Grieben vs The Purple Cow

Generally speaking, it takes a lot to shock me...well not in a horror movie sense, I’ll break down like a toddler at a scary movie, but i mean in an every day sense. Very little surprises me in my everyday life.

A recent example would be a campaign run by VLG, a firm out of Houston that runs under the username @wefightboredom on twitter. this campaign representing a fictional hotel was itself an experiential case study advertising their services. Their campaign wasn't anything technically over complicated, it was just well executed and a perfect example of Seth Godin’s legendary purple cow.

What they sent me pictured here, was a non de-script brown envelope containing what appeared to be a hotel room card key and a bar napkin with (what appeared to be) a hand written personalized url, or PURL. Once visited, there was a simple but effective interactive flash page guiding you through a virtual hotel and menu selection.

The whole exchange was really nothing special in its outcome, little more than an opt in form and simple food and beverage survey. What it did do was go about collecting the data in a unique way.

The mailer itself was obvious and mysterious. It told me very plainly that a hotel wanted to get a hold of me. I had never heard of the hotel so i knew it was promotional kit, but it gave no hint to what promotion was, just a CTA asking that i visit their personalized website just for me. They had peaked my curiosity with a bar napkin. Maybe I’m a bit of a nerd but that in and of itself got me excited.

Once on the site i knew almost instantly that this wasn't a real hotel chain, I haven't had a long career yet, I have only had 4 business trips that involved hotel stays and yet I still receive at least 3 promotional mailers from various hotel chains each week. This mailer wreaked of batch and blast, but with a sophistication that surpassed anything I had seen in any communications from a run of the mill hotel chain.

After completing the self guided survey I learned that VLG was trying to promote their services and within 10 mins of completing the survey I had received a call from a representative making following up. Being as junior as I am at the moment the call was for not, but this entire interaction had two outcomes that I think should mark it as a success.

First, they blew my mind, only two other campaigns ive interacted with have had the same affect. First was Marketo’s “You Dont Know Jack” trivia game self assesment. This campaign was borrowed an existing trivia brand repurposed to collect qualification criteria. It was brilliant because well it was fun and i was more than willing to fork over valuable information that most marketers have to beg and plead for.

The second was Eloqua’s Drake campaign, gets an unfair advantage because I’m a user but i think has some real value. This campaign did a number of things it created controversy by starting by flatly denouncing a a commonly held belief that brand avatars are pointless endeavors and the company put its money where its mouth was by making numerous challenging statements to that fact. This peaked my interest as a marketer, i wanted to see how the experiment would turn out. It engaged me and held my interest and created a way for me to interact with their brand in a way that wasn't always possible beforehand. It also second was that it created a way for them to maintain relationships with users that was normally only possible on a 1-1 basis with live employees. while relationships with real employees is a very valuable thing, its value that is list as turnover moves that headcount elsewhere. the Drake campaign created the opportunity for an ever-present relationship, a conversation with an avatar that would never leave the company.

Wow that started a tangent there, So to get back on track, like these two campaigns, the VLG campaign had blown my mind and forever impressed me, but secondly and possibly more importantly it got me talking. While these other two campaigns engaged me as an individual even to the point of passing along through social media, this campaign had me up and walking the office, passing around my tangible evidence, telling the story of my interaction and basically drooling on my office floor trying to share my experience with any other marketer i could find. Short of asking for a promotion so i could fill out a purchase order their simple activity of setting up a landing page and mailing me a napkin had derailed me and gotten me to interrupt as many people as i could find.

I know this post has been a bit of a love fest but in a world tripping over itself to provide analysis of ROI and revenue attribution sometimes the art of marketing gets lost and these examples from VLG, Marketo and Eloqua are proof that while on the backend the science is important, giving me something awe inspiring will not only the person in your database and unbelievably positive brand experience, it will broaden your audience in in a way limited only by the number of people within earshot.

Grieben vs Data Management Accountability via Jigsaw Data Fusion

So this is a followup to my previous post about the Jigsaw acquisition by Salesforce. I commented on some potential reasoning behind the merger and potential PR pitfalls that could result. The strategy is now self evident based on the resulting products being offered, but I think the potential for bad PR still remains. That being said what they have come up with is some pretty exciting stuff, at least from this data coordinators perspective.

Pop over to their site to get the overview, Jigsaw Data Management There are 4 products so far, Jigsaw Team,Jigsaw Lists, Jigsaw Unlimited, and Data Fusion. The products are pretty self explanatory, Team gives you a multi-user account to view data, lists is easy list generation for marketing and telesales, and unlimited is well, unlimited.

The most exciting product from my standpoint however looks to be Data Fusion this is the tool that i skeptical guessed was coming in my previous post, it compares your corporate CRM data to the cloud sourced database held within jigsaw and gives you an overview of potential incorrect and out of date data.

I find this to be a pretty exciting tool from a data management perspective. In many organizations data management is seen as a double edged sword. Data users assume poor data quality and blame it on IT for poor cleansing, and operations blames users for poor cleansing for entry. This tool allows both sides of this discussion to stop pointing fingers and work together to clean the database.

Rather than assuming data is of poor quality, this tool references a third party to identify potential problems within your CRM. Using this tool not only can data that is verified as incorrect be identified and removed, but potential problem data can be easily added to campaigns for verification and re-engagement.

Part of the problem with data management is accountability, who is responsible? weather on the operations or user side of the discussion what to do with potential problem data is a decision has system wide implications. depending on how many stakeholders there are, cleansing can be an impossible task and the resources required to identify let alone act on data management initiatives can be staggering.

This tool can potentially become a lighting rod, rallying all sides of the debate changing the issue from, "how do we identify the dirty data?", to "here is the dirty data, how can we fix it."Its the Rosetta stone both sides have been searching for because fixing an identified problem is much easier then agreeing on what problem should be solved.

So far there is only one case study available, but I'm excited to see how this tool develops and what results customers are able to realize as a result of it. If you have any real world examples of how this or other data tools have impacted your organization from a data quality or user philosophy standpoint, I would love to hear from you.

Grieben vs Social CRM & Crowd-Sourced Databases

I was perusing some posts today and found one linking to a techcrunch.com article (seen here) discussion the salesforce.com(SFDC) purchase of Jigsaw.com. I found the purchase somewhat puzzling. In this post I’m really looking for my reader’s insight on the reasoning behind the purchase.

There are some obvious synergies between the two; SFDC is an industry leading CRM solution, and Jigsaw is a great source for contact information. If your company has a inside sales or marketing team, you have likely heard of jigsaw. From a strategic standpoint, I see this purchase making sense. When so many of SFDC’s customers use it as a source for data that creates records, normalizing values and standardizing field mappings would add to the ease of use for both tools strengthening the value proposition for cross selling opportunities. Also SFDC has its newer offering called chatter which is adding social media like functionality to the corporate CRM. This enterprise level technology applied to the jigsaw database could help make Jigsaw increasingly robust. Looking at the merger from this perspective, the deal seems like a no brainier.

My problem with this union however comes to the conflicting business models. Jigsaw is a crowd sourced list purchasing vendor. The social nature of it allows its global users to continually clean and verify the data lending it credibility; its very nature requires that the database be shared.

SFDC on the other hand is taking that same principal and applying it corporate data. The crowd is smaller and keeping that data private is a key concern for its constituents. Their products are starting to mimic other tools that users interact with on a daily basis and applying those same principals to the interaction with the corporate data stored on the SFDC servers. Even though their product is evolving to include functionality that is social in nature, this is more to better reflect the users experience and adoption.

I haven’t interacted with the Chatter product yet but it looks to be very powerful and in the right organization could add great value to the data and users within that organization. My question however is from a strategic standpoint. Put yourself in the shoes of an SFDC customer. You could potentially use both products, the CRM and Jigsaw services, and rightfully love them both, but think about that situation. How would you feel about the company you trust to keep your data safe, getting into the data sharing and selling business?

As an SFDC user, I trust that in general the company wouldn’t care about the data in my database. I think they care about the service they provide, and the security of the database, but the data itself is 100% my responsibility. Add in a secondary product based on the sale of the contents of the database and that introduces a conflict of interest that I think with be a delicate issue for PR & Marketing at SFDC to address in the future. I have complete confidence in the organization and from my dealings with their employees I know they have a culture that fosters security of the data above all else, but this is adding a level of doubt to the equation that could cause many question SFDC’s motives going forward that if not for me personally experiences with the companies employees I might tend to agree with.

Tell me in the comments below, what do you think of this merger, its implications on the future strategy, or if it impacts your view on SFDC as an org.

Grieben vs Marketing Automation

I was surfing through related videos on youtube, and I came to 2 realizations. First that I’m almost criminally negligent in updating this blog, and second, using social media and being able to explain it are very different things.

I ran across this video by CommonCraft. I love their vids, I somehow feel more connected for videos of crafty paper cutouts then just a standard interview of CG animation. These are in the style of most Google launch vids explaining their new beta product or twitter example on the homepage explaining twitter and its use.
The video in question (See Here) was trying to explain social media with the same crafty method. The longer I watched the more confused I got. The analogy they were trying to use just wasn’t working for me. I inherently understand the functionality they were explaining, but in trying to simplify it with an analogy they made it so much more confusing because their situation was just a little too ridiculous. If you watch it, and picture the billboard on your front lawn you’ll see where I’m going.

It took some stretching and suspension of disbelief to get through the vid but it did remind me I would be blogging a bit more and got me thinking about a post I had promised as a follow-up to my last post. My last post focused on how small businesses agility made it possible for them to emulate the user experience of a large corp that invested in marketing tools. They don’t necessarily need the investments because on a smaller scale the analytics and automation don’t provide the necessary ROI to make the investment.

If you are a corp that is able to get sign-off to make that kind off investment however, you can take the example from the CommonCraft vid and flip it on its head. Think about it, using a tool like Eloqua which I have much more experience with, or its competitors like Marketo(Shout outs cause there people have commented on my blog in the past…Sup Steve :) ) and you are able to collect all that user generated activity to help yourself segment and better serve your customers. Failing using it to make product development decisions you can at least use the data to better target those more likely to listen to your pitches for products that are in production.

The video explains how a niche maker producing one flavor of ice-cream can use the user rating systems of many social media sites to explain their product from the buyer perspective helping other buyers better evaluate their pre-purchase decisions. Now take that same idea, flip your funnel and apply it to your marketing efforts. If you are an Ice-Cream producer who has hundreds of flavors you can take a similar approach to your buyer’s online activity to segment which flavor you would market to them. Steve Woods from Eloqua calls it digital body language, See his blog, or book of the same name.

Imagine how annoyed your users would be if each flavor sent out its own marketing initiatives. Someone who likes rocky road might hate Mint cheesecake. You wouldn’t want to make the mistake of cross marketing the two flavors. But if you are tracking their activity you might be able to identify a correlation between people who looked at rocky road or commented on it on facebook see they also look at other a few other types. Using that connection you can market the other flavors to Rocky Road fans who haven’t looked at the other flavor, as well as market Rocky Road to the other flavors consumers who haven’t tried it.

The beauty of this approach is that in so doing you could be generating more activity deepening your datasets making it more possible to identify even more patterns.

Now of course there are limitations but if you use this data to more strategically plan your activities as well as help drive your product development you can more predictably forecast both sales and satisfaction which makes everyone happier, management and customers alike.

That’s all for now, I’ve ranted on for far too long.

Grieben vs Small Business

I was recently reading a post on MarketingProfs about marketing analytics(See here). The focus was on using the right analytical tool, not all tools are created equal, and while quantitative analysis is the most concrete and measurable, it’s not always the best choice because it doesn’t allow for the same intuitive observations primary qualitative research allows. Now I am a marketer whose position is based on funnel reporting and CRM support so reporting is my lifeblood making what I’m about to say feels controversial, what if you don’t care about analysis.

When looking at marketing from an operations perspective, the best tool is the one that is most efficient and trackable, but when you look at the from the end user/consumer the best tool doesn’t matter as long as expectations are met or exceeded. One of the great things about the web is its ability to level the playing field for small businesses. Entrepreneurs can take advantage of so many digital solutions that can incorporate rich media and functionality into their online web presence that a prospect would never know you were a one man shop unless they showed up at your physical address. Small organizations need to realize this and leverage it rather than feel overwhelmed by their lack of resources.

The power that lies in marketing tools like Eloqua and Salesforce.com are in its ability to track the sales process so you can build buyer profiles to help predict who is most likely to become a customer. Startups often don’t have the time to collect, analyze and produce reports that are so vital in the corporate world, they are to busy getting things done. Templates, automated responses and robust tracking/reporting that are only valuable if you handle the volume to drive sample sizes big enough to make the results meaningful and use it to become more efficient and save time. If you are a small org, say 50 employees or less, chances are the volume you are handling is low enough that a couple people can manually manage all that traffic, and too low for any reporting you tried to give you any meaningful insight.

What most small operators don’t realize is that their mammoth competition is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to look small. Online, visitors expect fast response to requests and real time conversation and billion dollar orgs invest in these tools so they can meet the need to reply. They are fighting to look like 1 person replying to 1 email something entrepreneurs are doing simply by being small.  As long as your site is perceived as delivering the content in the same way, you are no worse off. Your users don’t care if their name is in an activity report or not as long as their white-paper is delivered.

When you take the need for all that granularity out of it, your available low cost solutions explode. Marketing activities drive revenue, the need for reporting exists only to convince unbelievers of its value. Let the corporations with employees like me worry about reporting on results, you already know your activities are vital so stop making excuses and get to work.

Grieben vs Social Marketing

In the wake of Yesterdays Breast cancer awareness viral campaign, I’m reminded about why I love social networks and social media in general.  It creates an environment for users to connect and share things that they care about, disseminate information quickly if you can reach the right influencers and above all provide another way for those who care about your product/service/charity to feel engaged and contribute on a daily basis. It also reminded me of why so many marketers have trouble embracing social marketing in their day to day campaigns, I mean honestly, who cares as much about the widgets they buy as they do about breast cancer?

For those of you aren’t sure of the campaign I am talking about here is the gist of it, yesterday on facebook, females everywhere started changing their status to a color. Seems harmless enough right? It all started with this message popping up in mailboxes.

“Some fun is going on.... just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY girls no men .... It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status... Haha .”

As you can imagine, guys everywhere started asking what was up.  Some caught on, some didn’t, most of the time girls let the cat out of the bag ruining the fun for everyone, but it was wildly successful and spread like wildfire. It was interesting before you understood it to see people in your network who had no other connection but through you posting similar mysterious things. It got people talking. Why did it work so well? Why did so many women jump on board? I’m sure an number of people will give some more detailed analysis but I think it comes down to the old sex sells adage. The fact that it was for a good cause (breast cancer awareness) is a given for adoption, but it also made it fun, an inside joke to play on the boys, mixed with a little harmless dirty talk(the color of your underwear). It was like being in the schoolyard again. It was simple, genius and damn near impossible to replicate in a normal business context.

Some have tried and succeeded, the IKEA store opening comes to mind see link for video(IKEA Store Opening) where the first people to tag themselves as  items in a showroom gallery to win the item, or Burger Kings Drop 10 friends get a free Whopper campaign(Drop 10 Facebook Page) and of course the most widely touted campaign of all, the Obama Presidential Campaign. Each of these all managed to make their offering note worthy, sometimes a difficult task if you sell certain items.

That’s why there is so much “spam” out there. Countless facebook pages and twitter accounts devoted to organizations that know they need to be there, but aren’t sure why and instead post special promo codes or press releases. As a user who’s there to be engaged and interact would you be interested in this info? Many marketers haven’t figured out how to use social media channels to their advantage yet, so they are just extending their normal batch and blast behaviors to new channels.

If you don’t have a product that your customers and prospects can’t stop talking about to promote you, or don’t care enough about to spread throughout their networks, there’s still a lot of value in social networks as a tool for customer service and intelligence. Companies need to be sure they don’t ignore it, because if your customers aren’t actively out there promoting you, you can be sure there are some that are badmouthing you. Becoming a part of the discussion is important so if you aren’t going to respond to complaints’, you will at least be aware of these issues your customers and prospects are talking about.
If they haven’t already, organizations need to invest in the resources to monitor and respond to what’s happening out there, and vendors are stepping up to provide tools to aid in these efforts.  Eloqua has stepped up to include sharing and reporting tools to integrate social media into their automations suite(ELQ Reporting) and CRM giant Salesforce.com has integrations  for twitter and facebook, and is even taking a social approach to its operations with apps like Chatter.  The shift is coming and its not a bad idea to get prepared now.

Like when the boys on facebook didn’t know what was going on with color status updates, you and your organization don’t want to be out of the loop when its your company that the in crowd is talking about in the school yard.