Matthew: Hello and welcome.  Today is September 10, 2009 and you’re watching PTV Live.  Thanks everybody.  My name is Matthew Mamet and I’m at MSMamet on Twitter, and with me today is Mike Troiano, Tech venture entrepreneur, blogger at scalableintimacy.com, and you can also find him as MikeTrap on Twitter.  Welcome to the show, Mike.  Glad to have you on.

Mike: Thank you.  Glad to be here, Matthew.

Matthew: Well I just want to remind everyone before we get started that this is an interactive show.  Please talk to us on Twitter by using the PTV Live hash tag and we’ll get to your questions live; I’ll be monitoring them here on the laptop as usual. 

But before we dive in, Mike, I’m not sure I gave you the proper introduction; or I’m not sure I gave you your due.  Tell us a little more about who you are in detail and what you’re all about.

Mike: Sure.  So I kinda started off as an ad guy in New York.  I worked at a place called McCann Erickson and worked on GM and Coke, and AT&T to kinda learn the ropes of the branding space there. 

I went out to San Francisco and worked at Foote Cone & Belding, which is another big agency, on Taco Bell.  Came back east.  Went to B school in Boston and through a long chain of events, became the founder and CEO of Ogilvy and Mather Interactive.

Since then I’ve started four or five companies.  Some have had reasonable outcomes; others have ended [?] in tragic failure.

Matthew: Well that’s the nature of that game I suppose.

Mike: That’s it, that’s it, yeah, but very glad to be here today and share some thoughts.

Matthew: I’m excited to have someone on who has great experience in building brands and just brand management as well as companies and company management.  I think you bring a unique set of experiences.  I’m eager to hear them, and I’m sure everyone out there is as well.  So make sure you tweet to PTV Live and we’ll test Mike’s knowledge.

Mike: Indeed.

Matthew: So let’s start off with an easy one.  I read a blog post from a really smart guy over at scalableintimacy.com

Mike: Yes.

Matthew: and you talked a little bit about engagement which I think is a huge buzz word in the marketing world.

Mike: Right.

Matthew: I’m hearing a lot about engagement marketing, and you turn it a little bit on its head and cut through the hype a little bit and say let’s not forget that engagement is a means to an end. 

Specifically, you say that the social equity we build through participation and by that you meant Twitter followers and all the content that we create online, it creates a potential for value, but in the end it’s all about activation.  Tell me a little bit about what you meant  by that and how do you perceive that companies should be activating that potential that they acquire.

Mike: Sure.  Well there’s a lot of talk about engagement and engagement is useful and necessary, but as you say, I think of it as a means to an end.  I think if you view engagement as the end, you end up exhibiting behaviors that don’t make sense.  Like you try to…what’s the value of re-tweet?  Is there objective value in a follower or a friend on Facebook?  I think it just leads to some silliness in terms of the way companies value their participation in social media and measure its impact.

I have said on the blog several times and will say here, engagement is bullshit as an end unto itself.  The value of engagement is in creating the potential for what I think of as activation.  That is, if you’re gonna…I think of social media largely as a big cocktail party at a trade show.

There’s two strategies to having a cocktail party.  One is to be the guy who’s looking at name tags and over your shoulder trying to see if there’s someone more interesting to talk to in back of you; and sort of leading with the business card and asking for the order.

Matthew: Involvement; those people.

Mike: And then there’s people that are there and they’re trying to talk to you, and they’re trying to have a genuine conversation.  Then if the opportunity arises to do something in your mutual interests then you pursue that.  I just think the latter is a better strategy at a cocktail party and it’s the better strategy in the vast majority of social media as well.

Matthew: Yeah, I think I would agree.  You mentioned a little bit about the silliness and I think we’ve all seen the silliness that some companies go through whether they are B2B or B2C kind of doing follower drives.  We’ve all seen these campaigns where the end goal is to get as many followers or Facebook fans or whatever as possible.

You start to think to yourself, OK, so what?  Now what?

Mike: Right.  And now what…that’s the essence of activation.  So having acquire n-thousand Twitter followers, what do you do?  For me, we’re evaluating some of the software alternatives inside one of the companies I’m working with; and shot out a note the other day on Twitter to say hey, tried these two, anybody have any ideas…and you get three or four responses. 

It’s a great way to find talent.  It’s a great way to answer pretty much any question that you have certainly that the Twitter verse type of folks are well-equipped to answer. 

So that’s activation and it’s legitimate.  If in the context of a lot of rapport building and legitimate conversation, really reaching out to people to build relationships, the whole engagement thing…  In the context of a lot of that activity, it’s perfectly OK for you to ask for the order, ask for the deal in that context.

Matthew: I think I would say that the reason why is you’ve built a level of trust.  You mention legitimacy and that kind of implies authenticity and credibility, but if you ask for help and you get help, and you give help, there’s a level of trust and trust building required in order to ask someone for the order.

Mike: That’s right, that’s right.  It’s all about relationships.  I’ve always said I think there’s  a really kind of Italian sensibility in social media.  I think it’s why I’ve embraced it so fully.  I see a very kind of “you do for me, I do for you” kind of a thing which comes very naturally for some of us with lots of vows [?].

Matthew: Sure.  Actually, we had Chris Brogan here yesterday and he had a story to tell about why he does business with Blue Sky Factory which is an email marketing firm.  He talked about the fact that there’s a lot of alternatives; bigger alternatives…better, I don’t know. 

Mike: Right.

Matthew: He said I do business with Greg because I know him.  I trust him, and he’s a trust agent for me.  That’s why I work with him.

Mike: Right.

Matthew: So I trust that he’s gonna do what I need done for marketing.  That’s a big component.

Mike: I think that’s absolutely true.  I will say that like a lot of people, Chris was really the first guy that gave voice to a lot of these ideas in a genuine way.  It’s been several years ago now, but his thinking and his expression of those ideas had a big impact on me and the way I think about social media. 

Matthew: Excellent.  Moving on to our next article, another stalwart of the marketing business, Seth Godin, who recently discussed the idea that “Achievable avalanche opportunities” was the name of a blog post, that said people are far more likely to embrace a smaller goal they feel is likely to succeed rather than devote themselves day and night to the amorphous jackpot.  He
was really I think talking about the ways to activate your network as well as ways to inspire folks. 

In taking your experience both as someone who has built brands as well as companies, what are your thoughts on Seth’s opinion about setting, if I could paraphrase maybe, setting more achievable goals to a larger end rather than trying to generate a lot of buzz to a huge jackpot scenario?

Mike: I think it makes a lot of sense.  An avalanche is just a very large volume of snowflakes.  I think that when it comes to motivating people and getting them pulling in the same direction to the extent that direction is new and unfamiliar to them, I think to have some sort of early validating success is kind of management 101.  You want to have an early win to kind of validate the course for the people who are participating on the journey.

So I think it can be a feature or bug depending how it’s applied though.  You don’t want to set goals that are easily achieved just for the sake that they are easily achieved, because then you give yourself a false sense of accomplishment which is not an uncommon thing.

Matthew: Showed up for work today.  Check!

Mike: There you go.  Win! 

But I think there’s…  People need that validation.  It’s a human thing.  I think as long as you’re not going to the point that you’re not challenging yourself; a little bit of failure is a good thing.  It’s a good thing for people and it’s a good thing for organizations. 

As a father of four kids, some of whom are approaching teenager-hood, one of the things I try to encourage them is that it’s OK to fail once in a while because it means you’re pushing yourself in a direction that’s…you know, there’s something at stake.  I think it’s true for companies as well.

Matthew: Let’s apply this now to what we were just saying about activation.  How do we take this idea of setting more achievable goals and apply it to ways to activate your network.  So ideally everyone would like there n-thousands of followers to be re-tweeting and signing up for blogs, and getting more followers on the list, and being evangelists, but that’s probably not the case for most follower bases.

Mike: Right.

Matthew: There’s probably four or five really that are your follower leaders.  How do we make it so there’s more than four or five and try to activate that network?  Any thoughts or any examples you’ve seen where brands have done a good job and you can point to that and say oh, that was good?

Mike: Sure.  Let’s talk a little bit about scale to start.  I think a lot of the mistakes brands make is in not first defining the scale of what.  So when people criticize the scaleability of social media in general, I think it’s because they’re comparing the reach of a social initiative against the reach of a broadcast initiative or a more conventional model; and I think that’s an apples to oranges comparison.

I think what you’re interested in is the equivalent scale of result.  What I mean by that is, if you need to create 7,000,000 impressions in broadcast or print media in order to achieve an outcome of 700 sales, the comparative metric you care about in social is not 7,000,000 reach, it’s 700 sales. 

Matthew: Right.

Mike: So what is the comparable level of participation, engagement, outreach required in social media I think has demonstrated itself to be a much more impactful medium…

Matthew: Right.

Mike: …versus broadcast.  We were talking about Chris just a moment ago.  I remember him doing a post about BMW and Audi and how people felt about the two brands.  BMW and Audi spend a lot of money on advertising.  After Chris’ tweet, I did the numbers and like half a million people had been exposed to this notion about what other people thought about BMW or Audi.

I think that impression is a much more impactful impression than the kind of impression I get from a TV spot; because it comes from another person and it’s an authentic idea.

Matthew: It’s in an interactive medium.  You’re not just sitting there waiting for the commercial to be over.

Mike: That’s right.

Matthew: Or flipping through the magazine waiting to get to the articles.

Mike: That’s right.  You can challenge it.  You can participate in it yourself and that creates a different level of participation and engagement.  So coming back to your question…  Start by scale of what and scale of result.  What’s the nature of the result I’m trying to achieve?  It may be that if I’m trying to glean information, having the right people is more important than having the most people.

Matthew: That’s right, yep.

Mike: So making sure that my outreach efforts are you know…  Targeted is sort of an old style word, but that they’re focused on people that have either the information or the problem that I’m interested in, and making sure I do a good job of kind of separating the signal from the noise in terms of the people who follow me.  As you get past a level in Twitter of follow-ship, the signal to noise issue becomes a real issue.

Matthew: Right.

Mike: Because I think just by virtue of getting to a certain scale you become highly followed and I’m one of the people who believes in following everybody that follows me and it creates challenges.  Sometimes I wonder if it would be more productive to have the 1,000 right people as opposed to the 10,000 people.

Matthew: Do you mean that as it applies to both sides meaning following just the right 1,000 people or having the right 1,000 people follow you; or both?

Mike: I think it’s probably both.  I mean I think we…

Matthew: Does that mean you’re not gonna follow me after this?

Mike: Not you.  You’re in the right!  You’re in the zone, baby!  You’re in the core!

Matthew: Good.

Mike: No, I think the relentless pursuit of sort of numbers inside networks like Twitter is…since Scobal [sp?] dropped all of his followers, I think that idea has fallen out of favor  and I think that on balance that’s a good thing.

Now there are certain applications where the more people you have that can hear your message, the better you are.  Part of the reason I follow lots of people and the people follow me is that I can ask a question and more than not I’m gonna get a good response  or useful answer to it.

And the thousand people that are useful for Question A are a different thousand that are useful for Question B.

Matthew: Right.

Mike: Unlike an enterprise or a brand where I have a pretty focused constituency, I think  on an individual basis your needs are gonna vary over time.

Matthew: We’ve just talked a lot about focus, targeted, relevant, and signal to noise.  I want to move on to our next topic which I think is a great kind of follow on to that, which is a study that was released that says that online video tops all but Facebook in social media marketing.

What we’re seeing is that people are using video now more often than the traditional media channels — traditional for what? the past year — but you get the point.

Mike: Right.

Matthew: And I wonder is that because using a video is a better way to make an authentic, credible connection more so than that 40 characters that fly by?  So that’s the first part of the question.

The second part is in your opinion, what value do you think online video has to building an online constituency community or an online brand experience?

Mike: Right.  I think video is incredibly useful because in the 2 x 2 matrix of har
d and impactful, it’s in the upper right quadrant.

Matthew: Right.

Mike: One of the things I tell clients in the social marketing space is that a lot of times people are intimidated by the need to create all this content and you’ve got to feed the beast once you move into the social marketing space, and…

Matthew: Or just to interrupt for a second, I would even pose it that you have to feed the beast whether you’re in social media or not.  Every company needs to be creating content.  Sorry to cut you off.

Mike: No, that’s a great point.  I think that most companies create 80% of the content they need just by being.  It’s a question of being smart about capturing that content and digitizing it and putting it into forms that make it useful to you online and elsewhere. 

There’s no medium where that’s more true than video; where I can have a conversation with someone whether it’s my CTO or a sales guy or the CEO or whomever.  I can just shoot them doing what they do naturally and capture it and put it online.  So I think that’s the easy part.

In terms of the impact part, people want to connect with other people.  I don’t think people think… I mean I don’t think of Twitter as 140 characters.  I think of it as other people.  I rarely run into the 140 character limit.  I guess at some point it becomes second nature, but I do think that where I have an opportunity to listen to another human being, I prefer it like any person does.

The challenge with video can be the linearity of it.  It may only be 10 seconds of a 10 minute video that I’m interested in, but I know that your tools are among those that are helping to solve that problem. 

Matthew: Right.

Mike: If you can fix that, I think your average human being is much more comfortable participating in a video experience then they are in any kind of contrived textual experience.

Matthew: Well since you brought it up, I’ll go into the shameless plug of how we think that non-linear video or branched video is a key component to telling your story.  So thanks for bringing that up; thanks for giving me the opening.

Mike: My pleasure.

Matthew: So lets talk about our next article which is from Media Post that points to some missed opportunities by marketers in increased online conversions because they failed to serve up personalized content to web visitors. 

I have some statistics in here which I know all marketers love and enjoy.  Let’s pull them up real quick.  I don’t have my highlighted copy here.  70% of the content decisions appear on websites appear to be made by one person. 

Well, moving on.  I think that what the article essentially says is that by offering personalized content you can see a dramatic increase in conversion online.

Mike: Right.

Matthew: And it makes me think of the promise of internet marketing when internet marketing first started as a true practice within organizations seven or eight years go.  We all thought that look, using technology and technology online, at a bare minimum we’ll be able to offer up persona based content because we’ll know who they are, what their interests are, what search terms they used. 

Here we are in 2009 and we’re still talking about wouldn’t it be great if we could offer up more personalized content.  So I ask you, first of all, why haven’t we done this as a group or an industry?  And second of all, how do you think personalized content can help in marketing online today?  What should we be doing today?

Mike: Right.  Well I think the reason it’s not done more is it’s hard to do.  You shouldn’t under estimate the behavioral impact of hard.  Creating a site has its challenges; creating any site, the [unintelligible] content of a site.  When now you’re talking about creating the end versions of a site and a site that adapts based on the needs of an individual user, I think it becomes that much more difficult.

My last company, it was an insult going around. I heard someone call someone and say oh that guy is kind of a page thinker, which is really…

Matthew: What were they driving at there?

Mike: There’s someone who’s kind of mired in the first version of html based sites.

Matthew: Got it.

Mike: My name is Mike Troiano and I am a page thinker.  I’m a recovering page thinker.

But now that sites are being assembled dynamically, kind of on the fly much more, I think you’re starting to see more personalization and adaptability of the nature of the information being presented to individuals.  So I think we’re getting there gradually, but the dream of one to one marketing, which is something that’s been talked about since the 90’s, is very hard to do.  It’s very hard to realize given the tools today.

Matthew: I’ll push back a little bit on that.  I think there’s companies out there both B2B and B2C that spend a huge amount of money on their website.  They hire companies like the ones that you founded and ran, and it’s not necessarily a lack of funding for sure, but yet we still haven’t seen the technology side of the technology marketing rise as quickly as say your creative side of marketing. 

I mean, you get a lot of great websites that look great and are engaging, but they don’t have that automation behind it.

Mike: Right.

Matthew: I think that yeah, it’s hard; everything is hard.  As you said earlier on about setting more achievable goals to kind of keep moving forward, there are a lot of difficult things about cutting through the noise and getting your product or service out there in an authentic, credible, useful way.

I’m almost wondering if there’s that focus still on marketing as a creative endeavor as opposed to marketing as a technology endeavor.  I know that shift is happening all the time to balance it out more, but I want to probe about that.

Mike: I think there is some of that.  I would say that hard equals expensive.  If you look at the places that have a justifiable cost benefit analysis for the investment in individualized features.  Like when I go to Amazon, my experience is probably very different than yours. 

Matthew: Right.

Mike: Retailers tend to do a good job on individual personalization because the economic benefit of that personalization is very concrete and tangible for them.

Matthew: Yeah.

Mike: So the associated investments are more justifiable to the guy who writes the checks. 

Matthew: And easier to see very quickly too.

Mike: Right.  On a content driven website, you’re right it’s doable, but it becomes that much harder to climb the hill of individualized personalization.  In certain applications, lets say in a sales application or in many marketing applications, it can be justified, but once you get past retail where I think that’s kind of been the bedrock of individual personalization, companies have had a harder time justifying the expense; and I mean the monetary expense and in terms of complexity.

Matthew: Right. 

Mike: Which is something that not many people building these sites necessarily have experience doing.

Matthew: If there’s a bigger enemy to a marketing idea or marketing campaign than proving ROI, I don’t know what is.

Mike: Right.

Matthew: We love it; we hate it at the same time.

Mike: Right, right.  It is the fire in which we burn.

Matthew: So you mentioned sales just now which I’ll take as an opportunity to move on t our next topic which is a theme that we’ve been covering a lot on the show in the past few weeks, wh
ich is the emergence of social CRM.  Which at a very high level is the concept of these tools that marketers have been using for a while now — social media, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. — being adopted and embraced by sales teams. 

Combining what we know and love about traditional CRMs like Sales Force which are great ways to keep track of activities, contacts and deals; and bringing in the engagement mechanism of social media as well as the wealth of information.

You’ve talked a lot throughout this episode about a lot of great information out there.  I just have to ask my followers and listen to my followers and I can learn.

Mike: Right.

Matthew: So how do you envision sales organizations using this going forward and how can we use it with online video over the course of say the next three to five years?  How do you see these two things coming together or not coming together?

Mike: Right.  I coined a term “social relationship management” and there’s a lot of content on the blog — it’s scalableintimacy.com — about social relationship management or SRM, and now social CRM is kinda the term of art, so…

But I think that it’s important to understand what’s similar and what’s different than conventional CRM, conventional relationship management.

The essence of the difference is captured in the notion of weak ties. There was a sociological paper done a long time ago about the strength of weak ties.  In our personal lives, it may be that in the course of our lives we have thousands of relationships with different people and I think we see this in our professional networking contexts; and those relationships in aggregate can be incredibly valuable to us.

But we have a kind of biological limit on the unit volume of people that we can maintain active relationships with.  So one way to think of social media and its impact on business and society is it sort of enlarges the number of people with which you can maintain some kind of relationship. 

The New York Times coined the term “ambient awareness” that you maintain awareness of these people, but it’s not really a relationship.  It’s something different, but there is contact.  There’s potential for communication that’s enabled by this technology.

Matthew: Sounds a lot like, you know, sales folks would say I’ll ping them to keep us on their radar.

Mike: Right.

Matthew: These are mechanisms that they’re used to that can now be applied in aggregate, as you said.

Mike: Right.  Sales guys understand this intuitively, I think.  But I think as we move into this social CRM space, I think that it’s important to be comfortable with the value of weak ties and not to force them into strong ties.

So if you look at Salesforce.com there’s a massive infrastructure for data collection.  Salesforce.com is hungry for every detail of the person you met at Truck World.  It want phone number, address, all their Twitter ID’s; and there’s this process of sucking all that information into a CRM system and data capture is a big part of the value that conventional CRM systems create. 

When you talk about social CRM, step one is to be comfortable…all I know about this person…

Matthew: Like Ford.

Mike: Yeah, like blue boy on Twitter, and I know that they’re an advocate for Ford and so they serve my interests and I gotta be cool with that.

Matthew: Right.

Mike: To the extent that I’m like grabbing blue boy’s cookies and I’m trying to figure out, I think that’s a road to ruin. 

Matthew: It sounds a lot like the scenario you described at the beginning of the show where you’re at the conference and you’re getting the business cards, and you’re trying to ask for the order and close the deal…

Mike: That’s right.

Matthew: You’re moving beyond the level of trust that you’ve established; you’re extending beyond that and people will reject it.

Mike: That’s right.  I actually think there’s an analog in people that are struggling to apply demographic targeting techniques to social media.  If I have a product that appeals to men 18 to 24, I think of it that way; it’s kind of engrained in us as marketers that if I sell Doritos, that’s who I’m talking to.  In social media I have the ability to talk to people who like Doritos. 

Matthew: Yep.

Mike: Or people who like snack chips; and if one of them happens to be an 80-year old woman in Poughkeepsie, then so be it.  They’re a snack chip eater.  So the notion of targeting, we’ve had all these sort of demographic proxies for the people you want to talk to.

Matthew: Right, because there was no way of knowing.  You had to market in mass.

Mike: That’s right.  So if you can shed some of that baggage and reaching out to the right people in social media is a simple matter of listening to what people have to say and looking for people who have the problem your product solves; or, alternatively, putting content out there that is useful to those people and letting them come to you. 

So I think that, again, to come back to your question, I do see tremendous value in managing these weak ties.  They’re incredibly valuable to an organization, but I think part of doing that effectively in the social space means being comfortable letting go of some of the proxies for value that we all bring with us from the broadcast space.

Matthew: Well we have a question that came in I’d like to get to before we wrap up, this comes from Line Abo [?], does social media demand greater rigor regarding targeting appropriate audience versus throwing out content and seeing what sticks?  So do we think more about before we act?  You know, should we say this message at this time or is it more about feeding the beast and just keep that contact going?

Mike: I think that’s it’s important to have a contact strategy and I think that the nature of kind of figuring out what content you should be publishing is really the process of thinking back of the needs of the user, of the person you aspire to talk with.

So if you say to yourself, OK, my organization — you know, every organization has some footprint of content that they can produce and there’s a range of different things, different strategies that they have — and out there is a person that I want to talk to and that person has a range of problems and is interested in a range of information.

In the diagram of those two things, what the overlap?  If you can focus your energies on producing content in that space, then I think that a) you’re gonna attract the right kind of person to your content, and b) build a relationship with them over time because you’re helping to solve their problem. 

Matthew: Excellent.  Thank you for the question.  And I think on that note, I’ll say that that’s all the time we have for now, but I wanted to thank you again for being on the show, Mike.  I learned a lot which is always a good show when we can end with everyone learning something. 

You can always leave us feedback.  We’re always looking for feedback.  Go to permissiontv.com/itunes to leave us your feedback as a review.

Mike, I will assume that you’re gonna rush back home and leave us a five star rating.  You can always follow us online.  I’m at msmamet on Twitter and you can also follow permissiontv on Twitter. 

Mike, how can people connect with you after the show?

Mike: Scalableintimacy.com is my blog and I am at MikeTrap on Twitter and would love to hear from you all.

Matthew: Great.  Next Thursday is September 17 and we have C. C. Chapman whose  partner at the Advance
Guard and I’m looking forward to picking his brain.  So stay tuned for that.  Thanks everybody.  Have a great week.  Thanks again, Mike, I appreciate having you on the show.  We’ll see you next week everybody at 3PM.  Bye, bye.

[00:06]
Matthew: Hello and welcome!  Today is September 3rd, 2009, and you’re watching PTV Live!

[applause]

[00:13]
Paul: All for me, all for me.

[00:14]
Matthew: That’s right, all for you!  Today we’re here talking to Paul McNulty, Chief Marketing Officer at Unica.  We’re very happy to have you on the show today.

[00:21]
Paul:  Glad to be here.

[00:22]
Matthew: Thanks for joining us.  My name is Matthew Mamet, and I’m @msmamet on Twitter, and just want to remind everyone, this is an interactive show!  Please talk to us on Twitter!  You can use the PTV Live hash tag, and we’ll get your questions answered on the show today live!  So, thanks again for being here.

[00:36]
Paul: All right.  Glad to be here.

[00:37]
Matthew: I know you had a very very long travel…

[00:39]
Paul: I did a long commute.

[00:40]
Matthew: …approximately 500 yards from that direction over here. [laughs]  We are basically neighbors here up here in Waltham [sp]. 

Just wanted to start by asking you Paul, as the CMO of Unica, which is known as one of the premier sources of products that provide deeper level of insights for business website activity, how does Unica help companies with online marketing?  

[01:02]
Paul: Well, we have a variety of different products that we offer, and solutions and services that we offer for online marketing.  Net Insight[sp], which is our web analytics product, is a great product to help our customers analyze their web data, and then more importantly, be able to analyze that data, combine that data with their other customer-related data, for deeper insights into not only web traffic and visitor traffic, but how specific individuals align with their purchase history, their previous history, and interactions with companies also using the web, so kind of blending that customer data with web data.

[01:36]
Matthew: Ok, so bringing together the online data with some of the offline data?

[01:39]
Paul: …with offline data, yup.  And then we also offer a full suite, a full interactive marketing solution which allows marketers to again analyze their customer data, and then create outbound campaigns through email, which would be the primary online vehicle that our customers use, and then also to personalize the website, so we have a product that allows you to, based on, again, customer history, customer context, personalize website offers for individual customers.

[02:07]
Matthew: Excellent, so, myself, someone who has been in online marketing for years, I’m well aware of Unica, and I’m really excited again to have you on the show.

[02:15]
Paul: Good!

[02:16]
Matthew: I want to learn a little bit more about how, as a CMO of Unica, how you are approaching that brand, as well as information that you can share with clients and customers that you have. 

[02:23]
Paul: Absolutely.  Good.  I’ll do my best.

[02:27]
Matthew: So, we’ll get to some of that a little later on in the show.

[02:28]
Paul: OK.

[02:29]
Matthew: I just want to start with an article – interview, actually, that I read on DM News[sp], in which you were interviewed, and you said that, ”In departments that make good use of technology, it makes for more effective marketing.”  Which, understanding a little more about what Unica does, that doesn’t seem like much of a surprise that you would say that…

[02:44]
Paul:  Nope, no. [laughs]

[02:46]
Matthew: So really what I want to ask is, for those marketers that haven’t yet embraced technology, how would you recommend that they really see the light and get on the bus?
 
[02:55]
Paul:  Sure.  Well, I mean in some respects, marketing technology is a lot like technologies that we’ve been involved in, in different ways.  I mean it’s important to begin by understanding what your business problem – business challenge is, you know, what is it that you’re trying to do?  What is the problem that you’re trying to solve?  If you’re having problems and you want to better analyze and more deeply understand your web data, that would take you down one path. If you have situations where you want to better present customized and personalized offers to your customers, that would take you down another path.  If it’s about simply – not simply, but increasing productivity, increasing response rates, increasing the amount of work your staff can do, that takes you down another path.  So I think it’s more important to start by understanding what the business problem is you’re trying to solve, and then that will kind of guide you to the next steps that you take as you evaluate technologies.  And you know, there’s different companies that specialize in different technologies. 

And then once you’ve done that, there’s a variety of tools or sites for information that you can use to analyze or evaluate different solutions.  Personally, I’m a big believer in Forester[sp], I think they do a nice job from the standpoint of pretty in-depth analysis of different technologies.  But again, it begins with you understanding what is the problem you’re trying to address – email marketing for example – and then from there, evaluating the different solutions.

[04:16]
Matthew: So, a key component of what you said is understanding the problem or the challenges that you’re trying to address; from what you’ve seen at Unica, what are some of the challenges that you feel marketers are faced with?

[04:27]
Paul: Sure.  Well, there’s a number of different challenges, I mean there’s a gamut of them depending on the industry or in the particular company.  It may be around increasing response rates.  And that’s a very broad and sweeping statement, but the response rates could be on email; it could be response rates to catalogues – a lot of our customers are using mailing catalogues.  How effectively are those tools generating response rates?  So, you know, can you increase your response rates? 

Then other questions: can we be more productive?  Can we run more campaigns with the same staff, kind of increasing velocity, another kind of challenge marketers would be faced with. 

Understanding more about your customer is another challenge I think many marketers have; understanding who’s buying, who’s not buying, why are they not buying, looking at that kind of a business challenge that companies would often run into.  Operationally, marketing departments can be from, you know, small – from five, ten, fifteen people – then at some companies they can be huge, many thousands of people in a marketing department.  Oftentimes our customers are challenged, and how do they manage the complexity of campaigns across different stovepipes?  So these would be all the different kinds of challenges you might have – improving productivity, improving response rates, understanding and managing activities better across the marketing department.

[05:54]
Matthew: So there’s a lot of information there and I had to take some notes down because I wanted to ask follow-up questions. 

So you mentioned response rates as kind of the number one challenge, and you mentioned a bunch of different vehicles.  At the top there was email marketing, and I think there’s been some discussion lately about the effectiveness of email marketing over time.  What are you seeing as kind of a broad trend with response rates with marketing?  Is it as useful as it used to be?  Because I think – I’m hearing that they may not be.

[06:23]
Paul: You know, again, it’
s going to vary significantly by the customer or the industries that you’re talking to.  From our own standpoint, email is a pretty effective marketing tool, but it really does come back to providing the right message to the customer, to the audience you’re after. The more effectively you can meet the need of that particular buyer, the higher your response rates are going to be. 

[06:46]
Matthew:  So, the right message is really  – if I could just take that a step further – is the one that they find the most useful?  Would you say that that’s right?

[06:54]
Paul: Yeah, yeah.

[06:55]
Matthew: And understanding that gets to one of the points that you mentioned earlier – is a challenge is simply understanding what those needs are. 

[07:01]
Paul: Exactly, I mean…

[07:02]
Matthew: And I think every marketer at some level knows they need to know more about their customers.  How can we do that?

[07:06]
Paul:  So, for example, and again, as we go through some of this, some of these things I’ll be talking about Unica – you know, we’re a $120 million a year, B-to-B software company.  But we have a lot of customers that are kind of very large B-to-C retail, financial services companies.

[07:24]
Matthew: Sure, sure.

[07:26]
Paul: So I’ll try to take care, when I’m answering, for who?  When I’m wearing my CMO hat.

[07:29]
Matthew: [laughs] Well, all marketing departments are wearing a lot of hats these days…

[07:33]
Paul: [laughs] That’s true.  They are. 

[07:34]
Matthew: …so you should be adept at that.

[07:35]
Paul: They are.  Um… the… I’m gonna lose my train of thought.

[07:39]
Matthew: [laughs] Sorry.

[07:41]
Paul:  So, from the standpoint of understanding customers, one of the things that we do is get a pretty good sense for what customers or prospects are viewing on the website.  What’s interesting to them?  We have products in different categories; we have web analytics products, we have campaign management products, we have marketing operations products that help you plan your marketing.  So by analyzing the places that people are working on the website or looking on the website, and the kind of products they’re downloading or information they’re downloading, that is a way that we can provide them with more relevant information, through email, in that particular case.

[08:20]
Matthew:  Excellent.  And then the last piece that I jotted down is increasing velocity, which gets back to what I just mentioned about, you know, marketing budgets are shrinking, especially in this tough economy that we’re all faced with, and marketers are trying to do a lot more with a lot less.  What are specific ways that you’ve seen, or that you yourself are increasing velocity within your team and your department?

[08:46]
Paul: Well, one of the ways would be to design an automated campaign so that you can define campaigns that are based on criteria will, you know, maybe an email campaign, that will run at a predetermined time to a predetermined audience, using a collection or a selection of different offers.  So by putting in that upfront effort to define your overall email strategy – who you’re targeting with which offers – you can pretty much automate then the delivery and the measurement in the email responses.  So instead of handcrafting each of those campaigns, doing a segmentation or a list-pull for each campaign, you can automate that process, to more easily and effectively deliver many different kinds of campaigns; in that example, an email campaign.

[09:31]
Matthew: So, again, a further example of marketers that embrace technology, can forget it, to use a phrase.

[09:36]
Paul: You know, it’s interesting; I just think as a marketer today, you really need to have a good understanding of all the technologies that are at your fingertips, and you don’t necessarily have to be able to get down deep into database design and the scheme instructions and such, but you have to have a pretty good sense…

[09:54]
Matthew:  I think all marketers, again, are challenged with keeping up to date with technology.  How do you do that?

[10:01]
Paul:  Um… [laughs] It is a challenge. 

[laughter]

We were talking about earlier, not only is it keeping up to date, but you know, it’s constantly changing and evolving.  Personally, from my standpoint, a lot of time reading; I have to try to keep abreast of what’s happening within my own kind of world context; networking – people that I know I try to keep in touch with different marketing organizations.  I find some of the analysts are pretty good at providing information on up-and-coming technologies…

[10:33]
Matthew: What kind of organizations do you think are worth the effort?  Because that takes time, right?  And time is limited.  In some of the organizations that I’ve either been a part of or networked with, there’s always that debate, ‘is this really worth my time getting out and going?’

[10:51]
Paul: You know, I guess I would find that in some respects – and I was thinking, ‘Who would I put on that list?’ – But top of that list would actually be my own personal network, which is kind of interesting.  It’s people that I’ve worked with, who I know are similar companies, who have similar challenges.  I have lists, I contact them, and I know them well enough so that I know how they’re going to reply.  So that, to me, doesn’t help your viewers right now, but for me it’s helpful.

[11:19]
Matthew: I think it’s helpful to understand that, as part of your marketing tool kit, the idea that people as a key component of that is very helpful.

[11:27]
Paul:  I mean I would actually say that you know, as much as I love technology and as much as I put that high on the list, the people you know, the networks you create, the information you can share is extremely important, so that to me, my own personal network is high. The CMO Club is good, it’s a small and growing organization which provides pretty good information.  As I mentioned I think a little while ago, Forester[sp] I think does a good job, more technically-oriented information.  And then there’s a number of journals and a variety of other things you can look at.

[11:58]
Matthew:  Ok, excellent.  I just wanted to remind everyone that we are live, and you should be tweeting your questions to the @PTV Live hash tag. I’ll be monitoring them over here, and we’ll get your questions answered.

But I wanted to move on to our next topic, which is an article that I read from Real SEO Video Blog[sp], that states simply, “Without video, your website will not rank in Google.”  And the person who’s making the statement is a gentleman by the name of Bruce Clay[sp], who says, “A year from now,” – so this is a predictive comment – “A year from now, if you don’t have video, if you don’t have engagement objects on your website, you’re just not gonna rank.”

[12:37]
Paul:  Well I think that the important word there is ‘engagement objects’.  It may be video.  And I think more and more, we marketers are looking for ways for, especially as content becomes extremely important – people are looking for information that helps them do their jobs better.  Engaging with your customers and prospects, giving them a reason to visit your site or sites that you’re associated with, is important, whether that be a survey, whether that be a demo of your product, or whether that be a customer testimonial, or whether that be a video. 
So, it may be. 

I think video is – and he’s supposed to be quite good at what he does – video will be an increasingly important component of maximizing your search rankings.  But I think ultimately, you’ve got to make sure that the tools and techniques that you’re using work for your audience and your customer.  So, video is probably very applicable and very helpful for customer testimonials. 

[12:34]
Matthew: Sure.

[12:35]
Paul: We use video to try to convey the excitement that happens at our user conferences, so they get a sense for the networking, and the interactions.  But there are other activities where it is actually just simpler to read the product list and kind of look down the system requirements.  So, I think first and foremost you want to make sure that video is the right tool to use for the message and the audience, and I do think that, as your comment on engagement objects – increasingly important that you find ways broadly to interact with your customers, and doing that in ways that’s providing them information as you’re interacting.

[14:11]
Matthew:  Absolutely, that phrase ‘engagement objects’ definitely caught my eye.  I think there’s a lot of discussion lately about ‘engagement marketing’, and that word is definitely turning into a bit of a buzzword.  But at the same time, I think it’s rooted in the sense of yeah, this is what we need to do here – we need to go beyond flat text on a page and downloading my case study as we fill out the big form.  It’s more than that – it’s the give and the get of understanding who the buyer is or the customer persona, visitor persona; and getting, engaging, in smaller chunks.

[14:46]
Paul: Exactly.  We use the phrase ‘interactive marketing’ as this broad umbrella statement of ‘What does it mean to engage?’ or ‘ How do you engage with your customer in a way that you’re aware of your customer, not only of their particular history, but the particular context in which they’re engaging, you know, in the call center, on the web – how do you engage with the customer and then provide them, ideally in real time, the information that’s most applicable to them, regardless of the channel that they’re operating on?’  So, yeah, very much this idea of engagement.

[15:18]
Matthew: So that engagement goes much broader than website activity?

[15:21]
Paul: Oh, absolutely.  I mean, you think about it, right – your expectation, as a consumer, is that you are understood as an individual, whether you’re on the phone or you’re on the web.  So that’s a lot of work for marketers, to build to kind of work across the silos that we have in marketing to have a more unified customer experience.

[15:39]
Matthew: And again, those silos are the different departments in your organization…

[15:43]
Paul: Yeah.

[15:43]
Matthew: …that, as a marketer, getting access to the customer service data, getting access to what’s in the CRM, you know, that may not be as easy as you might think for some folks, and in order to paint that picture of true engagement, you need…

[15:57]
Paul: Exactly.  Exactly.

[15:57]
Matthew: …you’re going to have to get the systems and things to help you do that.

I mentioned just now CRM; I would like to talk a little bit about an article I read called, “The Importance Video in Sales 2.0.”  ‘Sales 2.0’ is a topic that we’ve really become focused on in this show, talked about it for a number of weeks now, and essentially, there’s an article – let me pull it up here – I’m a little far behind in my notes here – “The next generation of sales reps are using technology to grab mindshare through surrounding prospects with helpful content.”  That sentence kind of smacks into what we just talked about, is understanding the context in which they’re in, and then surrounding them with the helpful content.  You know, we are a video platform, so I have to throw out the line here that says, “video presentations are the easiest way to surround your customer.”

Let’s start first with your company, with Unica – How are you guys using video to not only attract an audience on your marketing programs and on your website, but maybe on the sales side?  Is that something that you are doing?  Have thought about doing?  Haven’t thought about it until just now and thought maybe you’d like to?

[17:10]
Paul: [sarcastically] Oh my God.  Yup! 

[laughter]

No, no, we have thought a little bit about it, and again it’s a long list of things to work on.  So, we have used, we do use video around our customer testimonials, we find that to be a good way to kind of convey what customer has done with our products and with Unica, and the benefits.  Those tools we make available to the sales team.  So it’s almost as if we’re thinking of, ‘What’s the message we’re trying to convey?  What’s the right vehicle to channel it, vehicle to use?’

[17:39]
Matthew: What media, yup.

[17:41]
Paul: And then whether that’s delivered by a sales rep or online is secondary.  Now that may not be the right way to think about it, but I’d say then that’s where we are right now.

[17:51]
Matthew: I think it’s a great way to think about it.  Part of what marketing’s function is, is to provide the relevant messaging and the sales kits for your sales team, and again, however that media is likely to be consumed, a marketing department needs to create that, whether it’s PowerPoints, audio Podcasts, video.  So, that’s good news to hear!

[18:14]
Paul: And we’ll be doing more, because for some of our newer products which are by nature quite visual – the online marketing stuff, products that we have for web personalization, email marketing – I think there’s an increasing expectation that people can see the product; they want to understand it’s uses, not only hearing from a happy customer, but they also want to get a sense of how it’s being used.

[18:34]
Matthew: And you had mentioned earlier on the program, you know, video and other engagement objects should only be used where appropriate, and for companies that have a high-tech or difficult to explain product or service, video might be the right way to do it.

[18:48]
Paul: Yeah, it can be a really good way to do it.  A really good way to do it.  And we’ve actually begun doing some videos on YouTube that are a little more snippets, kind of little informational, as practices type of things.

[18:56]
Matthew: OK.  How have you found the response rate?

[18:59]
Paul: Eh, pretty good, pretty good.  But again, that particular use of YouTube is a little new for us, but so far, response has been pretty good.

[19:09]
Matthew: Alright, staying within the sales and social media track for a second, let me talk a little bit about Social CRM.  So this is a tool that can be used as part of a Sales 2.0 strategy.  There has been an emergence of Social CRMs lately; one of them is this company, Buzzstream[sp].  I wanted to understand, how is Unica – or if you want to talk a little more about clients in this regard – how are you seeing social media being used not only for marketing and brand listening and some of the more typical ways or traditional ways of using social media…

[19:44]
Paul: [laughs] Tradition, yeah, four months of tradition there, six months of tradition there.

[19:47]
Matthew: How much of it is being used by reps?  How often are sales reps saying ‘Look, if I want to make a connection with a potential company, maybe it’s smart to use LinkedIn, or maybe it’s smart to use Tw
itter, to sort of get in there?’

[20:01]
Paul: So, you asked a lot of questions there.

[20:04]
Matthew: OK. Pick one…

[20:07]
Paul: I’ll start with social media overall.  As I think about our customers, I would say that the majority of our customers are in kind of the experimentation phase – the early adopter phase.  There is a question of, ‘How do I measure it?  How do I best use it?’  I think there’s an understanding that it’s important as a vehicle to share information and encourage information about you – your company, your products, your brand – to be shared, but the way people are engaging social media kind of runs the gamut across our different customers.  In our own company, from the standpoint of our sales guys, most of them are using LinkedIn as a way to do a little bit more research on their prospects, and some of them are using Twitter as a way to follow specific individuals that they’re interested in, as another technique to kind of learn more about their potential customers.

[12:08]
Matthew: Excellent.  And I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about a question that Seth Goden[sp] posed.  I actually asked this of our guest last week, Steven DeMarcos[sp], the CMO of Compete[sp], and I liked it so much that I wanted to apply it again this week.  You know, for all of us in marketing, Seth Goden[sp] is one of the gold standards, and Seth’s got a lot of short, picky blog posts, kind of your ‘thought of the day.’ 

Here’s the ‘thought of the day’ from Seth – “How do you overwhelm people with delight worth remarking about related to your brand?”  And I know that you just completed a major brand redesign, changeup or overhaul, improvement, and with that came a new website, so, how did you incorporate that desire to “overwhelm people with delight” as you went through this process?  Tell me about that process.

[22:02]
Paul: That’s kind of a softball question for Unica.  For years, the mission of the company has been empowering customer success.  And that is, you know, what we do, we believe very strongly that our goal is to ensure that our customers are successful with our services, our products and solutions.  This is the first company I’ve worked for that actually has a group called ‘customer success’.  All they do is kind of make outreaches to our customers, make sure they’re happy, they’re connecting with them on different opportunities to work with us.  So, we as a company work very hard to power or to ensure the success of our customers.  And I think we have a pretty good reputation for that; if you look at our customer list, if you look on our references, if you look at our case studies, we have a lot of very happy customers. 

Now how we go about doing that, it really comes down to every interaction.  Every product that we ship, every customer service interaction that we have is really dedicated to make sure that the customer is satisfied.  We’re not perfect, there are always …

[23:06]
Matthew: Nobody is.

[23:07]
Paul: Yup.  But I think that the folks that I’ve met are quite dedicated to making sure that the customer is satisfied. 

Now, in the re-branding that you just mentioned, one of the things that we heard from our customers is that we’re very good at what I just described, when it comes to our technology, and they’re looking for a little more.  So it’s like, how do you help us be more successful as marketers overall?  How do you help us learn from what you’ve learned, build better solutions, better user products?  So, we’ve tried to weave that into brand, which is the tagline, ‘Marketing success starts with U’, the letter ‘U’, the double play with ‘U’ for Unica as well as ‘you,’ the marketer; and then we’ve built this idea of ‘you the marketer’ into the website, providing more resource information, information on the marketer’s role, as ways that we’re trying to help them be more successful, beyond just our technology, but also how can they use our technology, how can they learn from others.

[24:00]
Matthew: So there’s a lot there about engagement, and about community, and providing relevant, useful content.  I think that all of those things are implied in how you’re shaping the brand going forward. And you recently brought a new logo to life. 

[24:16]
Paul:  Our new logo, yup.  Yup.

[24:17]
Matthew: As a marketer, you know we all have to talk about the design process of logo creation.  How did you go about that?  And some of that sometimes seems like a black magic or voodoo art, but how did that process go for you?

[24:30]
Paul: We used – I’ll put a little plug in for the agency we used – a company called Raincastle[sp], they’re based here in Newton[sp], Massachusetts.  They were very good.  The process we went through was we interviewed some of our customers; we tried to get to the essence of what we stand for and want to shift the image a little bit, because company brand is not based on the logo.  It’s not the logo.  The company brand is a instantiation or a representation of what you do, what your brand is.  So the logo itself was part of a much bigger process about what do we stand for?  What do we want to stand for?  Where are we going?  The agency helped. 

And then it was just a lot of collaborative work looking at ways to really build on this concept of, it’s about the conversations and the interactions that you, our customers, have with your customers.  And we want to enable you, our customers, to have interactions, more powerful and meaningful interactions, with your customers.  So we felt the little speech bubble was a way to kind of connote the idea of interacting conversations happening not only between us and our customers, but between our customers and their customers.

[25:39]
Matthew: So again, it’s engaging, it’s community, it’s starting a big dialogue with all parties involved.  And there’s listening there. I mean I think…

[25:46]
Paul: Yup, absolutely.

[25:47]
Matthew: …that’s also implied with the speech bubble, is that if someone’s talking, someone should be listening.

[25:51]
Paul: Absolutely.  Absolutely.

[25:53]
Matthew: Let’s talk a little bit about –the final question that I have is, you’ve mentioned several times that ‘we’ve asked our customers’ or, you know, ‘you need to ask your customers’ and know how to know what your customers need.  What are some tips or tools that you can give marketers out there to do that?  Also understanding all the things we talked about with regard to increasing velocity, and not having enough time, and decreasing budgets, because that can be a labor-intensive process, but at the same time, without that, you’re starting with nothing again, and you may not be successful.

[26:27]
Paul: There’s a lot of different techniques that can be used for that.  We, for brand research, used a combination of qualitative research, which is basically calling up customers and talking to them, I mean it’s a very open-ended, and you draw for that, and you talk to a couple dozen customers and you begin to get a sense for what their issues are.  Now it’s a bit of an arduous process, from the standpoint of you need to spend an hour with each customer, but you really get a richness of information from those type of interactions with your customers.

[26:58]
Matthew: So, by saying that first, as the first way, I would imply that that is the best way to do it.  Am I hearing that? 

[27:04]
Paul: Yup.  Well…

[27:06]
>Matthew: You’ve got to talk to customers.

[27:08]
Paul: Well, you absolutely have to talk to customers, and in fact should be part of what we’re all doing as marketers as often as we can, but what I just described can also be expensive.  So at the other end of the spectrum, there’s a lot of tools that can be used from the standpoint of web surveys, and developing surveys where you can get a broader reach into the hundreds of thousands of respondents.  We are trying to get a more quantitative view on a much more defined set of questions.  You want to understand, like the survey I mentioned earlier, what’s the number one challenge you have as a web analyst, or with your web analytics tools?  You can get very discreet answers in that. That’s very different than having a discussion with somebody who does full-time job as a web analytics person, and getting from them kind of what keeps them up at night.  You learn different things.

[27:54]
Matthew: So a little bit of both. 

[27:55]
Paul: Yeah.

[27:56]
Matthew: A little bit of both.  Well, thank you very much, Paul.  That’s all the time we have for now.  I just wanted to say that I definitely enjoyed our conversation…

[28:02]
Paul:  Me too.

[28:03]
Matthew: …and thanks for taking the trip over.

[28:05]
Paul:  I appreciate that.

[28:06]
Matthew: Just wanted to remind everyone that we’re always interested in your feedback.  Please subscribe to iTunes at permissiontv.com/itunes and leave us a rating, tell us how we’re doing.  And, I wanted to let everyone know that tonight, Permission TV will be attending and demo-ing our technology at Tech Cocktail 3[sp], the event in downtown Boston.  Please come by and say hi, we’re going to be giving out free T-shirts…

[28:29]
Paul: Free T-shirts!

[28:29]
Matthew: … so, hope to see you there.  Paul, how can people connect with you after the show?

[28:32]
Paul: The easiest way is just to email me: pmcnulty@unica.com.

[28:37]
Matthew:  Great.  Next Thursday we have tech venture entrepreneur Mike Troyano[sp] on the show, so stay tuned for that.  Thanks and have a great week, everybody!  Please follow me @msmamet on Twitter, and we’ll see you next Thursday at 3pm.  Bye-bye, everybody.

[28:50]
Paul: Thanks.

[00:00]
Matthew:  Hello and welcome, everybody!  Today is August 27th, 2009 and you are watching PTV Live.   Thank you, everybody, my name is Matthew Mamet.  I’m at msmamet on Twitter and I’m here today with Stephen DiMarco, Chief Marketing Officer at Compete.  Thanks for joining us today Stephen, it’s a pleasure to have you.

[00:21]
Stephen:  Happy to be here.

[00:25]
Matthew:  As always you can talk to us on Twitter.  Send all your feedback to the PTV hash tag and we’ll answer any questions that you have, live with Stephen.  So, thanks everyone for joining us and Stephen I just wanted to thank you again for being here and to ask you just to summarize what Compete does, very briefly.  I think, for the most part, we are all aware of the little charts that we see on all of the major blogs that help support all of the bloggers opinions. 

[00:57]
Compete is known as one of the premier sources of website tracker analysis but how does Compete help companies with their online marketing initiative?

[01:02]
Stephen:  Very good question.  I can give you the 15 minute answer or the two hour answer.

[01:08]
Matthew:   Let’s see, we have a half-hour today so let’s shoot for two and a half minutes.

[01:11]
Stephen:  Alright, I have that version, too, so no worries.  Compete is an online measurement company and we basically help our clients answer two questions.  How do I find the consumers that I want to turn into customers?  Once I capture their attention how do I actually convert them into customers in a way that they will continue to come back again and again and again?  The way that we do that is through an online panel of two million consumers in the United States.  We have permission to see all of the web traffic that they generate about themselves.  As we know now the web is becoming such a central part of how consumers live their lives; how they search, how they shop, how they socialize, how they get information on pretty much anything these days.  It’s creating this wonderful breadcrumb trail about what consumers are doing online so that marketers can learn from it and engage them, not only online, but offline as well.

[02:01]
Matthew:  Excellent!  I think everyone would agree that understanding users and consumer’s behavior is key to marketing.  Services like Compete are key to everybody’s marketing efforts whether they be online or offline so we are really happy to have you here. 

[02:18]
Stephen:  It reminds me of a story.  Once, when we were presenting to a company that we were trying to turn into a client, they were faced with a large initiative; launching a new website.   The person said, “I understand that you’ve got all this great consumer information and competitor information but I don’t have the time to look at it, I need to get a website out.”  So, while you’d think that most people would want that, sometimes that extra information, some marketers would rather navigate blindly.

[02:46]
Matthew:  Well, we’re going to talk a little bit about that; actually, that’s a great segue into our first topic which is a great article that I read on MediaPost by a guy named Stephen DiMarco.  So you recently wrote on MediaPost about a statement made by Al Ries who said that, “Determining the ROI of a marketing program is an expensive exercise with little or no value.  An experienced marketing exec instinctively knows whether a marketing program is working or not.”  Stephen, since you’re the CMO of one of the largest traffic analysis and information companies around, what do you think about that statement?

[03:28]
Stephen:  I think that Al Ries is dead wrong.  It’s tough to say, Al Reeves is absolutely a guru in the world of branding and positioning.  When he penned that article for Ad Age, it certainly captured my attention and I responded immediately.  The number of comments, I think there were somewhere over 100 comments on the Ad Age site about that article, in particular.  Often when you see articles like that, the comments will divide right down the middle; some supporters and some detractors.  This was closer to 90 percent detractors and 10 percent supporters.  So maybe there are 10 percent of marketers out there who still like to manage through intuition versus data.  I think it’s absolutely false. 

[04:06]
Matthew:  On the article that you wrote for MediaPost there were a lot of comments as well.  I printed it off and highlighted a few.  I think that for the folks that commented that were in defense of Al, I think they also were thinking along the same lines as the client or the prospect that you talked about just a few seconds ago.  Some folks still view the up-front planning analysis and then, after the fact, metrics-gathering as a luxury.  I think, in one of the comments down here, from Leo.  Leo Exter says, “Moving quickly is sometimes more important than moving accurately.”  I think there’s still a lot of marketers out there that believe that quantity is much more important over the quality or the ROI.  Your approach in your article was actually a great way of blending the creative impact of a campaign with data, metrics and ROI.  You outline four key points from a case study with Blackberry.  Let’s talk a little bit about what those four key points were.

[05:15]
Stephen:  Sure, you might have to remind me what the four key points were.  I know the Blackberry case study very well.  It’s a great story.  But the four points…

[05:22]
Matthew:  The four points; the first one was extreme positions are provocative but obfuscate our opportunity.  After I looked it up in the dictionary, I said, “Okay, I know what he’s saying.”  Really the challenge is not whether or creative should be at the forefront of marketing, the challenge is getting them to work together.  I think that Al is advocating for one extreme.  There’s a lot of folks in the comments who said, “Oh, he’s wrong.  You should do everything by the book, by the numbers.”  Really, what you’re advocating is to understand how they both work together.

[05:52]
Stephen:  Absolutely!  That experience is not uncommon in the best ad agencies; whether they are pure interactive agencies or integrated agencies, full-service agencies.  The best creative directors want creative briefs that the client writes and invests the time so that they can really understand the business and the metrics that the client is really trying to achieve.  That is where creative’s feel that they’ve got the best instructions to go do what they enjoy doing versus the absence of a creative brief where the quality of the idea is based purely on the creativity of the idea and that’s unbounded and often doesn’t result in the objectives that the client wants.  At the end of the day, creative’s don’t want to come up with…creative people don’t want to come up with ideas that are rewarded at award shows but result in the firing or dismissal or account review a year later because you are not achieving sales objectives.

[06:46]
Matthew:  Which is a great segue into the second point which is measurement drives all of these decisions.  A great line here is that in the best examples, data interpretation and creative implementation occurs continuously, making marketing agile.  I think that the concept of agile, as it applies to software development, has been around has been around for many years and only recently have the marketing departments and marketing specialists started to understand that this concept or this methodology could
really apply to marketing as well.  You know measure, understand, execute, and then start over again; re-measure, understand and then execute.

[07:23]
Stephen:  And that was exactly the point that I was trying to make.  We’re big, within Compete, followers of agile as an approach to software development.  We use it for compete.com and many of the other practices and as a sales and marketing team we said, “How can we develop and bring some of those ideas into the sales and marketing function at Compete?”    It’s hard, the marketing cycle and the sales cycle doesn’t necessarily fit nicely into an agile format.  Where it really gets difficult is where you’re looking for results that are not necessarily tied to a lead generation or direct response marketing efforts but are tied to branding and positioning and all the things that Al talks about.  My premise is that you can actually measure all of that and you need to measure all of that and moving quickly doesn’t mean that you have to move blindly.

[08:17]
Matthew:  Next point; if you can’t quantify it, you’d better be really lucky.  If you follow Al, using instinct alone is akin to just gambling.  I think that, pretty much, speaks for itself.

[08:26]
Stephen:  Yeah, there’s a great line…I feel obliged to quote to offer some perspective on my existing perspective.  I guess I’m doubling down on what I wrote.  A great quote from a book called ‘The Four Hour Work Week’ that was written by Tim Ferriss.  He said, “If you can’t quantify an outcome, you don’t have a goal.”   Everything that we do for our clients and certainly we take our own medicine; everything that we do for marketing Compete to the world has to have an outcome in mind before we can even start to expend any effort on it.

[08:57]
Matthew:  Important, and I think that if you find yourself in the trap and I think it really is a trap of, “I need to get my website launched, I need to execute.”  I think there is a systemic problem, if I can take your idea to the next logical conclusion.  Maybe it’s time to slow down and fix some more systemic problems.

[09:14]
Stephen:  Right, it’s the final two percent of thinking that you really have to push yourself to do.  That final two percent makes all the difference.

[09:21]
Matthew:  Then the final piece is; math can help you engineer outcomes not just measure performance.  I think if I remember, in the comments the fourth point was the one a lot of people said, “Wow, light bulb here.”  If I understand what happened then I can start to predict what will happen with next efforts.

[09:39]
Stephen:  That’s absolutely right.  If you understand your outcome, you can break down conceptually all of the steps that need to occur in order for that outcome to be achieved.  Then you’ll align your marketing programs against that.  Every step of the way, the goal is to get a consumer one step further in the process.  It would be nice if life was that simple and a lot of things go wrong but at least you know where they are going wrong in a process and very quickly address them and get them back on track.

[10:03]
Matthew:  Excellent.  So, let us know what you think.  You can tweet to the PTV Live has tag.  We are obviously coming at this from a very analytical mindset but for all of you creative marketers out there, let us know if we’ve got it right or we got it wrong.  While we wait for people to tweet in, let’s move on to our next story of the week which is an increase in companies that are blocking their employee’s access to social media sites.   If you’re in marketing you’ve probably heard of this thing called Twitter and this other thing called Facebook and it’s going to save everybody’s life and make the world a better place.  Most companies out there actually don’t agree with that statement.  This is some research from a company called ScanSafe; currently 76 percent of companies are choosing to block social networking and it is now a more popular category to block than online shopping, weapons related websites, alcohol related websites, sports related websites and other webmail.  This is an article that is on Mashable, which is a social website in and of itself in addition to being a blog.  You can imagine what the comments trended toward, “This is outrageous.”  I think that, one of the comments that I wanted to pull up that made a lot of sense to me; “Challenges to enterprise social media adoption are the corporate culture, concerns around employee productivity, information security and legal issues.  I think that if you think about companies that are choosing to block social media it’s probably a little bit of all of those things.  The idea that I don’t want something to get out onto the social web that isn’t approved or PR’d or that’s sensitive and it really is a sign of the times.  I think and let me know what your opinion is on this companies aren’t blocking people’s use of the phone or their email account.  These are all communication tools that we all understand and know and love but social media, being new, is getting this undue attention.  I want to understand.  What’s the policy at Compete?  How do you guys use social media?

[12:17]
Stephen:  This is a no-brainer, right?  Compete does not block access to any site on the web and you can imagine any kind of website that consumers might go to throughout the day.  It’s fully open.  It’s part of the corporate culture; it’s frankly a corporate policy that we don’t block usage for things like that.  IM, social media sites, social media application, you name it, it’s open.  If we did start to block stuff the issue is primarily that people wouldn’t want to work at Compete.  I mean, part of the reason that Compete is a special place to be is because there is a natural curiosity that comes with people who are analytic about what consumers are doing on the web.  We really need to access everything that consumers are doing online so that we have a point of view of it for clients.  In thinking about why other companies would do that, I don’t know what the balance is between productivity concerns which means that people are pounding on Twitter all day long, which even at Compete is not the case although we are heavy twitterers, versus…this goes back to, really, any kind of blogging.  Should my company blog?  Do I need to provide some editorial review before a blog or before a blog comment goes online?  We haven’t done any of that.  In fact, on our blog, we have a very popular blog it’s in the top 25 Ad Age ranked blog.  We allow any person at Compete to write a blog for Compete about a trend, a company or consumer segment they see online.  They use our data and we put out about one or two blog posts a day without any kind of checking or editorial review process.

[13:58]
Matthew:  I guess results don’t lie.

[14:00]
Stephen:  They don’t lie.  Our goal is to have a provocative blog so we tell people to push the envelope on what they talk about.

[14:07]
Matthew:  Have you ever had an experience where someone pushed a little too far and you found out after the fact?  If so, what was your response?

[14:15]
Stephen:  We have never read a blog that we said, “Oh, I wish you hadn’t written that because you gave out the next five years of our business plan.” 

[14:17]
Matthew:  That would be bad.

[14:18]
Stephen:  I would be happy to share our five year business plan with any competitor.  I’m not sure they could do anything with it
, anyway.  Where we have gotten into some interesting questions is where the blog has been so provocative that the company that we blogged about…I’ve gotten many CMO phone calls saying, “How did you get this information about my business” and “Now my board is calling me why are you reporting that online I’m not as effective as my direct competitor at engaging or converting customers online.  That’s not good the investor relations community is angry at me now.”  So, we love those.  That’s exactly why we want to blog because it brings the conversation to the debate and that’s when we try to sell those people some intelligence that helps them get from number two to number one in the first place.

[15:07]
Matthew:  Excellent.  So that has a very real and tangible and measureable outcome.

[15:12]
Stephen:  Yes, for sure.

[15:15]
Matthew:  Excellent.

[15:16]
Stephen:  The only other thing I would say to your point; people are going to communicate throughout the company.  There’s nothing about a social media site that makes it necessarily easier to communicate.  It just makes it easier to get that out to a wider audience.  Anybody who would steal corporate information and share it with a competitor on a blog is likely to do that in a more clandestine effort anyway.

[15:19]
Matthew:  Let’s be honest, if someone wants to get on Twitter there’s ways to get on Twitter from within a corporate firewall that is blocked.  That is the final comment that I was going to read here; there’s proxies which is essentially the way that would work.  You can go to a site that would re-direct you over to the site you want to go to.  Now you are paying the bill for being big brother saying, “You can’t do this.”  You are taking your corporate culture down a notch for no real outcome or benefit, rather.  So keep that in mind.

[16:13]
Stephen:  I do most of my blogging and blog group reading from my iPhone so you can’t block that.

[16:20]
Matthew:  That’s interesting.  That’s a pretty small screen to be doing a lot of reading.

[16:26]
Stephen:  I do this a lot; I’m very good at flicking.

[16:30]
Matthew:  So how many blogs do you think you can get through in the course of a day on your iPhone?

[16:33]
Stephen:  I probably don’t read as much as I should be reading.  I probably will read, I certainly read the Compete blog posts every day so that’s one or two.  I’ll read, maybe three or four more.  I’ve got my select few ranging from the sports blogs to the industry blogs to whatever else catches my eye for that day.

[16:52]
Matthew:  I just can’t get into the whole reading the newspaper or blogs on my iPhone.

[16:57]
Stephen:  Really?

[16:58]
Matthew:  I’m an iPhone user.  I love it but for me, Google Reader on my Mac is the way to do it.  I always find it interesting when I meet someone who…

[17:05]
Stephen:  How do you do that when you’re driving?

[17:07]
Matthew:  I don’t.

[17:08]
Stephen:  That’s when I do my best blog reading.

[17:10]
Matthew:  When you’re driving?

[17:11]
Stephen:  Yes.

[17:12]
Matthew:  Alright, very good, everyone stay away from Stephen on the highway.  I want to talk a little bit about a great short post from Seth Godin.  All of his posts are pretty short and pithy.  He says that for brands that matter there are two questions that every marketer needs to answer.  I’d like you to answer them on behalf of Compete if that’s alright.

[17:32]
Stephen:  I will attempt to do that.
[17:33]
Matthew:  Number one:  Do I want people to interact with me and my brand in unexpected ways?  As opposed to just quietly consuming it and actually I think we’ve probably already answered that.  I’ll let you answer it right now though.

[17:47]
Stephen: The key word in that sentence is unexpected ways.  I think that will threaten some people to answer it differently.  I want people to interact with my brand, period.  The deeper the interaction with our brand the more they will learn about the company and the services we provide our clients and how we help drive value for our clients which will help, our hope, drive their purchase propensity and start to work with us.  When a client goes quiet on us or a prospect goes quiet on us, that’s not a good thing.  We don’t like to lay low.  We want to be top of mind.

[18:25]
Matthew:  Being top of mind, sometimes, means challenging, we talked a little bit about that with your blog.  So, unexpected ways I think is a resounding yes.  Two:  this is a pretty easy answer.  When they interact do I overwhelm people with delight worth remarking about?  I’m going to assume that you are going to say yes.  I’m going to follow up with a third question.  How?  How does Compete overwhelm people with delight worth remarking about?

[18:51]
Stephen:  This is an easy one for use because we are big Seth Godin fans.  We’ve got pictures of purple cows; we’ve actually got purple cows in our office.  I think the key word there is remarkable.  It’s worth telling somebody about and that gets back to that common concept of promoter score.  I use the term is it ample or is it worthwhile?  Anything just north of ample is good.  Is it worthwhile, worth someone’s time telling somebody else about it?  Absolutely, we obsess about that.  We do it all sorts of different ways throughout the company.  I think the blog is a great example of that; where we do try and create original content that provides a unique and compelling view of something that people didn’t know existed beforehand.  So, from having something to talk about at a cocktail party or going in to your CEO and saying, “Wow, look at this thing, it’s really interesting.  Let’s use it in our board presentation.”  We’ve actually had people who use our blog in analyst’s calls as a way to demonstrate how effective the business is.  That’s how you know you’re hitting remarkable status.  Even in the reports that we provide our clients on a month-to-month basis, we are always pushing the envelope with what marketers can do with data.  In many ways, when you look at data in the hands of a marketer, it almost seems like…in the old days it would have been a bit of an oxymoron.  It just didn’t go together, kind of like giant shrimp.  The way that data gets really useful for marketers is when they make a decision on it.  The way they could make a decision on it is if they see a way to make money, steal a share from a competitor, drive brand awareness, save money or something that they can really associate with.  That means that you need to connect the dots with data, to a decision, to an outcome.  You start to hear these common themes through how Compete views the world.  For us it’s, if you can take a piece of data, tell a story about it that relates back to what you know the marketer cares about, change their business and can quantify it in dollar terms.  If you say there is a 50 million dollar opportunity, Mr. or Mrs. Marketer, to make this change to your website or to your marketing campaign, that is remarkable.

[21:01]
Matthew:  I think that, in this day and age, marketers are tasked with doing more and more with less and less.  I think this is a story that we are all hearing.  A product or service that can provide that level of insight and instruction to a marketer is extremely
valuable.  Again, getting back to what I was saying at the beginning of the program, marketing these days is understanding behavior and wants and needs of your prospect community.  These are all things that you need to know.  It’s great to hear it.

[21:37]
Stephen:  I’ve got one for you.

[21:38]
Matthew:  Okay, go ahead.

[21:39]
Stephen:  I have a question for you Matthew.

[21:40]
Matthew:  Oh, boy.

[21:41]
Stephen:  What’s the last remarkable brand you’ve interacted with?  Or a remarkable website?

[21:44]
Matthew:  Compete, right now.

[21:47]
Stephen:  Thank you.  Thank you, very much.

[21:48]
Matthew:  Prior to that, the last remarkable brand or website I think I continue to be impressed with Skype.  I was actually renewing my credits on Skype today.  In really understanding what they’ve done with the product and service they’ve provided is useful, it is remarkable, and it continues to improve.  Their online experience is clean and it’s everything you need and nothing you don’t.  So, I’d say Skype.

[22:16]
Stephen:  Do you get people to sign up for Skype?

[22:19]
Matthew:  We all are signed up on Skype, here.

[22:22]
Stephen:  So you are the Skype evangelist?

[22:23]
Matthew:  I think there are a bunch of us who said, “Look, I’m too lazy to get up and go talk to you so I’m going  to IM you.”  Then there were a few of us who said, “Let’s all get on the same platform so we don’t have to fire up 900 platforms.”  We all settled on Skype and I think we’re happy as an organization because of it.

[22:41]
Stephen:  I agree, Skype is remarkable and iPhone, recently, probably the most remarkable product out there.  Rue la la…do you know ruelala.com?  The e-commerce website?

[22:52]
Matthew:  It rings a bell but I don’t…

[22:55]
Stephen:  It’s another remarkable…

[22:57]
Matthew:  That’s like a Tech Crunch favorite.  You can read an article on them on Tech Crunch every three or four weeks but I can honestly say that I haven’t taken the deep dive to understand them.

[23:05]
Stephen:  I think for people who enjoy Seth Godin and his quick snippets of wisdom it’s very useful to take it down to a practical level and say, “Okay now, let’s go find examples and learn from them so we can relate what they are doing back to us.”   Some of the examples Seth with give are the bike repair show back in Charleston, South Carolina does something special.  That’s interesting but I’m selling web analytics.  I can’t give a poor child a bike for every one that I sell.  I guess I can give a poor child a compete.com subscription for everyone I sell.  I just don’t know how useful it would be.

[23:39]
Matthew:  He would probably throw a tomato at your house.

[23:42]
Stephen:  That’s what happened.

[23:45]
Matthew:  Seth is more about marketing religion than it is marketing handbook or tactics but he’s a great guy.  I love getting my daily inspiration from Seth.

[23:56]
Stephen:  He’s good.

[23:56]
Matthew:  I want to talk a little bit about selling.

[23:58]
Stephen:  Sure.

[23:59]
Matthew:  I want to talk a little bit about how online, and Web 2.0 for lack of a better word, have changed the way that people sell and have changed the mission of the marketing organization within a company.  First article comes from…I think this is a Mashable post.  It says that there are six must follow steps for any economy.  This is actually geared toward folks that are selling themselves as freelancers or service-oriented industries.  It doesn’t all apply to what you do but there was one part that I though bore mentioning.  The quote is, “While the economy is problematic it is never the reason a person or a company fails.”  I want to understand how has Compete weathered this economy understanding that everybody is pulling back their budgets?  Do you agree with that?  That the economy is never the reason that you would fail in your endeavors?

[25:00]
Stephen:  Yes, if the definition of failure is to go out of business, yes.  If the definition of failure is grow slow, then, no.  Certainly if you are doing a lot of business with the automotive industry or the financial services industry your business is not booming unless you are in accounts receivables collection, which we are not.  I do think we are comfortable in this environment.  Compete, particularly, because we launched in 2000/2001.  We were launched and founded in a kind of recessionary environment.

[25:33]
Matthew:  The first one, right?

[25:35]
Stephen:  Yes, so we are economy proof.  I’ve been here the whole time so I’ve seen, in the two cycles.  What happened in the first cycle which is happening in the second cycle now is people are saying it’s not enough to provide me with data.  I have too much data, I don’t have enough time, I don’t know what to do with it, it’s getting dusty on my bookshelf, it’s  nice to know but not a need to have.  Unless you can make your data relate back to decisions and make it a need to have then you are not going to be having a successful business or successful sales conversation.  You have to align your sales cycle and your sales processes with convincing your client or your prospect that this is a must-have.  That they will grow share and they will preserve costs using this data in ways that they couldn’t beforehand.  That requires a very consultative, smart sales process.  It also requires you to think about marketing differently.  Our website is a great example.  The whole reason that we launched compete.com and have a premium model with compete.com is so that companies that want to learn more about our company, about Compete, can interact with our data.  You can write anything that you want in a piece of marketing collateral and pdf it and email it to a client.  You can have pictures of your management team on your corporate website, that’s not what people care about.  They care about what can I use this data to do?  What action can I do better?   Why not open up the data to them to start to experiment with it?  Frankly, compete.com is our best sales tool…sorry, our best marketing tool right now.

[27:11]
Matthew:  So, there was a lot in that.  It was packed.

[27:15]
Stephen:  Sorry.  There is four years of experience with that.

[27:17]
Matthew:  Let me just pull out a few gems that I heard.  One is providing direct, demonstrable evidence that you are going to affect your client’s bottom; top line and bottom line is essential in a down economy.  Two is a consultative sales approach.  So understanding a prospect’s, I’ll say buying process for lack of a better phrase, and selling into that rather than trying to put a client or prospect into your selling funnel.  Understanding what their needs are and fulfilling them.  So, those are two that I got.

[27:53]
Stephen:  Correct.

[27:54]
Matthew:  I’m going to have to check the tape for the rest of them.

[27:55]
Stephen:  The rest was let a client experiment and explore your service rather than describing to them in paragraph form.  That’s been very powerful for us.

[28:06]
Matthew:  Show rather than tell.

[28:07]
Stephen:  Show rather than tell.  I will debate you about the buying process versus the selling process.

[28:13]
Matthew:  Okay, go ahead.

[28:14]
Stephen:  The buying process in our point of view from a client’s perspective often results…is often leading you to a path where the prospective buyer will say, “No, I don’t want that.”

[28:27]
Matthew:  Okay, so you are assuming that all buyers are inherently reluctant to buy?

[28:31]
Stephen:  Yes.

[28:33]
Matthew:  They are inherently reluctant to make a purchase.

[28:34]
Stephen:  Yes.

[28:35]
Matthew:  Interesting.  I don’t know if I would agree.  I’m not an expert but I think that if we’ve done the right amount of work to qualify and to bring the right traffic to the right site, then they do want to buy.  Their concerns need to be allayed through information.

[29:01]
Stephen:  Sure.

[29:02]
Matthew:  And by providing the right information at the right time we can move them through a process.  It remains to be seen.  It’s a bit of both maybe.

[29:12]
Stephen:  I agree with that.  Clients or prospects will get as much information from you as possible, drain you of your livelihood and get you to the point where you’re desperate to make a sale and then you’re selling based on their buying process versus selling based on your value proposition.

[29:28]
Matthew:  So there has to be a give and a get throughout.

[29:30]
Stephen:  Yes.

[29:31]
Matthew:  So, much like you do at Compete, you can have free access to the tool for a limited amount of feature set but if you want more; well there are things that you have to do in order to get that.

[29:44]
Stephen:  Consideration must be provided both ways.  I agree you can’t ignore the buying process but you don’t want to map yourself to the buying process because you’ll fail.

[29:54]
Matthew:  You can’t map yourself into the buying process or you will fail.  Words of wisdom.

[30:02]
Stephen:  From a marketing guy.

[30:03]
Matthew:  Good one, if I may say so.  I wanted to talk about one last thing in the sales process which is the idea of social CRM.  I’m not sure if you’re following this recent rise but there was a great article on ReadWriteWeb.  This one particular one, cure CRM, that really takes the concept of a traditional CRM, like a Salesforce, and maps that into the new tools like Twitter, Facebook.  You can actually, much in the same way that you can assign an opportunity to someone in Salesforce, you can assign a Twitter conversation to someone.  This particular article was a great example of this new way that we’re communicating with people;  this new way that sales is now using tools that have, for the most part, have been thought of as marketing tools.  I wanted to understand how social is being used at Compete to provide that consultative approach or to do more in the sales department.

[31:03]
Stephen:  Right, right.  So very good question, really interesting opportunities for companies.  We’re lucky, Compete is lucky.  We’ve got a sales team who’s top notch, a marketing team who’s top notch and we’ve got a client services team who’s top notch.  They work with clients.  They are all interdisciplinary.  The client services team is very effective at selling.  The sales team is very effective at providing client service and both of them can often create a lot of their own marketing campaigns and materials.  It’s an interesting, eclectic group of people who are doing a little bit of everybody’s job.  It’s not hard for a sales person to write a blog, promote it via Twitter and engage the Twitter followers in a conversation.  That happens quite a bit and we promote that.  From a CMO perspective it’s really hard to programmatically implement that and success often happens in hindsight when you say, “Hey, so and so did this cool thing and it had a great outcome and now we’ve got this hot lead and a meeting next week.  This is great.”  How did that happen?  How did we do it again?  How do we get every sales person or every client services person to replicate?  That’s where it starts to break down.

[32:20]
Matthew:  So there’s a little bit of experimentation, for lack of a better word.  There’s a little bit of…which seems to go against what we were talking about at the beginning of the program which is understand the ROI before you embark on something.  Just talk briefly about how you encourage experimentation without knowing what the result will be.

[32:40]
Stephen:  Right.  I think that’s a good question.  Experimentation we encourage at the individual level.  You’ve got your job and you’ve got the tasks that you need to accomplish in order to be effective at your job but some of the other time, go dabble a little bit.

[32:56]
Matthew:  Right.

[32:57]
Stephen:  Go discover stuff, go explore stuff.  There’s always going to be that aspect of something the first time that you do it.  You might have an outcome or an expectation in mind but even if you don’t, just go figure it out.  You see that a lot of times when you read someone’s Twitter feed and it will be, “My first tweet” and that will be four months ago.  It’s their last tweet, too.

[33:17]
Matthew:  Just checking out this social media thing.

[33:20]
Stephen:  So their first tweet was their last tweet and that was their whole exploration.

[33:23]
Matthew:  It sounds a little bit like the famous Google 20 percent time.  Which is a similar policy that Google has, it’s a little bit more structured even.  They ask you, they require that you spend about 20 percent of your time dabbling.  I think the famous case study is that gmail is the result of someone’s 20 percent time.

[33:43]
Stephen:  So you kind of force innovation into the time allocation that people have in their daily work life.  We’re not that structured.  We just have intellectually curious people who are trying to stay on top of Web 2.0 et cetera, et cetera, et cetera in their social lives but also on behalf of their clients.  Our clients are coming to us, marketers, agencies and publishers are coming to us and saying, “Hey, you know, tell me about this new thing Tweet cloud.  How can I get some interesting insights out of a Tweet cloud?  How does it work?”  So we have to be very deft and have to be one step ahead of our clients so we’ve got a perspective on that.

[34:22]
Matthew:  Excellent.

[34:25]
Stephen:  Did you get all that?

[34:26]
Matthew:  Yeah, I did.  I would love to keep going but we’re five minutes over and, unfortunately, that’s all the time we have for now.  Stephen, thank you very much.  I really learned a lot.

[34:33]
Stephen:  Thank you.

[34:35]
Matthew:  You can check out this archive online on our blog if you’re busily taking notes right now.  In the meantime, please leave us feedback.  Subscribe to iTunes at permissiontv.com/itunes and leave us a rating and review.  Stay tuned for next Thursday, September 3rd, Paul McNulty the CMO over at Unica which is literally right outside that window in the building right behind you Stephen.  He’ll be on the show with us and we’ll continue these conversations on these topics.  Until then, thanks and have a great week.  T
hank you again, Stephen.  I really appreciate your time.  See you next Thursday at 3 pm.