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My Next Chapter

You have a good job that pays you well at a solid multi-billion dollar company. Why on Earth would you want to go and join a startup? I have heard these words many times over the last few weeks as I have been contemplating the next step in my professional journey. Sometimes, they were asked by family or friends. Sometimes, by people at startups themselves.

The simple answer is I’d like to get on a rocket ship and help it to fly far and fast.

The more detailed answer has more, well, details…

What is this high flying endeavor, you ask? Am I joining a company that is powering the social media revolution with a new service? Am I getting behind the rapid change in how we use robots in every day life? No. I am going to join Actifio in Waltham in their quest to disrupt the data management and storage markets in the enterprise, and I could not possibly be more excited.

Once I convinced my wife that I was not going to a yogurt company, I explained to her, as I explain to all who will listen, that there are three main reasons I am joining Actifio as their new VP of Digital Marketing.

1. Actifio is already incredibly impressive.

For a company that many in the area have still not heard of, Actifio is about to become very well known because their story is compelling. They solve a real problem that enterprise customers need to address – the run-away volume of data, and copies of that data, that are permeating all businesses – and they do it in an simple, elegant way that saves their customers up to 90% on their costs in this area. Good story.

They have one of the most impressive leadership teams I have ever seen, let alone worked with, and they have already had tremendous success in previous endeavors. They are also moving as fast as a rocket ship (hence the obligatory image above) and growing rapidly.

2. The opportunity and challenge is compelling.

The marketing challenge itself is compelling – how do you take all of what has become possible in the last few years via social media, marketing automation, content production and distribution, etc. and roll it into a 21st century marketing model for reaching enterprise technology buyers that puts a human touch on a technical brand and drives awareness, customer acquisition, and creates evangelists for a great product and company…wow. That is a set of questions and answers to keep one awake at night pondering and now I get to help answer them.

3. Miketrap

The last piece is about my journey to get better at what I do and continue to raise my Marketing game. Mike Troiano, Actifio’s CMO, has long been one of my Marketing heroes. He lives out loud, tells it like it is, and is compelling in how he approaches humanizing and simplifying a brand’s story and driving Marketing’s contribution to a company’s bottom line. I have been quoting his maxims in my own work for the last few years and I really could not find a better person to help me in my quest to be a better marketer. To say I am looking forward to working with him would be an understatement.

Given all of that, this is the right step for me.

I have learned a lot and worked with some great people at The Hanover. I will miss my co-workers and I am sure they will go on to do amazing things. But, for me, I am ready to change my game and to raise my game and Actifio gives me a chance to do that.

I can’t wait to get started. Game On.

Photo Credit – Wikimedia

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Adjacent Content Marketing ftw

When you are coming up with topics for content marketing – not the stuff where you define your company’s value or the offerings of your products, but the stuff that people want to keep coming back for – don’t focus on your products.

No one thinks your baby is as cute as you do. You are not the market, even if you may be a member of it. Your mother may want to see 1000 pictures of the kids, but your neighbors do not. Why then do you think your market wants to read content about your product? If they are in a buying mode, they may want information about your product, but they don’t want an ongoing relationship with product content. They don’t want to share it with their friends and followers.

Content marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing today. It delivers benefits across many programs. It can cause people to come to your site and to return frequently. It can power your organic search traffic, by letting all those pages be indexed and found and by driving thousands of links to your site, thereby raising your authority. It is the lifeblood of sharing on social networks. And, it is a way to get the influencers in your industry involved with your brand.

To be effective, though, content needs to be about topics that are not product focused. To be authoritative, they do, however, need some relationship to your industry. The key then is to develop what I refer to as “adjacent content”. What does your market and community care about? What interests them? What will enhance their professional knowledge? Once you shift your thinking to those topics that aren’t about your product, or even about the problem your product solves, potential topics will explode in volume.

In RealEstate? Don’t write about your listings or your sales success; write about pricing trends in the market. Run a grocery store? Don’t write about your specials; write about the growth of local farms in the area and the demand for their produce. Make fine furniture? Write about the new woods available from Latin America that are changing the industry.

Not the thing, the thing next to it…the adjacent content. That’s your sweet spot. Build the value of your brand by giving people value in content that interests them AND that relates to what you do. Do that and they’ll come back and read your product copy when they are in buying mode…it’s right next door to where they hang out anyway.

Image credit: Mr. T in DC

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Word choice matters in sales. A view from the buy side.

After 20 years on the sell side, in both sales and marketing, I have spent the last couple of years on the buy side. As such, I have sat through countless vendor presentations and agency pitches. It is amazing to me how many salespeople, even the better ones, make fairly fundamental mistakes in word choices when they are trying to describe scenarios that relate to your business during sales presentations.

I learned long ago that the key to developing good messaging is listening to the market. Listen to customers and prospects closely. They will not only outline the problem that needs solving – thereby helping to define a feature set – they will also unconsciously “write copy” for you. Listen to enough people and you will hear the patterns of speech for how THEY would describe your product, which coincidentally is the same set of words that will resonate best with them when you sell your solution.

So back to those sales people. The same principles apply to spoken sales language as do to written marketing copy. If you listen first and pick up on the way a prospect or customer describes her business and then use her vocabulary when you speak, your words will resonate better with her. Does she call her distributors “agents”? Don’t call them brokers. Does she “sell direct” to consumers? Don’t call that part of her business “retail”.

Even more important than the words is to make sure you demonstrate a knowledge of the customer’s business. Don’t talk about selling direct if the business is purely based on a distribution network. This is basic homework. Read the company’s website before the meeting. Take note of the things that show how the organization does business and the words they use to describe it and their products. Though they may not even know it, they will appreciate that you speak their language and that they don’t have to correct your incorrect assumptions. Start the meeting by asking them to talk about their problem before you pitch your solution. Pay close attention to the words they use while speaking and use the same vocabulary when you finally do present your solution. It will resonate better with them.

It’s not rocket surgery… Why do so few salespeople get this right?

Image credit: Dullhunk

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(Being) SOCIAL (for) BUSINESS – Or, what I learned at SXSW and SBS2010

Social Business
I just returned from a great week in Austin, attending the fantastic Social Business Summit (hosted by the Dachis Group) and the SXSW Interactive conference. It was a great time, and I learned A TON! Other folks have posted some great recaps, so I won’t rehash those. But, just some of the lessons I took away included:

– When dealing with enterprise level social interactions, you can’t scale with just experts, you need to let your broader front line employees scale your social capabilities. (Charlene Li and Jaime Punishill)

– People want to join something bigger than themselves and giving them something to join helps them support your efforts. (Jackie Huba)

– Stories put a human face on statistics. Don’t forget that service is a set of experiences and not just metrics. (Frank Eliason)

– Businesses thrive on the network when they adapt to it and not the other way around. (Lane Becker)

– Businesses will more readily change in the face of a threat than an opportunity. (John Hagel)

– Measure the return on the attention of social collaboration participants not on the cost of the collaboration system. (Lee Bryant)

– Marketing going social is all about having people spreading your stories because they want to. (David Meerman Scott)

…and countless more.

I also learned that pictures of cute animals in your powerpoint deck is the new black…but that’s for another post.

But even more than these business imperatives and strategies, I had a real world set of experiences that highlighted one of the keys of Social Business for me.

Since I have returned, I have been telling people that I even more than the great sessions I attended, the conversations I had in “social” situations gave me incredible value. Sure, the parties were fun. But they served a real business purpose as well. I made some great contacts at 3AM, hanging out with great people. As I reflected on my time in Austin, I realized that this real world experience was an analog to how social media can work for business and also a guide for the best way to approach social business.

Business has always relied on personal relationships. When you have a relationship with someone, you have enough trust in them that you are willing to listen to them and willing to help them when you can. This is why business is done every day with people you meet at the rotary club, or coach youth soccer with, or see at monthly tweetups…etc. Genuinely seeing people as people and building trust with them is done for its own value and creates new friendships, but it also sets up future business. I know that if and when any of my new friends from the last week need help with something, I will be genuinely happy to be able to help them…FAR more so than if someone just cold calls me and asks for my attention.

And there is the analog between real life and social media. Companies and business people who see social media as just another message or selling channel miss the point and opportunity. Social business is an opportunity to develop relationships without needing to be in the same physical space and to do so with a lot more people – with what Mike Troiano has called Scalable Intimacy. People who pay attention to what I have to say and engage with me in social media build trust with me. People who DM me to check out their latest thing even before we have exchanged any pleasantries do not.

So my number one takeaway from Austin was a reminder that you get a lot of value from personal interactions – well beyond the fun. If we remember that aspect of human nature in social business, we’re already half way to our goals.

temporary technorati stuff: 2ENDS7A7HAFN
Photo Credit: The Plan8

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Mad Men Marketing Lessons: Speaking in their language – the secret of effective message development

Effective Marketing Messages
In a season 2 Mad Med episode, Don Draper decides to send two staffers to a West coast aerospace conference, an account executive and a copywriter. He tells the copywriter, “I am sending Campbell (the account exec) to do the talking. I’m sending you to listen.”

Among the many memorable quotes from Mad Men that marketers can take away as sage advice, this is one of my favorites. the reason is that it gets to the heart of marketing (and selling too, if truth be told). In order to both identify the need of a market and to understand how they think about it and talk about it, you need to listen to them explain it in their own words.

Too often, companies are in love with their product and the cool features they have built to solve a problem. they love their elegant use of standards or cutting edge technology. they describe their products in terms that use the language of their industry. It makes them feel smart and they think it makes their products seem, therefore, to be the best.

They will also fall prey to the classic marketing trap of thinking of themselves as the market. They say, “if I describe this in terms of how I think about this, everyone will understand.” [In Mad Men, some of the less talented copywriters don’t even do that. they just assume others are the market and assume they know how they think.]

But the best marketers are great listeners. they don’t assume they know the market. they listen to what the market wants. They don’t describe a product in their own words. They use the words used by their targets or early customers to describe their problem and that solution. Even effective market research heeds this. In one of my earliest jobs, in market research, we would always run an open ended survey (endlessly coding the free form responses) to get the best way to describe things before writing the closed ended version in the language of the targets. This lesson stuck with me through my career.

The message development came from listening, not from talking/writing.

Apparently Don Draper knew that too…one of the many reasons we marketers love the show.

Photo Credit AMC

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Conversations are replacing content on the Web

OK, so maybe conversations are not REPLACING content, but it is clear that interaction and the discussion of ideas ARE changing the dynamic of the web. Just as static pages that you visit on websites are giving way to Social Distribution Streams of content you can consume anywhere, people no longer need to “publish” to communicate on the Web.

For some time now, I have found the most interesting nuggets or ideas in the comments of blog posts. Sometimes they are made by the readers and often they are made by the author in response to a question or challenge. You see this behavior on Twitter as well. People will link to, or retweet, an interesting post, article, or video and will add their own commentary as they pass the meme along.

In many ways, this behavior is a modern day letters-to-the-editor writ large and in real time. No more waiting for the next issue of your local paper so you can read the local liberal wit bitch-slap the local conservative curmudgeon, who happened to complain about an older article in the previous edition. The debate happens all over the web stream in a real-time, multi-platform discussion.

And the online discussion isn’t limited to reacting to online content. It has become harder to avoid spoilers about TV shows, etc., if you don’t watch certain shows when originally broadcast (and you didn’t avoid Facebook, Twitter, etc. until you catch up). More interesting has been the way that Twitter in particular has been inserted to create real time commentary and discussion to live events. Sometimes this is planned and productive and other times it is spontaneous and possibly disruptive (as in the recent set of cases where the audience has hijacked some conference keynotes). God help you today if you are not a good presenter or you misjudge the match between your material and your audience.

This all connects back to the themes of transparency and feedback. We are living in a world where the audience increasingly expects to participate and they will do so with or without your help or permission. Companies that choose to close comments on posts, for example, lose the ability to host and perhaps frame and influence the discussion. They don’t stop the discussion. It will happen with or without them. With Google Sidewiki it may even happen “on” their own site without their permission.

All this is actually GOOD news for the businesses and brands that learn to use the conversation to create relationships and develop communities. Messages are no longer one way communications that are distributed through a channel and controlled. Companies that recognize this and embrace this concept will flourish.

Photo by Akuppa