One of my goals this year was to do a study on reputation management. As we all factor in the effects of new media on our brands, I felt this was a topic with long-lasting appeal to every marketer.

My hypothesis going into the creation of these questions was that B2B marketers (including yours truly) just aren’t adequately prepared for an online reputation crisis. Dell wasn’t, Wal-Mart wasn’t. If those big B2C brands weren’t ready, I was betting we weren’t ready either. And I was right!

To be totally transparent with you, I wasn’t surprised by many of the responses to my survey. The bulk of you are monitoring your reputation in some way, shape or form. But are you poised to respond in the case of an online reputation crisis? 55% admitted you weren’t.

Perhaps you need stronger guidelines in place, like a blogging policy. Two-thirds of respondents don’t have one!

Many of you are do-it-yourselfers when it comes to monitoring your reputation. Is that perhaps because your company hasn’t made this a strategic priority? 53% admitted it wasn’t a strategic priority for you – yet!

My goal here is to give you the state of the union when it comes to monitoring reputations online. This data is bound to change, so I hope I get you thinking of ways to close the gap with your organization’s reputation!

Click here to download the free research report

Special thanks to my sponsors – Trackur.com, run by the renowned Andy Beal of the blog MarketingPilgrim.com, and Marketing Profs’ equally renowned Ann Handley for their support on this survey.

B2B marketers with highly complex products and services have been given a gift in the last few years in the form of Social Media.

In my opinion, Social Media doesn’t easily equate to Lead Generation for the complex sale. For example a prospect reading a blog entry doesn’t mean they want to buy anything, but it does mean they have engaged with your brand. In fact the stats show that certain forms of Social Media even out perform more traditional ones when it comes to awareness and recall. For example, unaided awareness from podcasts were 68%, compared with 21% for streaming video and 10% for television. Now that’s great recall!

B2B marketers need to set aside collecting metrics like page views, clicks, conversion rates and start nurturing individual leads by using the gift of social media they were given. Social Media is great for consideration so why not use it that way? Don’t measure your teams on page views generated from a campaign. Measure them on how engaged they can get your leads with your content and turn them into sales.

Sales generated from your lead nurturing program are the only real measure of engagement with your campaigns!

So, everyone I speak to these days that are involved in some sort of Web 2.0 initiative tell me how much effort they are placing on content.   I have to laugh, since many of us have been evangelizing the notion of content setting the context for a customer experience for at least a year now.

I just re-read a post by David Armano on Technorati + Authority, which discussed Technorati’s changes in its rating system.   Related to David’s last year were comments on content in general and its quality.   I’ve mentioned to David that  content “design” and the related experience seems to lag functional and interface components of experience design.  In essence, content is the stepchild of design.
So where is content in your marketing and experience design efforts?  Its been my experience that content design is a continual effort, requiring intensive attention. Your goal?  Getting your content to a level where it becomes a value added part of the customer experience?  I talk to customers weekly. What I hear is that there is always too much, not enough third party or UGC and that the content they tend to come across on on supplier sites is jargon rich.

Content is the cornerstone of a superior customer experience because it provides the context in which the experience takes place.  How do do you ensure that that cornerstone won’t crumble?

1. Dedicate a team to focus solely on the content aspects of the experience.
2. Focus on What you say  - its clear to me that most companies have a lot to say, more than they know what to do with. But what I hear from customers (and this is so obvious) is don’t tell us too much, tell us the right things.  Also, give me two perspectives, one that is role based and personalized to what I do and give me a functional view. In my work at SAP we actually saw clear geographic differences here with NA executives looking more for a role based content experience while stakeholders in EMEA were looking more for a functional perspective.  We don’t have data on APJ yet.
3. How you say it - one thing you need to spend time on is your “Content Tonality.”  Many companies have been accused, and rightly so at times, of taking a rather circuitous route to delivering a message.  To address this issue,  focusing on the source - your content producers.  Train your content producers to align their content with the Voice of the Brand.   Content should be plain spoken - we use blogs in our training as examples of the type of writing we are looking for. We are striving for a conversational tone, honest, impactful, positive etc.
4. Who do you say it to - I referenced this above. The content must align to specific personas based on who you are trying to communicate with.  What is most important is being able to personalize the content during the buying experience so that enables customers to develop an affinity for the brand which in turn will convert into revenues for said brand.

Things like radical transparency, entertainment value, co-creation are all critical elements of a next generation customer experience but without contextual based content, its all just window-dressing.

Supernova2008 just wrapped up this past week. If you’re not familiar with this conference, you may learn more at conversation hub. Last year, Umair Haque (Bubble Generation), Liz Lawley (Rochester Institute of Technology), and Jerry Michalski (Sociate) engaged the audience in a lively and insightful summary. You may watch the video that closes the interactive loop here.

As I listened to these passionate interpreters extrapolate from the experience, a few points jumped at me:

Access is ubiquitous - access to capital, relationships, resources.

Things get better the more people use them - these are betters, not goods.

All of your metrics are crap (they do not look at measures of devotion) - eyeballs and buckets don’t tell you the details about what matters and what’s going to be successful.

We don’t have a culture of getting good data - we have data filtered through the people who often have the least reason to give us accurate information.

Backchannels matter - at the event and to your business. If you’ve failed to engage, you will know because the backchannel will boycott you and join another conversation.

We need to pay attention to humans - we need to make things available to customers. They are people in their normal lives, not consumers, targets, or impressions.

Silence has value - we talked about how silence has a sound and a place at Conversation Agent last year.

Purpose beats profit - craft a strategy by who and why and bake that in the DNA of your business.

Your company can be a platform for customers to remix - firms are one economic component. The others are networks and community.

Plastic beats specific - today the economy is made up of plastic things. Things that can be duplicated and remixed and tweaked and hacked into in many ways.

If relationships are liquid, flows beat assets. How do you harness the power of these new forces for your business? Ask ourself, is there a DNA build underneath these technologies? How does what you do provide an experience, how does it make your customers feel? That is the component that is game-changing, not the technology.

In a post on my own blog yesterday, I wrote about how companies should not think about how to leverage social media as a new channel for doing marketing, but instead realize how social media has transformed the marketing game. I promised to expand on the topic and decided it made more sense to move the conversation to the marketing 2.0 community so we can continue this discussion until way after this post will have disappeared below the fold.

In yesterday’s post I said:

Social media is what transformed the rules of marketing. By providing a platform of participation to your employees, customers and prospects, social media has changed the fundamental pillars of the marketing game. Not only have the rules of game changed, so have the players, the scope, the tactics and the added values - to use the game theory elements of the game.

I further said that the end goal of marketing - creating a customer - had not changed.

Let’s take a quick look at the different elements of the marketing game and how they changed.

The New Rules

1. People do not want to hear from companies anymore
2. People want to hear from other people

Some people will argue that this has always been like that, and they are right. The problem is that prior to this platform of massive participation called social media becoming commonplace, you could not hear from other people in a scalable way - and so you had to listen to what companies were telling you.

The New Players

• Customers
• Employees
• Prospects

Except for competitors not being on the list, it sounds like the old players - doesn’t it?

The difference is what Clay Shirky calls “here comes everyone” in his latest book - which is a must read if you are in marketing. It is not just the employees that are in your direct line of command who are playing key roles in your decision making processes, it is all employees. And it is not just your largest customers, or those you pay to advise you, who will participate in your decisions - it is all of them, including people who have not yet bought from you.

The New Scope

The scope of marketing for many old school marketers was everything pre-sales. Many corporate marketing executives are not even in charge of product innovation - where you bring the voice of the customer back into the process of defining your next offer.

The new scope of marketing is everything pre-sales all the way to post sales customer support and new product innovation. And that for global tribes of people who talk to one another instead of just those who bought from you.

The New Tactics

• Business communities
• Social media & social networks
• People-speak and authenticity
• Speed of response

Those are big changes in how marketing departments will have to think and work in order to create new customers. No more corporate-speak, no more interrupt-based marketing programs, and no more targeting. It is now all about attracting customers, building relationships and trust by helping them and letting them help one another, and leveraging the tribal nature of people.

Is this how the marketing tactics should have been all along? Absolutely! But how many companies were doing that when they did not have to? Almost none.

Now they will have no choice if they are to survive.

The New Added Values.

• People’s attention
• People’s trust
• Talent in employees and customer champions
• Externalized business process that include employees, customers and prospects
• Retell-able stories to market with you customers instead of at them

So out are the switching costs, the better mousetraps, the big advertising budgets, marketshare and other added values that determined your marketing competitive value in the marketplace before social media shifted the power away from companies and into individual’s hands.

Summary

So while the end goal of marketing has not changed, the game you play to get to that end goal has forever been transformed. You can argue that whatever marketing 2.0 becomes is what marketing should have been all along, as I did before, but the reality is that for most companies it never was like that because they did not have to.

And the changes that need to happen are so fundamental that many will not make it.

Classically marketers have always been protective of their content locking them up in PDFs and then putting a registration page in front of them. This behavior is known to have a 1 in 10 (10%) download rate which isn’t bad by marketing standards but on the flip side that means there is a 90% leakage rate!

Studies have shown that a NON protected PDF will get as high as a 20X greater download rate. But then how can you capture registration information?

Peter Nieforth’s company, Vitrium Systems, has created a web-based tool called docmetrics. Their solution moves away from external registrations forms to forms that are embedded directly inside the PDF - this allows marketers to collect reader data while they are engaged in the content and share the content with their colleagues. In addition to the data on who is reading the content, docmetrics provides data on when the document was opened, how many pages were read, and how much time was spent on each page.

To hear more about this exciting new technology with my interview of Peter right on the show floor at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum! WARNING: this was recorded on the show floor so it is a little loud (sorry) because there was quite a crowd in his booth!
About Peter

Peter Nieforth is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder at Vitrium Systems Inc. Nieforth founded Vitrium Systems together with Narayan Sainaney, Blair Adamson and Alfred Dorey bringing together a core group to crystallize and commercialize the ideas and research of Sainaney. Nieforth specializes in financing, organizing and commercializing promising start-ups, most recently acting as Director of Investment for The Loreto Bay Company (LBC), where he worked on raising a total of 18 million US dollars for the world’s largest sustainable resort community, which is currently being built by LBC in the Mexican Baja. Nieforth has also served as an investment specialist for BMO Bank of Montreal, as Financial Advisor for Yorkton Securities Inc. and as Financial Consultant with Merrill Lynch Canada Inc.

Nieforth studied Political Science at Acadia University, and graduated from Mount Saint Agnes Academy in Hamilton, Bermuda.

 

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It should come as no surprise that the online gaming market is exploding. In fact, last year online gaming attracted 28 percent of the total worldwide online population — almost 217 million people!

For a long time gamers were thought of as young guys with glasses and zits playing for 14 hours a day but all that has changed. The market has been embraced much more by women and the age range has expanded from 7 to 107.

Opportunities for product placement as well as experiential branded games are close at hand for us as marketers. Now that games are becoming so prevalent, we’re beginning to see specialized ad networks focused on in-game advertising as an untapped channel. Microsoft and Google have already made acquisitions in the space and start-ups are chomping at the bit.

So to get a better understanding of the gaming space, I had the opportunity to interview Roman Nouzareth the President and CEO of Café.com. Roman is no stranger to online gaming, having successfully founded Boonty, Inc., a leading digital distributor of casual and hardcore games, and ushered in the try-before-you-buy downloadable business model. This time around, his business is focused on entirely new revenue streams – advertising and micro-transactions, or virtual items you buy and use in and around the games. He has a unique perspective on where the online gaming trend is heading.

About Roman

Roman is one of the founders of Boonty.com, the worldwide leader in the digital distribution of video games. Boonty offers Internet portals, ISPs, mobile phone operators, advertisers and PC manufacturers a complete solution that combines all areas of expertise needed for a generic video game digital distribution offering, the negotiation and selection of content from publishers, the design and management of a complete e-commerce and downloading platform, online marketing know-how, and a leading role in managing websites’ Games component. Casual and hardcore gamers can thus access a catalogue of over 1500 PC and mobile games for an optimal gaming and purchasing experience.

After successfully being in charge of sales strategy, marketing, and publisher relations in Europe and Asia, Roman is now responsible for the North American market. From Manhattan, Roman also took the Product Management lead for the company in order to design and release the new social gaming site cafe.com. Roman was also a Jury member at the famous advertising Cannes Lion Festival in 2000 and a speaker in various events like CES in Las Vegas. He holds a Law Degree from the University of Paris II Assas and is an investor in several start-ups.

 

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One of my most trusted friends and mentors recently joined a very intriguing company called – SuccessFactors (stock symbol SFSF). They specialize in HR software with a SaaS product that is second to none in the market.

From a marketing and social media perspective several things about this company got my attention and my envy as a marketer.

First was the clear communications from the top down. The CEO Lars Dalgaard uses email to the entire company much like an internal blog at all hours of the day reporting back on things like successful client meetings and other interesting findings. Best of all it creates an open dialog with the entire company and builds an internal sense of community and esprit d’ corp.

Next was the sheer amount of new client wins that are coming out of this company. I monitor their RSS feed and every time I turn around they are pumping out press releases with another new client name in it. Kudos to the communications department and the sales team for making that happen!

But what really got my attention was how they unleashed their own internal community on rating and ranking each of the Presidential Candidates by 10 different competencies and published it on their public website. This is a fabulous example of demonstrating your product and its possibilities by connecting it to something that everyone is interested in.

So when last I checked here was the tally…

1. Budgets/Cost Controls – Vote McCain
2. Communication – Vote Obama
3. Decision Making/Judgement – Vote Obama
4. Dependability – Vote Obama
5. Global Perspective – Vote McCain
6. Integrity/Ethics – Vote Obama
7. Listening Skills – Vote Obama
8. Leadership – Vote Obama
9. Managing Conflict – Vote Obama
10. Planning – Vote Obama

Overall Winner - Obama

Sorry Hillary but I guess you already knew that!

Here are 15 suggestions that take advantage of the innovative opportunities that Web 2.0 offers for marketing.

1. Attitude is everything! Being positive makes positive things happen (I work with people).

2. Good is ok (I’m a recovering perfectionist!).

3. Don’t let too much time pass between steps in a project. (it’s deadly).

4. Action is better than study. Marketing 2.0 is about experimentation!

5. Brainstorm, Do, Evaluate, Redo (oh! that’s #4 again :)  )

6. Get out of your box & try new things. Ask your customers for ideas. (they will surprise you!)

7. Feature vs Benefit - just because it’s pretty & shiny do your customers want it?

8. Don’t assume - ask your customers (get to know them - they’ll tell you everything want to hear plus maybe some things you didn’t want to)

9. Observe & listen to your customers (they are begging to be heard)

10. Have a vision & dream big (and because I don’t set limits I’m pleasantly surprised with the results!)

11. Bring management on board first (mention the idea, then build over time)

12. Consider feedback as a gift (negative is the most valuable)

13. Measure, don’t just count - it’s far more valuable

14. Build for the future

15. There’s no mistake that can’t be fixed (if you never try how will you know? see #6)

Bonus - have fun! Marketing in the Web 2.0 world is about the customers. Let them show you their joy in pleasing them.

What are your favorite reasons for marketing in Web 2.0?

You: a young company.  What: about to bring a product to market. How: Segment your market to find those most likely to buy.   Now, sounds easy?  Its not but it can be relatively painless.  When you first bring your products to market you want to find the “sneezers” (to borrow Seth Godin’s term), those who will help develop the market for you by being advocates evangelists for your product and spread the word.  Helping to drive viral adoption.

Many marketers you hire are going to want to perform a traditional segmentation - that is, they will attack a particular geography or vertical as a way to find those sneezers. But I’d submit that’s not enough.  To truly be successful in bringing your product to market you have to segment your market by “attitude”, yes attitude… those individuals that have the inclination to buy from you… attitudinal segmentation enables companies large and small to find the sneezers, those most likely to buy and more importantly find those who just love to talk to you but will never buy, as well as those who just plain will never buy.  These last two groups represent a huge amount of wasted time, energy and money, which any sales rep worth their salt is anathema to.

Attitudinal segmentation is a best case example of the science of marketing.  Yes, this part of marketing is not art but 99% science. As part of this scientific effort you will ask the market questions to answer the following using a statistically valid sample with a combination of real time virtual, and web survey data:

• Which groups within your potential market ascribe a high degree of value to the capabilities of your solution (don’t say ALL because that’s not true!)?
• How large are these segments and where are they (you will realize that they cut across verticals AND Geos but the analysis will provide you with logical geos and verticals to start with?
• Where should you focus your scarce sales resources to get the most bang for the buck?
• Which groups of customers should we ignore? Or said better, which groups of customers should we only address opportunistically?
• What elements of your offer - product, service, pricing, ease of use, etc… do prospective customers find most appealing and what specifically about those attributes do they like?

B2C companies have been using attitudinal segmentation for quite some time as part of their Go-to-market strategies. B2B companies can and will benefit from a scientific approach to marketing as well, especially when you combine such a segmentation effort with an evaluation of your offer and its attributes. By understanding what components of your offer (product, pricing, support, etc… ) are most attractive to your potential customers, you will be able to more easily adjust it to maximize uptake by those most likely to buy.  For example, if you are selling a SaaS solution, do your customer’s prefer to be billed monthly or quarterly?  Do they want a super friendly easy to use interface that means more screens or a more crowdes interface but only takes one screen to complete the transaction?  You won’t really know until you ask!

Remember, its not enough to merely understand your market, you must determine what you should do DIFFERENTLY to maximize the economic value of understanding your market.  This type of segmentation combined with a detailed understanding of your offer enables you to pre-test each segment’s reaction to your offer and GTM strategy enabling you to make adjustments to both.

C’mon, what do you have to lose?  Customers, market share and competitive pole position.