The Next Transition in Communication

Over time, the way in which communication happens has gone through some very interesting transitions. Each of them resulted in profound changes in information flow, and with that, significant changes in the discipline of marketing. We’re about to see the evolution of a fifth form of communication, and it will have an equally interesting effect on our lives.

1. One-to-One

The oldest form of communication is the one-to-one model. Face to face interactions and conversations were the main way in which messages were communicated. While very interactive, this was not a very scalable model at all. However, because it was the only way of conveying messages, it found an audience that was not overwhelmed with communication, and was likely much more receptive to new information.

2. Broadcast

The modern marketing industry was born with the advent of mass broadcast communications. Radio, print, or television enabled messages to be mass communicated to broad audiences. This was a highly scalable, but entirely non-interactive, as it was a one-way communication and allowed no way for the listener to engage with the communicator. Also, as broadcast grew, it reduced the attention span of audiences by overwhelming them with too many communications.

3. Email

The next interesting evolution in communication was with the advent of email. I’m not talking about email marketing, however, as that is much more similar to a broadcast model. Interpersonal email, however, added a very interesting element with the “Reply All” function. Now, the audience members in a communication group could easily respond to a discussion, and do so in a way that created ad hoc, topical group discussions. However, these discussions were closed to outsiders. A person who was not in the discussion would not see the discussion happening and could not join the discussion without explicitly being included by an insider.

4. Social Media

Solving this discovery problem, of course, was social media. Now, with the discussions happening in an open format, anyone can detect, read, or join existing discussions. The speed with which these communications happen has been well documented, and discussions on a particular topic can quickly grow to involve and influence hundreds of thousands of people. However, social media creates huge volumes of communications, most of which are not of interest. Filtering through this noise is a daunting challenge, and whereas most social media can be filtered by keywords or brand names, this still tends to result in an overwhelming volume of content.

5. Conversation Discovery

So what's next? As the major search engines apply their computing and analysis horsepower to understanding who is talking to whom about what, we may be on the verge of a fifth major shift in how information is communicated. Passive conversation discovery, guided by the algorithms of Google and Bing and their analysis of vast amounts of social media data, may be the way we discover what conversations are happening that may be of interest. Much like Amazon’s book recommendation systems which looks at “people like us” and sees what they are interested in, Google and Bing may soon be able to accurately detect and show specific conversations that are most likely to be of interest to each person. This finally allows the interactivity and openness of social media while not having the overwhelming volume of unfiltered social


Each of these evolutions in communication has changed how we interact with each other, how we learn, and how we market. This coming fifth transition promises to be as disruptive as any before it.

What are you doing to be ready?



(this article first appeared as a guest post on SavvyB2B)

The Rise of the "Fanmium" Products

Social media has led to a wealth of new ways of thinking about business. One of the most interesting, and most discussed, is the ceding of control of the market message to our audiences. While we as marketers may want to get out there and promote the value of our products and services, the most effective way by far is to have our audience do it for us.

This leads to an interesting paradox. We as marketing teams have energy and resources that we want to devote to making noise about our products and services, there is no longer an easy path to spending those resources in order to get the desired results. Covert tactics to pay people to write nice things about you are usually discovered quickly and backfire badly.

The "Fanmium" Strategy

However, there is one technique that I think is interesting and has merit; the “fanmium” strategy. This is a twist on the “freemium” product strategy, but involves giving away licenses of your product (or an equivalent) to those who provide coverage. Coverage could be anything from blog posts, becoming a fan on Facebook, or joining an online community.

I have seen this strategy being used from time to time, but most recently came across this strategy being used by a company called Cerebrata, which offers a product called Cloud Storage Studio. In various discussions on Windows Azure forums, I had seen mentions of the use of Cloud Storage Studio, probably coming across references to it 6 or 7 times. Finally, I had a problem that I had seen them mentioned as providing a solution to, and I downloaded a free trial.

What caught my eye though, was the way they structured their licensing:

- A trial version, feature complete, time limited (30 days)
- A development version, feature limited
- A professional version ($49,99)
- And most interestingly, a “Fanmium” offering


To be more precise, here is what they say:



(full disclosure, I bought a full license to Cloud Storage Studio, and am doing this post only because I found the “Fanmium” concept very interesting).

In looking back on what had caused me to find Cloud Storage Studio in the first place, all of the reviews and mentions were very accurate, and none had been overstated. The product is an excellent product, and well worth the price tag (it saved me about 5 hours of work the first time I used it), and without that the strategy would not work.

The key to this strategy, I believe, is looking for honest exposure, rather than trying to buy favorable reviews. Cerebrata is very clear on their desire for honest reviews. They are, luckily, able to achieve favorable reviews on the merits of the product alone.

Looked at from all perspectives, this appears to be a very good strategy:

Cerebrata:
o $49.99 for each bit of exposure is a very reasonable price to pay
o Investing in product, rather than advertising, makes this strategy viable

Bloggers:
o Providing an honest opinion on a product in exchange for a free license is a good deal
o $49.99 of value is not enough of an economic motivator to risk alienating the audience you have grown by providing an inaccurate review or false praise

Buyers:
o Finding the uses for Cloud Storage Studio in context of discussions of the problems they solve was much more helpful than high level advertising
o Free trial version allows independent assessment of product quality, regardless of reviews

What are your thoughts? Have you considered a “fanmium” offering? What do you think the constraints are on when it would/wouldn’t work in a B2B environment?

Is Foursquare Relevant for B2B Marketers?

Recently, I’ve been playing around with foursquare to get a better understanding of it, and think about how it might have a significant impact on B2B marketers. Whereas I’m far from a power user, I have unlocked a few badges (sadly, one of my first was the “Jetsetter” badge that is given for checking in at 5 airports), and I’m in strong contention for the Mayorship of Eloqua.

With South by Southwest happening recently, the number of foursquare announcements on Twitter, of people “checking in” made #SXSW a top Trending Topic. Considering that foursquare only launched a year ago at SXSW 2009, this is clearly a phenomenon worth looking at.

Lots of businesses, especially those selling to consumers, are experimenting with special offers via foursquare in order to motivate those in the area to drop in, make a purchase, or accept an offer. However, it’s not clear that there is any relevant parallel of this in the business to business environment. Business buyers for any given organization are much fewer in numbers, do not generally make purchases based on their current location, and are unlikely to be motivated by the style of offers (come in now, save $10) that are viable using location-based advertising.

Certainly, at tradeshows and events, many B2B organizations are experimenting with foursquare, setting up transient “locations” at their booth and offering prizes to people who check in. I suspect, however, that this way of using foursquare in a B2B marketing environment is temporary at best, and will quickly pass.

I was tempted to conclude that foursquare might, therefore, have limited relevance to B2B marketers, but as I looked into what businesses had been tagged in places as disparate as Toronto, Zurich, Brussels, Antwerp, and London, I began to realize that, very quickly, vast numbers of business venues are being tagged. Almost every venue I visited had already been entered into the foursquare database.

The motivation to do this is startlingly small. Users are able to unlock “badges” with colorful icons and creative names like “Far, Far, Away” and “Playa Please”. Whereas it may seem too small of a motivator to incite behavior, the badges are displayed to the world, and it clearly is driving 100s of Millions of venues around the world to be tagged. I will even admit, it’s a bit addictive, and I found myself looking into the meaning of the badges to see how I might “unlock” the next one.

And that’s where the true opportunity of foursquare gets revealed.

The badges are unlocked for all sorts of very specific behaviours, such as checking in at 25 pizza restaurants. In order to be seen as having done these specific behaviours, of course, the venues you visit must be tagged as such. Because of this, there is a motivation on the part of every user to correctly (and with great detail) tag each venue with its correct type. Foursquare uses up to three levels of increasing detail to tag each venue – a very detailed categorization.

As a B2B marketer, especially one selling to very small businesses that are owner-run and not adopters of technology, this (theoretically) makes available a highly targeted data set. Want to know how many ship’s chandlers are in the port of Zanzibar? (an example that came up in a recent conversation I had with ShipServ’s John Watton). Foursquare may soon have the best data set. Currently, they don’t collect contact information for those businesses, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to apply the same model to acquire that data.

This proves a challenging problem for the classic providers of data who employ research teams to keep their data up to date. The more remote and small the businesses are, the worse the economics are in keeping this data accurate and current. Obviously, Google has been working on this problem too, from a different angle, by allowing business owners to update their own information on Google Maps. However, the dynamic is very different. In foursquare’s model, high-tech enthusiasts with iPhones and Blackberries update the data on multiple locations based on the motivations of a game, while in Google’s model, individual small business owners update their own information on Google based on their own business motivations.

Looked at side-by-side, the data provider models are very different:

Classic: Data provider employs researchers to update data on businesses

Google: Data provider allows business owners to update their own data

Foursquare: Data provider motivates population of enthusiasts to update data on local businesses

It’s not clear which one of these models will be able to collect the most up to date, accurate, and deep data on smaller businesses. It’s equally unclear whether foursquare will be able to leverage this data set to enable B2B marketers who target these micro-segments. However, as I think about what effect foursquare will have on B2B marketing, it is this effect that seems most promising.

Models that leverage the network effects of millions of people can be immensely powerful, and it appears that foursquare has hit on one of these models for gathering deep, location-based information on businesses around the world, that may be extremely valuable to B2B marketers who need this data set.

I would love to hear comments from other data providers, or anyone familiar with the data space, on how they see this model evolving.

Information Will Find Me

As the way that we find information becomes increasingly driven by social influence, it’s interesting to look at where this trend goes in the longer term. The logical extension of this trend is that the consumers of information – our prospective buyers – will expect that the information they should be interested in will find them, rather than them finding information. Much as in the consumer world, songs, books, and movies are recommended to us based on collaborative filtering techniques, information in the business world may soon find us.

A combination of our own unique social graph, and that social graph’s interests and reading history, may soon make the dominant trend of information discovery one of passive recommendation, rather than active discovery (such as via search). As each individual’s interest areas, business role, and social influence graph becomes more and more known by search engines and content portals, the information being presented will cater itself more deeply to what is likely to be of interest.

Analytics across extremely broad populations and vast amounts of data on what was actually clicked or viewed will allow this process to become startlingly precise and highly accurate, further increasing its effectiveness, adoption, and relevance to marketers.

The question for marketers, of course, is how to have relevant content discovered by appropriately interested buyers in this way. The two key points are relevance and interest. As marketers, we need to focus on creating interesting content that is of relevance to each type of buyer we are likely to encounter. This content, whether it is eBooks, webinars, live events, or interesting data, can then be introduced to the discussion through well targeted nurture marketing approaches.

In a world driven by passive information recommendation, there is nothing more important than having your information be found interesting by people who are "like" the people you want to target.

When your information is found, and deemed interesting by an influencer population, it will find its way to a much broader population. Vice versa, if it is not found, or not deemed interesting, it will not find its way to a broader population.

In a world driven by passive information recommendation, there is nothing more important than having your information be found interesting by people who are "like" the people you want to target. The more relevant, interesting, and targeted the content is, the more likely each potential influencer is to read, recommend, or share it, which then guides whether audiences beyond your own will have that content recommended to them based on their unique interests and social graph.

Membership has its Privileges; Best Practices IP vs. Social CRM

I wrote recently about our decision to expose our pricing publicly on our website. It was one of the most commented-on posts ever on this blog, as it seems to have connected with a number of people in the same situation. The intersection of theory and reality in the world of social media always spurs some interesting debates. We all agree that transparency is great and noble... but... what about the realities of having a broad set of products that range in price by a factor of over 10x? What about low-end competitors who compete aggressively on price? When reality and theory intersect it spurs some fun debates, and I appreciate all the comments from people in similar situations.

Today, I want to share with you a similar change in philosophy that we just made at Eloqua, that had equally passionate debates.

Last week we opened up public access to Eloqua’s best practices community portal where the biggest and most vibrant community of marketers gets to work, tackles challenging business problems, and builds the lead management processes that power their businesses.

This caused substantial debate internally, that is likely not unique to Eloqua, as we wrestled with the pros and cons of making this change. Given the response to the last post, I wanted to share with you our thinking on transparency, social CRM, and best practice knowledge.

Why do Marketers Upgrade?

The challenge that we wrestled with was that one of the main reasons that our clients join us, or upgrade from low-end systems, is to join the “community”. They want to compare notes with peers, understand how other marketers are engaging their sales teams, see what analytics their colleagues in similar industries have on their marketing dashboards, and get tips and tricks from people who have gone down this path before. This "membership has its privileges" motivator was very compelling.

The thought was, in opening up our online community portal, are we not giving away the “essence” of this community? The knowledge, best practices, tips, tricks, analysis, and ideas are all there. Could you not just buy a cheap-and-cheerful solution, and then leverage the experience and expertise of this community?

It was a very valid question, and it caused us a lot of consideration. In the end, after much debate, we opened up the portal and shared our expertise publicly. Rather than decrease the value of this knowledge, through giving it away, we are trusting that it will greatly increase the enthusiasm of marketers to join the best marketers on a journey of transforming their businesses.

Does Sharing Expertise Increase or Decrease its Value?

One of the parallels that worked well to win over those who were hesitant internally was that of Mike Holmes on the home renovation TV show Holmes on Homes. Sharing his expertise publicly, week after week, to 100 Million TV viewers has not, in any way, reduced the demand for top quality home renovation contractors. Far from it, it has increased it.

Can home owners watch the show, take notes, and then do it themselves, or use a low cost contractor to get the work done? Perhaps, but they now know the realities of the projects they are tackling, and are more likely to want to engage with a renovations contractor that brings expertise as well as power tools.

Sharing Marketers' Stories

As with any company, we have long been sharing client stories of success. We share videos of Mark DiMaurizio from Comcast Spectacor talking about how the Philadelphia Flyers and 76ers use deep segmentation to connect with B2B and B2C buyers, and we show Katina Fisk of Approva talking about marketing analysis and dashboarding.

These are great testimonial videos of the end state, and they highlight a great “finished product” in terms of results (thank you Mark and Katina). However, what we wanted to showcase in opening up the community was how those results actually get built. This is where the best marketers shine.

In the online community, however, Amit Varshneya and Tom Svec look at the nuts and bolts of building the type of deep segmentation that Mark talked about by leveraging company-level rather than contact-level information. Similarly Tricia Wilkerson looks at the specifics of tracking and analyzing banner ad clickthroughs in order to generate the type of marketing analysis Katina highlights.

Each of these marketing success stories, like Mark and Katina’s, that we share comes from the work of marketers like Amit, Tom, and Tricia. By sharing these stories, we hope to paint a picture of what marketing success truly looks like. Will the passion for great marketing that is shared by community members outweigh any downsides of sharing this “under the floorboards” view? We believe it will.


Have you had similar internal debates about opening up your expertise to the world? Please share them here, we would all benefit from your experiences on this topic.

Message Delivery vs. Message Discovery

The most obvious change in marketing that we are seeing lately comes down to how our messages reach their intended recipients. This is driven, of course, by changes in the behavior of our audience of potential buyers. The information “filters” we use are shifting from being economic filters, driven by publishers, to social filters, driven by the relevance of individuals and their messages. As this takes place, we as marketers need to shift towards thinking about how messages can be "discovered", rather than how they are delivered.

There is no more obvious place where this transition is happening than in the worlds of search and social media.

Search, either natural or paid, provides an active way to discover information. A prospective buyer actively seeks information on a given topic based on keywords. Successful marketers are able to ensure that their content is present at the top of the search results, either through an effective search engine optimization strategy, or through good search engine marketing and a healthy search marketing budget.

In the various social media channels, however, information is not pushed out directly, but rather it is published, and then discovered by an audience based on recommendations from their peers, content syndication, and chance. The more interesting and relevant your content is, the larger an audience of influencers will share it, forward it, and link to it, bringing it to the much broader audience that they influence.

Distribution via Influencers

Unlike in search marketing, however, there is no clear metaphor for applying a marketing budget in order to achieve broader distribution of your information within social media. Although a variety of paid structures are being experimented with, none have received the wide acceptance that paid search marketing has.

This means that the most reliable way to ensure that your messages are maximally discoverable within the world of social media is to build strong relationships with the key influencers in your space who are likely to share those messages and ensure that your messages are sufficiently interesting, relevant and non-salesy in order to make them shareable.

Your long term reputation with each of these key influencers is based on a history of creating high quality content, but each individual content piece stands on its own in terms of its ability to be found to be interesting and sharable. The techniques of great journalists are of use here in making each content piece most interesting and most likely to be read.

Headlines, Teasers, and Discovery

Whether it is an article title, an interesting statistic, a tweet, a news headline, or a catchy name for an eBook, the majority of your potential audience will only encounter the briefest of summaries of what your content is about. Convincing your audience to take the step from headline to content by clicking on your content is as much art as is it science.

The better the headline catches the potential reader’s attention, without being misleading, the more the content is read and the messages within it discovered.

The art of writing provocative, catchy, and intriguing summaries of information in just a few words was originally developed by newspaper editors writing headlines. Their goal was to have their publication “discovered” by those passing by a news stand. Now, in a world dominated by the need to make information discoverable, these skills are required more than ever. Each article, headline, or tweet should be thought of in the same light. The better the headline catches the potential reader’s attention, without being misleading, the more the content is read and the messages within it discovered.

Social media analysis moves mainstream

Last week, Webtrends announced that they had extended their customer intelligence capabilities into Facebook. In this new integration, there are two things happening that are worth commenting on. First, there is a continuing move to see a unified view of online behaviour, and online messages across all communication channels, and not a siloed view where each individual communication platform is treated as somehow separate.

In exploring the Webtrends solution, you can see this evolution taking place. When a blog post is written, Tweeted about, then shared on Facebook this is a natural way that information flows in today’s environment. An analytics platform that treats each of the platforms as silos would be forcing marketers to think of communications by “silo” not by “idea”, and that would be a significant mistake. The barriers between social platforms, and between those platforms and our blogs and web properties are rapidly disappearing and already virtually non-existent.

This manifests in both the way that the data is captured (not just within properties under our direct control like main websites, but wherever the audience is, such as on Facebook) and in how it is presented, as an integrated view of activity across communication platforms.

The second interesting trend that became apparent in looking at this integration of Facebook activity into the marketing analysis world was the lack of campaign centricity. Facebook, as with almost all social media efforts, has a “flywheel” dynamic to it. Effort is put in continually, and over time, the success begins to build slowly, but with its own momentum. This is drastically different than typical marketing campaign efforts where each campaign has a fairly defined investment/payback model; a point-in-time investment which is tied to a short-term payback.

Webtrends shows metrics on community success (views, shares, fans, etc), and indicates through “flags” where the driving events (such as blog posts, tweets, and marketing promotions) took place. By doing this, they guide marketers to the view that the driving events are there to build community, engagement, and influencers, which will then over time drive the creation of qualified leads. This view is significantly different than the more direct campaign-to-lead model of typical marketing, but a much more accurate representation of the marketing realities of social media.

As we market to B2B buyers, optimizing how information finds its way to them is crucial. To do this well means that we need to think more in terms of the ideas, and less in terms of the channel by which the information is disseminated. Similarly, as we build our engagement with our buying audiences in social media, we need to think more in terms of how our efforts are building and driving community success, rather than thinking in terms of single campaigns. With their new ability to analyze Facebook, understand the flow of ideas across social media channels, and see community success mapped against the events that drove it, Webtrends helps us make important steps in this direction.

What do you think? Have you tried their new capability in your environment? What insights are you able to gain from it that you weren’t able to get previously?