What’s Wrong with Tech Marketing – and How to Fix it (Forrester Interview)

Posted on February 15, 2011 by rgeller

As I blogged last week, I spoke with Dr. Thomas Grant of Forrester about a new report: Tech Marketers Pursue Antiquated Marketing Strategies. Our wide-ranging discussion covered many topics that should be of interest to Flack’s Revenge readers.

The report calls technology marketers out on the carpet for being too focused on lead generation and new business. When compared with other industries, the techies simply do not spend the time or money that they should on market research or customer relations, and do not use social media or PR to full advantage – it is instead all about big bang events, product releases and other news, and talking rather than having thoughtful conversations.

No doubt, some will wince at its conclusions, however, the report does offer suggestions for improvement. In Part 2 of my conversation with Dr. Grant, I tried to zero in on these things, elicit examples and also find out more about ways in which tech marketers can more productively use PR and social media, and work with media and analysts.

Read on, and if this is a topic that interests you, I encourage you to visit the Forrester site as they have a selection of interesting reports that pertain to marketing. It might also encourage you to read into techniques like TURF analysis to gain new insights from data gathered.

Do companies ever make the transition (from being product–driven to market and customer-driven)?

it is wrenching… and sometimes takes disruption.

Discussion about SaaS as an example of disruption that is changing thinking

What really struck me about SaaS was that it kind knocked people for a loop… they started saying things like “Well, this isn’t just a delivery model, this is a business model… we have to have a very different engagement model around our customers, we have to design our products differently.”

In a way, what had happened was that they had been thrust into a very close relationship with customers that didn’t exist necessarily in an on-premises world… with many layers of obfuscation between you and ultimately what people were doing with the technology… and suddenly people realized, well, damn, customers aren’t just interested in things that are new, and they’re not just interested in products, and they’re not just interested in us as a vendor in delivering products that are new…

[This] has led people away from emphasizing too much what is new, and new leads and so forth… obviously from the statistics, not everyone is there yet.

Emphasis on the new, new thing

One of the things that companies have learned is that, [while] new is good… new is not always intrinsically and obviously valuable. That is why the pace of innovation in the tech industry is a double-edged sword… on the one hand, it allows people to come up with things of value and deliver them to the market quickly, but often also lets them deliver things that are not of value, or not explain the value as effectively as they should because they’re rushing to get it out and then they move onto the next thing.

On relatively small budgets for press and analyst relations (see chart)

The conceit that because we are developing new technology, we are defining the market, ergo there is no market research to be done is patently wrong. Aside from the fact that not every technology [and] innovation is disruptive to that level, also, too, it is the case that you are addressing a human need; people do express their needs usually in a pretty clear fashion that you can then do market research about…

it is unfortunate that they don’t tap available resources as much as they do, nor… other sources of influence… It is, especially in the B2B world, a pretty complex process… in the best of all possible worlds, you are trying to create some sort of a cascade of positive viewpoints on what you offer as a vendor that go, ultimately, into not just a press release or a piece of marketing collateral but ultimately go in a conversation between a CIO and a colleague when they sit down together… you’re ultimately trying to reach that kind of conversation.

I don’t think that is something the tech industry has effectively mastered… again, not just press and analysts, but other people might be important influencers… they don’t get that picture too clearly.

There’s an unfortunately standard model for doing analyst relations… what analysts don’t enjoy is talking to a vendor only when there’s a huge announcement, and there’s this carefully stage-managed conversation… frankly, the analysts have a hard time getting a word in edge-wise, because there’s this gushing fire hose of information about this big new thing… that’s not as effective as being in a more conversational mode with analysts….

Are tech companies under-investing in PR relative to other industries?

I think they are under-investing where PR is going… PR doesn’t have to be just about announcements about new products.

One of the areas that is often misunderstood is the value of a new success story… what people look for in a success story is not necessarily what vendors think they are looking for… which is usually just validation that the vendor is wonderful.

If you are looking at PR as a conduit for information that will have an effect on a potential buyer or will help keep a customer loyal, having a story about how someone addressed a problem – even if the vendor is a minor character or not even mentioned – is still going to get my attention…

What about tuning into vendors content on blogs and Twitter, assuming it is interesting and an area you cover you’d want to tune into that, right?

Yes… and I do, for example since I do write a lot about social media as an input into the development process.  I’ve gotten to know one of the persons who posts there a lot and I have a lot of respect for what she has to say. We’re willing to follow what a social media outlet has to say regardless of whether it is a vendor or somebody else.

We asked Cisco how has social media effected their launch process… they said, well what happens is that the spike of activity flattens out a bit, there’s more conversation they have to engage in leading up to a launch event and there’s actually, on the trailing side,more going on afterward… not just a “show up and throw up” event, then they rush off to the next big launch, but they have to engage over a longer time. Forrester

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Forrester to Tech Marketers: Grow Up!!! (Interview with Dr. Tom Grant)

Posted on February 10, 2011 by rgeller

I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Thomas Grant about a new report from Forrester: Tech Marketers Pursue Antiquated Marketing Strategies. Handshake 2.0 blogger Anne Giles Clelland had alerted me to the study, which sounded very relevant to the client base that we serve at Fusion and Social Fluency. I asked Tom if he’d share the report and entertain some questions, and he graciously consented.

In a nutshell, the report says that technology marketers are overly product and new business-driven, under-invest in research and customer relations, and don’t understand or use social media to full advantage. The last part is ironic because it was the techies that invented social media, and were among the first to flock to blogs, and news groups, bulletin boards and IRC chats before that.

It seems that tech companies show their marketing immaturity by pouring their energies and budgets into flogging new products to new customers – it is apparently all about the leads, lead, leads (the video segment above features outtakes from the great movie Glengarry Glen Ross, which was about down-in-the-luck realtors and their obsessive focus on sales leads).

I include a few excerpts of the report below, as well as from my interview with Tom. There is so much good ground we covered that I will include more details from the Q & A in a follow-up post.

Compared with other industries, B2B technology industry companies treat marketing as an opportunity to sell new products and services to new customers. For these vendors, the product is the axis around which marketing efforts turn. The primary objective is leads…..

The high rate of potential innovation in the tech industry plays a large part in setting these priorities…The company is obliged to describe each new offering to customers, so product marketing from commercials to 3d product photography is an ongoing concern. Appealing to new customers is a primary reason for adding products and services…

In the typical technology company, development teams sit at the heart of the organization…In this mindset, development creates value in the form of products and services. Other groups, such as sales and marketing, are merely responsible for delivering it. This chain of assumptions leads to a disproportionate emphasis on product marketing… One of those unintended costs is the tech industry’s relative indifference to market research….

One of the surprising results of our survey was the tech industry’s perspective on social media. While tech industry marketers talk a great deal about how social media have transformed all aspects of a company’s relationship with its customers, these same marketers treat social media primarily as a public relations channel…

The report says that technology companies can improve their marketing by taking the following steps:

Get past product marketing…

Include sustained activities more prominently in marketing metrics

Test these new strategies in social media channels

For further details I urge you to visit the link and purchase this report (others too, as it turns out Forrester has a selection of relevant reports on marketing best practices).

Q and A with Dr. Tom Grant of Forrester (Part 1)

What was the methodology?

It was a really big survey… in this case, since we were talking to both tech companies and other kinds of companies… we decided: this a great opportunity to see what distinguishes the tech industry from a marketing perspective.

How are you defining “tech?”

These are ISVs, hardware companies, services companies… people who are in the business of either producing hardware and software or whose job it is to help deploy it successfully … there are a lot of B2B companies… but [some of the companies] do other things, it was not exclusive of B2C.

On social media (and lack of effectivenes in using it)

I’ve always had a gut feeling that tech companies were a little too self-congratulatory about how cutting edge they were about social media… a lot of [their ineffectiveness] does have to do with, first of all, the heavy product emphasis, [in many cases] the entire company is acculturated into thinking about products and not necessarily about the value stream from the customer’s perspective. The other part of it is this emphasis on leads; if it is not a lead-generating activity, then what the hell are we doing?

It sometimes takes a very dramatic change to get out of that mode

Tomorrow: Finding a Cure (From a Scream to Market Whisperer)

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Imaging Centers up their Image

Posted on February 3, 2011 by rgeller

I am a sucker for a good headline and a good story about PR. That is why yesterday’s Wall Street Journal article Boosting Medical Scans’ Image caught my attention (it also doesn’t hurt that I have three radiologists in my family and I worked as a field service rep at GE Medical Systems early in my career).

It seems that imaging centers are working hard to add amenities and become more inviting places in advance of tougher accreditation rules coming in 2012 that might drive up costs. Also, manufacturers of these systems – like my old employer – are making the scanners more patient-friendly and less intimidating.

According to the Journal:

Some hospitals are upgrading their imaging facilities, giving them a spa-like feel intended to help patients overcome fears they may have of the procedure. The Northeast Georgia Medical Center in Gainesville, Ga., has added amenities like separate dressing rooms. The women’s area offers warmed waffle-weave robes, household magazines and a waterfall. For men, the waiting room resembles a mountain lodge with dark teak wood, traditional robes, masculine colors and hunting and fishing magazines.

At some children’s hospitals, imaging machines are decorated in an outer space, jungle theme or a “pirate island” theme to represent an “adventure” for young patients getting a scan. Advocate Hope Children’s Hospital near Chicago even added Jeff Koons’s artwork to a CT machine and room. Some hospitals are buying Philips Electronics NV’s miniature “Kitten” scanner, which children can put a special toy through that activates a video about how the scanning process works.

This kind of reminded me of other types of establishments that became famous for turning otherwise hum drum experiences into entertainment events; theme restaurants like Rain Forest Cafe come to mind, as well as supermarkets like Stew Leonard’s here in the Northeast – they have petting zoos and talking cows in their dairy isles.

While I don’t know if people will go out of their way to get a scan for entertainment value anytime soon, it seems that these changes can be good for the business of medicine, good for patients and good for the image of the profession. The article relates the experiences of one imaging center, at Northwestern Memorial Hospital:

The new equipment and facility has meant 80 patients a day are now scanned at the new clinic, up from 45 at the old clinic on the same number of machines. She says the redesigned machines mean fewer patients need sedatives to help get through the scanning procedure.

I decided to get my older brother’s take; he is a radiologist, CEO at Hudson Valley Radiology Associates, and chairs various hospital and medical boards; in short, he knows the field well.

Dr. Mark Geller said: “Imaging centers are focusing on customer service and patient satisfaction in an effort to differentiate themselves in the marketplace from their competition and in anticipation of reimbursement regulations looming in the future tied to patient satisfaction. It is good business, plain and simple. All of this is good for patients and referring physicians. The unfortunate part in all of this is the assumption that quality of care is the same everywhere. That is simply not the case. Making a care decision purely based on amenities may not be in the patient’s best interest. My counsel would be to shop quality first (equipment, doctors, technical and support staff), and then, all things being equal thereafter, chose your provider based on service metrics and ambiance.”

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SMAFUs: What they are and how to avoid them

Posted on January 28, 2011 by rgeller

A colleague burst into my office, concerned over an update she had seen on LinkedIn that led her to believe one of our top people had left the agency for another job. Later that same day, our LA manager sent me a note – he was alarmed over heightened activity on our Twitter account. Someone was tweeting under the agency name at a much more rapid clip then we were accustomed to, with 20 updates in the last half hour – had someone hijacked our account, he wondered?

These are both examples of the unintended consequences of social media. In the first instance, an innocent change to the user's profile triggered a LinkedIn network update and email that alarmed my colleague. In the second case, auto-posting caused our Twitter account to go haywire when we refreshed some old posts on the agency blog.

I am sure others can cite similar examples, which illustrate some of the pitfalls of social media. For all of the great intelligence that can be gleaned, and tools for communications, there can also be unforeseen network effects. It just goes to show you that you need to be wary about information gained from social media monitoring, and also very careful with technologies such as auto-posting, so as not to create these messes or draw the wrong conclusions..

These situations and others have compelled me to invent an acronym that is the corrollary of SNAFU, or situation normal all fouled up – call it "SMAFU: Social Media all Fouled Up"

Posted in Fun Stuff, Web/Tech | 2 Comments

Six Factors Reveal How News Spreads on Twitter

Posted on January 25, 2011 by rgeller

My post on the Social Fluency blog today reveals six factors that Gilad Lotan used to analyze Twitter activity surrounding the Tunisian uprising.  I had interviewed Gilad previously, regarding unrest in Iran in 2009, and the role that Twitter played.

Below, please find the six factors.  I urge you to visit Social Fluency and Gilad’s blog to read more on this topic.

  1. He tapped into Twitter’s API to search on the hashtag #sidibouzid (the name of the province where the protests started), and find out how often it was mentioned during the critical time period.
  2. Gilad reviewed the volume of tweets for users who were most active on the topic, as well as:
  3. The reach of key users, i.e. the numbers of followers
  4. The words in user profiles, to better understand what types of people were joining the fray and when
  5. He looked at geographic distribution of users over time
  6. Gilad explored the social graphs of users to understand which ones were part of groups and connectors between groups.
Posted in PR Tech | 4 Comments

Questions to Ask when Choosing a Tech PR Firm

Posted on January 20, 2011 by rgeller

Over the years, many have asked me how to best go about selecting a PR firm.  They have wanted to know what criteria are important, and about the right questions to ask.

I generally respond that the questions and criteria should relate to the following categories:

  • Agency vs. freelancers and internal staff
  • Agency size, fee structure, location
  • Agency philosophy/style
  • Track record
  • Social vs. traditional media
  • Misc. (RFPs, awards)

I was recently discussing this very topic with Anne Giles Clelland, a friend, collaborator, and tireless entrepreneur, blogger and maketing consultant.  She asked me to write a guest post for her blog Handshake 2.0 that answers these questions, which I did – the article is featured on the blog today.  Please see this link for the story.  Thanks, Anne!

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1 Space, 2 Space, Red Face, Blue Face (Slate Rants on Punctuation and Brings PR into Fray)

Posted on January 18, 2011 by rgeller

My job as a senior manager at a PR agency requires me to do a fair amount of editing and writing.

Yet I am an engineer by education, and my training in these things has been mostly on-the-job (see my previous post about tips for effective writing). I am a believer in the importance of getting these things right; but am not nearly as strict and excitable as some others are when it comes to grammar and style.

Yes I am sure you have all run across the grammar taskmaster, an interesting and amusing breed (often unintenionally funny, as they tend to be rather humorless).  This is a long way of pointing out an article in Slate that my colleague Heather sent to me.  It rails against the practice of uisng two spaces after the period in a sentence.

I have heard arguments for both sides. Writing for Slate, Farhrad Manjoo makes a pretty convincing case for one space (I always though that using two makes the text look a little less cramped).  The article brings PR into the fray as a-two spaces offender.  Here is an excerpt:

Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.And yet people who use two spaces are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste.* You’d expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you’d be wrong; every third e-mail I get from readers includes the two-space error. (In editing letters for “Dear Farhad,” my occasional tech-advice column, I’ve removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.) The public relations profession is similarly ignorant; I’ve received press releases and correspondence from the biggest companies in the world that are riddled with extra spaces.

A very interesting and informative article, but not a quick read – did Farhad need to (ahem) use so much space to make the point?

Posted in Fun Stuff, In the News, Writing Tips | 1 Comment

Building Thought Leadership with Social Media

Posted on January 17, 2011 by rgeller

On Friday I blogged about how content curation can be used to support thought leadership-building efforts.

Companies that are striving to up their games when it comes to social media and thought leadership can do both by using content curation in conjunction with blogging, Twitter, etc.

I spoke with Tom Ridlle of CIThread – the company offers a content curation/marketing solution, which I previously reviewed on the Social Fluency blog.  He shared some thoughts about how content curation can help; I include an excerpt below, please go to Social Fluency to read more if you are interested in the topic (the funny thing is, only after writing it did I realize that my post citing Tom’s comments was an of example content curation in action!)

Curation means different things to different people…

At a minimum it means finding and presenting third party content that you think will be of value to the communities of interest you are trying to engage. Presenting involves where/how you post it, and what you have to say about it to provide guidance/perspective.

Authentic, external content is the key in connecting/influencing. The level of trust in vendor or media produced material is at an all time low. And now, given an wide range of choices, it’s not necessarily what individuals are now drawn to anyway. Consumers are cynical.

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CES Media Coverage Indicates New Mood and Optimism in Tech

Posted on January 12, 2011 by rgeller

CES is the last of the tech mega trade shows still standing in the US.  Yet this show, like many others, has suffered in recent years in terms of attendance, excitement and media coverage, as companies have pulled back marketing budgets in response to a bad economy.

I was not sure if I was just imagining it, but it seemed to me that this year’s CES really bounced back.  The coverage has been impressive almost more for what it (and the show) did not include (as usual, Apple sat this one out, and since it is an electronics show, social media and cloud computing were not really represented).

Topics that were front center related to interplay of pivotal trends, technologies and national issues, like 4G, wireless, tablet computing, and government policy about  broadband and wireless spectrum (FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski addressed CES about the last item, and that got lots of coverage).

Well, thanks to Factiva I can go beyond specualtion to get a pretty scientific view of media coverage and track not just number of articles, but topics, major trends, people, and media voices reflected in the articles.

So I decided to do a quick search to test my hypothesis. I searched major publications (filtering out wires and press releases) over 3-month periods spanning November-January for 2009, 2010 and 2011. You can see the numbers from Factiva below

  • 2011: total articles: 1,784
  • 2010: total articles: 1,435
  • 2009: total articles: 877

According to Factiva, there were about 25% more articles this year (compared with 2010), and over double the number of articles that appeared in 2009 (the biggest bounce seems to be from 2009-2010).  Steve Jobs eclipsed Steve Ballmer as the executive most often mentioned in the articles for the first time this year, despite the fact that Apple was not even at the show.

Social Mention gave me a way to track sentiment over the past month regarding the social media buzz about CES (unfortunately there is no way to compare with previous years).  It showed an 8:1 ratio of mentions that were generally positive vs. negaitve.

I did not do a real thorough audit of broadcast, but seeing tons of news coverage from the show floor is what really drew my attention and made me think that the coverage was in general more extensive and also more exuberant this year than in other recent years.

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From Telephone to Twitter – Hits and Misses in Andrew Cuomo’s PR Playbook

Posted on January 6, 2011 by rgeller

It is a new political season, and there's been lots of coverage about the new landscape and incoming class.  Politics follows not too far behind my primary passions of PR, technology and social media.  So I especially like to track and read the articles that combine a number of these things.

On that note, the New York Times had a couple of great stories recently about Andrew Cuomo, the new Governor of New York.  It was interesting that one article focused solely on Cuomo's use of the telephone as a power tool, in dealing with the media and others.  It is an old school approach that is apparently effective (well, anyway, this was a very long article and the reporter seemed somewhat enamored and impressed).  According to the story:

The call comes with no warning, at almost any time of the day…The unhurried, instantly recognizable voice on the other end of the line belongs to Andrew M. Cuomo. There will be long pauses. There will be many questions. Get comfortable: you may be on the phone for a while…He makes relatively few public appearances, rarely gives on-the-record interviews and disdains the Sunday chat show circuit. His e-mails are restricted to a small circle and, frequently, to two words: “Call me.”

But more often, Mr. Cuomo calls you… he will first ask about the foot surgery or Little League game that came up during the last conversation. Only rarely does a secretary ask you to hold for Mr. Cuomo’s call: he makes it a point to be on the line when you pick up. He almost never puts anyone on hold.

The effect, many say, is a powerful sense of intimacy.. Mr. Cuomo also relishes the visceral feedback of a phone call, he said: the sound of the other person’s voice and the sense of his or her mood…“I am not an e-mail person,” he said. “You don’t get context, you don’t get emotion and you don’t get a connection.”

I think the subtleties in how we communicate often go underappreciated, and this article serves as reminder about the importance of these choices.  While an in-person meeting might even be more effective, Cuomo can cover more ground using the telephone – and the phone is clearly better than other forms of communications when it comes to the nuances, the seemingly small touches that can make all of the difference in the world when it comes to relating to people.  Cuomo's direct approach is also noteworthy, and might cause some PR folks to cringe because there's apprently no PR intermediary in the mix – yet I am sure jorunalists appreciate having that type of access (even if it is on his terms).

Then again, in this era it is never enough just to master one mode of communications, and another article in the New York Times covered a misfire in the Cuomo administration's use of Twitter.  Apprently, they were quick to publish the name @NYGovernor, but someone beat them to the punch in establishing a Twitter account under that name.  Here is an excerpt:

At first glance, the Twitter page…  seemed perfectly plausible for a politician, and featured the same snapshot of Mr. Cuomo — smiling and looking off into the distance — that can be seen on the home page of the governor’s new Web site.. [the] first few Twitter messages seemed right out of the governor’s press office…

But the tone eventually got less statesmanlike, as the subjects veered toward his dislike of the Executive Mansion (not enough parking for his muscle cars)…

If that did not raise enough suspicion, there was Mr. Cuomo’s Twitter biography: “First elected governor of the State of New York since the Luv Guv.”

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