Writers get a social boost with InboundWriter

We are proud to have contributed to the successful launch of yet another innovative product this week!  Our client Eightfold Logic just launched InboundWriter, the first cloud-based social writing application of its kind.   InboundWriter integrates real-time search data and the dynamics of social media directly into the writing process itself to help content creators of all walks – marketers, bloggers, journalists, etc. – to write more relevant online content.  Its mission: increasing audience reach, engagement and conversions.   Put simply, InboundWriter taps into social intelligence to drive productivity and results for its intended user – writers.  

There are a lot of things about this product that make it a poster-child for Schulman+Thorogood.  First, InboundWriter is born of the growing inbound marketing mandate, with the objective of empowering writers to easily draw on the “wisdom of the crowds” to attract the right audience to their content.   It is designed for content engineers™ and will undoubtedly contribute to the momentum of the content marketing movement by redefining how we create relevant content.  Joe Pulizzi, a content marketing evangelist and the founder of the Content Marketing Institute agrees:  “Today’s brands have no choice, to get attention, they must be interesting — that means creating consistent, compelling content.  InboundWriter helps increase relevance, and is one of those ‘of the moment’ products that turns content into a more powerful strategic asset.” Read the rest of this entry »

Drip Drip Drip, Can higher education change fast enough to keep up with Moore’s law? The Deans Think So.

It’s commencement time around the nation when newly minted alumni begin their quest for the golden fleece, the first job. Time to get real. But is education truly preparing students for this brave new world, one where measurement of productivity is polished to a high gloss and finds its way to the balance sheet?

Engineers produce things to be sold, salesmen sell things, and business students are taught to understand  and drive the metrics of business. But what happens to English majors? Where do they go with their diplomas in hand in this capitalist land of uber-productivity, which is after all, one of the things that separates the US from other countries.

Moore’s law describes a driving force of technological and social change, yet the university tends to move at glacial speed steeped in tradition as deep as Dante’s Inferno. And  the educational glaciers are melting with the modern heat of demand, yet supply is not there. Today, an imbalance exists between skills being taught and what business requires –  all driven ever more quickly by technological innovation, as Moore described.

Some universities see the handwriting on the wall (and the puddle of water at their feet)  and are looking for innovative ways to leverage their current curriculum in order to produce graduates with the skills needed for today’s competitive environment. Pelin and I spoke last week at the University of the Pacific, the oldest university in California, to a room filled with university deans, department chairs and professors and students interested to hear our views on what industry needs from these new workers. Since the earliest days of web analytics, we have understood that “creativity without conversion equals zero.” English majors need to be able to place a value on the words they create, in a business context. Their work needs to translate to the bottom line and it must be measureable. We presented our idea of an innovative Content Engineering curricula, a hybrid set of courses which span disciplines and schools, designed for the content creators in our online future. (Maybe explain what content engineer is?)

These Content Engineers understand the persuasive value of words; why people buy; the technology enablers, and will be able to establish and optimize objectives which are measured by business goals, and to effect that change with their new skill set learned in university. We are at the dawn of a “relevance revolution,” and instead of following, US education needs to lead the way to maintain international competiveness. Higher education can’t continue to teach the same way it has for the last millennia — not with technology and the speed of business continuing to increase. And as Americans, we are uniquely suited to undertake this challenge and to excel. The new English majors are not your grandmothers’ bard for sure!

We’re optimistic that leaders in higher education see what industry and students need in the future, but that only time will tell as the glaciers continue to drip, drip, drip. We thank our hosts at the University – Deans Dr. Tom Krise, College of the Pacific;  Dr. Lewis Gale, Eberhardt School of Business; and  Dr. Ravi Jain, School of Engineering and Computer Science, for allowing us to share our vision with their facility, staff and students.

A lesson in Marketing at Cornell (But…I was the teacher!)

I am here at beautiful but frigid Cornell, at the invitation of Steven Gal of the Johnson Graduate School of Business, to guest lecture at his entrepreneurial marketing class.  The reason for the invite:  MBA students are starved for practical knowledge on how to leverage social media and online marketing for their entrepreneurial efforts.   When Dr. Gal announced my impending visit to his colleagues, other entrepreneurship professors jumped at the opportunity to engage me as well.  My jam-packed schedule for the three days on campus include several classroom lectures, a lecture at the Cornell Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute, meeting with the aspiring entrepreneurs of Cornell eLab, dinners with the entrepreneurship professors and few of their hand-picked students, as well as meeting with the Cornell Enterprise team.  Add to this the numerous ad-hoc meetings with individual student-entrepreneurs who want to pick my brain on their go-to-market models. You get the picture…Whew! Read the rest of this entry »

Bathwater, Cornell and the Adoption Myth…

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.

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Moving from a Culture of Accountability to a Culture of Predictability

This past week I moderated the Forecasting, Analytics and Compensation Management Panel at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco (good event by the way – probably the best one yet!).  My diverse panel included sales execs from ArcSight, LaCrosse Footwear, and GuardianEdge who deployed Sales 2.0-powered sales management solutions from Xactly, Right 90 and Cloud 9 Analytics, respectively. 

Given my marketing analytics background (or DNA as some might say ), I’ve always been focused on making marketing more accountable to and aligned with sales. My personal edict is “You Cannot Improve What You Cannot Measure”, and I practice it religiously to ensure my clients drive the most revenue possible with their marketing dollars, great or small.  What was thrilling about my pre-conference conversations with the panelists was how the Sales 2.0 movement is enabling sales organizations to adopt a similar culture of measurement, bringing in much needed accountability.  Actually according to my panel, it is moving beyond accountability – and shifting sales into a culture of predictability.  Here is how: Sales management solutions, such as forecasting, business analytics and compensation management tools, improve visibility into sales performance with objective, dynamic data.  Better visibility in turn exposes volatility at the aggregate level as well as gives us the ability to drill down to pinpoint and act on the problem areas – whether product line, geo, sales rep, lead source – resulting in overall sales performance predictability.

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Bridging the Sales and Marketing Chasm with Smarketing

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. Attention span crunch has become pandemic, and we now have the mandate of ensuring every customer engagement is targeted and relevant to synchronize buying and selling cycles – or risk being left behind to join the multitude of businesses that simply didn’t make the necessary transformations in time.

It wasn’t too long ago where the norm was for marketing and sales teams to shout insults and pass blame on for not reaching revenue goals: “The leads are worthless!”…”No, it’s the sales reps who just cannot close!!” Fast forward a decade and the rules have changed. Marketing is now measured and compensated more like sales reps on attainment of goals; and our friends in sales are having to think more marketing-like and segment and target prospects with the right messages at the right time to increase conversions. Welcome to the world of sales and marketing 2.0 or “Smarketing”!

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