Wow! What a relief! I said it and I feel good! How about you?! OK, so it wasn’t so much of a secret was it? It’s this reality that brings me to the next way that business really needs to look at their content no matter how dry the subject matter may be. There needs to be a level of entertainment.

People often work in environments that can sap the lifeblood from them. As a result, anyone who can brighten their day with something amusing yet still relevant to business scores a big win. While it sounds interesting, it’s not as easy as one might think when putting it into practice.

The best way to show this is an example of someone who took a dry subject (lighting) and turned it into something that made me chuckle and think. These are two desired results that are rare in the world of business to business marketing, let alone marketing as a whole.

The following video was done by Cree Lighting’s Ginny Skalski. She and Cree as a whole have done a great job of taking a rather dry subject matter, lighting, and built interest around how Cree intends to revolutionize lighting through LED technology. Their blog is accomplishing this task, but what really caught my eye was this video that is worth the minute and a half look to see how one can both entertain and educate even on the most mundane topics.

While it’s not obvious from the video, the timing of this video adds to the humor a bit. You see, Cree did this at Easter time, so the use of chocolate Easter bunnies for this particular demonstration is even more clever.

So how do you entertain your audience? A better question to ask first might be, “Do you believe that you even can entertain your audience?” Is your product so dry that nothing could breath life into it, let alone entertain someone? Is your company so “old school” and boring that they wouldn’t consider this kind of approach to marketing even remotely plausible?

Well, you might be working for the wrong company or you might have been thinking about things from the wrong angle. As with any content question, the particular company situation and specifics will dictate what might or might not be done, but here are a few areas to consider if you think you can have a chance to make this happen.

Video – People watch ridiculous amounts of video online and the B2B space is not excluded from that. With the ability to shoot HD-quality video from a little handheld device, such as an iPhone or a Flip MinoHD, there is little if any capital investment required. What is needed, though, is some considerable thought and planning. While the Cree video looks simple, it wasn’t as easy as it appears to make it happen.

Twitter – With Twitter you can get away with more, especially if there is a personality attached to the account. Sometimes it’s better for a business to let one of their more creative types engage with customers so they can ‘keep it light.” This tactic, however, is fraught with risk so be very careful.

Blogging – Corporate blogs are a great place to throw in material that is on the lighter side. You can profile people or show some of the faces behind the products. There are many options with a blog. If your corporate blog is lacking personality, then I would suggest that it is lacking engagement which kills its effectiveness. Lighten up a bit.

Overall, finding ways to entertain people in the business world is much easier to talk about than to execute. Remember this, though. You don’t have to think that everything has to be THE piece that will go viral and get a million views. Look at the Cree example. It has received over 22,000 views as of this writing. Not bad. That’s 22,000 people who now think that LED lights exist and that they are different in a positive way. That’s success in any marketer’s book.

So look to entertain your customers and visitors alike. Remember that all work and no play makes a company look dull. Are you dull right now? Well, you need to get busy and laugh a little.

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What about search marketing, how do you value an hour with your Search Marketing Consultant? When a particular tactic is being executed upon, such as rewriting the ad copy throughout the account in order to test a new approach, do you measure value by simply looking at the end result or do you take into account the expertise and number of hours that have gone into the work?

Measuring Value

It is virtually impossible to compare search marketing solutions between vendors largely because as Rand Fiskin put it in a post 3 years ago:

‘Knowledge of how the industry operates and how to judge vendors is knowledge that’s nearly as hard to come by as the search marketing techniques themselves’

It’s nearly impossible to measure two vendors side by side. Even two vendors who appear to offer a very similar service may provide a rather different experience in execution, value and cost. Though difficult to accurately compare search marketing solutions, you can draw upon the experiences you have had with vendors.

How do you value the work that a vendor does for your business? Do you measure output or the time dedicated to your account? If you are looking at the end task result only and not taking into account the man-hours that have gone into the work, you may be undervaluing the solution.

Valuing search marketing services is just one of many challenges that still face this, relatively speaking, fledgling industry. Compared to the legal system, which has hundreds of years on search marketing, we are still far away from developing standards that could assist in setting a minimum bar. If we had standards in this industry, tangible, measurable standards, you could then more easily valuate what is worth $50 per hour vs. $250 per hour.

However, how a client views your search marketing offering depends in large part on how you present and sell the solution. If you are flogging search marketing like a commodity, the client will expect a great deal more for less. Though very different from the legal model, search marketing holds a position in the services industry. It is yet unclear whether clients value the work enough to consider it ‘tertiary level, professional services’ – however, if they do not, this is in large part a fault of the industry itself with the rogue & cowboy manner in which it has presented itself in the past.

Search marketing has to have a serious offering on the table to be treated seriously by clients. The overwhelming presence of poor quality solutions that pervade the market serve only to devalue the market value of search marketing solutions. Only when clear benchmarks are set will search marketing be able to draw a clearer line in the sand, defining its value, even by hourly rate.

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But what, exactly, will the consolidation look like? Will weaker marketing automation vendors merge with each other to establish a larger market presence? Will they merge with complementary firms to offer a broader range of capabilities? Will they specialize in particular industries to establish a small but profitable niche? Or will they simply be crushed as giants from related industries introduce their own products?

Let’s look at a similar consolidation about ten years ago, among the original marketing automation vendors.* These were campaign management systems including Exchange Applications, Recognition Systems/Protagona, Prime Response, Intrinsic, Unica, Aprimo, Decision Software TopDog/MarketWide, Alterian and SmartFocus.

The pattern is quite clear. A handful of vendors managed to survive as independent firms: the big winner has been Unica, which competes successfully among high-end buyers. Decision Software has remained a small company while Aprimo is most successful in B2B marketing resource management. Alterian and SmartFocus are also still independent, but are sold as services via marketing agencies (Alterian) or directly (SmartFocus).

The rest of the competitors, including the original market leaders, were nearly all purchased as line extensions by much larger firms. Exchange Applications went to Amdocs, Prime Response went to Chordiant (itself recently purchased by Pegasystems), Protagona was purchased by DoubleClick (now part of Google), Ceres ended up with Teradata, Intrinsic was bought by SAS, Epiphany became part of Infor, Paragren was bought by Siebel (now Oracle). Other, less successful vendors simply vanished. There were no mergers of equals and no one thrived as a specialist in a particular industry. Although Unica, Alterian and SmartFocus have purchased complementary products, these were extensions around the campaign management core.

Although the world has certainly changed since the late 1990’s, I see no reason to expect a different pattern among demand generation vendors. A few might survive as independents serving the most sophisticated clients. Eloqua and Silverpop are the obvious candidates. Of the remainder, the stronger firms will probably be purchased by companies seeking enter the demand generation space, and the weaker firms will quietly go out of business or be purchased for their client lists.

The more interesting question is who will be the buyers. The obvious candidates are CRM vendors. Of course, Oracle has already made its move by purchasing Market2Lead’s intellectual assets. Salesforce.com is the big question and no one would be surprised to see them make an acquisition. Enterprise software vendors like SAP and Infor are also likely buyers. Microsoft is another possibility, although its Dynamics CRM is sold mostly to smaller businesses than the typical marketing automation system. Speaking of small business suppliers, Google and Intuit are long-shot contenders.

Email marketing is another obvious adjacent space. Again, there was already one transaction: Silverpop/Vtrenz in 2007. The potential margins from marketing automation probably look relatively attractive to email vendors. The problem here may be that the independent email service providers (ExactTarget, Responsys, Vertical Response) are relatively small companies themselves, so it might be hard for them to make a substantial investment. On the other hand, as the consolidation proceeds, small marketing automation companies may get pretty cheap.

Finally, we come to Web marketing companies. These include content management systems (Autonomy Interwoven, EMC Documentum, OpenText, etc.) and Web analytics (Adobe Omniture, IBM Coremetrics, WebTrends). Note that many of these are already part of larger suites whose owners could easily afford a marketing automation acquisition. A couple of smaller Web content management firms (Marqui, SiteCore) have already moved towards marketing automation. One challenge faced by the smaller Web marketing companies is that their customers (Web site managers and analysts) are generally not the buyers for marketing automation. Even “inbound marketing” (search engine optimization, keyword advertising, Web display ads) is often done by someone other than the marketing automation user. This is less of an issue for larger firms, who have relationships throughout their clients’ organizations.

Incidentally, not everyone agrees that smaller marketing automation vendors must vanish. I had a conversation today with one vendor who argued that success still depends mostly on helping new users get value from their systems. In this view, small vendors can succeed by providing excellent service and support, as well as by linking with marketing agencies and consultancies. This could certainly be a niche – remember that Alterian and SmartFocus survived by working as service providers. Still, I ultimately expect that most mid- and large-size firms will purchase marketing automation as part of a larger software suite, and thus that independent marketing automation vendors will find it increasingly tough to survive.

*Actually, there was a previous class of “database marketing” systems including Customer Insight Company, OKRA Marketing, Harte-Hanks P/CIS, Max$ell and RTMS. These used proprietary, non-SQL database engines. Most were purchased by larger companies and then discarded when adequate systems using standard SQL databases became available. Alterian and SmartFocus, both descended from Brann Viper, still survive.

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Business and its supporting branches of information dissemination, connection, and contact, are no longer practical in the era of interactive media. A new philosophy and methodology is required to effectively shed the perpetual cycle of catching up to consumer behavior. Doing so will position us for prominence and influence to guide experiences, direction, and earn presence through not only traditional media, but also through the opinions, thoughts, and ultimately public validations of our influencers and influential consumers. But it will take more than ideas, creative approaches, or simply “showing up” to the conversation. A new skill set is required to effectively compete for attention, mindshare and ultimately affinity. Hybrid Theory introduces a workforce of cross-breeds , experts who master an array of marketing artistry, social sciences such as psychology and sociology, creative vision, business dynamics, service, and communications. These individuals do not displace the authorities in their respective disciplines, they simply extend their capabilities into new media and corresponding domains and markets.

Part One: Social Media Upsets the Balance

In social networks, attention is earned and engagement is a privilege. But instead of innovating or identifying opportunities for meaningful internal and external collaboration and engagement, many organizations and the teams that support them, debate over who owns social media on behalf of the brand. The answer to the question of “who owns social media” is not representative of the opportunity that seemingly eludes most organizations.

In its sixth Communication and Public Relations Generally Accepted Practices (GAP) study produced by the Strategic and Public Relations Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, it appeared as though a clear winner was crowned in the tug of war for social media governorship. According to the report, more than 25% of companies placed between 81 to 100 percent of budgetary control over social medias compared to only 12.6 percent going to marketing. In addition, one quarter of respondents claimed that PR held strategic control over social media as a whole within their organizations and only 9 percent was bestowed upon marketing. An interesting point of note is that just over 25 percent stated that marketing held zero budgetary control and 22 percent said marketing maintained no strategic control whatsoever.

Jerry Swerling, Director of the Strategic and Public Relations Center explained the results, “[Social media] require a relatively non-commercial approach; they entail dialogue rather than monologue; they often convey objective information rather than product features; and they tend to be free-form in nature, which is just the opposite of the highly controlled world of marketing.”

If you believe the information contained within this study, PR is a clear beneficiary of the strategies and purse strings that drive corporate social media. But to say that it is the industry standard or even the right or only answer, is far from reality. While Public Relations may not operate with commercial motives, it doesn’t operate without its own bias and agenda. It is only one part of the overall marketing mix and it too, is in need of reinvention.

The truth is that while we control the top down aspects of branding, it is the people who define our stature in social media today. Their views are emanated through the impressions, perceptions, and opinions they not only harbor, but also share via word of mouth in the real world and in the networks that connect us socially. The web has a long memory and the words of customers enjoy the same visibility, if not sometimes greater, through the SEO and SMO that we employ in our marketing efforts.

So in the great debate as to social media ownership, for the time being, it appears as though it’s not created, but co-created. As such, our best interests are served in the investment of time and energy in identifying the missing elements that currently prevent our business from embodying a true 360 approach in all we do. Doing so opens the doors to identify and apply specific value and resources to where it’s most critical and to specifically match capabilities with needs.

The socialization of media begets an approach that’s reverse engineered in order to affect the culture of our organization to inspire relevance in our markets and in turn, socialize the outbound efforts that connect products, services, and communications across every impacted branch of our business. In the process, we’ll find that the only thing that changes in terms of ownership of social today is the introduction of shared equality and equity in the engagement of our stakeholders through the evolved mechanics of:

- PR
- Marketing

- Advertising
- HR
- Finance
- Sales
- Service
- Product
- R&D
- Strategic Alliances

- Et al

A hybrid approach is required to ensure that engagement is focused and genuine in order to meet the needs and expectations of today’s social consumer.

The Five P’s of the Marketing Mix

Social networks and the prevailing cultures within each foster interaction and reward active contributors with visibility and connectedness. As individuals in online networks earn prominence, it’s clear that their authority and influence is only expanding. As we’re learning, people and their actions and words, are now critical ingredients in business. Therefore, a 360 approach is only complete through the integration of a fifth “P” to the marketing mix, people.

We’re familiar with the Four P’s of the marketing mix. For those who need or perhaps would enjoy a refresher, the term “marketing mix” stepped into the spotlight when Neil H. Borden published, The Concept of the Marketing Mix in 1964. In the late 1940′s, Borden adopted the term in his teachings inspired by James Culliton who had described the marketing manager as a “mixer of ingredients.” Borden grouped the ingredients of the marketing mix in 13 parts, product planning, pricing, branding, distribution channels, personal selling, advertising, promotions, packaging, display, servicing, physical handling, fact finding and analysis. Years later, E. Jerome McCarthy grouped these ingredients into what we now refer to as e 4 P’s of marketing:

1. Product
2. Price

3. Place
4. Promotion

Source: NetMBA.com

The Four P’s represent the variables controlled by a marketing manager as dictated by the internal and external dynamics of the market ecosystem. Originally, the 4 Ps were designed to create the perception of value in order to drive activity and in a positive and profitable direction.

In the era of social media, the 4 Ps require a new tenant in order to make its rent. Now in 2010, social media upset the balance of top down communication. Whereas organizations thrived on the governed dissemination of information as of a form of control nowadays, many of the intermediaries and individuals they hope to reach are now far more influential than we may realize.

As content production and dissemination is democratized and influence is equalized accordingly, a new “P” is necessary to ensure the integrity of the existing 4 P’s.

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Marketers are so busy, we can sometime think in silos. It’s a result of focusing on a project. It’s understandable and I think it happens even more in social media. Most everything we read notes how we need new rules for social media and how different social media is so it’s no surprise that we sometimes throw golden rules out the window as we create new rules.

New tools usually do require new tools. For example, social media is an engagement tool, not an awareness tool. And you can tell which brands understand this by ticking through their Facebook pages. Which brands are trying to engage you and which ones are simply broadcasting the same message in a different channel?

But some golden rules do not change. Audience and goals win the day no matter what medium you’re knee deep in. Brands have hard-earned touch points established with their customers. The email newsletter mentioned in the research above is usually one of those touch points.

Marketers need to step back from the retweets and Like counts and look across these touch points. A 360 degree view lets you see unnecessary duplication as well as untapped opportunities. Doing this would drive down the results from Get Response’s research I suspect.

So let’s think in Venn Diagrams and not in silos.

Perhaps to a fault, I’m a very visual thinker. I tend to sketch my ideas (poorly) to explain them and to test their validity. As a result the Venn Diagram and I became fast friends somewhere in between when John Venn created them and before they became pop culture icons. It’s just one tool we can use to remind us to step back and take in the view from time to time.

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This is the part where something unusual happened. The defense attorney appeared to become more interested in the nature of Google AdWords, which he apparently was not aware of. He asked the question “You can put ads for law firms at the top of Google results?” and it struck me that this question had no bearing on the case, but it might have had an impact on the attorney’s marketing plan. It was almost as if my response to his question turned on the proverbial “light bulb” that got him thinking about how this could help his business.

Neither the prosecutor, judge, nor defense attorney was aware of the nature of Pay-Per-Click advertising, so I had to give a brief explanation of how it worked, and comment on the high cost per click for DUI Attorneys in Phoenix. Incidentally, CPC for DUI lawyers is high in Arizona because people who are prosecuted (or plead guilty) get a one day minimum jail sentence, and are required to install breathalyzer interlock devices in their cars. This motivates people to search for DUI attorneys online in greater numbers than in a state with less harsh punishments. Because more people in Arizona search for DUI attorneys, and they are more likely to “convert” as clients, lawyers are willing to pay up to $53.90 per click!

Given Phoenix’s famously high CPC for DUI terms, I would have expected an attorney in that field to have heard of PPC marketing. He certainly seemed intrigued when I mentioned advertising on Google. As I left the courtroom it occurred to me that the field of search engine placement may still be a relatively untapped territory if more people like the attorney are unaware of its existence. As an employee of an internet marketing firm, I am always talking about what I do, and it would seem that there is more opportunity for getting the word out about search marketing in general. As more small, medium, and large sized businesses understand the power of PPC and SEO services, they will increase the pool of leads for agencies like ours.

As it turned out, I was not selected for the jury, perhaps because I helped manage PPC campaigns for attorneys in the same field as the ones involved with the case. Leaving the courthouse, I wondered to myself how many other people in business are completely unaware that you can “buy” a spot at the top of the search engines.  Although there are a lot of savvy small and medium sized business owners out there who are exploiting PPC and making a handy profit, it stands to reason that a significant portion of the marketplace remains open. If the search marketing industry can find a way to better communicate to people who may not be aware of search engine placement, then it would seem that the potential for growth in our field is still very good.

Note: If you want to see some of the highest CPC keywords on search engines, SpyFu.com has an interesting list of contenders.

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First, some basics. For those unaware, crowdsourcing is a fantastic resource that allows businesses to tap into the cheap labor pool of students, the home-bound, the unemployed, and anyone who wants a flexible part-time job. All you must do is break down your job into a very simple repetitive task that can be done in a few seconds or a minute, post that task on Mechanical Turk or one of its competitors, and sit back and watch as the tasks come back completed.

Mechanical Turk is by far the most popular and famous crowdsourcing site, but you should know that it is restricted to the U.S., so folks in other countries might want to look at CrowdFlower or other sites. So, while I will refer to Mechanical Turk a lot, most of what I say is just as applicable to other crowdsourcing sites that might be more appropriate to what you are doing. For example, 99Designs is a site that allows you to crowdsource any graphics design task from a full Web site makeover to a logo, offering a prize for the winning entry.

Let’s take a marketing example for crowdsourcing on Mechanical Turk to see how it works. Everyone talks about how important it is to do link building for organic search marketing, but who has the time to do it? I know a restaurant chain that needed links to its local Web sites for each restaurant location. Now, a highly paid marketing person is never going to find the time to research the right local directories, blogs, newspapers, restaurant sites, and tourism sites for the 52 cities those restaurants are located in. Maybe you could wait for summer to arrive and find an intern to do it. But it’s faster and cheaper to post the task on Mechanical Turk to list the URLs and e-mail addresses of 20 sites in a particular city that meet the criteria. For that you might pay 20 cents a site. Maybe $1 a site if you are feeling flush. If this seems cheap, you should know that many tasks pay just one or two cents.

I’m not kidding. Many of the tasks are that easy to post and get gobbled up that quickly. So how can you beat coming up with your list of link targets for a couple of hundred bucks over 50 cities? It sounds too good to be true, but it is true.

You might want to be careful about one thing, however. Mechanical Turk postings are public, so they can be mined by your competitors trying to figure out what you are up to. For a while, a Mechanical Turk tracking site was up that showed the hottest requests and what company posted them, but when I checked today the site was down.

So, think before you post. Provide the absolute minimum detail about what you need done. Not only with this provide more security for you, but it simplifies the task, which allows it to be completed more quickly and allows you to pay less.

Be careful about how you identify yourself. Obviously you shouldn’t misrepresent your identity, but it can’t hurt to avoid using your company name if it is the kind of task you wouldn’t want your competitors to know about.

In general, the risk of exposure to competitors is extremely small compared to the value of on-demand cheap labor. If you haven’t thought about how to use crowdsourcing for your marketing, your competitors might already have.

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