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This week I had the pleasure of contributing an article to the Chief Marketer web site. The article is about using web casts to drive leads and ROI. This is a topic quite familiar to King Fish as we manage over 250 web casts yearly for our clients.
To read the article please click here to go to the Chief Marketer site, and check out all of the great content they have on many other issues relevant to today’s marketer.
This year’s Digital Hollywood conference in Los Angeles has been shedding light on the significant challenges marketers face as they try to lasso prospects online. By and large, the panelists have been candid about the immaturity of this medium, but have been unified in their belief that traditional advertising is waning, and providing prospects with meaningful online experiences is the cost of entry.
The panelists, most of which carried senior executive titles, provided sound bites that had me in complete agreement. Here is a sample.
During a session entitled: The Web, Social Media and Advertising: Transforming and Disassembling the World of Traditional Media and Communications, Matt Rosenberg, Group Director, Organic said that to be successful, “Brands are immersing themselves in the content experience…you need to let your brand take a backseat.” I absolutely agree, and that is a core strategy at King Fish Media, where our job is to help clients engage with prospects and clients on a far more meaningful level than brand advertising offers.
Recommended contacts who spoke at this panel:
Raquel Krouse, VP Social Media, Interpublic Emerging Media Lab
Matt Rosenberg, Group Director, Organic
Mark Lewis, Strategic Planning Director, DDB San Francisco
The next session, Bridging TV and Broadband: Strategic Relationships – Advertising, Technology and Content, took the full customer immersion concept to a different level. A senior executive from the Home Shopping Network candidly evaluated her brand, and said that the universal knowledge of her brand allowed for movement into new media platforms (Interactive TV and .TV), saying, “People at the company worried about these platforms, but with the huge brand loyalty, they go wherever the brand goes and build communities there.” We, at King Fish, describe this phenomenon as owning, not renting your own media channel – Private Media.
Recommended contacts from this panel:
Jeff Miller, President and CEO, ICTV
Fred McIntyre, SVP, AOL Video
On a separate note, I hope to never again hear these words as much as I have during the last three days: “paradigm” (thought we were done with that), “frictionless”, “zero sum game”, “net loser” and “value proposition”.
During each of these sessions, I heard frequent confirmation that intent-based vs. interruption-based communications is the most effective means for clients to communicate with their prospects and customers; custom media provides the single strongest venue to effectively achieve success with this effort.
I’ve been talking with marketing managers at vendors and large integrators, and they share a common complaint: their efforts are unappreciated and often dismissed by their sales counterparts.
No shock. Research conducted by VARBusiness last year found that marketing and business development ranked among the least valued items for improving sales and growing a business. Conversely, greater management focus and expanding sales teams was ranked among the best actions to drive growth. In other words, brute force wins over strategic development.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, channel dogma holds that resellers (solution providers, integrators and system builders) generate leads on behalf of their vendors. The reality, however, is solution providers don’t generate leads, are horrible at marketing and don’t do enough to promote their own brands.
What’s to blame? Two of the great evils of the IT industry: compensation plans and vendor brand supremacy.
Innovation and growth require risk taking. Compensation plans, however, counter risk taking. As products become commoditized and markets become saturated, vendors and solution providers will bring new and complex products to create new revenue streams. Sales teams are often compensated on gross revenue of best selling products. When they’re given a goal for sales, sales teams will often devote the bulk of their attention to products that will get them to their goal fastest without consideration to overall growth of the business. This is also why companies create special sales teams when introducing new products and services; they’re unencumbered by legacy sales and products.
Solution providers don’t do enough to develop and promote their own brands. Instead, solution providers rely upon their vendors’ brand strength to drive sales and the vendors prefer it this way. To draw an analogy to the automobile industry, no one buys a car body, engine, tires, drive train, seats, windows and lights and then builds a car; they buy a car that is the final product of scores of suppliers. Nissan Motors, for instance, has more than 10,000 suppliers that feed parts to the manufacturer for the assembly of its various cars. Yet, the general public knows few of those suppliers even if they are the best parts makers in the industry. The contrary is true in the IT industry, where vendors want brand supremacy over the brands of their resellers, integrators and solution providers. No one buys an IT system; they buy the pieces and then pay someone to assemble them.
Vendor brand supremacy has the unfortunate effect of creating partner reliance upon the vendor for marketing and lead generation. So long as vendors continue to promote their brands over the brands of their channel partners, the solution providers will look to their vendors to either supply marketing or underwrite their marketing efforts.
To achieve real growth, businesses must be willing to take risk. Corporate leaders may understand the risk imperative; what they need to do is remove the obstacles to risk and structure their channels and compensation plans to encourage their field teams to embrace the challenge of risk rather than just maintaining their personal revenue streams.
Send Larry your thoughts and feedback: lmwalsh@twentyonetwelve.biz or at www.twentyonetwelve.biz
I know this blog entry will be read by a lot of people. Not because I’m an especially controversial columnist but because I am about to use the magic word: iPhone.
The King Fish folks asked me to opine about this topic because I am the classic mobile gadget nut. Someone who has owned basically every Palm device since the original Palm Pilot. Plus, full disclosure, I am also a die-hard fan of technology from Apple. My mother used to work there. I used a Lisa before I got my hands on the first Macs. I’ve used an Apple III. I did an internship with Apple marketing services during university. So, I’m hooked. Yes, I am one of the people who was fuming last week because I paid way too much for my iPhone in early July. No, I did not wait in line for it. Yes, I will absolutely use my Apple store credit to get something else from Apple.
Like every iPhone owner, I also have become a defacto demo rep. I’ve been approached in airports, in the supermarket, in Starbucks. Interestingly, the main thing people ask to see is the gravity-sensing feature: how the iPhone screen flips from vertical to horizontal and back again depending on how you hold it in relationship to the ground. Even right now, it is so logical and so way-cool that it takes my breath away.
My mother discovered a feature I didn’t know about when I was in Hawaii a couple of weeks ago: How you can shrink or explode what is displayed on the screen simply by pinching your fingers together on the glass. I know, pretty obvious, but I started using my iPhone so quickly when I bought it that I really didn’t study the owners’ manual.
The main question people ask me, and the one you probably care about most, is how the iPhone behaves as a business tool.
My answer: about as well as the Mac.
For one thing, if you’re surgically attached to your BlackBerry or Treo, then the iPhone is definitely not for you. Thumbing isn’t so easy, although the virtual keyboard does become easier to use pretty quickly and the self-correcting feature is used pretty much regularly. But this is not a device meant for instant e-mail junkies.
Another thing that perplexes me: Why on earth must I return to the main screen every time I want to switch to a different application? I was so spoiled by the Treo’s quick access key, that this annoys me pretty much every time I pick the iPhone up.
The iPhone does basic e-mail pretty well, but I’m a free agent, so I don’t have corporate networks to contend with or set up. It does support IMAP, POP and Exchange servers, though, so a small business would probably have pretty good luck with it. One thing I haven’t figured out how to enable: accepting calendar requests or meeting invitations, which has been the bane of my existence over the roughly two months I’ve been using my HeathPhone. Of course, that’s more a function of the basic Macintosh e-mail client that I use, I suppose, and not necessarily the iPhone. I need to migrate to something better, but I haven’t had the time to research it.
One feature that I do believe will become requisite for other mobile smart phones: WiFi support. The ability to hop on and off networks at will, defaulting to my AT&T Edge service when necessary, is pretty compelling. The fact that it happens seamlessly is wonderful. This has implications for cutting voice communications costs. Imagine using the WiFi network available in one of your branch offices. Moreover, WiFi support means you can get to Web applications easily, if you’re willing to squint at the screen. Heck, WiFi has already shown up in the newest iPods, so you can see where this is going.
Using my iPhone, I’ve managed to submit entries to my GreenTech Pastures blog at ZDNet pretty easily, and I’ve even checked my checking account balance from the road. (My bookmarks have carried over from the Safari browser I use via the iTunes sync feature.) NetSuite pretty quickly came out with iPhone support for its business automation applications right after the product released, and some of my friends have pointed me to widget applications that I could use. One of those applications, www.flickim.com, provides instant messaging functionality (one of the things I miss most from using a Treo 650). Another application called Files2Phone from 1stWorks will let you grab documents, audio and other media files from your desktop remotely. One thing I long for: A way to put my To-Do list on my iPhone. Haven’t figured that out yet.
So, there definitely are innovators trying business-ify the iPhone around me. I’m not complaining. But there is a major caveat: I’m using two Macs to run my freelance business. I’m not so sure my iPhone would play so well if I lived in a Windows world.