Gain free insights into how to build a better business.
Learn valuable tips for successful technology implementation and also gain insight into (data) insights.
Where are companies investing their marketing dollars as the economy turns down? Two blogs in my reading list posed this question recently. One is Jeremiah Owyang and the other Marketing Sherpa.
Their posts stimulated my own post on where companies are likely to gain the greatest bang for their marketing bucks and why.
To set the stage, we'll start with some wake-up results from Marketing Sherpa and then I'll segue into answering some where and why questions posed by Jeremiah...
Most times when a marketer like me touts the benefits of a knowledge base, we focus on the customer service benefits. While those are plentiful, today I want to share a story that exposes the internal benefits of having a well-populated knowledge base.
Back in the day, Cynthina Heinsohn, developer extraordinaire, and I worked in an Exxon Exploration Planning group. Among our various semi-regular responsibilities, the Planning group prepared our division management team (the Exxon way) to weather senior executive reviews of our division's operational activity and investment portfolio (and our division budget encompassed $100s of millions).
For each review, our group's preparation involved undertaking a mountain of analysis, generating a plethora of reports, and then building two to three back-up books filled with the results, with each binder book being about about three to four inches thick. And this happened two to three times per year...
Jeremiah Owyang, senior analyst at Forrester Research, authors an interesting blog called Web Strategy by Jeremiah. I like peeking in on his articles because they focus on how companies can use web tools to connect with their customers. A topic near and dear to us over here at Community Network.
One of Jeremiah's articles from last August focused on The Three Spheres of Web Strategy, complete with a cool graphic that shows the overlapping relationship among the spheres...
I'm a huge users of certain group forums in my own professional and personal life.
Some of these forums have played important roles in increasing my customer loyalty so I thought I'd share a few examples from the trenches to demonstrate how a group forum can help you...
Hunters and farmers. Most sales folks would tend to consider themselves one or the other. However, Brian Carroll, lead generation expert, contends a sales person needs to be a good farmer in order to be a good hunter too.
In a recent article in his B2B Lead Generation Blog, Brian discussed what he believes is the best way to reach out and form relationships with customers. And I agree with his thoughts...
I recently bopped around the Internet researching something or another. During my search, I came across an article a couple of years old that cautioned businesses about how the Internet undermines business productivity because employees waste time on social networking sites like Facebook or shopping online during work hours.
It got me thinking.
Maybe some employees do dither online. The funny thing is, though, I see the Internet in the opposite light. I realized I've become more creative because of the Internet. And the gains the Internet brings far away its cost...
In my last article, I highlighted Umair Haque's perspective of the shrinking advantage of traditional brands. However, unlike Haque, I don't believe branding value is shrinking but evolving. Today let's discuss methods in which a company can leverage the immediacy of online connectivity to maintain its branding advantages.
In my mind, it all comes down to this. For success today, a company has to be willing to listen to their customers and to work with them. And that means ceding partial control of the branding process to your customers.
If you're a marketing manager going "eep!" right about now, then you're not getting today's customer environment...
Communities of online customers are rewriting the rules of corporate branding. The reason is because they're spending more time talking with other consumers through various types of online connections than listening to companies with their traditional branding messages.
In other words, customers are wresting control of the branding message from companies. In an environment like that, how do you continue to be an influential voice for your own company and products?
We're going to talk about that today...
