What Works, What Doesn't

Results Spur Execs To Share Their Wisdom

With thought leadership generating so much noise these days, I invited Director of Marketing Matt Barker at TeleHealth Services to describe how he convinces his executives to share their insights through blogs and bylined articles. His secret: Tracking the results generated by their content, and using those results to push for more and better contributions.

With more than 2,500 customers, TeleHealth Services is the nation's leading provider of interactive patient education and communications solutions (such as hospital TVs for patients) for the health care industry. Upon taking the lead marketing role last year, I began looking for “thought leadership” opportunities to spread the word about our products.

One piece that generated quantifiable results described how our interactive patient care systems help educate patients and staff. After the piece ran in one of the largest hospital executive publications in the country, and was featured online, we saw a spike of over 500 visitors to our site from the publication’s domain. Adding a form to capture visitors’  contact information resulted in more than  32 “warm” leads, of which two turned into sales that generated more than $200,000 in revenue.

I not only gave my sales team reprints, but touted the results of this and similar efforts within TeleHealth Services. As a result we were able to create an internal group of experts who meet regularly to generate ideas. After each meeting, I cross check the topics with my healthcare contacts to make sure the subjects are relevant.  The result is that with very few man-hours we can develop collateral that drives leads to the sales force, saves them significant time in the sales cycle,  and spreads my organization’s thought leadership.

As with any thought leadership strategy it takes some time to get the ball rolling. Currently my team is still writing the pieces, but I have begun rallying executives and subject matter experts to begin blogging and experimenting with social media. While traditional media is still a large focus for us, our main goal is to spread the team’s knowledge, and to become trusted partners in our client’s success, which is where social media comes in.

Our plans for the coming quarters are to begin delegating some of the writing duties and to branch into blogging, social networks, and other digital marketing arenas. With both types of media, the lesson is if you track and publicize your results, you can get your in-house experts to share their knowledge and boost sales.

As Matt says, it’ takes time to get a thought leadership strategy going. If strikes me that another strategy would be creating internal processes to repurpose content (such as translating market updates for the sales staff into external-facing blogs or newsletters about industry trends.) Thoughts?

Why Aren’t We Pre-Testing Thought Leadership Content?

My recent post on pitching thought leadership continues to drive comment, including a raspberry from my girlfriend who thinks “thought leadership” sounds like controlling people’s minds. I tell her it just means coming up with truly new ways of solving a customer’s problem. She just rolls her eyes.

A lot of the rest of you, though, agree that thought leadership is critical to rising above the “he said, she said” of competing product claims but that it usually isn’t done right. One of the most interesting threads came from Chris Stetson, a veteran researcher at OpinionPath who wonders why so few marketers take the same time to “pre-test” thought leadership content in the way they would a more conventional marketing or advertising campaign.  

A big reason, he suspects, “is that the ad folks are ill-at-ease reviewing editorial work. They still deep down love media's impartiality and the power that such credibility produces. So they want even the custom content to retain the good 'ol air of impartiality.

Except how do you make sure your thought leadership copy will increase the reader’s belief that the brand is a thought leader if you haven’t tested it? Seems like we’re back in the old days where “I know half of my ad dollars are wasted; I just don’t know which half.” Anyone out there have any best practices for testing thought leadership content in this new age of B2B, vendor-sponsored publishing?

Maybe We're Not Ready for Thought Leadership

My recent blog on “Promoting thought leadership” got a lot of comments – most of them focusing not on how to promote thought leadership, but on what constitutes thought leadership in the first place.

In a recent blog Chris Koch at the IT Marketing Services Association suggested that the term “thought leadership” itself is so overused as to be useless. He’s suggesting business to business marketers instead do “Idea Marketing” which involves heavy lifting like actually going out and finding new and useful ideas from your subject matter experts, and distributing them through a publishing process complete with lead tracking and nurturing.

In my experience, most vendors aren’t ready for anything as involved as that. For them, “thought leadership” essentially means any white paper that’s NOT just a laundry list of product features. They are content with pieces that lay out what a customer needs in a product, presented in a way that makes their own “solutions” (mentioned discreetly in the summary) look good. In short, a typical white paper. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not thought leadership.

True leadership means going where no one has gone before, and/or showing others the right path to take when times are uncertain. It implies breaking new ground and meeting needs customers didn’t know they had, like Apple did with the iPhone and Google did with its search engine. That’s a quantum leap beyond what’s hard enough most of the time -- keeping a close eye on customers’ needs and beating the competition in meeting those needs.

A final obstacle to thought leadership is that many customers aren’t ready for it, because they’re still mastering the basics of what the vendor is selling. As one client told me today, “The really smart guys in the room aren’t reading the white papers.” His audience is, instead, the unlucky fellow who’s just been thrown into managing, say, Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance and is trying to figure out how not to get himself or his boss fired.

Someone out there is really tailoring content to where the prospect is in the buying process, sending primers to newbies and real rocket-science stuff to the experts. But from what I see, those leading-edge marketers are still few and far between. 

Pitching Thought Leadership

Many clients ask me for "thought leadership" white papers. Translation: We’re so smart we not only come up with great products, but with a better, and different, approach to the problem the product solves.

Fewer actually think about how to promote their thought leadership. Two tips are to 1) boil down your new approach to a list of specific action items, and 2) explain why your new way of thinking is better than what came before.

One initiative that gets this right is the Consensus Audit Guidelines, developed by a consortium of private companies and the federal government. It consists of 20 specific controls, from “Inventory of Authorized and Unauthorized Hardware” to “Security Skills Assessment and Training to Fill Gaps.” These steps are neither so specific as to apply only to specific cases, nor so high-level as to be useless. Their promised benefit, also clearly explained, is focusing organizations on the most likely attacks to make the best use of their security budgets.

Another effort, the “DUST” model for mobile security from the Compliance Research Group, comes across as less compelling. DUST stands for “Devices, Users, Sessions, Transactions” which makes sense, but doesn’t tell the reader what to fix. Their backgrounder describes good features to have, such as “dynamic authentication and authorization thresholds based on risk context” but never puts them into an easily-scannable list. Nor does it describe how “DUST” is better than what came before.

Coming up with a new way of looking at the world can leave you so impressed with your own thinking you forget the problem you were trying to solve. Boiling down your genius into a list of “to dos,” and explaining why your breakthrough is so great, drives the point home for your reader.

ZDNet Newsletter Jazzes Up Content To Grease Way for Sponsored Links

The “Tech Update Today” email newsletter from ZDNet (screenshot below) is, like many others, advertiser sponsored and mixes links with sponsors’ content with news stories. Most such newsletter bore me, but ZDNet has me hooked with tricks as old as the tabloid newspaper.

 

 First, the layout is attractive, with bold colors and large type. Virtually every story is teased by a dramatic color image. Second, the lead story is clearly identified, and its significance (“…Google + reCAPTCHA could raise bar in anti-spam battle”) clearly explained. Third, the reader gets an easily scannable list of alternate content, ranging from brow-furrowing (security questions about cloud computing) to eye-catching (How I Tweeted my way out of spinal surgery.)  Fourth, as the reader scrolls down they’re continually rewarded with a mix of serious (Skype Founders Sue Ebay) and fun stuff (exotic cars at the Frankfurt Auto Show.)

How do you do this in your email newsletter?

1)      Invest a few hours, a few hundred bucks or a week of an intern’s time on an attractive design. On-line services offer templates, and an underemployed designer might help for a modest fee and a testimonial.

2)      Be unpredictable. Don’t stick with ho-hum case studies, product announcements or recycled press releases. Mix it up with a blog post (even from outside your organization), a “most frequently asked question” feature from your help desk, or even a link to an unfavorable news story or product review with your rebuttal.

3)      Selectively use outside talent such as writers, editors or designers to bring the content/presentation up to the level you need. Do as much as possible in-house, but admit it when your inside staff lacks the time or skills to do it right.  

4)      Don’t be a slave to linking sponsored white papers to content. It’s numbingly dull to see “Ten Ways to Maximize Virtualized Security” (sponsored by VMware) right next to a news story about “CIOs Concerned About Virtual Security.”) ZDNet drops a light, fun story between the virtual security story and white paper. It also avoids repeating the exact same angle in both. The story might be about virtualization security, but the sponsored link is a Webcast on how Google handles its own cloud security.

Inform your readers, yes, but keep ‘em entertained and guessing about what they’ll see next, even as you’re making your marketing pitch.

Management Vendor Gets Ink With SMB Survey

As I’ve written previously, if you’ve going to do a survey hoping to get ink make sure it generates some hard news. A recent survey by network management vendor Spiceworks did just that, asking if small to medium sized businesses are keeping their IT hardware longer than before. The answer: Yes, and about a year longer, to be  specific. That, and other survey results, got Spiceworks mentioned in Investors Business Daily, and Network World, and eWeek. The lesson: Imagine the headline of the news story you hope to see featuring your name, and work the survey questions from there. Including some nifty graphics LINK highlighting the juicy stuff doesn’t hurt, either.

 

An added note: Spiceworks itself has an interesting business model, providing free network inventory and management software paid for by advertisers and sponsors. Spiceworks also lets users join buying clubs and tell vendors what they’d like to see in future products through its “Voice of IT” program. It’s yet another threat to IT trade pubs and those who serve them, such as PR agencies: Give away the content (in this case software) to aggregate customers, and plumb those customers for market insights at the same time. I assume Spiceworks also charges vendors who want to do custom surveys of that customer base. Wonder if they’re making any money, from what sources (advertising vs. selling research) and how many IT managers buy into this model?

 

 

 

 

Give Away the Database, Charge For Yoga With Larry Ellison?

The sustained downturn is doing some screwy things to the economy, like reducing the price customers will pay for “core” offerings while making them more willing to spend on what used to be “extras.” Two examples of core offerings that are losing their pull: Computers and tickets to sporting events.

Bloomberg reports that Wal-Mart and Staples are slashing notebook prices to or even below the break-event point so they can sell more higher-margin accessories such as service, external hard drives or even computer bags. Turns out for every $1 customer spend on the computer itself, they spend 89 cents on accessories. Service, especially, is a high-margin item, which is why the helpful sales reps push it so hard. One source even compared it to movie theaters that make their profits not on the ticket sales, but on the concessions like $5 a bag popcorn.)

 Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reports the Dodgers are making a killing selling special access to fans, such as – I told you this was wierd – 100 fans paying $100 each to do yoga with outfielder Andre Ethier (above). The three nights the team offered batting practice for fans under the stadium lights brought in another $170,000. Dodger’s President and CEO Dennis Mannion says events like these could eventually bring in more money than tickets, concessions or parking.

I’m left wondering, through, if there’s any way this could work for big-ticket, complex IT offerings or whether vendors are already doing all “give away the product and sell the services” (see: Linux) that they can. The closest we have to “fan access” is when beta customers get a break on pricing in return for steering the development efforts.

And I doubt that, say, EMC inspires enough love that customers would pay to write some microcode for a new disk arrays, the way Dodger fans can pay $1,500 to deliver the ball to the pitcher’s mound. But hey, if this turns into a profit center remember where you heard it first. 

The Recovery Starts...Here?

Guarded hopefulness was the theme at last week’s XSITE (XconomySummit on Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship) at Boston University. The theme of the one-day event showcasing Boston-area startups and VCs was “The Recovery Starts Here.” But the talk in the hallways was instead of a long, slow slog back to anything resembling normal business conditions.

Initial results of a survey done by the Xconomy Web publication showed only 24 percent of attendees felt the US gross national product would increase by the fourth quarter. But, as someone told me the other day, in today’s economy “’Flat’ is the new ‘up”.”

The day was nothing if not eclectic: Presentations by start-ups promising everything from a cure for Alzheimer’s to a “roadable airplane” (not a “flying car” but an airplane that can hit the road if the weather is bad or the pilot needs ground transportation.) Perhaps the biggest “innovation” in view, though, was a new model of fund-raising in which corporations such as EMC fund or direct research at the area’s colleges that otherwise might have been done by privately-funded startups. The vendors get low-cost research; the universities get much-needed revenue. Whatever works, especially in a funding environment one venture-capitalist called “horrific.”

Collaboration with federal and state governments was also a major theme. oMohamad Ali, Massachusetts Senior State Executive for IBM, told the conference IBM is working with New York State to seek funding to develop interoperable standards for medical health records. He said Massachusetts companies need to get on the standards bandwagon, as companies seeking to cash in on the federal government’s drive to digitize medical records will only locate in, and bring jobs to, areas that have health records standards on which they can build.

While there was plenty of evidence of a tough economy, there were also glimmers of hope, especially for Massachusetts companies. One speaker said that Massachusetts still has a number of small manufacturing firms geared to producing very high-quality, small-volume production runs of specialized components for military systems – production capacity that is well-geared to biomedical devices. And panelists at a session on health care said the federal push to records digitization could spur demand for everything from security to data mining to cloud-based storage and data analysis. Another possible growth area: Consultants to help small medical practices make the jump from paper to digital records.

The highlight of the show was inventor DEKA founder Dean Kamen, of Segue fame (infamy?), who slouched on stage muttering he was speaking “under protest” but wound up getting a standing ovation for a call for technologists to support his F.I.R.S.T. nonprofit, aimed at making science and engineering as exciting to young people (especially women and minorities) as “the NBA, NFL or Hollywood.” A Brandeis University study shows students who took part in the program were more than three times as likely to major in engineering than those who did not, and more than twice as likely to expect to pursue a career in science and technology. Kamen’s message is that, with our exploding national debt and increasing competition from other countries, we need to draw far more people into engineering and the sciences than we now are. If even one of them builds something like the robotic arm Kamen built for injured veterans it will all have been worth it.  

Geeks Use Social Media -- Wisely

Still think social media is only for teenagers or ditsy trend-followers? Check out this story from B2B on how even very technical, engineering-driven companies are using social media to engage and motivate customers. What’s as interesting as the fact they ARE using social media is how they are rigorously measuring the impact of social media, and optimizing various social media channels for different types of customers.

At telecom equipment vendor Avaya, Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing Paul Dunay has focused an existing flood of blogs and Tweets on four objectives: listening (to conversations), supporting (customers), energizing (the community), spreading (Avaya’s vision) and embracing (product ideas). “We’re using Twitter as a ‘teaser’ channel, Facebook as a hub of information, forums as a type of help desk and blogs as our corporate voice,” Dunay says.

At semiconductor firm Analog Devices, director-marketing for the GP DSP division Robert DeRobertis measures the effectiveness of social media so carefully that “My CFO knows that if he cuts one key element in my plan, it will have an impact on revenue.” He also says his program closely tracks the customer buying process, “staying abreast of important influencers who guide these processes and aggressively featuring offers.”

And at specialty alloy developer Indium Corp., Director of Marketing Communications Rick Short posts casual photos of employees at work and simple, content-rich video product demonstrations and tests aimed at a highly technical customer base. Not only are customers enthusiastic, he says, but Indium employees have responded as well – with white paper output by Indium employees increasing 50% per year for the past three years.

That in and of itself could pay for your social media efforts right there – assuming your engineers are good enough writers. If they're not, there’s always us ink-stained wretches still looking for work

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Economist Delivers Numbers to Prove Strategy

Quick follow-up: We recently showed you what you can learn from the Economist’s success in an otherwise dying market for print publications. The lessons: That print isn’t dead, that people always want in-depth analysis, and that strong, consistent marketing can differentiate you even in a commodity market. Today’s proof: The Economist Group (that includes The Economist and CFO) reported a 26% boost in operating profit for the fiscal year ended March 31^st. The firm attributed the increase to “strong circulation growth” for The Economist (to record levels). Not bad when everyone from the Boston Globe to Time and Newsweek are busy shrinking and re-thinking themselves enough just to keep the lights on.