The Score on Facebook

The next week will be very interesting with regards to Facebook.  Here are a few things to watch:

People Quitting Publicly on a special site set up just for this purpose.

Not that any number of quitters will make a difference to Facebook's nearly 500 million total. But this was just 2,000 last week and this is just a sample of the true number of quitters.

People Giving Money to Diaspora on Kickstarter here.

These guys don't have anything going for them except having said they will build a competing system. So far?  $185,000!  (they wanted $10,000)

Later:  Mark Z. posts his response in the Washington Post.  

Turn the Key and it Works

Earlier this year I rented this Camaro and drove up the coast between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay.  I never thought for a moment that I would have trouble making the car work.  I just knew that when I turned the key it would work. Many of you know that I also drive around a world war II era tug boat from time to time.  Aside from a few old timers, I am literally the only person that can make the thing go (and it takes about 30 minutes and 30 steps just to get it going).

Which one of these experiences is your computer and which is your cell phone?  After countless rejections from my kids, I have now stopped offering to teach them about their computers.  When they have a problem I just fix it for them and most times I do so without crabbing about the fact that they won't let me teach them how it works.  They just expect it to work -- and they should.  Computers have been around for long enough now that we should be able to turn the key and they should just work.  Unfortunately, computers are not getting easier to use.  Every advancement in capabilities is accompanied by a greater increase in complexity and we continue to lose ground.  

When you add in the fact that most customers have zero interest in becoming a computer mechanic -- and we have trouble in the making.

So who is going to win?

• Smart Phones: Easy to use - have you ever read the manual?
• Fastest Path to a Browser: Except for the whole Flash thing, this is my iPad -- always on and zero brain damage.
• Anything managed by professionals somewhere else: IT in the cloud.

People who are betting their careers on the PC should spend more time figuring out how to just make them work.

Here is how Steve Jobs thinks about this.  He is still the most impressive CEO in the business.

Should Google Add Some Polish?

Yesterday on This Week in Google, Leo Laporte and his tech friends were reviewing the first day of Google i/o.  The TWIG panel recounted how over 5,000 developers showed up and overwhelmed the event (and the WiFi -- which is pretty funny for a cloud company), and how the content of the event was dense even for its target audience of developers, and how there seemed to be a significant lack of coordination as Google blog posts were going live during the keynote that had no correlation to the keynote messaging.

It was at this point the Leo said all of this rough around the edges stuff was good because a Google with too much polish would be scary.  Forgive the very loose (not direct quote) account here.  Please do listen to the podcast if you want the actual dialog.

This brings up a very interesting idea in marketing.  There is a continuum that spans from accessible and not polished to not-accessible and very polished.  Google seems to be taking up residence on the accessible end and Apple on the other end.  Where do you position your company?  I would argue that trust is highly correlated to accessibility and that if you want your customers to trust you -- don't get too polished.

Google Enterprise Keeping Score

There has been a good deal of press and even more talk about Google taking on Microsoft in the Enterprise.  Last week Google made a post to its Enterprise blog about a channel partner that left the Microsoft channel program in favor of the Google Apps channel program.  In fact the post is guest written by the company doing the switching.  Clearly the chance to be featured on the Google Enterprise Blog is big for a young small company.

The most dangerous part of this to Microsoft is that Microsoft will not even notice.  The partner in question probably does not even show up on Microsoft's radar.  

Losing a partner to the competition, no matter how small, is a problem.  Losing a partner that specializes in migrating to Google Apps and Amazon Services is a problem.  Google is chipping away at the edges of Microsoft's channel partner relationships.

Google i/o starts today in SFO.  So I suspect we are going to see a bunch of stuff like this during the week.

Facebook is Amway 2.0

Mark Zukerberg is the next Richard DeVos.  We know history repeats itself, and as we are seeing it right now as Facebook becomes Amway 2.0.  Both organizations provide tools to aspiring networkers, focus on counting things, and work to monetize the relationships to the maximum degree possible.

Aspiring Networkers

Both Amway and Facebook provide the tools and encouragement to build a network of friends.  Quantity of friends is more important that quality, and no attempt is made to value one friend more than another.  There are no best friends on Facebook or in Amway. 

Count Your Friends

Once in Amway you are encouraged to produce a list of your friends so you have a place to start building your network.  You are coached as to how to approach your friends, and suggestions are made about friends of friends.  The objective is to get as many friends into the network as possible.

We Make it Easy for You

Once you get enough friends into the network, you can work to sell things to them, or work to get them to sell things.  You can be a big success even if your friends don’t buy anything – as long as your friends of fiends do.

So the next time someone asks you to lunch to discuss a new “business opportunity”, make sure to ask:  is this Facebook?

All of this is not necessarily bad for Mark Zuckerberg.  After all, Richard DaVos owns a really big boat and the Orlando Magic.

Later:  Here is a good post by Robert Scoble about what Facebook should do.

Eliminating Waste in the Sales Processes

Salespeople go through training to learn how to handle/manage rejection which emphasizes how the process of selling is not only wasteful, but intentionally so.  Salespeople are expected to not close a large percentage of prospects.  This is why the weekday movie matinee is called the salesman's special.  Clever salespeople, or those without much motivation or poorly designed compensation plans, make a habit of picking the deals they are not going to close in advance and avoid spending time on them.

It is no wonder there is animosity between the engineers that make the products and the the salespeople that sell them.  The engineers are grinding out the products and the salespeople are overpaid to go to the movies.  Clearly this is sufficient motivation for the engineers to rebel and it is happening right before our eyes.

Google and Amazon and Apple and others have built their companies on the premise that sufficiently well engineered products don't need any salespeople at all.

CRM and SFA have not done much to address the issue.  In fact after 20 years of these revolutions spending on sales and marketing as a percentage of sales has not declined (gotten more efficient) at all.

Unless sales as a profession can come up with process improvements to match the productivity gains in the rest of the economy it could be at risk of wholesale replacement.   

Comdex is Back

Everything Channel purchased the company that owned the Comdex brand in 2006 and has just this year launched plans to bring back what was at one time the biggest technology trade show on earth.  Believe it or not it probably never made it into the top ten largest trade shows of all time with Auto, Book, and Agribusiness tradeshows dominating the top 10.

But this is a legacy brand with a new twist:  The show is going virtual.  In an refracting irony suitable for the hall of mirrors, Comdex will be reborn in a virtual Las Vegas -- where there are physical replicas of New York and Paris!  Yow!  We can now go to Virtual Comdex and see virtual renditions of New York and Paris set in a virtual Las Vegas, all without leaving the comfort of our desks.

With this many layers of virtualization, I wonder if I have to worry about getting back safely.  

All histrionics aside, we all should applaud Everything Channel for bringing back this great event while at the same time pushing us into a new experience.  We will be there -- and I hope you will be too.

HP Hires - and hires

Mark Hurd has been very busy remaking HP.  Just put "HP Hires" into a search engine and you will get the picture.  Here are a few that I think are the most interesting:

Bill Veghte:  Long time Microsoft veteran and the guy that got Windows 7 back on track after Vista.  He left in January.

Richard Gerstein:  From Sears -- where he was the top marketing guy in charge of the brand.  at HP he will be the top guy in charge of marketing at the Personal Systems Group.

Mark Stephenson:  From Cisco.  Let's watch for the lawsuits on this one.

Add to this all of the talent from the Palm deal and you have a serious make over underway.

Another Layer on the Silos

Is it just me or does it seem like the big vendors are isolating themselves even further?  Here are the events that I can remember from the last few weeks that point to this trend:

Apple pushes Adobe away:  The old folks remember that Pagemaker, made by Aldus and acquired by Adobe, was the killer business application on the Apple platform.  But hey, that was a long time ago.  Steve Jobs clearly thinks they can make it without Adobe on their team.

Apple Sues HTC to Kill Android:  Some say that android is now the most expensive phone operating system because HTC had to go to Microsoft for patent protection and then Microsoft shot at Google for Android -- pushing the cost of Android up to as much as $40 per device -- and none of the money goes to Google.

HP buys Palm, Kills the Win7 tablet, gives its partners an anti Cisco ultimatum:  I guess if you are going to start shooting, you might as well shoot at everyone.  

Dell pushes the fear button on Cisco:  Look for Dell to come out with networking gear soon because their PR machine is on the anti Cisco track.  Funny because Dell and HP are always going at each other, and HP is all over Cisco, you would think that Dell would line up with Cisco.  Nothing like fighting wars on multiple fronts.

Things are getting hot in tech!

LATER: Jim Jubak on MSN Money had a similar thought.

The Changing Role of the Salesperson

There has been a great deal of talk about how the role of the salesperson is changing.  This includes the extreme proposal that salespeople are not needed at all.  Being a salesperson at heart, I am unlikely to gravitate towards my own extinction.  I do think the role is changing significantly from that of an augmentation of the product or service to that of an advisor supported by the Brand Promise.

Selling Was:  Salespeople have historically been used to fill the inadequacies in the products or services made by their employers, and create relationships with customers.  The result:  customers feel connected to the salesperson, who is accountable for product or service performance,  more than the company.

Selling Is Now:  Through the success of Dell, Amazon, and Google, selling now often happens without the aid of a salesperson.  The customer arrives at the purchase decision independent of the manufacturer or salesperson.  In some cases, particularly when involving technical complexity or variable services, third party providers have emerged to help customers with the buying process.  These VARs, consultants, and specialists advise the customer and charge for their time.  Since they are not employed by the manufacturer (their business card has a different name on it), they are not identified with the success of the product or service or as accountable for outcomes.  

Selling Will Be: Manufacturers will rely more heavily on the Brand Promise to frame the relationship with the customer.  Salespeople will increasingly be outside the manufacturer and offering services to compliment the product -- often incorporating several products into a solution.  Products will become increasingly standardized and manufacturers will have decreasing capacity (and inclination) to handle exceptions.  This will turn the 80/20 rule up side down -- and customers will be served if they are a good fit, and the customers requiring an exception will go to different manufacturers catering to their profile.

The missing component:  How do align these outside salespeople with the Brand Promise.

How to Kill Marketing

CEOs have an amazing ability to kill the creativity of their marketing departments.  It is not their fault really.  The quarterly pressure of Wall Street can drive even good people into defensive and short term thinking.  Add to this the fact that most stocks are currently overvalued and the CEOs don’t even know why (no one does).  See my How Much To Pay the Guy Driving post for a colorful metaphor for our current market conditions.

So we created a system that makes CEOs short term thinkers and CEOs have created systems to impair their marketing departments.

Here are some tactics I have witnessed.

1. Price over Effectiveness:  Measuring marketing effectiveness is critical but hard to do.  Measuring spending is all too easy to do.  Spending impacts this quarter and effective campaigns impact next quarter.  So CEOs value price measurements over effectiveness measurements and this quarter looks better and next quarter looks – well next quarter is so far into the future.  In its worst incarnation this tactic measures marketing by relative changes in spending.  Success is doing what was done last year but for less money.  Effectiveness isn’t even in the formula!
2. Punish Idea Failure: The fire-able offenses should be failing to try new things and failing to kill bad ideas.  All too often however people get fired from marketing positions because the idea they tried failed.  Which not only discourages new ideas but encourages clinging to bad ideas and working the numbers over and over until they look good.  (see my post on the Excel Pig).
3. Underfund Radical Ideas: This sounds like the same thing again, but it is considerably different.  All CEOs know that they need good talent.  They also know that if too many new ideas are turned down during planning the most creative people will leave.  So the lukewarm track of approving the project but funding it at a level that makes success highly improbable.  It is hard to fail fast when fast is too expensive.

Here I am mostly talking about the big publicly traded companies but we have all seen the sector that is supposed to be the most innovative, venture capital, do these same things.  And in Hollywood,  Harry Potter 7 is another outcome of our starving the creative people of oxygen.

Since sending the CEO to rehab is probably out of the questions, here are some suggested tactics to counteract the CEO’s tendencies.

1. Get some ground rules in place:  The best time to do this is before taking the job.  It is impossible to set fundamental ground rules if you are on the ropes and part of marketing is being on the ropes form time to time.
2. Throw a bone to this quarter and get the cash next quarter:  Believe it or not, there are quarters when the CEO is on the ropes and badly needs the numbers to work out.  Push a campaign to next quarter, cut some stuff that is not to painful to restart, contributed to a quarterly win.  Along the way make sure you get buy in for the thing you really want next quarter.
3. Build a Feeder or Farm System:  All of the major league teams have farm teams because they are cheap and a good way to test players before it really counts.  Build your own marketing farm team in a small subsidiary, partner, or even an obscure division of the company.  This will give you real life testing instead of focus groups and much lower cost of experimentation both in terms of reputation when things fail and outright budget.
4. Game out the Competition:  Good CEOs spend their time thinking of the company in the context of the industry – frame new ideas in that context – not a marketing department or other internal motivations (so and so product group wants this).  A good game theory diagram showing your last move, the competition’s response, your next move, and the anticipated response by the competition.  This is great stuff for the CEO to talk about with the board.

Remember, some CEOs are actually good people trying to get the job done.  Keep that in mind and use these tactics to make your marketing department immeasurably valuable.

My iPad is Just a Toy

There was a time that I worked hard to improve my golf game – as if a steadily declining score would justify the time I was spending.  I found I enjoyed the experience much more when I started thinking of it as a walk with friends through a manicured park interrupted by the occasional swinging of a club.

I have had the chance now to get used to my iPad and to show it to interested onlookers.  Even though no one has yet asked me directly if this is a device for serious work; it does seem to be on the minds of the curious.  So my intro now goes like this:  It is an amazing piece of technology that is a delight to use – but in the end it is a toy.  It is not going to replace any of my other devices and it will travel with me from time to time, but mostly it is a device that lives at home.  This may seem like a denigration, but it is not intended as such.  I think I will be much happier with my purchase when I consider my iPad ancillary to the technology tools I use for work.  I will never be a pro golfer and the iPad will never be a professional work device.

Yes there are the work use cases with the external keyboard and the productivity apps, but I doubt anyone really thinks work can be done on the machine.  Even someone who’s job is just reading the newspaper will find themselves sitting in front of their PC or laptop.  The mind is a nimble thing, and when I pick up the iPad, mine already separates activities into iPad friendly and not – and I don’t even try to do the unfriendly ones anymore.  Here is a list of things I do and don’t do on my iPad:

• Do:  Read the paper:  I read the NY Times and Wall Street Journal on the iPad because I can bring the thing with me to the kitchen and sit with my kids.  I do not use the Apps – the NY Times Editor’s Edition is inferior to the NY Times web page and a big step down from the Times Reader on my PC.  I did not even try the Wall Street Journal app.  Who would pay more for the app than the online version – don’t know what they were thinking there!
• Do:  Check the weather:  I Installed The Weather Channel app TWC Max+.  It is OK, but not as good as the native weather app in my iPod Touch.  Half the time I go to my favorite local weather web page instead. 
• Do:  Check the stock market:  I installed iStockManager but again, it is not as good as the native iPod Touch app.  But if I am on the iPad at the time I use that.
• Do:  Tweet:  I do post from the TweetDeck app, but it is a strain to copy and paste links, and believe it or not while reading tweets on TweetDeck, you cannot click on the links – weird.
• Do:  Maps:  I do look stuff up on the native maps app.  It is pretty cool, but it does not show traffic, so for that – back to Safari.  One amazing thing however is location based services without GPS.  I use both my iPad and my Touch with a Verizon MyFi device.  With that connection, the maps application and pinpoint my location to within about 100 yards – incredible.  I guess we know how the cops find the bad guys these days.
• Do:  Read email.  I think the native email app is good enough for reading and I can reply from time to time, but typing on the Touch is considerably easier than the iPad – and you don’t look so stupid.  Same goes for notes.
• Don’t: Google Reader:  I am a big Google Reader user and the Google App for the iPad is not very good.  The Touch one is better, but not enough.  So I read my RSS feeds at my desk.
• Don’t: Work:  Craft documents, emails, spreadsheets, reference databases…  no point in even trying.  Why spend twice the time and burn cycles on work arounds when you can save up that stuff for later and spend half the time.
• Don’t: Watch Video:  I tried to watch a movie and that was a joke.  I am just glad no one could see me holding the thing awkwardly in my lap.  Home video – which I thought would be the killer app is still something I cannot figure out how to do. 

So I do like the iPad a great deal.  Mostly because I have accepted it’s place in my computing life and I don’t try to make it something it is not.  

Fifteen Ideas from Baptie Channel Focus

Yesterday I wrote about some themes that emerged at Channel Focus, and I promised to share some of my other notes.  Like most everyone I make lists of notes while at conferences -- always intending of course to pay some attention to them later in my life.  The act of writing this blog is great encouragement for me to put a little more thought into these notes, so here is my list of fifteen things I want to remember from the conference.  Whenever possible I give credit to the people that either directly proposed the idea, or said something that sparked the thought in my brain.  These are not direct quotes but attribution none the less.

1. Sandy Carter (IBM): Know the customers problems better than they do.
2. David Green (Motrola): 1% of the cloud is for the enterprise right now.
3. Sandy Carter (IBM): We see far less than the Gartner 20% at the enterprise. The private cloud is the way to go. Good stepping stone to the public cloud.
4. Oli Thordarson (Alvaka Networks) Everyone overestimates change in the short term and underestimates the impact in the long run (Geoffrey Moore). And Solution Providers are the most adaptable creature on earth.
5. Gartner Study Cited:  Was 20%, now 50 % of purchasing decisions influenced by the Business Decision Maker (BDM) and going to 70%.
6. Sandy Carter (IBM): Social Media is 50 % for listening.
7. Tarkam Maner (Wyse): 300 to 3 watts of power required per device makes wireless power possible.
8. Tim FitzGerald (Avnet): We are 3 years into a quest to deliver solution and the partners in our program are experiencing growth at 3X the industry.
9. Ross Brown (Microsoft): Three screens include the TV; Younger gen drives the adoption; 90% of all MS developers will be on cloud projects by FY11; Script is fast and flexible compiled is not; cloud computing will take the most complicated licensing (MS) and double it.
10. Ross Brown (Microsoft): ISVs are partners now but many want to be customers instead.
11. Ross Brown (Microsoft): You really don't have to find new partners but broadcast your intentions and let them come to you.
12. Ross Brown (Microsoft):  Who is building the Government Cloud?
13. Julie Parish (NetApp): Only 15 % going to the cloud – so do what you do best even if it is not cloud oriented.
14. Rod Baptie (Baptie): 20 percent fewer SPs now than 2 years ago.
15. Rod Baptie (Baptie): Channel thinks the cloud will happen much faster than the vendors do. 

Baptie Channel Focus 2010: Three Themes

Earlier this week I attended the Channel Focus conference in La Jolla, CA organized by Rod Baptie.  Rod does a tremendous job putting these events together and all of us in the industry owe him a debt of gratitude.  It was a pleasure to connect and reconnect with people in real time and compare ideas and experiences.  Although there was not an official theme, there were some ideas that came through for me this year.  Here are three that I want to remember:

1. Hot Trends: The Cloud and Social Media:  These are big things in our business now and they would emerge as the topics in any conference.  There were many good tactical ideas for dealing with each and I have some lists of thoughts I will publish later.  That being said, the old saying:  “the more things change the more they stay the same”, did ring in my ear.  We have been talking about these and the cloud in particular for a long time and as the changes actually start happening it is almost anticlimactic.  We need to remember that the hard work of building and operating channel partner programs still has to be done through these changes.  In the very last session we discussed a recent survey of vendor and channel partner sentiment and found that the channel partners could be more ready for the changes than the vendors.  Not surprising on one hand because channel partners are smaller companies and prone to change faster, but it is ironic because it has been the vendors that have been evangelizing the changes to the partners. 
2. Organizing Ourselves:  At lunch yesterday Rod Baptie and Scott Hammond took a few minutes to remind us that we have no industry association to advance our thinking in a more organized way and advocate for policies and practices that could benefit all of us.  Rod and Scott have been working on this since the conference in 2009 and have made considerable progress.  Perplexing as this reality may be, we do need to get on this.  I will post a link here to the working group as soon as I get it.
3. The Recovery is On:  Everyone I talked to seemed to agree that the recovery is on – and everyone is swamped trying to make the most of it.  Hiring seems to be going on in channel marketing departments everywhere as the plans that have been cooked up during the downturn are pressed into service.  As we struggle together up this steep ramp the winners will be the ones that make sure to keep things simple enough to execute well and that listen to their partners.

As always the speakers were very high quality and the agenda was just packed.  Rod squeezed what any normal person would consider enough content for three or even four days into two days.  Even though some people may have to add a third day just to recover, I think the format was very good.  Short enough to attract the busiest people and with sufficient density to satisfy the most discriminating conference attendee.

One more thing:  We all are absorbing more information than ever:  The social media tools do enable vendors, channel partners and customers to process much more information – and so our capacity to absorb messaging seems to be taking some big steps forward.  We have been working for several years to make the communications vendors have with channel partners more compact and efficient – in response to partner feedback of being overwhelmed.  In this event I did not hear that sentiment anymore.  Could it be that through these new aggregating and distillation tools that the channel partners actually want more information from the vendors?

This reminds me of something I heard Jay Rosen say not so long ago (and this is a paraphrase from memory):  There has never been a time where I have been able to get enough information about a topic I was really interested in.  There may be something to this.

Making Marketing More Measureable: Three Dos and Three Don’ts

Every year CMOs are surveyed and every year one of the top goals is to Make Marketing More Measureable.  You can read all of the surveys by searching for “making marketing more measureable” and see for yourself how the studies all say this very thing.  Sales and Marketing are like brothers that are too close together in age and skill – always competing and not really wishing for the other to succeed.  Sales has a built in advantage because of its very concrete measurements.  When revenues are up, the sales department gets all the glory (and that inflames the relationship with marketing), and when revenues are down the sales department blames marketing – and that sure does not mend fences!

We have been both participants in and observers of this conflict because the services we deliver at CSG place us right at the intersection of sales and marketing.  In some of the most interesting cases, our services are used by sales and paid for by marketing!  You can only imagine those meetings.  Along the way we have learned a great deal and have done our best to boil it down to some easy to remember dos and don’ts.  If you run a marketing department please understand that we believe you are in control of your own destiny and we don’t buy into the belief that these are intractable problems.  In fact, we believe that a great deal of the pain endured by marketing departments is self inflicted.  If you run a sales department please understand that this list is not intended as a weapon to use against your marketing department.  We believe that sales cannot be successful without marketing and the sooner everyone recognizes it the better.

Three Things to Do to Make Marketing More Measureable

Do: Measure Opportunities Delivered

The job of the marketing department is to deliver opportunities to sales.  All activities in a marketing department serve this job.  Everyone can think of exceptions to this but I would argue that the exceptions only get marketing people into trouble.  Sure there are a bunch of things to think about but the sales department only gets measured on one thing – sales.  The sooner the marketing department faces the fact that it exists to deliver opportunities to the sales department – the better.  Yes but…..and we have heard them all…measuring opportunities is a much less exact science than measuring sales.  Sales are measured according to GAAP accounting standards and there is no accounting standard for measuring opportunities.

Do: Deliver Great Tools

Indeed it is true that measuring opportunities is quite subjective and the chance that sales is going to value the contribution of the opportunities delivered the same way that marketing does is practically zero.  Sales is the customer of marketing and the only way to measure customer satisfaction is through the eyes of the customer.  Therefore, hurling the opportunities over the wall is just not going to work.  The opportunities must be delivered through a mechanism that collects granular feedback at the time of delivery.  This must be a great tool that members of the sales department actually use.  The tools must be so good that the people using them actually like to use them!  The only meaningful measure of the value of the opportunities delivered is the value the customer (sales) assigns to them.

Do: Collaborate on Process

The process of delivering opportunities and collecting feedback cannot be developed by marketing alone.  Sure the marketing department can get the thing started, but on the second day sales must be brought into the project and engaged to work towards a delivery and feedback system that works for everyone.  There is an easy way and a hard way to do this.  The easy way is to show the sales department that the marketing department understands it exists to deliver opportunities to sales and that the only accurate way to value the opportunities delivered is to accept the value assigned to them by sales. 

Three Things that Don't help Make Marketing More Measureable

The inherent complexity of measuring the value of opportunities delivered is enough to send anyone looking for other things to measure.  The marketing industry is awash with new measurements from web traffic to white paper downloads to booth badge swipes to partner referrals to Twitter followers social network mentions to event attendance and on and on.  All of these are important and require significant attention by competent people in the marketing department.  Don’t expect that anyone other than the marketing department cares about any of this.  Remember that every time you celebrate an increase in web traffic the sales department thinks you are doing so to avoid talking about the value of the opportunities delivered. 

Don’t: Mix Up Your Goals

When building a marketing budget anyone can fall into the trap of confusing things that contribute to the opportunities delivered with the actual opportunities delivered.  Great brand building is necessary, important, and does contribute to opportunities delivered.  Great brand building is not an end in itself and should not be measured as such.  If you sponsored the Indianapolis 500 last year and are going to do it again this year – don’t justify the sponsorship deal this year by declaring that it is cheaper than last year or the reach is greater this year.  Brands are built to contribute to opportunities delivered to sales. 

Don’t: Lose Your Resolve

If sales agrees to give you feedback on each opportunity delivered so you can clearly understand how and when you are delivering the most value to them  (your customer) – don’t back down until you get it.  Clearly you have to win the agreement first and get the feedback second, and clearly it is not going to happen overnight, but unless you maintain your resolve in the pursuit of the feedback, you will never get it.  So stick to your end of the deal and expect your customers in the sales department to stick to theirs. 

Despite the inherent conflict between the squabbling brothers of Sales and Marketing, we have also been fortunate to witness companies where these departments have balanced and symbiotic relationships.  In these companies the clear customer orientation and the simplicity of the measurements between departments is evident.  When done right it is an absolute pleasure to watch and the value to the organization increases by orders of magnitude.

Brand Promise vs. Intention

The actions a company takes make more sense when considered in the context of its intentions.  A few weeks back I posted some thoughts on the brand promise.  This week is an interesting week to think about intention.  

Many years ago Steve Ballmer said he wanted to get a small(ish) payment from every computer user every year instead of selling packaged software.  This it seems has largely been forgotten by the press -- and frankly I cannot even remember what year it was when he said it.  I am quite sure it was long before the popularization of the cloud.  Maybe 10 years ago?  

Either way, I think this is still Microsoft's intention.  Microsoft wants to have a pretty good solution for just about any computing need and would be perfectly happy if everyone purchased subscriptions to gain access to everything Microsoft makes.  I think of Microsoft as the tool superstore of computing, and their desired business model is to have everyone pay for access to the superstore and then be able to use anything.

Google's intention is to get in between us and the information we want.  They realized early on that in order to do this they would need to know a great deal about us.  Smart guys that they are, they anticipated that we would be very nervous about anyone that knew too much about us, so they developed the motto "Don't be evil" to encourage themselves to behave well and to put us at ease.  I think of Google as the toll booth on the highway.  Right now the tolls are being paid by advertisers, and there are other highways, but Google's desire is to have a toll booth on every highway.

Apple's intention is to be the maker of shiny objects.  Steve Jobs knows that the desire for the latest and greatest shiny object is nearly insatiable and he has set out to be the guy that defines and delivers them.  When people say that his creations don't do everything, he says -- the things that my devices don't do, don't need to be done.  I think of Apple as Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium.  The stuff is just so amazing we don't even care what it costs or what it does not do.

So Facebook.  It does appear that Facebook has a highly targeted desire to be the single point of identity management on the web.  The question is -- what is their intention?

Facebook's Social Grab

It has been described as Ambition by Robert Scoble, an "impressive feat of innovating at scale" by Albert Wenger, and Dave Winer described it as Zuckerberg's megalomania.  The word scary seems to have increased in usage worldwide just because of Facebook!  The outcry against Facebook wanting to own our identities has been quite the chorus this week.

So on the one hand we think -- everyone is outraged so this will never work.  But on the other hand we are back doing what we do and not changing our behavior.  Just like Wall Street -- we don't trust those guys but we keep giving them our money.  It is a similar psychology.  We know the stock market is set up to benefit the insiders, but everyone thinks they are going to be the one person that defies the odds.  We know that Facebook is making an intentional and targeted and well executed attempt at owning our identities, but all we can think about is getting some of that traffic.

Many people are pulling the fire alarms and no one is leaving the building!  If you think I am overstating this, consider for a minute the idea of unwinding/shutting down your Facebook account.  We are all thinking we will each be the one person that can get out before the crash.  400 million users -- let's just get a little of that traffic before we get out.

So before we just go back to what we were doing and stand by while Facebook gains even more momentum -- let's remember this is not an Open Social Graph -- it is Facebook's Social Grab.

Tallying the Impact to the Channel

The announcements in the last few days by Facebook and Twitter are very real reminders of the pace at which things are changing in our industry.

In an effort to take a step back and evaluate the impact of these and other shifts to the technology channel marketing industry, we are assembling a group to do a SWOT analysis on the Channel.  

We are going to kick this off at the Baptie Channel Focus event next week in San Diego.  You can participate even if you are not going to be at the event.  Here is what you need to know:

•  Follow us on Twitter:  You will be able to see all of the contributions and you can contribute your thoughts -- just put @CSG_Channels in your tweet and we will take care of the rest, or
• Email us at swot@csgchannels.com.  We will turn your contribution into a tweet -- so others can see it.

We will take everyone's contributions and craft a SWOT Analysis of the Channel that will be shared with the industry.   We will not be completely relying on the wisdom of the crowd in this effort however.  We will be assembling an advisory group that will steer the effort.  In the event you would like to participate as an advisor to this project, please send us an email at swot@csgchannels.com or contact me directly.

Here is the link to the announcement about this project on our web site.

Reports of the death of email...

It is hard to believe but the fax machine that runs over a telephone network has been around for about 50 years.  We still have them in our offices.  In 1996 I was president of a Rotary club in Seattle with a membership of mostly downtown professionals (architects, lawyers, CPAs...) and we distributed our weekly newsletter by fax because only 30% of our members had email addresses.  

Soon after that however, email took off and within a year or two everyone I wanted to reach by email had an address.  Spam was not really a problem yet. It was the golden age of email.  Not only that but we were the email welcoming committee because we wanted more people to do business by email -- so we all promoted it all of the time.

With email on the scene no one defended the fax machine.  The paper rolled up, you had to be there, your document was exposed to anyone that happened by... there was a lot to hate about faxes.  Of course when you needed a signature by 5 pm and it was 4:45 pm -- everybody was glad the fax machines were there.  In fact, all of the real work still came in over the fax machine.  When a fax arrived on my desk -- I paid attention.

The list of technologies that have threatened to do to email what email did to fax is long.  Most recently we have Linked In, Facebook, and Twitter.  And each time the welcoming committee moves to the newest and greatest thing and we all heap scorn on the last thing.

True there is plenty to hate about email.  All of the newsletters (most of which I somehow signed up for), the spam that my IT guys block, the rest of the spam that the junk mail filter traps, the cc's of stuff I will never read, the notifications of changes to online things, the phishing attempts and on and on.  

Twitter on the other hand is just as great as email when it was new.  There is not much spam, everyone is positive about using it, and the welcoming committee could make a Republican feel comfortable in San Francisco.  Mostly however, we all love Twitter because no one expects us to read anything there!  Glance at the stream if you want, but there is no social contract forcing you to read anything or respond.  

The email camp is pretty lonely by comparison.  No housewarming gifts and piles of useless junk and also things that people actually expect me to read and think about.  I don't think anything is even close to displacing email as the medium of real work for a very long time.

Is your KPI an RBI or an OBP?

Some marketing departments are just glad to be able to say that they measure something.  The winners are measuring the right things. Everyone has their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and some of the measurements are based more on tradition than on relevant facts.

Over the last 10 years baseball has been turned up side down as traditional measures like Runs Batted In (RBI) have been supplanted by On Base Percentage (OBP).  The teams that figured out how to make their measurements more accurate won -- and the same thing is happening in technology marketing right now.  

Why is the OBP better than the RBI?

•  The OBP takes walks into consideration (after all, no matter how a batter got on base, he is on base)
• The OBP works no matter where you are in the line up (someone else has to be on base for you to get an RBI).

 Why doesn't the RBI go away?

•  Because everyone wants to compare to last year
• Because the competition is doing it
• Players are working to improve their RBI number

How many of your measures are quaint and traditional like the RBI?

Here are some of the traps we see people falling into on measurements: 

1. Better Than Last Year:  We have all done it.  If the numbers are better than last year it must be better right?  Well if you are talking about revenue -- yes.  If you are talking about an intermediate measurement like partner count, attendees at an event, or even satisfaction surveys -- better than last year may not mean the activity is worth doing.  We must take a step back and question the value of the activity before we congratulate ourselves for going in that direction even faster.
2. More Than the Competition: I am as competitive as the next guy and it is easy to think things are worth doing if the competition is doing them.  Just doing what the other guys do is not necessarily the highest value activity for your marketing effort.  So before you jump into the contest make sure the activity maps to your overall plan.
3. Assuming Ownership of the Best Looking Number:  It sure is tempting to take the best looking number you can find and make it the result of whatever campaigns have been running -- particularly when the executive review is looming and the other numbers don't look so good.  Unintended outcomes are great, we would not have Post It notes without them. but if you cannot convince yourself of the correlation and be confident that the outcome could be repeated, don't take credit for the number.

Just like in the majors, we should work to reduce everything to contributions to revenue.  This will reduce the tendency to fall into these traps.