Call it the ‘Death of Marketing Tour,” a bit of a morbid title, but the theme is rapidly gaining traction. That’s because it’s not actually about the “death” of marketing, but about its total re-birth in the social era.

Pelin and I made two local speaking stops in the last two weeks to deliver STG’s though-provoking new presentation: “The Death of Marketing as We Know It: Adapting Marketing to Changing Customer Behaviors and Demands.” The presentation describes the sea change in marketing, from outbound to inbound programs; the rise of the “content engineer” to effectively engage the changing customer; and the importance of establishing a culture of measurement to optimize the marketing mix. The genesis for the presentation came from an essay STG wrote for Cornell Enterprise called “The Birth of Customer 2.0 & The Death of Marketing As We Know It.”

Our first stop last month: the San Diego Software Industries Council (SDSIC) on April 22. The feedback was great. Wrote one marketing executive: “This was the best presentation that I’ve attended through SDSIC to date (and I’ve attended quite a few). Congratulations on a successful event today!”

Our second stop: San Diego State University (SDSU), where we spoke to Karen Marchetti‘s Internet marketing class. The response was great there too, with many students engaging with us on emerging marketing careers in new media.

Earlier this spring, Pelin gave a similar presentation to the Cornell University Entrepreneurship and Innovative Institute. Last month, Pelin and Rand gave a university wide presentation at the University of the Pacific (UoP), which may be considering a future curriculum in  content engineering.

When it comes to optimizing the marketing mix to generate the highest quality and volume of sales leads, few can match Pelin Thorogood’s expertise. This was confirmed in April when the Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA) named Pelin as one of the 20 Women to Watch in Sales Lead Management.

Pelin joins a distinguished list of winners, including: Ardath Albee, Marketing Interactions; Lisa Arthur, Aprimo; Jeanne Hopkins, HubSpot; Maria Pergolino, Marketo; Jill Rowley, Eloqua; Jenny Vance, LeadJen; and others. See the full list.

Pelin expertise in sales lead management is forged by her background in web analytics, social media marketing and sales intelligence. During the more than years she has been advising InsideView, a sales intelligence leader, Pelin played a prominent role in helping define and nurture the Sales 2.0 movement, and recently went on to evangelize social selling. Prior to founding Schulman+Thorogood Group that, she served as SVP Marketing at web analytics and online marketing optimization pioneer WebSideStory, now part of Adobe Systems.

Pelin first wrote about Sales 2.0 three years ago in this article in InsideCRM: “Sales 2.0: How Will it Improve Your Business?” She later teamed with partner Rand Schulman to write about how to market to customers in the social era for her alma mater, Cornell University: “The Birth of Customer 2.0 & The Death of Marketing as We Know It.”

Congrats Pelin!

As the web becomes cluttered with more data and spam generated by black hat games and content farms, relevant Content becomes more critical. The key is findability. Can your content be found? There are many ways to insure good results but there’s a lack of formal education around the new media and just how to do that. Though Web Analytics has been around for a decade, few really use it to optimize their work and we know why and it needs to be addressed by higer education and creating relevant graduates. But things are changing so quickly, so how do you that in this environment and what is the role of higher education in setting the foundation, and giving tools to future content creators?

I’ve been talking about a new disciple that I’ve called Content Engineering for about five years, and now I’m happy to say that higher education is addressing the issue head-on. Pelin and I are speaking to the students and facility, hosted by the Deans of the Business, Engineering and Liberal Arts schools at the University of the Pacific to share our vision of how Social Media is changing marketing and those of us who create content. What’s key is that UOP recognizes that students and future Content Engineers will need critical skills across disciplines – English & Communications; Business and Engineering. We expect to see more schools and universities create programs that address these requirements in the near future.

This is a good start.

It’s sure great to talk to real people for perspective. We don’t do it nearly enough. Those of us in Silicon Valley spend too much time talking to each other and obsess endlessly about the buzz du jour – Twitter’s analytics;  Facebook’s privacy; the newest browser; Google’s new search algorithm and the games SEOs play. We talk about Social CRM, Social Selling, Customer 2.0. viral, Freemium, brand  and conversions.  But it’s not the real world.

My partner Pelin and I were invited to present a keynote recently for a Strategic Marketing Conference hosted by Cornell University at the beautiful and historic FDR Presidential Library, a few hours from NYC, in the Hudson Valley where the autumn colors where in their full glory. We presented our topic, and a recurring them about how marketing is dramatically changing to attendees from around the country – professors; business leaders, students and entrepreneurs.

We were honored to present our observations about the rise of Inbound Marketing, and some of our experience working with “cutting edge firms”, like Eightfold Logic, ViralHeat, and InsideView each pioneering these new concepts. We regularly speak at technical conferences, but we thought this might be a bit different as it had a general and mostly non technical audience. A few minutes into our presentation we asked a series of questions to find out more about the attendees, “How many of you use web analytics” – most hands went up.  That’s good we thought. “How many of you use links on your web site, and know how to link”?  This time almost no hands were raised and few knew how to link, and NO ONE knew the value search engines place on the right links!

How could that be? Surely they MUST understand the value of linking? Well, no, they didn’t. I’ve been creating marketing applications for 15 years and have to constantly  be reminded about the adoption myth. The one where I think everyone uses our products, and they don’t. While the rate of adoption will certainly be more rapid than it’s been in the past, the rest of the world is not living in our tech bubble. The real world is doing just fine and it’s good for me to get out and be reminded not drink too much of my own bath water. While a link is ubiquitous, its value is not understood by most. And that’s the lesson I relearned during my visit to Cornell. In future posts I’ll talk about how we can accelerate adoption. What role colleges and universities need to play, and what marketing skills will look like in the not too distant future.

It sounds like one of those chicken or the egg questions…and given all the buzz about Sales 2.0 technologies and methodologies, you might be tempted to answer “Sales 2.0”.  But I think Sales 2.0 is really the sales organizations response to the “evolve or die” mandate they face, given the smarter and more informed buyer they have to sell to: Customer 2.0.   I do believe the customer has evolved faster than the sales guy…and I believe this is – at least in part – due to how B2B trends typically follow B2C.  Prospects who are looking to make B2B purchase decisions are also consumers, and have been making B2C decisions for a long time.  Access to online reviews, comparison shopping engines, Facebook or Twitter “conversations” on products and services they are evaluating has turned them into much wiser B2C buyers…So, why not transfer that same process, powered by “social intelligence”, to the B2B buying cycle? 

I started an earlier blog post with the observation “We market and sell in a brave new world where prospects are equipped with near x-ray vision into companies, products and people they are considering doing business with.”  This statement implies Customer 2.0 holds all the cards!  Hence, evening out the playing field requires sales to be just as knowledgeable about the buyer and bring real value to the sales process by demonstrating why their products and services can solve the customer’s unique business challenges.  Relevance emerges as the key to synchronizing the selling cycle with the buying cycle.  Armed with a 360° view of their prospect’s business that can only come from “listening to” them and engaging them through social media, sales people now have the opportunity to gain the deep insights necessary to get Customer 2.0’s attention – insights that will drive Customer 2.0 into deeper engagement with your company and delivering on the ultimate promise of Sales 2.0!