taylor corporate video has an impressive 180,000+ views. That's a lot of customer contact is what I thought.

Bob does a great job of covering empathy for Dave Carroll, making references to material on their web site, and extending empathy to other guitar players who have suffered similar fate. He makes reference to material they have on their site from TSA about carrying guiatrs on planes and suggests to avoid problems travellers should print and carry these rules to educate airline employee's. He closes with a subtitle but strong message about a new service that Taylor Guitars now offers to repair not only their guitars, but other manufactures guitars.

It hit me, Wow what a great way to play off the idea that your product is in the news and when it gets viral like Dave Carroll's video that you leverage that to reach out to new and potential clients the way Taylor Guitars has.

I think it is a brilliant use of Video for a corporation and demonstrates how to reach out in a social media way.

Thanks for listening...

Chapter 2 - CIO to Marketing Person

In the first installment in this series I introduced the concept and how I was brought into this evolving role as Marketing Guy. Just for clarity I have not abandoned my role as CIO type, I have added the marketing to it.

I started with 3 major challenges;

• Learn to be open to social networks versus my typical IT thought process that all social is bad, block it.
• Marketing is not always an obvious skill, it goes way beyond know your customer and create the next selling pitch.
• IT and Marketing have nothing in common

The first item was easy for me to overcome as my history in IT has shown that I am typically an open guy to start with and I see more value in looking at technology that isn't obvious in solving business problems. e.g.: Linux in the enterprise over 10 yrs ago, Virtualization in 2003

The second item took me a few months to let my guard down as my instinct was to block and avoid. I started into facebook just to monitor my Son and from there I haven't looked back. In July I was starting to get it so I posted this piece as a response to "Why Twitter users Give Up". I haven't looked back since

The last item was only overcome in the last 2-3 months. It now is very easy for me to see why CIO types should be involved in business development/marketing, although not necessarily leading the charge. They should be at the table contributing to the organizational ability and understanding, I see that as the role I play.

Thanks for listening...

From CIO to Marketing Person!

This is the first in a series of posts I will share my journey from CIO type to partner in marketing strategy development, a whole new space for me.

So why bring in the IT guy? Reason is simple, new marketing efforts in 21st century go beyond putting feet on the street and knocking on doors, it involves a combination of traditional marketing efforts and technology leverage (innovation just seems too strong of a term).

My journey began back around beginning of summer, it was at that time I was asked if I would be willing to help "LEARN" about this form of marketing.

From an IT perspective the "PUSH" marketing method is just SPAM! or at least i thought it was.

The social aspect of Marketing or "PULL" was just flavour of the day, or so I thought.

This begins my journey, so what do you do when you start something new, learn so you can understand (they are not the same)

Remember this is a piece about marketing, so it is more important in how I say something, not what I say :-)

Why Most Twitter Users Give Up

This post began in a group I am part of on LinkedIn, MB CIO. The person posting fully agreed with this article and below is my response to them.

I am still twittering and with great success. What defines my success, who I follow and who follows me. I typically follow a select handful of reporters who I have worked with and I like their approach to a tech/mgmt story. I also follow analysts, those 3rd party non practicing IT folks who charge a great deal to hear their word, it is free on twitter. Finally the last group I follow are other CIO, IT Leaders to hear what they are saying and sharing.

Twitter is about "what are you doing" type of messages, some of what I post at times, it is also about referencing back to other sources of information. That information can be the draw to get Twitter users to go to a web site, important if part of your business strategy is using the web as a viable vehicle to interact with your clients or potential clients.

To date I have 110 followers, not all are real people as far as I know, as the use of add me type bots do exist, but at least 2/3 of them are real people who choose to follow my comments and references. Some of my most recent followers are other CIO's, a group I look forward to further exchange in my extended network.

For me Twitter is still a work in progress, which is why I have a few social media guru's I follow, so I get the best mind think in advance before the main stream catches up. I can already see how our business team can use it to create opportunity to sell services by providing knowledge to it's followers, by creating opportunity/alternate service channels.

In the end our clients will define our corporate success which I firmly believe will be using some forms of social media, will that be twitter specifically? Don't know but I don't want to wait until it's too late to catch this wave as it will be our clients I am not listening to, and that we can't afford.

Thanks for listening . . .

Negotiation Tips and Techniques

I do not take any credit for the first portion of this list, it came from notes I made while on a FREE Gartner webinar today. The closing points are my own and I thought unique enough from the previous points to share.

This list is compromised from Tweets I sent on Twitter, so they are reduced to the 140 character limit of Twitter, you would need to attend the Gartner event to get all their insight behind these bullets.

From Garner Conference Call titled; Hardball Negotiating Tactics

Negotiating tactic #1 - Don't play hard to get - be hard to get a hold off (ensure entire team is on side and not having side conversations)

Negotiating tactic #2 - Commoditize Pricing to demonstrate market awareness (vendors & pricing)

Negotiating tactic #3 - Cancel Contracts for non critical elements, hard dollar impact lets them know you are serious

Negotiating tactic #4 - Reset the rules for RFP's, go back and re focus based on business needs & keep asking until you get the right answer

Negotiating tactic #5 - Give nothing away for free, does your vendor know more about your business than you do, close the door on their information network

Now for 5 extreme tactics for negotiating (credit to Gartner for these also)

1) Keep looping on strategic decisions until vendors comply

2) Good cop. Bad Cop with other parts of business, let IT be the good guy in negotiating

3) Use indirect competition, services based offerings a good tactic these days

4) If vendor performing negatively today, score their performance and use it to bring them in line

5) Delay purchase until vendor is compliant

Here are a few of my own negotiating tactics;

1) Negotiate on the basis you are establishing a 10-15 yr relationship with them, focus long term vs short term

2) Negotiate on the basis of honesty, be fair and honest and recognize we need a deal and they need to make money

3) Negotiate for the business and not for yourself, avoid temptation of add-on's, cash incentives, and other freebies, you win - biz loose

4) Know when to walk away and not waste everyone's time, perhaps your too early on the curve for the offering

5) Finally know you target goal and be happy when you meet or exceed it, don't keep pushing as you may risk some part of the relationship

Thanks for listening