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.”

Second, InboundWriter is about increasing audience reach, engagement and conversion through content optimization.  The product enables writers to experiment with different words and writing strategies and observe in real-time the impact to potential content popularity.  This is right in our sweet spot!   After all, we are all about combining left brain and right brain action to ensure creativity can indeed drive business results.  We will surely be blogging about the ROI of relevant content as we analyze reach, engagement and conversion metrics for content “optimized” by InboundWriter.

Last but certainly not least, a social product deserves a social go to market plan – which is exactly what we delivered.  InboundWriter is using one of our favorite pricing models to drive adoption: Freemium.   Similar to some of the most widely used social applications such as Skype, LinkedIn, Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, the basic version is 100% free.   If the product delivers on its promise, the power of viral marketing will drive hoards of new users to InboundWriter…and a certain percentage of them will opt for the additional functionality and upgrade to the “professional” version.  Already, the TechCrunch article and the slew of additional coverage drove hundreds of sign-ups to the product in just day one.  It will certainly be interesting to see how these “free” users convert to “paid” users and identify any differences in product adoption rates for different segments of writers.   The next several months appear to be ripe with the promise of new metrics for social media marketing success – so stay tuned!

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.

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!

But there is good reason for this insane demand…and Dr. David BenDaniel said it best during dinner last night: Universities are falling behind in incorporating the latest social media and online marketing developments – and their massive implications to business strategy – into their curriculums.  (Incidentally Dr. BenDaniel was my entrepreneurship professor during my Johnson years…and helped me get connected with UCSD Connect which lead to my very first start-up experience – the man is an icon! ).   Cornell is actually doing much better than most in this area since it has such a well-organized curriculum around entrepreneurship at Johnson as well as a massive University-wide initiative.   But traditional marketing courses in most business schools still focus too much on “old-style” marketing strategies and are creating future Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)-marketing leaders.   This needs to change.   Clearly not all MBA students are entrepreneurial, and many will take on more traditional marketing roles within CPG companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Unilever or P&G.  But the reality is that the use of social media and online marketing is no longer limited to start-ups or tech companies in Silicon Valley.  One of the social media success examples I gave during my lectures is about Whole Foods.  Whole Foods has impressively embraced social media more than most, gathering over nearly 2 million followers on Twitter and half million fans on Facebook in the process. While it is easy to understand why a relatively young company or one started by a tech-savvy founder would so completely embrace social media communication tools, it is quite a bit more remarkable for an almost 30 year old established brick and mortar company with roughly 50,000 employees and over 270 stores worldwide to have done so.  And they are not alone.  More and more companies are following this model and embracing inbound marketing strategies to engage the new customer (Customer 2.0) in the emerging media channels.

Seems to me we have a great opportunity to add our new truths to the well-established curriculum.   If we don’t teach tomorrow’s business leaders about the opportunities and challenges presented by social media and online marketing, how can we expect them to lead their employees who are likely to be more social-media savvy then their managers? How can we expect them to steer their companies successfully without at least understanding the new go-to-market models powered by the social Web?  While there is undoubtedly a lot of hands-on learning the students will do when they step out into the “real world”, business schools must do their part in educating our future business leaders to not just survive but thrive in this brave new world.  My trip here indicates that the Johnson entrepreneurship professors certainly get this…and the conversation with Dr.  Vithala Rao this afternoon – who asked me to come back in the fall for more! - tells me Johnson marketing is on board as well…

I am delighted that my Alma Mater is once again taking the lead.  I’d say definitely worth the 18 hour round-trip 

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.

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.

Think about it:

• Business Analytics improve visibility into the pipeline. With just a couple of clicks, we can see what deals are won, lost, closed, or added to your pipeline, even deals that slipped.  Better pipeline analytics help drive a better forecast and also help alignment with marketing re: driving the appropriate lead gen efforts to mitigate potential shortfalls. 
• Accurate sales forecasting, based on dynamic sales data, can build trust in the forecast for run-rate business as well as new demand, ensuring alignment with production – getting us a step closer to achieving the dual goals of improved profitability and customer sat.
• Smart compensation management can help us incent sales people to drive sales of the “right” products (and you got it, we get to define what “right” means!).  We can now adapt compensation plans to match changing market conditions to better align sales comp to business objectives.

Uncovering volatility and bringing about predictability into sales performance have far reaching benefits. It of course helps with the all important revenue numbers – but also drives organizational alignment between sales and finance, sales and marketing, sales and product management, sales and production… (yep, you get the picture) and improves trust between these often mistrusting departments.   Most importantly, it translates into customer value in the form of a more efficient and customer-centric organization. And, to quote a popular MasterCard ad, “that’s priceless!”

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”!

The 2.0 approach requires the art of selling and marketing (a.k.a. creativity) to be augmented with a healthy dose of science (a.k.a. repeatability) to achieve the massive productivity gains required. While there are several factors that contribute to realizing these efficiencies, I believe there a few that are paramount to increasing accountability, reducing customer acquisition costs, and ultimately driving revenue.

Here are the four essential steps to grabbing the Sales and Marketing 2.0 brass ring:

• Align sales and marketing organizations around jointly-defined processes, definitions and success metrics. Establish a “system of record” – whether it is your CRM or your marketing automation system or both if they are synched – to ensure you are capturing all customer engagements in one place. And make sure to agree on the definition of sales stages to ensure your lead scoring process is consistent and gives you the necessary data to measure the effectiveness of each of your programs.
• Target the right audience with the right message at the right time. The days of one-to-many mass emails are gone. Launch targeted one-to-few campaigns by segmenting your prospect database. Watch for trigger events in the industries or geographies you are targeting to reach out to prospects with information that’s relevant to their current initiatives and urgent business challenges. Use behavioral targeting based on how your prospect is engaging with your website or your “free trial”.
• If lead scores indicate prospects are not quite sales-ready, nurture them! Educating prospects with whitepapers, tips and tricks emails or educational webinars are great ways to nudge them along the sales cycle (and effectively reduce your cost per lead!).
• And… don’t underestimate the power of continually testing and measuring the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts. Is your website attracting and converting the right prospects? Which programs have the highest percentage of converting into sales-ready leads? How do changes in message or design translate into improvements in conversion rates? Remember, you cannot improve what you cannot measure!

Want to find out what we think on next gen demand generation strategies or dig deeper into how you can implement some of these recommendations? Then follow us on our new blog Smarketer. We hope you will join the conversation – and share your own experiences as well!