The Well Rounded Marketer

Buyer Personas-Your best friend in marketing

2010-07-29T11:56:00.001-04:00

I'm a huge fan of using buyer personas to help guide all manner of marketing decisions including pricing, content development, communication strategies, product design, website design and social media strategies. In fact, I'd say that creating and consistently using a brand's buyer personas is one of the most important disciplines for the WRM. Keeping focused on buyer personas insures that your product/service and marketing strategies are customer focused, not product or company focused.

A buyer persona is an archetypal example of a buyer that you create which represents a group of similar buyers that you wish to attract with your brand. You could just make a list of demographics and psychographics of your intended market and segment them but having a well crafted buyer persona helps bring that market and the segments to life. This helps everyone in your company to more intimately understand the customer experience and make customer centric decisions.

Here's an example of a business and abbreviated buyer personas:

Let's say that you own a B&B and over time you've noticed three groups of buyers that tend to visit. One group is of research scientists who stay for several weeks at a time while working at a nearby university. Another is business people who tend to stay a few nights during the week. A third is couples who come for romantic getaways on the weekend. With each of these you can develop very detailed personas which will guide different pricing, packaging and marketing strategies.

Here are some of the attributes you might build into each of these three personas:

Mark has a Ph.D and is a leading DNA researcher. He is very focused on his work. He leaves the B&B early in the morning, not typically eating breakfast and comes back late at night. He is not interested in exploring the area. All his travel plans and decisions are made by an administrative person at his home university. He will typically stay for 3-4 weeks once a year. He has no social media presence or interest.

Elizabeth is a software salesperson and comes to town once a quarter for 2 or 3 nights. Some nights she is out for business dinners while others she enjoys exploring the town or just relaxing. She makes her own travel reservations and has some leeway in spending. Sometimes she stays in hotels but prefers B&Bs because of the character and personal nature. Keeping daily contact with her family is important. Having wireless internet access is important. She uses Facebook for social interaction with friends and family but doesn't join groups with commercial interest. She has a Twitter account but doesn't monitor it regularly and doesn't Tweet much. She also has a LinkedIn account used for business networking. She prefers getting commercial messaging via email as long as it is relevant to her and not more than once a week.

Rich and Lisa have 2 young children and try to have a romantic getaway for a night or two every month. Lisa tends to do the research balancing price, the ambience of the B&B or hotel, and the local charm and activities. They have a set of regular places that they return to but also try new places once in a while. Lisa is a heavy Facebook user for all things social and commercial. She doesn't use Twitter. They do look for getaway specials which often influence their decision.

You can imagine how even just these three personas would affect the marketing strategy for the B&B owner. They each have different needs and sensitivities to be addressed through services, pricing, marketing strategies and website design. Perhaps s/he might even design the B&B website with three different portals on the home page for these personas.

Do you have buyer personas? Are they intimate, insightful, detailed and alive? Does your whole company embrace them? Make them you best friends and they will serve you well.

Do-It-Yourself Well Roundedness in 12 Weeks

2010-04-29T15:36:00.005-04:00

One website I've followed, admired, and used as a resource for several years is "The Personal MBA". I recommend it to any WRM as a great list of carefully selected business books which will increase your well roundedness.

It was created in 2005 by a young entrepreneur, Josh Kaufman, who believed he could learn faster, more efficiently and less expensively by reading the right books rather than going to business school.

Here's Josh:

And here is the Personal MBA Manifesto:

As he surveyed the market of business books he realized that others would benefit by having a website that listed the best of the best. So each year, he reads hundreds of books about business and related fields like psychology and science and recommends the best ones. The list evolves from year to year and is designed to give a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive in depth view of business across an expansive list of categories including sales, marketing, communication, negotiation, decision making, opportunity identification, creativity and innovation, finance and accounting and leadership. Currently there are 99 books in 25 categories.

The website even offers a free 12 week crash course if you have the inclination and time to read all the books. Otherwise, look at the list of 99 books and find ones that address current issues you are wrestling with or that fill gaps in your knowledge breadth or depth.

Josh also has a book coming out this fall on the Personal MBA approach to business education. I look forward to reading it and will report on it here.

Finally, if you are not sure where to start, consider "Blue Ocean Strategy". This inventive look at business strategy will get you thinking creatively and expansively about how you compete. Or appropriately, "10 Days to Faster Reading."

Cloud Computing Version 2

2010-03-31T17:35:00.001-04:00

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, has been instrumental in establishing cloud computing as an accepted enterprise technology. He isn't known to the general public as well as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates because he lives in the B2B world and doesn't market consumer products. But he has been a continuous and effective evangelist for cloud computing. He learned to lead during his early roots at Apple with Guy Kawasaki and Steve Jobs and then with Larry Ellison at Oracle. He's not only been an evangelist but he has built a significant company, Salesforce.com, from scratch to a billion dollars in revenues in 10 years. You can read about that here:

And this is what Marc looks like:

I enjoy his provocative way of declaring a vision via a simple question. For example, he says that in 1999 the thought “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com?” prompted him to leave Oracle and start Salesforce.com. His goal was to allow enterprises to run software from a simple website rather than with the traditional model of complex, customized, expensive systems and data centers.

The question he is obsessed with now is "Why isn't all enterprise software like Facebook?". Not only should software be easy to use in the cloud but it should be inherently collaborative and social.

And he views the launch of the iPad as a catalyst for the shift to an evolved form of cloud computing-a shift so profound he calls it "Cloud 2". He believes that devices like the iPad, coupled with cloud computing and social application capabilities will enable a new generation of easy-to-use and innovative applications that will change the world. The applications we use today will be rewritten to integrate a raft of new technologies including touch screens, social media, feeds, video, geolocation, and smart phones.

I don't think there is much to argue with here. The convergence of hardware capabilities-especially tablets, the ubiquitousness of broadband internet access, the explosion of social media, the explosion of mobile devices and the increasing sophistication of cloud based software creates a potent combination for compelling and wholesale new creation. It's more a matter of how and when this new generation will unfold. It will be fun to participate and fun to behold!

(read more in the TechCrunch article, "Hello, iPad. Hello, Cloud 2".)

Social Media Demographics and Technographics 2009 Update

2010-02-22T14:59:00.007-05:00

As you've seen in earlier blog posts, I'm a big fan of the smart people at Forrester Research and the frameworks they create to systematically evaluate and understand markets and trends. About a year ago I wrote about "Social Media Demographics and Technographics" and pointed to Forrester's book "Groundswell" and their initial attempt to meaningfully map social media users and adoption.

As it turns out, their initial framework has stood the test of a chaotic year with one addition which I'll mention later. But first, I thought it would be fun to see how technographic adoption for my own demographic has shifted during this year of explosive social media adoption.

Here's the data from 2008 for men my age in the U.S. and the ways in which they participate in social media:

Here's the 2009 data for the same group:

Are there any surprises? Not really. The biggest leaps are in the "Creators", about a third more men, and in the joiners, about 50% more. About a fifth of this segment doesn't participate vs. a quarter a year earlier.

The indexes vs. all adults indicate that these men have actually not grown in social media usage as much as women and younger male demographics, again as we might expect.

You can use this Forrester tool right here to access data for other demographics. Remember, the rungs are not mutually exclusive segments-most people participate in multiple ways.

Forrester also realized with the advent of Twitter and increased use of social status updates that there was a missing rung on the ladder. So they've added a rung going forward called "Conversationalists". Here's their new technographic ladder:

Click on the ladder to go to Forrester and find more great Groundswell information.

Nurture the Geek in You

2010-01-06T15:25:00.003-05:00

We all have some latent Geek in us-a part of us that enjoys not just what technology does but that also marvels at the workings and ingenuity of the technology itself. The WRM fully nurtures their inner Geek, bringing alive all the inherent passion they can for the exploding digital world. The WRM strives for a hands-on sense of the breadth, the shortcomings and the possibilities of technology, insights into the experience and minds of their customers and a front row view of the imminent shifts in digital marketing.

The last decade was merely the birthing of the Digital Age. Nascent working models for digital media components-social, mobile, broadband, music, television, advertising, search, Cloud, etc. reached wholesale adoption levels while in many cases reinventing themselves along the way multiple times. These cycles of invention and reinvention will only continue this next decade and with this pace of change, there is no way to meaningfully predict the landscape even five years out.

Along the way, the media and the marketers have lagged these dramatic digital and cultural changes. In the next decade those media and marketers who can catch up will be the winners.

The WRM must then become a digital enthusiast. S/he must awaken the Geek within and learn to engage, immerse and find delight in the digital world unfolding around them.

To this end, I've assembled a list of 12 free applications and websites the WRM may want to explore, use or even adopt as a day-to-day tool. (One great thing about the digital world is the amount of useful free stuff that is available).

This list is only a start. The WRM should subscribe to some forward looking content like TechCrunch, Mashable or the technology section of the New York Times, including David Pogue. Make it a fearless practice to look for new free things to try or join every week. This is part of your new job.

Here are my suggestions-some are standards and some my whimsy:

This is the standard social media site with 350 million users. You must have a nominal Facebook presence and spend some time with it weekly. Upload pictures and make some useful or fun posts, find some friends you really care about, join some groups

This is emerging as a standard (at least for now) with about 18 million users. You must have a nominal Twitter presence and spend some time on it weekly. You can do it on your computer, you don't have to have a mobile account. At the least, follow people you respect in your industry, news organizations or companies who have good Twitter strategies (e.g. Zappos). It's OK to have a small following. Cull the list so that they are people who will benefit from things you are likely to Twitter. When you attend conferences or webinars, monitor the Twitter hashtag for that event to see how it is used and jump in if you feel compelled. Remember, no fear!

This is a business standard with 55 million users. You should have at least a nominal Linkedin presence and spend time on it weekly. It's worth completing your profile including recommendations-this is the new way people and resumes are found and shared. Network with some colleagues from the past. Join some relevant groups. Have fun answering some business questions in the "Answers" section.

Your browser is perhaps your most used app. With the advent of Cloud computing, the browser will only become more critical. I prefer light, uncluttered fast apps which is also Google's mantra. You deserve to try Chrome, Google's browser-it's fast and uses far fewer resources than Internet Explorer and even Firefox.

You need antivirus protection. But McAfee and Norton are complex and cumbersome...you can literally feel the drag on your computer, especially if it's older. Panda Cloud is the first Cloud based antivirus solution. All the heavy lifting is done on their servers, not your computer. It's small and light. Look at how simple the main screen is (above). It even got a PC Magazine Editor's Choice award.

Skype has over 500 million users who use it for video calls, phone calls and instant messaging. The application is free but you need a video camera, microphone and speakers to make a free video call. Find some friends or family across the country or the world who you'd like to spend time with more often and give it a try. Skype was just sold by Ebay to a group of technology investors who are likely to do some interesting things with it-for example Panasonic and LG just announced integrating Skype into their internet connected HD televisions.

Evernote is a place on the internet to store your life. They call it "Lifeblogging". You can store pictures, ideas, audio, notes, web pages, screenshots, PDFs, documents, etc. and access them from anywhere. You can tag and/or geo-tag the items and organize them yourself or Evernote will index and search it for you. Their technology includes OCR (Optical Character Recognition)so even handwritten notes will be searched. You can upload from mobile devices too. They just passed 2 million users. The founder's ultimate vision is that we simply video our whole life, tag the events, thoughts and milestones and store it on Evernote. Imagine that!

"Readability" is a tool that reduces clutter on web pages. It's easy to use. Of course it gets rid of advertising which doesn't help us marketers. But hopefully, it will encourage us to participate in more tasteful and targeted advertising environments so that users won't find a need to use "Readability".

Pandora will stream music to you all day long for free. You pick the artists that you like and they will play that artist and artists like them so that you can easily discover new music. They actually use real musicians in a major music analysis project called "The Music Genome Project" to figure out which music is most like other music. The music business has changed from CDs to downloaded music and will shift again to streaming music from the Cloud. Pandora is a free way to experience music from the Cloud. If you are willing to spend $5 a month for unlimited streaming music look at Mog -it's free for an hour with no credit card.

Understand firsthand how easy it is to create a personal or small business website. Squarespace has a free 14 day trial, no credit card required. Squarespace is a well reviewed website publishing and hosting company known for design quality and reliability.

As the Cloud expands with light, easy to use applications the large,complex, bloated applications that have to be loaded on your computer (e.g. Microsoft Office) will be relegated to big business.

There are now applications in the Cloud for virtually everything you can think of. Zoho alone has a couple dozen web based productivity and collaboration apps most of which are free.

Google will be launching their own Chrome operating system this year designed for Netbooks to efficiently use Cloud applications. Netbooks didn't even exist a few years ago and in 2009 sales doubled from 2008 to 30 million units.

So Google docs is one of the current Cloud standards for creating and collaborating on documents, spreadsheets and presentations online. I find the interface sparse but as with all these applications, the goal is to experience them firsthand.

Ironically, Microsoft Office 2010, due out later this year, will have a free ad supported Cloud version. You can try the desktop beta for free now.

This is the icon for the "Snipping Tool" that comes with Vista or Windows 7. I'm throwing it in here because it's so damn useful and no one seems to know they have it. (Awakening the inner Geek includes exploring the unused functions of the software you already have.) The Snipping Tool lets you grab any size piece of anything on your screen to save or put into a document or email. I've even used it to grab a frame from a video. Oh, and by the way, if you have Vista, upgrade to Windows 7 pronto. It's stable and faster. Don't think of it as an upgrade, just an improved Vista.

C = 4m + 3v + 2(i-f) - 2a ©

2009-11-17T19:07:00.005-05:00

This is an heuristic, a working formula, that indicates the factors that affect conversion rates of web landing pages. It's a fully educated formula, born of thousands of tests by a very left brained company, Marketing Experiments. They are a marketing research lab, completely focused on helping marketers optimize marketing communications by testing all reasonable approaches. They are owned by the MECLABS Group which also owns Marketing Sherpa, another marketing focused company with great research and insights. Both companies have large followings and offer a large buffet of free content and paid education of great value to the Well Rounded Marketer.

The formula's parameters are as follows:

C = conversion rate
m = motivation of the prospect
v = the value proposition's clarity and power
i = incentive to convert
f = friction in the conversion process (e.g. hard to read)
a = anxiety (e.g. giving out information)
© = copyright :-)

My interpretation of this is that if the multiplier is relatively larger the value it modifies is relatively smaller. So a given level of anxiety will overcome an equal measure of value proposition. Value proposition is more powerful than motivation. Anxiety is equal to the difference of the incentive to convert minus the friction of converting. A given level of anxiety is twice as strong as the same level of motivation.

No matter the weighting, all these contributors and inhibitors to conversion should be addressed in best practice landing page design. Keep them clean, simple, focused and compelling. Keep them focused on one desired action. Give prospects a strong incentive to act promptly. Don't ask for information that is not immediately essential. (You can always collect more as the nurturing process moves on.) Make sure your privacy policy is easily accessible. Make sure the value proposition is utterly clear.

Here's a simple example where Marketing Experiments tested two versions of a New York Times subscription landing page. The second had more than 6 times the paid orders than the first just by repositioning the "intro offer" to a "free trial".

Before:

After:

Landing pages performance can be dramatically improved by very simple changes. Make it a practice to continually experiment with your landing page elements and be sure to track the results.

Two Fresh Books for the WRM

2009-10-14T13:11:00.003-04:00

Here are two new, complementary books for the WRM. One is on social media and the other on "inbound marketing" of which social media is a key component.

The first, "socialnomics: how social media transforms the way we live and do business," was published in August and written by Erik Qualman, currently the Vice President of Online Marketing for the world's largest private educator.

To generate interest in the book they've created a compelling video with data about the growth of social media which is likely worth 2 and 1/2 minutes of your time. (If you don't like it, let me know and I'll send you a time voucher refund. :-) )

Socialnomics proposes a simple and useful framework to describe how companies should continuously interact with customers via social media:

The 8 step cycle begins with the company listening. Notice that the company shouldn't begin selling until they've listened, interacted and reacted with customers. As the customer goes through the buying process and the using process, they are listening and interacting and reacting, noting the quality of their buying experience and the service or product they've bought and sharing that with the company and/or others. They ideally become a positive "salesman" for the company but could also become a negative one. If the process is working at it's best, the company will be aware of all this in real time and adjust iteratively.

The second book, "Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs" is written by the two founders of Hubspot, Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan. Hubspot is an "inbound marketing" company I've written about enthusiastically in earlier posts. (I'm still enthusiastic about them.) The hardcover will ship on the 18th of this month and the Kindle edition is already available.

"Inbound Marketing" according to Hubspot requires constant publishing in a variety of formats and places so that you have maximized your chances of being found by your customers or prospects. For that reason, their website is ever expanding and it is hard to find an orderly and efficient progression of inbound knowledge. This book will likely provide this and be a great starter for inbound marketing newbies and a good refresher for the experienced.

P.S. Don't forget to put Groundswell on your social media reading list too, mentioned in an earlier post. Click on the book to go to that post.

Meet Multivariate Testing-Your New Best Friend

2009-08-21T13:35:00.001-04:00

In a previous post I mentioned the importance of testing for the WRM and noted that it is probably one of the important marketing disciplines least practiced...and therefore a discipline with rare opportunity to build competitive advantage and improved financials.

A marketer should be testing constantly and should test whatever can be tested, starting with those areas that have the greatest leverage. This may include pricing, positioning, branding, headlines, promotions, channels, content, tone, and even whole environments (e.g. websites, direct mail, catalogs).

Testing OFAT (one factor at a time, also known as A/B testing)is how most testing has been done (or not done). It can be slow, often months or years, and expensive.

The superior option, only recently available to marketers, is multivariate testing (MVT), also known as multivariable testing or factorial design testing. The math for multivariate analysis has been around for over 100 years. But it is complex, intensive, laborious math when done by hand. Only recently has computational power allowed MVT to become mainstream.

The benefits of MVT over A/B testing include:

-smaller sample sizes (=lower costs)
-ability to test multiple variables simultaneously in one experiment (= much faster results and lower costs)
-ability to test combinations of factors ("recipes") rather than just single factors (e.g. a price and a headline)

Here's some data from an MVT supplier for marketers, Conversion Multiplier, that brings the MVT difference to life:

A multitude of selling factors can influence whether your prospects convert to customers. These include headlines, subheads, benefits copy, graphic layouts, prices, discounts, guarantees, privacy assurances, bonus offers, background colors, images, navigation structures, product presentations, calls-to-action, shopping carts, and more.

Just two variations for each of these 15 factors produces 32,768 combinations to test. Three variables produce 14.3 million combinations, and 4 variations -- more than a billion. Because A/B split testing is a sequential process, you're looking at years, if not lifetimes, to identify the winning combinations.

MVT is now mainstream in website optimization and a host of tools are available for that niche. In fact, MVT is an integral part of Google's Website Optimizer and they've done a masterful job of keeping the math behind the scenes. Here's a screen shot from Website Optimizer showing how easy it is to interpret results-in this case three combinations of variables were tested on a website vs. the original:

But MVT has little visibility in the remaining universe of marketing in part because there are few tools to enable it with the ease of Google Website Optimizer.

One affordable mainstream tool worth a look is the direct marketing SaaS, Longbow. The Longbow website includes a primer on MVT and also a very useful sample size calculator.
Longbow would be a good tool for performing experiments on direct mail and email campaigns.

Or you may want to hire a consultant or build staff expertise to design and execute your experiment strategy.

Other than those focused on website optimization and a few direct marketers, I have not met a marketer who tests with the breadth, frequency and discipline that is possible. There is no excuse not to test and in fact there are profound benefits-the benefit of the testing itself is measurable and it will also confirm or deny the effectiveness of your marketing components in quantitative terms. Testing should be an ongoing, iterative and strategic part of any marketing plan, ingrained in the marketing culture and a nurtured corporate skill. And with today's computational tools, MVT in particular can give you a quick competitive advantage and financial gain.

B2B Social Media Technographics

2009-06-17T10:32:00.005-04:00

Two blog posts ago, I wrote about a superlative book about social media usage, "Groundswell" , and the framework used in the book to segment levels of social media participation. I also wrote about the related profile tool that Forrester Research provides to generate snapshots of how many consumers fall in each of the six technographic segments of this framework also organized by three demographic criteria: age, country and gender.

I'm pleased to see that Forrester has just put online a similar profile tool for B2B technology buyers. Here's a sample output screen for technology buyers of software in businesses with 100-499 employees who are responsible for buying software:

The good news is that 78% are participating in social media which would indicate that a social media strategy would be an essential part of a marketing mix to attract this market. (caveat: the sample size of 80 is small-you'd want to confirm that your own customers and prospects have similar characteristics)

Here's the same profile for companies with 20,000+ employees. Social media participation is less for each segmentation of the technographic ladder but overall participation still nets out about the same, at 79%:
This data is great for those targeting technology buyers which basically means IT people. A next step for Forrester is to gather data for other markets within businesses, e.g. marketers, sales people, HR, executives, etc.

My experience is that corporate marketers, although they are responsible to evaluate social media as part of their own company's marketing mix, are less likely to use it themselves than the data shown here for IT people. Here is an observation I made as a response to a blog post by Laura Ramos at Forrester:

My experience with our prospects and clients, marketing managers and executives of mid and large size companies, is this:

most are on the ignorant, reluctant, trailing edge of adopting things like blogs, Twitter, Rss feeds, Facebook profiles and groups, etc.
many do not even "search" regularly on business topics (e.g. we can't get to them via organic or PPC)
the ones who are more adventurous, trying things like having a Facebook profile or joining a Facebook group, or blogging are disappointed at how little benefit there is and how much time it takes from other activities
So we in turn, do maintain our blog, facebook group, rss feed, PPC etc. for image and to reach the minority of enthusiastic adopters, but the bulk of our marketing success still comes from old school marketing-trade shows, media coverage, telemarketing,etc.

I'd be interested to hear from others who market to B2B audiences to hear about their experiences with social media marketing to different audience types (e.g. IT vs. marketing).
Finally, here's a live version of the B2B tool that you can test drive right now:

The Dunbar Number and Social Media

2009-05-15T10:50:00.005-04:00

The Dunbar Number is 148. It is a prediction of the mean group size of social groups for humans or basically, the number of people with which a human can have meaningful relationships.

This number was predicted by an evolutionary psychologist, Robin Dunbar, at the University College London in the 90's. He noticed that a given species of primates always formed groups no larger than a certain size and, more intimately, that a member of a group always had about the same number of grooming partners. For example, chimpanzee tribes number about 50 and each chimp has no more than 2 or 3 grooming partners.

He proposed that the maximum group size for a primate species depends on the size of the primate's neocortex. Extrapolating to humans, he derived the theoretical group size of 148, noting that this limit seems to be reinforced by the size of various human social organizations including Neolithic villages, Hutterite communities and army units.

He also noted that rather than "physically grooming", humans are able to substitute language as the key way for humans to maintain personal contact. He speculates that as much of 42% of a group's time would have to be devoted to social grooming/interaction to maintain group cohesion.

You can read Dunbar's document here.

This concept was then popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's book, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. " In this book, he shows how ideas and message and behaviors can become mainstream when even a small number of people start behaving differently, an appealing concept to a marketer. He points to the Dunbar number group size as foundational in organizing marketing campaigns.

Two other anthropologists, H. Russell Bernard and Peter Kilworth, have led field studies directly focused on modern society and have found a repeated finding roughly double the Dunbar estimate (a mean number of 290, a median of 231).

Now, with new Social Media mechanisms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter humans have new and efficient ways to establish social groups. Do these in practice reflect the hypothetical limits that the scientists suggest? Or do the social media mechanisms enable a greater effective social group due to more efficient methods of "grooming?" Or do they enable more gradients of "grooming and quality of relationship?" How can marketers harness this?

At this point I see three directions:

People will continue to have the same size small set of intimate friends they had before Social Media. Social Media will enhance those relationships.
People will maintain ongoing casual relationships with a larger sphere of people, likely in the range of the Dunbar number for the more socially active. This sphere will be of people they actually know. These groups may be somewhat larger than "before Social Media" due to the efficiency and nature of the communication mechanisms.
Social Media mechanisms will allow people who offer value much vaster circles of influence than ever possible before.

Here's data from a Facebook case study from The Economist which reinforces the first two points:

The average number of Facebook friends in a network is 120 with women having somewhat more than men. However, the number with which an individual regularly interacts is much smaller than their network. The average man has regular two way communication with only 4 friends, the average woman with 6. These numbers don't increase much (10 and 16, respectively) for those with large networks, 500+.

This third point has been amply demonstrated with Twitter where top influencers directly reach hundreds of thousands of people who have chosen to follow them (e.g. Guy Kawasaki, Ashton Kutcher). Their tweets are then retweeted which increases the effective reach. Most importantly, there is value and real influence in the content.

So I believe Social Media has changed the nature of social groups and grooming. There is no longer one Dunbar number. As marketers, we need to keep abreast of the newly evolving social break points that Social Media mechanisms enable and harness them in our marketing efforts. We have unprecedented opportunities to find fans and influencers and have messages spread faster, more quickly and more efficiently than ever before.

Social Media Demographics and Technographics

2009-04-21T17:59:00.010-04:00

As Well Rounded Marketers, we want data to help understand our marketplaces accurately and to make balanced decisions. This is especially important with social media, a quickly moving target with standardized measurement tools, methodologies and businesses only emerging.

Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li (both of Forrester Research) wrote a seminal book last year (not quite ancient history yet) but a great place to start for a comprehensive set of case studies of businesses using social media and useful measurement methodologies. Included is a useful framework for evaluating the stages of social media participation which they call the Social Technographics Ladder. Each step up in the ladder represents a group of consumers more involved in social media than the step below. To be categorized in a particular segment, they must have participated in that activity at least once in the last month. Here is the ladder (click to enlarge):

And here's a link to an 8 slide presentation on the ladder.

Now for the good part. They also provide a profile tool so that you can generate a snapshot of how many consumers fall in each technographic segment organized by three demographic criteria: age, country and gender.

Here's a snapshot of my demographics (45-54, U.S., Male):

I was surprised that versus the whole population, my group of baby boomer men is at or above the average in being "critics" and "collectors". I had assumed that this would be more strongly skewed to the younger demographics.

It's worth going to the tool and sorting by different demographics to see where your assumptions are awry and to see how different demographic groups compare. And remember, this is 2008 data. Social media usage has grown dramatically since then. Facebook has 200% annual growth as of March (to 91M) and Twitter has 1200% growth(to 14M). Some of this is international growth but US penetration has also grown substantially.

My hope is that they add a time dimension to this already useful tool and framework so we can see growth velocity by various demographics and technographics.

Cool Internet Tools

2009-04-09T14:08:00.003-04:00

As I mentioned in the post on inbound marketing, Hubspot is a company that excites me. They get me excited about inbound marketing and in the energetic, progressive and fun way that they do business. They are fearless about trying new things, yet with the discipline (born of a high ratio of MIT/Sloan managers) to continually measure and iterate.

One aspect of their inbound marketing strategy is to have a family of free "Grader" tools for internet marketers. These are very useful tools, continually updated and designed to create viral word-of-mouth among their prospects and good enough to invite repeat usage.

Website Grader

The original and most robust tool is the Website Grader , now used about 900,000 times. All you do is put in a URL (yours or those of competitors if you want) and in a minute or so you get a very thorough report including a percentile grade on how well you performed in marketing effectiveness versus all the other URLs that have been tested.

You can repeat the test over time to track your progress in improving the marketing effectiveness of your site. I've even used it in the past to manage website designers by attaching a bonus to achieving a 90+ score.

Press Release Grader
The Press Release Grader helps you make sure the news releases that you or your PR agency write are optimized for effective inbound marketing. This includes the readability level, contact information, use of "Gobbledygook words", link analysis, and a word cloud to confirm that the key themes that you intended in the release are coming through.

Note: "Gobbledygook words" are those that are overused. Here are some examples of commonly overused B2B words from the Gobbledygook Manifesto (click to enlarge):

I've used the press release release grader dozens of times and each time I always find something to improve. There's no reason you shouldn't always target a score in the 90s.

Twitter Grader
The Twitter Grader, like Twitter, is quickly evolving. The current version gives you a grade and a rank and reports whether basic information is visible and gives you basic statistics for a Twitter profile. It also includes some tools (e.g. "Twitsnip") and ability to look at statistics for top Twitter users segmented in different ways (e.g. by city).

I haven't found Twitter to be indispensably useful as of yet, so nor do I find the Twitter Grader as compelling as the first two tools. But if you are a Twitter user, you should certainly check it out.

Facebook Grader
The Facebook Grader can be geared to business or personal sites. As with Twitter, the focus of the score and ranking seems to be on quantity, rather than quality. Your "reach and authority" is based on how many "friends" you have and the number of "friends" your friends have, etc.

As with the Twitter Grader, you can also browse the "elite", those users or pages with the highest reach and authority. (e.g. Barack Obama, Coca-Cola, Homer Simpson)

My sense is that most business users have a more serious presence, "their business face", on LinkedIn so I hope Hubspot attempts a LinkedIn Grader too.

Personality Grader
The Personality Grader is an interesting and ambitious project, the latest of the "graders". It analyzes and measures your online presence across thousands of social sites. It measures frequency and size of network but also attempts to measure "sentiment" via computational linguistics and "intelligence".

My Personality Grade today is 63.5. I have the "reach of a celebrity" although my content has the "emotion of a spambot." I don't understand the intelligence scores as it suggests that I share less about my personal life which I don't really share online at all.

It might be interesting if this report also showed the links and authority for one's name beyond social sites including mentions in interviews, news releases, video tags, etc.

All in all, this is a very useful set of tools for anyone who is online or who markets online and I know that Hubspot will continue to improve their usefulness.

News about News Releases

2009-03-31T14:26:00.005-04:00

Disintermediation. I love trying to say that word. I love the concept.

It basically means "taking out the middleman" and this is happening in many industries today due to the internet and to the benefit of consumers.

And that is what is happening with news releases, AKA press releases. Now, your prospects can read news releases directly, without the content having to go through a PR agency, journalists and publication.

The old model-the release is targeted to journalists:

A news release is written by a PR agency in stodgy PR lingo and sent to journalists in hopes of obtaining media coverage. This only happens a few times a year when there is big company news that journalists will want to write about. The wire services cost about $2000 a pop in addition to the fees of the PR agency to write the news release and follow up with journalists. Prospects will only see the information if a journalist of a publication they read chooses to publish the story.

The new model-the release is targeted to prospects:

You write your own news release targeted to your prospects in language friendly to them. You write news releases frequently (e.g. twice a month), whenever there is even modest news prospects would be interested in. (e.g. a promotion, a webinar, exhibiting at a tradeshow). You write the release to be search engine optimized to your keywords and include links to appropriate pages on your website. You publish them via the new breed of wire services (e.g. PRWeb) for about $200 a pop. These wire services make sure your news release makes it to the new breed of news sites like Google News and Yahoo! News which are regularly crawled by search engines. When your prospects search for what you offer, your content and links show up.

Think of yourself as a publisher

Basically, this is another way for you to publish relevant content about your business (like blogging or Facebook groups or Twittering) where the content is fresh and will increase the chances that your business will be found by your prospects. Think of yourself as being in the publishing business with news releases as a very good way to publish your content.

At Loyalty Builders, where I last worked, our second greatest source of web visits for many months came from news releases, placing after organic search.

To be fair, the old school method is still very important. For most businesses, a hybrid strategy will be best-publishing directly for prospects and getting media coverage from journalists and bloggers. Find a PR agency that's good with the new and the old. I worked most recently with Version 2 Communications in Boston who was a great partner in creating direct to prospect news releases, generating media and blog coverage, evaluating new social media channels and generally keeping a focus on whatever it took for effective lead generation.

Here's an insightful eBook from David Meerman Scott, "The New Rules of PR ," to help you get started.

And here's a useful tool from Hubspot called the "Press Release Grader" which will help you make sure your release is search optimized.

What is Inbound Marketing?

2009-03-24T13:38:00.005-04:00

You may have heard the term "inbound marketing" floating out there in the digisphere. It is a new fundamental marketing approach the WRM should know about and likely be implementing in some way in the marketing mix. Here's a brief primer on what it is, what it isn't, why it is good and when to use it.

Let's start with what it isn't. It's not the old school marketing, AKA "interruption marketing" or "outbound marketing" that we grew up with although these tactics are still widely in use today and can still be economic. "Outbound marketing" is the set of marketing approaches that actively put messages in front of prospects, usually without permission. These tactics include:

advertising
direct mail
trade shows
email blasts
cold calling

"Outbound marketing", although the longtime standard, is not ideal for the marketer or the prospect as collateral damage is a matter of course-it's the carpet bombing of marketing. Many experience the message who shouldn't or don't want to, eroding brand image and creating extra costs for the marketer.

In contrast, "inbound marketing" is designed to have the prospect willingly come to you. This is because of the web wide framework you have set up that allows them to easily find you when they are looking for what you offer.

It sounds like SEO but it's bigger. The framework you have set up includes a comprehensive set of search engine optimization, social media, thought leadership and tools initiatives to insure that your prospects find you immediately whenever they are looking for what you offer via search engines or social media. Yes, you have search optimized your website and created lots of quality inbound links but you also have become an aggressive and consistent publisher of content, also search optimized, including blogs, whitepapers, eBooks, slide shows, videos, podcasts and news releases. You have continuous presence on the social media vehicles your prospects are likely to use, e.g. customer forums, wikis, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And you've created useful, relevant tools and/or fun viral media to also draw prospects to your website.

The beauty of inbound marketing is better targeting and greater efficiency-only those who are likely to buy actually come to you.

Now read this: "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of "inbound marketing" written by David Meerman Scott.

There's also an energetic Boston based company, Hubspot, which provides an inbound marketing methodology and services and who is a thought leader and evangelist for inbound marketing. David Meerman Scott is an advisor to their board. Check out their website and notice that they do eat their own dog food...all their marketing is "inbound marketing."

My personal dream would be to create all my marketing around "inbound marketing" and I tried to at my last company, Loyalty Builders. However, what I discovered was that for the B2B customer set we targeted, having solely "inbound marketing" wouldn't work for two reasons:

not enough of our prospects were active users of social media or even of search engines(see the first post of this blog for more on this).
not enough of our prospects knew that what we offered existed, i.e. they wouldn't be searching to fulfill a need they didn't know they had.

But we did effectively mix "old school" and "new school" marketing effectively and I'm sure the shift will be to more "new school" over time. It's more efficient for everyone.

Here are some actual results from another B2B company from 2008:

78% of initial inquiries were from paid outbound efforts, 22% from "free" inbound efforts
2% of the outbound inquiries closed, 12% of the inbound closed
net, the inbound lead close rate was 6 times more efficient
net, 65% of the total customers came from inbound marketing

So why wouldn't this company use "inbound marketing" exclusively? Because they wouldn't get enough leads to support their business model. But you know they will be pushing hard to maximize inbound leads at every turn.

So "inbound marketing" should be in every WRMs arsenal. If you have customers who use internet search or social media, you should be using it now as part of your marketing mix. If you have "long tail" customers, it's especially efficient versus outbound marketing. It will be more efficient than your outbound efforts although it may not fill your pipeline. You are likely to get your best cost per lead by build the best inbound strategy you can and filling in the rest with outbound.

Using the 7-S Framework for planning

2009-03-19T16:40:00.008-04:00

Way back in 1982, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, from the McKinsey consulting firm, published one of the most widely read business books ever, "In Search of Excellence." In the book they presented a planning model which I find timeless and useful to this day for any kind of planning-tactical, strategic, marketing, corporate, etc.

It's called the "7-S Framework" and contains seven interrelated mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive attributes of any organization that should be considered in any strategy or project planning process.

Here's a visual representation:

Let's briefly review each one. I find it preferable to go through them in this order:

Shared Values
At the center of the model are "shared values" also called "superordinate goals". These are the core values of the company in terms of how you operate with all your constituencies-employees, customers, vendors, and shareholders.

Are these written down for your organization?
Do all employees know them?
Are they practiced consistently?
Should any be changed or added?

Strategy
Articulate your objectives and the ways that you will achieve them.

Be quantitative about objectives-revenue, market share, profit, share of voice, etc.
Be sure to address value proposition and competitive advantage

Skills
This includes skills of individuals but as important, it includes organizational skills. If you are trying to plan a new customer service initiative and your organization has been poor at that you must address that skill at the macro and micro levels.

Systems
This does mean "hard" systems like networks, computers and software. But it also includes "soft" systems, human processes and procedures. It might include a reporting schedule, meeting schedule, communications requirements, training or monthly reviews.

Staff
How many and what kind of people do you need to realistically execute this strategy? Since the 7-S's are interrelated, you must address their skill sets and values too.

Style
What's the appropriate personality of this endeavor? Is it fun? Is it buttoned up? Is it collegial?

Structure
I've listed this last as it tends to get overemphasized and tends to get political. Structures should be fluid and constantly tweaked to best serve the business. What structure will best accomplish your business goals? Are there appropriate leaders in the right places with accountability and empowerment?

If you go through all 7-S's in a thorough manner and make sure they reinforce each other, you will have the basis for a solid plan for your initiative.

(thanks to Doug Burgum, an ex McKinsey consultant, my ex CEO at Great Plains Software and ex Senior Vice President at Microsoft for imparting the 7-S Framework to all of us many years ago)

How the WRM can Use Tag or Word Clouds

2009-03-17T10:17:00.013-04:00

A tag or word cloud is a powerful way to visually understand large amounts of data. And one can be easily generated by you or me.

note: a tag is a keyword or term assigned to a piece of information like a photo or file to help it be found by searching. Notice that there are tags ("labels")at the bottom of this post.

Here's a tag cloud from Flickr, the photo hosting site, showing the all time most popular tags for the photos on the site. You'll notice that the "cloud" of tags is in alphabetical order so it's easy to find words you may be looking for. The words are of various sizes, the larger ones indicating that there are more photos tagged with those terms. On Flickr, all the terms are hyperlinked so that you can click on it and go right to the photos with that tag.

You can quickly see that the number one category of photos is "weddings" and that most photos seem tied to travel and various locations around the world.

A word cloud is similar to a tag cloud except that it visually shows the relative occurrences of words rather than tags. These can be useful to marketers who have large amounts of written customer interactions (e.g. forums, blogs, Youtube video comments, Facebook groups) and want an easy way to discern the sentiments of the customers without having to read and categorize all the comments.

There are free tools on the Internet to generate word clouds. A good one is Tagcrowd , created by a doctoral student at Stanford University. It's very, very easy to do-just put in the url, upload a file or paste the text to be visualized.

Here's a word cloud I created of this blog:

I'm pleased that "marketing" and "customer" are the strongest themes and that "testing" and "social" show up strongly. If words showed up that I didn't intend to be major themes for this blog, I would know to change my writing.

Cool Websites: Internet Archive and WayBack Machine

2009-03-12T14:18:00.007-04:00

Occasionally, I'll point out some cool websites to expand the mind of the WRM.

Have you visited the Internet Archive and it's WayBack Machine?

The goal of the Internet Archive is "universal access to human knowledge." That's ostensibly Google's goal too, albeit from a commercial perspective. The Internet Archive is a non-profit focused on building a digital library of Internet websites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Sort of the Library of Alexandria of the 21st century.

The WayBack Machine let's you browse through 85 billion web pages archived since 1996. So you can see websites at previous points in time.

As a marketer, it could be useful in a variety of ways-looking for past content from your own websites that you can't find internally, looking for nostalgia to use in new campaigns, looking for past competitive insights, positioning, etc. And of course, it can just be fun looking around in the past like looking at dusty, old magazines saved in the attic.

For example, here's Apple's website from October 22, 1996. You can get totally excited seeing the new PowerBook Family announcement with a 117MHz processor and 16MB of RAM for only $3500.

Since you were wondering, the Internet Archive is a huge database-2 petabytes so far, growing at 20 terabytes per month. You can link to old pages on the WayBack Machine as shown above. And the name comes from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon show.

note: a petabyte is a thousand terabytes which is a thousand gigabytes which is a thousand megabytes. A typical PC sold today comes with 500 gigabytes of storage so the WayBack machine would require 4000 PCs worth of storage. As an additional aside, it's been estimated that the entire works of mankind in recorded history amounts to 50 petabytes of data. Next in line is the exabyte, then the zettabyte, then the yottabyte.

Testing-Sample Size and Power Analysis

2009-03-11T11:06:00.005-04:00

As I mentioned in another post, most marketers, including yours truly, do not test nearly enough.

Why? There are many reasons-it's intimidating, we haven't been trained in it, it takes more effort and time, it's too hard to get the necessary data from corporate systems, it's not ingrained in the marketer or corporate culture, etc.

Testing should be a regular part of a marketer's routine and virtually everything-including headlines, content, and offers via website, direct mail, advertising, and email-can and should be tested on an ongoing basis.

Multivariate testing can ultimately be faster and cheaper and tell you more but even simple A/B testing over time will make marketing strategies more efficient.

One obstacle for marketers is either figuring out how big the sample size should be or if they can rely on the results of the sample they've used (power analysis).

There are a variety of useful calculators on the Internet to do this but I thought I'd point you to a favorite, on the website of Longbow, a predictive analytics and direct marketing SaaS from Loyalty Builders (my old employer). It's a favorite because it is fast and easy to use and has robust documentation for all levels of users:

SAMPLE SIZE AND POWER ANALYSIS CALCULATOR

Here's a sample output computing sample size. Note that it shows the curve of the relationship between sample size and power allowing you to quickly see the trade offs of choosing different levels:

One final note-this calculator became a great viral tool for us. It shows up on the first page for a "power analysis" search and became the second most visited page on the Longbow website after the home page.

Recession Marketing-Part Two

2009-03-10T10:43:00.004-04:00

What's a marketer to do during this recession? In the last post, I suggested looking hard at shifting spending mix from new customer marketing to existing customer marketing and then to consider several ways of improving existing customer marketing efficiency and effectiveness.

There is another asset that you have that could also be worth looking at in new ways-your existing leads and even your "old" leads.

Many companies get into an inefficient cycle where marketing provides too many unqualified leads, sales doesn't qualify all of them and good ones get thrown away. In one company I worked for we went back to past leads to do a win-loss analysis and discovered that 40% were still alive!

So a good starting point, depending on the nature of your business and the length of the sales cycle, would be to not only go to your existing leads but include leads from the past 6 months or year. Do a win-loss analysis on a sample of them to decide if there is still opportunity there.

Consider scoring your existing leads to better determine how to allocate resources. Assign weighted scores for various behavioral and demographic attributes and then focus marketing and sales efforts on those that exceed levels significant to your business.

Below is the "Automated 21 Day Lead Lifecycle" flow chart from Marketo, a smart company that provides a lead scoring and management SaaS that integrates with Saleforce.com. Once a lead scores 65 according to their model, it is ripe for sales force contact. Leads below that level are kept in an "active prospect database" for marketing.

Here are some sample demographic and behavioral scores for Marketo-yours would need to be tuned to your business.

-visit a webpage: 1
-visit more than 8 pages in one visit: 7
-open an email: 1
-register for a webinar: 5
-attend a webinar: 5
-visit pricing pages: 5
-visit career pages: -10 (not likely to be a buying prospect)

If you are interested in more on lead scoring, here's an insightful presentation, "Marketo's Secret Sauce for Demand Generation."

5 Suggestions for Recession Marketing

2009-03-05T17:39:00.006-05:00

"Can a recession reshape marketing habits?"

"Recession-Busting Marketing"

"Focusing Your Marketing Spend In An Economic Downturn"

"Recession marketing: be brave or be gone"

"Social Media to Weather Recession"

There's a proliferation of articles, blogs, webinars, podcasts, etc. about what to do about marketing during the recession. As one of the headlines above implies, there's more of an imperative now than ever to find more effective and efficient marketing habits. But most of the recession marketing recommendations I've seen are ones that can and should be implemented at any time. Now the business and the jobs are really on the line.

So I'll throw in 5 solid suggestions. They can be used at any time but perhaps they will be especially helpful now:

1. Evaluate New Customer vs. Existing Customer spend mix

Most companies spend multiples more on customer acquisition vs. retention, typically 5-10x more. Many lose money on customer aquisition. And for most, existing customer revenue is multiples larger than that of new customers.

It's likely in this environment, gaining new customers has become even more difficult and more expensive. And it's likely that you can build existing customer revenues by spending more, or at least spending more smartly.

Look carefully at your new customer vs. existing customer spending and ROI metrics over the past few years and look for places to reduce spending and other places to increase it.

Exception: Some companies may be the gorilla in their industry and have cash reserves. For them, this could be the time to sweep up market share on the customer acquisition side.

2. Focus on Measurable Activities

Unless you are one of the few very large companies that can truly benefit from pure "brand marketing", all your marketing can and should have some measurable direct response mechanism. It may not be for a purchase but it can be for some call to action. Don't ignore email because "it is free". That too should be measured, not to save money but to save your customers from receiving unwanted communications.

If you can measure it, you can make a data driven decision if it's worth it. If you measure it you can also test it, the next recommendation.

3. Test Everything

A marketer should constantly be testing and should test everything possible including content, headlines, offers, pricing, and timing. I can't say this strongly enough and continue to be astounded how little marketers do test. Web testing is more prevalent because the tools are unusually easy to use, e.g. Google Analytics. But A/B testing can be applied to almost any marketing activity and new tools are now available to apply multivariate testing.

4. Find your "true" best customers

Many marketers look to their "heavy user" customers (top buying quartiles or tertiles)as their best customers. Others segment by recency and view the most recent buyers as best customers. I'd suggest that you look for the customers that have the highest propensity to buy and who wouldn't have bought without being touched. These are probably mid tier customers and your best way to find them is via testing and by using more sophisticated segmentation techniques like predictive analytics and uplift modeling.

5. Find customers in danger of leaving

Too many marketers accept churn rates or don't market to customers on the way out until it is too late. Look carefully at your customer lifetime models and your churn rates and the reasons for churn. Can you develop an ongoing marketing strategy that attacks those whose behavior indicates that they are in the early stage of dropping off? It's likely that reviving these customers will cost far less than a new customer acquisition.

A Good (but Temporary) Reason to Use Video for SEO

2009-03-04T15:13:00.011-05:00

I've read in several places now that videos are far more likely than text to get on the first page of Google's search results. This is big news for those trying to get those coveted search results, especially those with scrappy budgets.

Google has been supporting "blended" or "universal" search for over a year now and according to Jupiter Research (now owned by Forrester Research) 60% of searches return a blended result with some media other than text, 28% of them with video.

Due to the current nature of Google's algorithm and because there are far fewer videos than web pages, a video is 53 times more likely to end up on the front page.

This may not get you on the first page with high volume search terms but I suspect it will make a noticeable difference with the mid and long tail.

You'll still need to have good SEO practices with video (e.g. include key words in titles, tags and file names) and you'll still want to make sure your video production values and content support your brand. From what I've read, it's best for SEO purposes to have the videos hosted on Youtube.

As a test, I'm going to include a tagged video in this post (hosted on Blogger) and see how it affects search results for "Scott McComsey" and "Well Rounded Marketer". I'll update with results in a week or so.

Update 3/10: This blog now shows up on the first page for both search terms and it didn't before this post.

Be a Social Media Early Adopter but Market with an Early Majority Strategy

2009-03-03T12:14:00.018-05:00

The first premise of this entry is that a marketer should be an Early Adopter of social media technologies. The second is that the social media technologies actually used to go to market should match those used by the Early Majority of the customer base. The third is that presumed actual use of social media is overblown for most market segments.

Let's start with you, the marketer. Do you know what these are:

Twitter. Facebook. Ning. Blogger. SMS. Podcast. Linked In. Plurk. Pounce. Delicious. Jaiku. Skype. Orkut. Second Life. Yelp. YouTube. Cuil. RSS. Stumbleupon. Digg. Flickr. wetpaint.

Does not knowing make your marketing heart flutter that your marketing plan is behind the times?

As a marketer of almost any sort, you need to know what these are. You should be using some regularly, whether you really need to or not-pick the ones your customers are likely to use and consider it professional enrichment. You should take time each week to update yourself on facets of social media and tinker with what is relevant.

Now, what do you know really know about the social media usage of your customers? Let's start with a quick refresher on a typical technology adoption curve. The vertical axis shows number of adopters of a new technology, the horizontal axis shows time. Generally, it's most efficient to time technology marketing, in this case social media marketing technologies, for the early majority.

What social media are your early majority users of social media really using? Some may have Linkedin or Facebook or Twitter accounts but are they really using them? Your mission is to ignore media hype and find real data on what your customers really use.

The good news, the reality, is that in most cases, for most market segments, the actual use of these social media tools is over hyped. That which is exciting naturally gets disproportionate press.

Most recently, I have had the pleasure of marketing to marketers. I spent a good year crafting a marketing strategy mixed with new school and old school marketing tactics. The new school tactics (e.g. Facebook group) provided a progressive company image and some brand awareness but the old school tactics (e.g. trade shows) provided virtually all of our leads. My dream was to shift fully to a social media and inbound marketing strategy, but not enough of our prospects were embracing those channels, not even a majority as far as I could tell.

And so I was not astounded to recently learn from Forrester Research that "social media use in B2B is early stage; it's not well understood". Consider these statistics from a recent Forrester/Marketing Profs survey of B2B marketers:

32% use blogs; of those only 32% find them effective for brand building (about 10% of the total)
30% use forums/social communities; only 30% of them find them effective for building brand or generating leads (about 9% of the total)

(More from Forrester on that here .)

I was astounded however by a customer anecdote indicating that this market might even be more in the Dark Ages than I had thought. I asked a power user of the product we marketed-very sophisticated direct marketing software-how often he searched the Internet and what types of terms he searched on. This guy is a seasoned, sharp six figure marketing manager in a demanding $1B company.

His response-"I don't really have time to search. I don't search on anything."

We're not even talking about social media here...we're talking about basic internet search! This affirmed our difficulty in reaching corporate marketing people via paid or organic search. Many of them don't even search let alone participate in social media. My conclusion-the culture and pace of American business in many places do not allow for active social media participation or even regular use of the internet for information gathering purposes. Our perception of the use of social media, especially in the business markets, is based mostly on the very visible early adopters (e.g. some 3 million Twitter users).

So to recap-

Pay attention to social media and learn how it works and use it-find it's real value firsthand. You, as the marketer, must be an engaged Early Adopter.

And pay very deep attention to the social media habits of your customers. Find or build real data about usage and talk to your customers firsthand. If most of them aren't yet engaged in social media, it's not time to invest heavily. Craft your marketing strategies to fit the Early Majority of your customer base. The WRM will be strive to efficiently time the use of old school and new school marketing strategies...not too early and not too late.

Finally, social media adoption rates are growing quickly. Keep in touch with current data. Dig in to understand not just sign ups but actual usage. I'll leave you with a good site for marketers on Facebook usage including these charts showing growth by age group .