2011 June |Alterian Blog | Social Media, Email, Web Content & Campaign Management

Archive for June, 2011

Is Marketing Technology Management a Part-Time or Full-Time Gig?

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

Guest blog post by Marcus Tewksbury, VP of Strategy and Consulting, Experian Marketing Services

One of the recent questions from Scott Brinker’s and my Webinar, ‘10 Reasons Why You Need a Chief Marketing Technology Officer (CMTO),’ was whether a marketing technology role should be full-time or not. (Note: This role would report to the CMO and may have a title such as VP, Director or Manager of Marketing Technology.)

As with all good questions, the answer to whether it should be a full- or part-time role is, “it depends.”

If there was a simple answer, it would depend on how much technology your marketing requires. If it’s one or two applications, you can probably do that with a part timer; if it’s more than that, you’re going to need someone full time.

Argument for full-time: In college and for many years after (exactly how many I’ll skip because it’s slightly embarrassing), I had a frying pan…that I used for everything. Watering the plants, nailing stuff in the wall and even the occasional cooking duty. The point here is that a tool can be used a lot of different ways, some of which you’d never anticipate until the need arises. Marketing technology is like the frying pan. There isn’t a job within marketing it cannot address, but like the frying pan, you must consider how to use your tool most efficiently. To ensure this happens, you need a set of eyes always keeping a lookout for the latest and greatest, all the while ensuring your current technology is successfully driving initiatives.

Argument for part-time: If you are looking to do just the basics – like getting your site wired up for analytics, setting up an email gun that can handle triggering and nurturing, turning on basic social buzz monitoring, that sort of thing – then part time can get the job done. Note though, it’s not just a matter of setting up the tools once and going away. All tools need regular care and maintenance. To stay abreast of things, you want to have that expert opinion regularly weighing in on what the data is saying about the business.

Overall, your true need for a Marketing Technology Officer is going to depend on your current marketing efforts. But to excel in this new world of marketing, having someone who, at the core, understands and manages marketing technology is essential.

So, how do you see your company adding a CMTO?

Marcus Tewksbury – VP of Strategy and Consulting at Experian Marketing Services
Marcus focuses on strategic accounts for Experian Marketing Services, a powerful new agency model focused on driving relevant messaging based on sound customer intelligence, where he partners with marketing executives on how to best harness their customer relationships to develop “big ideas” that open new markets and expands revenue opportunities with existing ones. Over his career he has successfully launched dozens of products that have generated millions in revenue and been adopted by brands like Alterian, Baxter, Coach, Hallmark, Hot Topic, Kaloo, KAO, Microsoft, Tower Records, ULTA, Walgreens, and Wal-Mart.

Marcus blogs at TheMarketingMOJO.com. Follow him on Twitter @Tewksbum.

Posted in General Marketing | 1 Comment »

Web Content Management: An open and closed case?

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

When it comes to your options for a WCM vendor, one of the first decisions you will need to make is whether to use an Open Source solution or a Closed Commercial vendor.

Let us examine a few of the differences between the two:

Myth-busting

Open source is not synonymous with “free.” You might not pay a license fee, but there may be hidden costs or unstructured financial needs over the period of use. A ‘closed’ commercial option will have outset costs associated with licenses, custom builds and functionality, but on the whole, these will be fixed costs that can be planned and budgeted. This removes the ad hoc nature of various one-off payments for development, support or add-ons that can be experienced, assuming an open source route. Commercial vendors will come at a premium, but that is usually to the benefit of the overall package and quality of product where there is a commitment to product development and support.

Support

Open source is less structured in its means of supporting users. There is a strong reliance on the wisdom of the crowd, but that brings with it associated problems of quality and accuracy. Commercial-grade support will come with a higher price tag, but with in-depth expertise and knowledge of the product comes a greater level of trust and speed of issue resolution. The same is true of product training; structured, accredited courses from the vendor will assist you in your goal of achieving the desired results with your websites and professional development too.

Go to market

The speed at which you can go to market with your website(s) can be greatly improved with a commercial vendor; off-the-shelf packages can have you set up in a matter of minutes. Can you publish a website with a helpful site-builder wizard that gives you a website in just 10 clicks?

Scalability

Let us be honest here, sometimes a WordPress blog is all you need, and open source fits that need as a start-up. As your business grows though, do you have a system in place whereby you can scale your website(s) accordingly? A commercial vendor will be well set up for large scale projects and help you to make a seamless transition from enterprise to loftier ambitions and capabilities.

Consider the needs of your website(s). What value do you place on your website for your business? Is it your sole or main method of doing business and generating revenue? If you need a robust, scalable and secure solution that can be backed up with accredited support and training, a commercial vendor will enable you to execute your web content strategy in a coherent manner.

Tags: CMS vendor, commercial CMS, open source CMS
Posted in Web Content Management | No Comments »

Do you need a chief marketing technology officer (CMTO)?

Monday, June 13th, 2011

Guest blog post by Scott Brinker, co-founder and CTO, ion interactive

I know, there are a lot of new “chiefs” being proposed these days. Chief Content Officer. Chief Customer Officer. Chief Revenue Officer. And now a Chief Marketing Technology Officer? Is there anyone left in the organization who isn’t a chief?

But set aside titles for a moment. These new leadership roles aren’t really about proliferating the upper ranks of marketing management. They’re about recognizing that marketing has been changing dramatically — and that it’s time for the marketing organization to adapt its leadership structure accordingly.

Arguably, the massive influx of technology into marketing has been one of the most overwhelming disruptions of the past 10 years. The spectrum of new marketing technologies — bid management, content management, conversion optimization, web analytics, marketing automation, social media monitoring, etc. — has delivered tremendous innovation to our work. As marketers, we’re starting to feel like Archimedes: “Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.” Except with a laptop and an Internet connection.

But for many marketers, the great power of this technology has also come with great frustration. While the high-level principles of marketing are the same as they ever were — engage your audience with a compelling story and a differentiated experience — the mechanics of executing in the technical domains of software, networks and data can make you feel like a stranger in a strange land. And while there are guides to this terra incognito in the IT department, they often have differing priorities, schedules, and budgets. They often don’t understand why marketing wants what it does.

The solution: marketing must take control of its own technological destiny. Not everyone in marketing needs to become a technologist — just as not everyone in marketing needs to be a “creative.” But marketing should have its own technologists on staff, charged with the mission of making the technical machinery of modern marketing hum. They handle the nitty-gritty of configuration, scripting, and data integration. But they do this technical work clearly in the context of marketing objectives, seeking new ways to optimize the CMO’s goals with the tools of their trade. They aim to make the whole of all these marketing technologies greater than the sum of their parts.

A chief marketing technology officer (CTMO) — use whatever label you prefer — is simply the lead marketing technologist, organizing and managing that team. He or she reports to the CMO, not the CIO. Again, this is ultimately a marketing responsibility. There should be collaboration with IT, of course, assuring that marketing fully leverages its infrastructure and complies with technical governance standards. But collaborating is better than being solely dependent.

This Thursday, Marcus Tewksbury, VP of Strategy and Consulting at Experian Marketing Services, and I will present a webinar on this topic. We’d love to have you join the discussion.

This guest post was written by Scott Brinker, the co-founder and CTO of ion interactive who blogs on the intersection of marketing and technology at Chief Marketing Technologist. You can follow him on Twitter @chiefmartec.

Tags: Analytics, chief marketing technology officer, CMTO, marketing analytics, Marketing Technology, marketing technology landscape
Posted in General Marketing | No Comments »

Are you truly engaging or just frustrating your audience? – Lessons from the Merkle CRM Executive Summit

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

I’ve spent the last 3 days at the Merkle CRM Executive Summit. This was a great event attended by more than 250 senior marketing executives from very large brands like Dell, Disney Resorts, AARP and many others. David Williams, the CEO of Merkle kicked off the event with a keynote Monday morning discussing the evolution that has taken place, and is continuing to take place, in marketing. One of David’s themes, also common among many other presenters, was the shift marketers must make as consumers become more empowered and in control. There were many discussions at the conference around terms like engagement and relevance, and many presenters talked about the need for measurement and metrics in this new era of marketing.

David Williams offered an excellent definition of engagement during his keynote. Engagement, according to David, is any non-financial interaction a consumer has with your brand. The words in this very simple definition imply a number of things. First, it states the interaction is not financial in nature, but it does indicate value to both the brand and the consumer. This could be building positive value via great interaction or negative value via poor interaction. We recognize that non-financial interactions impact our brands. Second, this definition does not mention any specific channel. Engagement is channel agnostic; it happens in stores, over social media, online at websites, via advertising and a whole host of other places. Marketing strategies must impact channels, but engagement cuts across channels.

On the final day of the summit, Mike Talbot, President and Founder of Alterian, gave an energizing presentation about relevant and persuasive communication in marketing. Mike discussed the three pillars of communication: content, audience and execution. A brand must have the proper analytics in place to know all of the different audience sectors. It must also be able to develop appropriate content and messaging that cuts across channel but remains relevant regardless of the channel of interaction. Finally, the execution pieces must be in place to deliver that content at the right time to the right consumer through the appropriate medium.

To reinforce Alterian’s point of view on relevance, we conducted research on the brands attending the Summit to measure how relevant consumers view these brands to be. To do this, we collected nearly 1.5 million conversations from social media channels during the 2010 holiday season. We then combined this data with internet ranking data from Alexa.com to measure brands on two dimensions – relevance and popularity in the eyes of consumers on social media. This relevant communication index created a lot of buzz at the event. More than 20 brands stopped by to talk with us about what it was and how we created it. The relevance metrics and methodology are available below and for download at the Alterian SlideShare site. We’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts.

Merkle CRM Executive Summit 2011

View more presentations from Alterian

Web Content Management – A tale of two users

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Your website should offer a fantastic user experience, and you should expect your Content Management System (CMS) to offer the same. The easier it is to present a great website, the more conducive to your business your website will be.

If you reduce the obstacles to making a purchase, you will likely do a greater amount of business. Make your website frustration free and guide the user along the sales cycle by virtue of great design, ease of use and more pertinently, adaptability. Whether your website is being viewed on a desktop PC or a mobile phone, think about how your CMS allows you to execute content across platforms in a manner that does your content and business justice.

A good content management system will allow any marketer to provide the best possible ‘window display’ into their business, and this should be guided by analytics and the existing knowledge of the customer base.

Consider optimisation as a continuous process of a dynamic user experience and not a one-off project once a quarter. Melissa Casburn, Director of User Experience, at digital agency Isite Design suggests: “If users are the steering wheel, your CMS is the engine – it allows you to apply what you know about your users to the creation and delivery of a more personalized experience.”

Empowered by data driven insight from your users and with a web content management system that delivers websites with an enriched user experience, it is time for your multimedia content to do the talking. Ask if your CMS enables a simplified process for publishing to the web with user interfaces developed with the user in mind.

Does it make it easy for site owners to:

· create a richer, more relevant body of content to publish?

· allow multi-channel delivery of the same piece of content?

· empower those with subject matter expertise but lack of technical web abilities to get their content seen by a relevant audience?

A web content management solution that considers the user experience of the very marketers that are working with it will ultimately help to deliver a website that, in itself, offers a rich and practical user experience for the consumer too.

For more information, and to see an example of a company doing this exceptionally well, check out this case study for English Heritage.

Tags: CMS, usability
Posted in Web Content Management | 2 Comments »

Alterian SM2 Version 5.0 – User Interface and Usability

Friday, June 3rd, 2011

It is all very well having a complex and robust tool for running your social media monitoring, but social analytics are redundant if you can’t make sense of them or the user experience prohibits ease of use.

Version 5.0 was created with usability at the heart. From initial search setup through to the reporting, we have taken user experience into account. The fewer barriers to entry, the more use you will get out of the tool, right?

The reports have had usability tweaks in a number of areas:

· Content emotions have a reformatted chart text to improve appearance

· Share of voice – legibility has been improved by repositioning labels.

· Map overlay – Canadian provinces are now added to the diagram so you can further segment and visualise regional data sets.

The changes aren’t just cosmetic

Search setup has been fine-tuned in a number of areas. Language filtering can be more precisely guided thanks to the ‘unknown’ language option. A greater coverage of results will be returned and point you in the direction you need to narrow down your search to distil the data set, rather than assuming a language and subsequently missing out on vital results.

As part of the addition of further language capabilities on this update, you can quickly revert language and sentiment dictionaries to their original settings – just use the ‘Reset’ button.

Good monitoring is all in the setup

Arguably, the most critical aspect of using a social media monitoring tool is in the setup of any profile.

SM2 Version 5.0 has a much simpler, streamlined Search Setup Wizard. This will make it faster and easier for new users to get up and running. Existing users will appreciate the refresh too.

Get closer to your keywords

Proximity Search is another new feature that does some very clever things. If you really must know, it is a “Boolean logic that calculates keyword searches within a specified distance.” In essence, this means SM2 will do some additional leg-work for you as part of the search setup. It will scan the source text to find your first search term and identify second aspect after the “AND” command is within a specified number of words of the first, rather than somewhere further away and less context specific in the source text.

Contact me for a demo or visit Alterian Social Media Monitoring for further information.

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