Listening Platforms

In response to marketers’ changing needs, brand monitoring vendors are evolving to offer a more strategic and comprehensive platform. Forrester refers to this category of vendors as listening platforms. Listening platforms differ from brand monitoring vendors in one fundamental way: They deliver insights to shape marketing strategy rather than simply tracking metrics. Forrester’s evaluation of leading listening platform vendors across 62 criteria revealed an emerging category still maturing in its capabilities and vision. We found that Nielsen BuzzMetrics and TNS Cymfony established early leadership — thanks to their strong balance of data collection, analytics, and consulting services. Dow Jones Insight, J.D. Power & Associates (JDPA), and Visible Technologies are all Strong Performers: Dow Jones Insight for its strong data coverage, JDPA for text mining and market segmentation capabilities, and Visible Technologies for a strong technology backbone. Biz360 is also a Strong Performer with an innovative product offering — Opinions Insight. This study’s sole Contender — Radian6 — lacks the ability to identify sentiment but offers a solution with an easily  customizable user interface tailored for PR teams.

Recommended Read. Click Here to read the report.

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Who Should Own Your Next Technology Project?

Every key decision maker in business, regardless of their role, will face a technology decision at least once in their professional career. The goal is to ensure that the professional is best equipped with the knowledge and insight to make the best decision around IT implementation. A key consideration for any technology solution revolves around four key pillars. It must provide HIGH business VALUE; have LOW COST relative to the expected business value; generate a RAPID ROI to payback the stakeholder’s investment in the project and carry with it a LOW RISK of failure.

What follows are some ways to best overcome challenges in terms of IT and business executives collaborating on technology projects. Understanding how to empower both IT and business decision makers to collaborate is key to maintaining your competitive advantage.

Why Collaborate?
Collaboration is the key to the long-term success and while it might be difficult at first to implement, IT purchasing decisions should not rest only on the recommendations of the IT department, but rather be an engaged, invested and empowering decision process between business solution users and the IT department who supports them.

Using a race car analogy, you would view the IT people as the very necessary pit crew who know everything about how the car is put together and how it should run. The crew chief is responsible for making sure the pit crew works together to keep the engine in top-performing condition but he’s still not the one driving the car. That’s for the driver and in terms of business it’s the business executives leading the race to get their product to market more expediently and smoothly than their competitors.

The driver has to be able to make split-second decisions and help the car respond proactively to any challenges on the track. But the key is that one cannot win without the other. The pit crew needs the driver and the driver needs the pit crew in order to have a successful team and win the race.

IT and Business Execs Who Focus on Collaboration Succeed
As companies face global competitive challenges it’s vital for them to have both the IT (pit crew) and the business executive (driver) collaborating to beat the competitors in the marketplace (track).

The IT and the business-side have to understand that long-term it’s going to ease everyone’s pain points to work closely together. No longer will all the blame lie in the IT department’s lap. On the business-side this type of collaboration empowers the business executive’s usage of all the tools available to him.

In this race for global market share, IT provides the technical expertise to verify the solution will work in the existing environment while the business unit builds ownership for the product in terms of using the application to its desired end.

A collaborative effort boosts the speed and power of a business’ ability to get products to market. Businesses need to get new products out to the market faster and faster to win their competitive race. The more complex your product – such as industrial equipment or commercial insurance – the more difficult this can be. Providing product information to sales teams, dealers and other channels on their desktop can speed this process. But relying solely on IT to convert the product needs for the business units into a software solution can significantly slow their market response in a time when businesses must be very agile.

Oftentimes companies will throw a decision over the wall to IT and say, “Give me the application that’s going to solve my problem.” However, the real challenge lies in ensuring that both IT and the business-side work together to find the best solution.

Source: Luigi FDV

Planting the Seed for Collaboration (Who Does What?)

Companies must start by planting a seed in terms of germinating successful collaboration. First plant the seed and assist both sides to understand the benefits of collaboration, because there are two very different objectives that have to come together for success.

On the business unit side, IT’s job is to implement the product knowledge. This includes all the product data, user experience and user interface which impacts how the company sells in the marketplace. All the solutions and the collaboration have to be market-driven and the product side has to deliver what the market wants.

In the past, while it has served companies to develop their own solutions or configurations, it only serves them well in the short term. In the long run, it costs companies more time and money to keep these internal non-collaborative solutions meeting the needs of either constituent.

Take the case of a leading manufacturer of ventilation equipment, with sales of excess in $475 million annually. For this company, it was especially challenging because the business units were trying not only to build a current product but also to introduce new products concurrently. Getting the product knowledge implemented into their sales tool was time-consuming for this company.

Bottlenecks and IT Resolution
Companies frequently incur a bottleneck in the IT department. IT is often tasked to translate product knowledge gathered from different business units and implement it into the sales tool. This can lead to many product errors which have to be tested, reconfigured and solved. It also can cause significant additional added costs due to confusing work instructions, lost time and rework. One of the most significant exposures of incorrect product information is an unhappy customer and the loss of future business from that customer forever.

The challenge lies in effectively explaining to IT the product knowledge so they can get it implemented correctly. In the ventilation equipment company’s case, the product experts were in the business units – not the IT department – so many wasted hours could have been avoided with proactive collaboration on both sides.

If you have IT responsible for everything, then you’re going to have them on the hot seat all the time, and business units won’t always (if ever) truly get the resolution they need. This type of pressure builds a dysfunctional relationship and costs a fortune to the company in terms of productivity and improved business processes.

Instead, a collaborative engagement between both sides offers immediate benefits: it allows IT to control the framework of an application, and allows business units to control the business application itself. This includes having the capability to control the rules, knowledge, and customization of the solution for their specific needs.

Enabling this control lets businesses take ownership and react with speed when new features or functions are required. This is an improvement over describing what you need to IT and hoping they understand and can create the right fit for business units.

Everyone Has a Stake in the Race
Giving the business-side a stake in the process lets them incorporate necessary knowledge including: product rules, product data, how they sell their product, and how they position themselves in the market and with customers.

The most compelling benefit to dual collaboration is that it enables businesses to go to market faster, and be proactively responsive to customer demands.

When companies choose to collaborate, the results can be seen very quickly not only in terms of the whole teams working for the greater good of the customer, but also in terms of exceeding sales and being able to compete more adeptly in the market.

As in NASCAR, it is so in business, collaboration must come from the top down and everyone needs to have a stake in it being successful.

Once everyone takes ownership for their part and knows their roles, all the units can move forward together instead of in a dysfunctional fashion.

Now that’s the way to speed past the checkered flag and win the race in business.

Images sources:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/soldiersmediacenter/3855375117/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/luigistrano/502363112/

Courtesy - Jerry Miller

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Social Space….The Uncharted territory.

Wikipedia Explains Social Media as a media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media supports the human need for social interaction with technology, transforming broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).

Or let me put it in a simpler ways - Social media is content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies

The definition of Social Media could be as simple or as complex as we want. But its ability to achieve or disseminate a content is un-doubtfully behemothic or in simply HUGE. One of the recent reports by Nielsen Online suggest that Time Spent on Social Networking in U.S. increases by 83 Percent; Facebook Leads, top 10 sites’ list revealed.

It could be corporate’s that wants to leverage this new format or now in the “digital time span” medium age marketing to attract new or retain old customers. Aaron Uhrmacher provides 35+ Examples of Corporate Social Media in Action. Irene Lizarraga provides examples of beauty sites in the social media space, building awareness about Swine Flu or most importantly Kareem’s friend trying to use this medium to free Kareen out through http://www.freekareem.org/.

Social Media can offer help to all, provided you know how to gracefully accept it. But then is this means that it is for all and can be done by all. To that I would say that it is certainly for all but cannot be used by all. Examples of Social Media Disasters are all over the Internet, in every forum, in every group, and probably in every digital space. But then I would say to that what I learnt in my mountaineering days could be implied for social - “You tend to make mistake when you enter an uncharted territory, but then don’t make such where you loose your life”.

Social Media is not a process, it’s a believe of marketer that plan to venture into this uncharted territory that would provide reaping benefits but offers a gigantic valley full of illusions(s) or mirage. Hence don’t learn the traits of social media, learn and believe in social media. It’s a climb of K2, you cannot afford to venture out without preparations. I encounter situations where we may believe its working, but then is it actually doing what it promised or are we looking through our illusionary glasses. The best part of digital media is that - its biggest strength of monitoring the space has become its biggest weakness – we don't know how effectively monitor it, and of course Social media carry the same genetic code.

Hence it’s important to you to analyze that Which Social Media Channels Should You Be Using? And how you can monitor or analyze the same.

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2009 Marketech Tools and Trends in New Media

The MarkeTech Guide to Marketing Technology and Social Media Market­ing is an updated and upgraded version based on the successful e-book originally written for the American Marketing Association in 2008.

Marketing used to be simpler. Fewer technologies, fewer channels, less di­easier. That said, I personally can’t think of a time that marketing has been more fun. Our jobs have been transformed by technology

To say that much has changed in 18 months is a bit of an understatement. For example, Twitter was on the scene but was far from being a marketing opportunity. In fact, as of Q4 2008, HubSpot estimated that 70% of all Twitter users signed up in 2008 , in spite of Twitter’s founding back in March of 2006.

The effectiveness of the tools that we’ve used for decades has been called into question on the past few years. It’s interesting to note that consumer time spent watching vid­eo on the “best screen available” continues to rise quarter-to-quarter while their usage and consumption of CGM (consumer generated me­dia) content represents almost 20% of their time (surely there’s some overlap there!) but grabs a paltry 3% of the average marketing budget .

Marketing technology goes well beyond and before the advent of social media. Surely, some of the tools we discuss in this e-book are social media tools. However, and more importantly, they are the state-of-the art vehicles that today’s marketers need to understand to grow their bottom line and keep pace with the ever-advancing customer base and marketplace.

10 Questions Marketers Want Answered About Digital & Social Media

You’re not alone if you have more questions than answers when it comes to approaching social media marketing and market­ing technology. Michael A. Stelzner, author of the, “Social Me­dia Marketing Industry Report” , conducted a survey of 900 people regarding social media marketing. They received 700 open-ended responses and summarized the major questions marketing professionals wanted answered. I’ve included these questions because they so closely reflect the same questions that I’ve been receiving month after month while conducting the AMA’s two-day “TechnoMarketing” training course on marketing technology & social media. They include:

1. What are the best practices and tactics to use?

2. How do I measure the effectiveness of social media?

3. Where do I start?

4. How do I manage the social balance?

5. What are the best sites and tools out there?

6. How do I make the most of my available time?

7. How do I find and focus my efforts on my target audience?

8. How do I convert my social media marketing efforts into tangible results?

9. How do I cohesively tie different social media efforts together?

10. Does social media marketing work, and if so, how effective is it?

One in three marketers surveyed indicated that identifying best practices, measuring results and knowing where to begin were their top questions with social media. The MarkeTech guide aims to address many of these top-of-mind questions in the following pages.

For Detailed Report Click Here

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Overcoming Resistance: One Tribe at a Time

SOMEDAY

You have this story to tell. It’s gut-wrenching. True. Meaningful. It will change lives. It will save lives … lots of them. It has to be told.  You have to tell it – because you’ve lived it.

The "Someday, One Day" Story. Photo courtesy of H. Kopp Delaney

BUT

You have a family. Responsibilities. Spouse and kids. Your  job is pretty demanding. Business travel and all that. When will you ever find time to tell your story? Save those lives? So much to do …

IS THIS YOU?

Years later do you still have that story in you? Still have that idea for a new invention? New company? What’s stopping you? What’s stopped you?

RESISTANCE

You’ve heard about it before in, “The Power of Resistance: Lessons Learned” from bestselling author Steven Pressfield. It’s the intractable foe of all working writers and the death of most aspiring writers—and entrepreneurs, painters, astronauts, and <insert your dream here>. Resistance is a brutal, intangibly tangible force, an implacable foe. Evil. Toxic. It wants you dead—or dying slowly so it can laugh at your misery.

ONE DAY IS YOUR ENEMY

How many of you reading this right now intend “one day” to write a book? Start a new business, do charity work, paint, do something meaningful? “‘One day” is your Resistance. It’s also the unrelenting foe of anyone wanting to achieve anything substantive in this life.

THERE’S THIS PERSON I WANT YOU TO MEET

He has a spouse, kids, demanding job – a lot like you. His job requires travel and ongoing training – probably a lot like you too. But  he has this story in mind – that just won’t quit. This concept. He’s been writing, researching and working.  This story will change lives. It will save lives … lots of them.

RESISTING RESISTANCE

He’s committed to writing this story – and is – while still maintaining his commitment to his family, his work, his country. Passionate about it. He’s been doing the work – regardless of all other commitments. And — his job is making him travel soon – back to Iraq.  Yes, he’s a soldier.  He’s getting ready to deploy to Iraq, where he will lead an Iraqi commando battalion — but he finished the story. Along the way he made a friend, the bestselling author Steven Pressfield who uses him as an example of how to overcome resistance.

“Resistance, it seems, melts away in the face of conviction, passion and hard work.”-  Steven Pressfield.

The person’s name? Major Jim Gant. The story?  “One Tribe At A Time.”

“‘One Tribe At A Time‘ is not deathless prose. It’s not a super-pro Beltway think tank piece. What it is, in my opinion, is an idea whose time has come, put forward by an officer who has lived it in the field with his Special Forces team members–and proved it can be done. And an officer, by the way, who is ready this instant to climb aboard a helicopter to go back to Afghanistan and do it again,” said Pressfield.

IT CAN BE DONE

For those of you that are, at this very moment, being slowed by Resistance, taunted by Resistance, need inspiration to fight Resistance, aspire one day to defeat the evil beast of Resistance … read “One Tribe at a Time,” by Major Jim Gant.  Or – download “One Tribe at a Time” to your computer.

If you’d like to comment or ask questions of Major Gant or Steven Pressfield about “One Triibe at a Time” and the “Tribal Engagement”  concept go to Steven Pressfield’s commentary section.

Courtesy – Steve Kayser

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Expert Access Features Hollywood, Hitman, Tribes in Afghanistan and Tin Man Humor in Latest Issue

Expert Access (http://expertaccess.cincom.com), award-winning online business magazine's latest edition, features an eclectic mix of Hollywood, Hitman and Humor in these articles and sites:

HOLLYWOOD

"A Simple Timeless Tale: Lessons Learned from a Legendary Hollywood STORY Guru" shows how to use timeless storytelling methods to win in the complex sales process.

HITMAN

"Hoodwinked! An Interview with Economic Hitman John Perkins," pulls back the curtain on the real cause of the current global financial meltdown.

TRIBAL THINKING

"Overcoming Resistance: One Tribe at a Time" shows how to really win the war in Afghanistan. The article features Major Jim Gant and Steven Pressfield, bestselling author and screenwriter. "One Tribe at a Time" is an idea whose time has come, put forward by an officer who has lived it in the field with his Special Forces team members -- and proved it can be done. And an officer, by the way, who is ready this instant to climb aboard a helicopter to go back to Afghanistan and do it again." -- Steven Pressfield.

TIN MAN CLAIMS INNOCENCE -- THIS MIGHT NOT BE TRUE

"The Proof Will Set Me Free," a humorous Web 2.0 fundraising site featuring Jerry Shawhan, Cincom treasurer, and a Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) Most Wanted Citizen.

JACK BAUER WISHES HE WAS AS SLICK-LOOKING AS JACK BROWSER

"Jack Browser Case Files" (http://jackbrowser.cincom.com), a new Cincom WebVelocity site. WebVelocity is the latest tool for building dynamic web applications. Yes -- it is a bit geeky. Gamey. But good.

TRIED AND TRUE

-- Who Should Own Your Next Technology Project? by Jerry Miller, managing director, Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions

-- The Broken Bridge Between Think and Work by Dr. Woodrow Sears

-- How to Make Every Dollar Count in Your Channel Management Strategies by Louis Columbus, Cincom market analyst

-- Superstar vs. Team: How Manager Mistrust Prevents Growth and Winning by Devin Meister

BANISH THE BORING

The editorial goal of Cincom Expert Access is to provide objective ideas, information, insights and inspirations (sometimes in an irreverent, humorous manner) to help readers:

-- Do their jobs better

-- Become aware of new ideas, products and services

-- Occasionally have a B2B laugh

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How to Make Every Dollar Count in Your Channel Management Strategies

Doing more with less is the new mantra.

Walk through any marketing, sales, channel management or customer services office and you’ll see the results of how companies strive to get more accomplished with less. From the packed wall calendars of projects and programs to Outlook calendars of sales and channel reps working as hard as they can to keep resellers productive and profitable, there’s definitely a new intensity alive.

Quotas are up and budgets are down, and channel programs are often caught in the middle. Instead of seeing this as an excuse the best companies view it as a crucible that tests their true skills of making channel programs work.

PARTNERSHIPS: PRODUCE OR BE GONE

The days of trading logos and partnerships that don’t produce a dime in revenue are over. In their place, this new intensity of selling and true partnerships is all about getting real results, not pumped up measures of meetings, conference calls or sales calls that don’t deliver results.

THE SUCCESSFUL ARE DIFFERENT: THEWY ONLY REWARD RESULTS

Whether it is as simple as a marketing campaign to as complex as a new product introduction, companies getting results today are doing several things differently than the rest.

Instead of being lulled into a false sense of security, these top performing companies only track metrics that lead to results. One distributor of high-tech electronics has a real-time dashboard of channel sales reps and the percentage of calls that lead to a sale, average sales size, time of call, gross margin contribution (dollars and %), and call frequency of account. This helps channel managers to see trending in profitability throughout the month and they know at any point in time where they are against their quota.

EMBRACE COMPETITION

Embrace competition and nurture it to get the best from your channels. One manufacturer of networking components uses their Partner Intranet site to post the daily results of sales on the hottest-selling products in units (as pricing is confidential across their partner base). This has lead to exceptional levels of competition. Sales reps, being the introverts they are, like to attach their names to the deals that push them ahead of other resellers. This is part of the new intensity that is out there.

PRICING: HOW TO TO KILL YOUR COMPANY

Realizing pricing is the last weapon of choice to win deals but the best one to automate. Tempting as it may be when sales activity hits a wall, dropping price can kill your company. From the simulations I’ve participated in and run for my graduate students in an MBA program I teach in, without exception every semester a team will decide to becoming the low price leader with no investment in lean manufacturing, supply chain or aggressive R&D. They purely go after price. Result: the longest one team last was seven quarters and they were out of business. Instead consider how Epson, Seagate, and others in high tech, and how Putnam Investments, TR Rowe Price and Fidelity manage financial services transactions. Both of these industries rely on price exception management and in the case of Seagate, they have an exceptional special pricing request process. Managing pricing intelligently and aggressively is key to making every channel management dollar count.

SALES PROGRAMS ARE THE NEW KING OF MARKETING SPEND

Of the manufacturers spoken with including those producing and selling home networking, components and computer systems products, many are diverting their advertising dollars into sales for recruitment, sales effectiveness and sales tools. This is easy to track the ROI of and many manufacturers are using a phased “pay as you go” approach to make sure the dollars invested pay off. Sales is the new king of marketing spend now, and advertising spend is way down as a result.

ONLINE AND SOCIAL NETWORK SPEND DOUBLING

Online media and social network spend is doubling in many manufacturers. A VP of Channel Programs with a local manufacturer of networking products told me that online media and social networks received a 34% increase in budget while spending on print media was completely cut. He explained that they get more sales leads from Facebook and Twitter and they can track it more effectively than they ever got from print media.

The catalyst of this new selling intensity in channels is all about doing whatever it takes to save existing customers. When I asked a student of mine, who is a Sales & Marketing VP for a local manufacturer what the top priority was in this area, specifically going after new accounts of saving existing ones, he told me they dedicate nearly 40% of their marketing budget to attracting existing customers to existing products. “It is the heart of our retrench strategy” he said in class last week. Sales get a bonus multiplier for getting an existing customer to source three new product lines, he said.

BONUSES=HAPPY CUSTOMERS

Bonuses only get paid when customers are delighted and show it in survey results. One services company that specializes in CRM implementations and outsourcing business process improvement projects only pays their consultants if the customer satisfaction surveys come back with a 95% score or higher. With work done in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Bangalore, and Chennai this metric has made global collaboration work. It has brought intensity to the process of making the customers’ problems their own. The result is that this small outsourcer who has revenues just over $100 million has over 70 referenceable clients.

BOTTOM LINE:

Making every dollar count in your channel management strategies has to be anchored in nothing but results, and there must be an intensity to achieve despite higher quotas and shrinking budgets. Looking at these constraints as a crucible and not a crutch pervades those companies getting to their channel selling goals.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus

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