The article about the first opportunity not to miss ended with suggestion to keep trying even when you fall short. The second article on opportunities not to miss ended with becoming a skillful (proficient) specialist (expert, professional). Skills and experience in today’s world are at short supply. Appreciation for skillful specialists are also in short supply (maybe simply misunderstood). Understanding professional skill level, evaluating work itself and then managing to achieve business results should be our primary goal. The training and experience level of managers in all new technologies is at best a rare occurrence. At worst executives are ineffective and harmful (I had this experience recently).

Do you clearly understand, able to articulate and then define (guide, optimize, reward) today’s technology workers? Ask this question of your executive and middle management. Brancusi’s famous quote is a nice break here:

Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave. Constantin Brancusi

The quote interestingly enough comes from a modernist Romanian artist known for his refined early 20th century sculptures. Maybe the artistic expression of changes in culture and social structures (communism, socialism, end of colonialism) which artists tried to represent as the 1900s emerged, were his driving influence. Maybe the changes in Europe with the coming of massive industrialization and affordable international transportation (trains, ships, cars) were more influential. Either way, the changes today echo what artists tried to express a century ago.

The quote is still inspirational. As in the previous post, what is helpful in both managing and doing the work is knowledge and experience. Simply looking at the Google Webmaster Blog or the Red Hat Customer Community is a first step (see also Red Hat security blog). Then comes the deeper understanding of managing communities, simply and clearly explaining complex ideas and then actually making the information easily accessible (taxonomy, SEO). This seems to me a start of specialists and executives when it comes to knowledge. Unfortunately learning takes effort. There are too many books, videos and expert content (mainly blogs and e-books) to read. But don’t take this effort as a punishment or a barrier to entry. Contrary, learning new skills and understanding technology is one of the most rewarding step in the work.

Take into account a few unknown factors which will help you improve and keep at it:

• If you don’t have the skills or know the tools you need to learn. Learning takes time.
• Your skill set is just the beginning. Experience comes next and shows proficiency.
• Sector (domain) experience in internet audience is crucial in LinkedIn groups, Twitter users and newsletter readers (they are different in each field.)

These points will define how you are going to get things done. From management direction to who you are and what you need to accomplish. If you are a specialist (hacker, marketer, executive) you will figure out focus and direction. In general (in marketing tech-ops) unless you find an experienced technology communication specialist in your sector, there is a learning curve. Testing different writing styles, publishing formats and message approaches will get you a starting point. In my experience usually five tests (each can last from a few weeks to 2-3 months) you will see one topic, product feature or end use which will return better results than the rest.

Hopefully you are still reading and want to learn more. Marketing technology and ops is growing fast. It is crucial in every business sector today. Get in touch, and let me know what you are doing, if you have something to contribute (tools, a hack, e-book, blog, example) please share it in a comment or a guest post.

A few days ago I visited a small company in the FinTech sector. The company has weathered the first wave in the binary options world. If you are not familiar with new waves in the internet space, hold on tight. The first wave of competing with dozens of small new companies is a rough ride. In some sectors, like the binary options about five years ago (2008 to 2010) the attrition rate is phenomenal. Just keeping alive is hard. Exiting with an acquisition is fairly rare (maybe one out of twenty) and going public is even more impressive. So a company which goes public, then changes ownership, and keeps on going, has something to be proud of. This is the case of this start-up. But success in this case came at a cost. While other companies were creating content, affiliate programs or developing platforms to market as “white label” products, this one focused on direct sales. Not just direct sales with email campaigns, but good old phone banks. They have about 100 sales agents going at it twelve to sixteen hours a day. They sell the hard way, offering incredible returns of 20% to 50% per month on binary options. Most of the deposits come from people who do not understand exactly what binary options or even stock market price changes really mean to speculators. It seems like an end of an era for this market sub-sector. When sales do not work organically or with advertising, the hard sell people get their chance to make the last push. This sales technique is nothing short of 1950s American mid-west magazine subscription and life insurance scene. It’s seductive to use traditional marketing techniques which yield steady predictable results. The same can be said for advertising (AdWords, ad networks), direct mail (list swapping & renting) and even webinar (video and screen cast with chat) campaigns. But the traditional techniques lose out when new habits shift consumer behavior. The shift from personal one-on-one to digital sales techniques is steadily taking over. Experienced executives in traditional marketing methods are easier to find. They have less products to sell and are competing for fewer positions. They are also more predictable, a call center manager with B2C experience, can show tangible historical results. This is not always true today with new products in new market sectors.

New Techniques & Newer Skills

Blogging, social media groups and integrated (mashed) marketing are just starting to show tangible results in traditional markets. This is especially true in the financial B2C world. There are very few companies investing and getting results there. But the ones who have invested  and developed marketing channels, can compete with traditional marketing techniques. This was somewhat clear when seeing a room full of sales agents on the phones at this binary options start-up. Most sales efforts are still in the area of pre-sales. While binary option traders understand how trading systems work, there are many positioning and differentiation advantages to this company. Explaining the advantages of government regulated service, real option trading with a well financed market maker and even regulation which apply to reporting takes time. Each call center sales associate also needs to go through a learning curve. Finally, call center work is hard and tends to wear down people. Their average tenure of a call center worker is measured in months. Very few stay on the phone for more than a year. All these elements make for a hard to manage operation.

Blogging: Slow Start, Long Range & Effective

New formats today make the world of pre-sales a totally different operation. Blogs have changed companies from Google to O’Reilly Media. Influence in blogs is usually slow and takes a great deal of subtle development. Finding a voice, developing an authority and reaching an audience is not something that most people know at the onset. A good blog straddles formal and informal messages. It gives a continuous (sometimes daily) stories on a wide range of topics. In the binary options trading it can cover both technical (analysis, execution, tracking) as well as personal (trading psychology, working habits) elements. It will also need to somehow entice readers to contact the company or at least to give contact information. They also need to be shown how one company’s product is different (essentially better) than all the other competitors out there. There is certainly plenty to write, explain and even influence in binary options.

The next question you may ask: can blogging replace the “hard sell” closing activity of call centers? Stay tuned…  good news there also…

The last article about the first opportunity not to miss ended with suggestion to keep trying even when results are not as expected. Do you keep on trying until you get what you want? Do you change direction after a few months? Do you seek help or outsource the work? Edison’s famous quote:

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

The quote was said about searching for the light bulb filament. We are not searching for a new light bulb in effective technical communication today. But the quote is still inspirational. What would be useful is knowing how long to do one thing (i.e. blogging, social media or paid promotion) and how much effort and resources (mainly money) to allocate. From seeing many people and companies, a first effort of less than a year is just getting started. If you have experience with the product, communication (writing, promotion) or the audience (specifically on the internet) you may see results in less than a year. 

Take into account a few unknown factors which will help you improve and keep at it:

• If you don’t know the product or technology you need to learn. Learning takes time.
• Your technical writing or promotion skill set. Gaining experience takes time.
• What is your experience with internet audience? LinkedIn groups, Twitter users and newsletter readers? Some market segments require experience and testing.

These three points will help you figure out what you need to focus on first. In general unless you find an experienced technology communication specialist in your specific product sector, there is a learning curve. Testing different styles, formats and message approaches will give you a good idea what works. My experience is usually after five tests (each can last from a few weeks to 2-3 months) you will see one topic, product feature or end use which will return better results than the rest.

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there. – Will Rogers

One important point we all notice constantly but sometimes forget: product interest today changes quickly. This goes even more for feature fads among technology consumers. Even in professional sectors like IT and servers this is true. What was hot a few months ago will lose interest quickly. Here Google Trends can help in reducing the number of tests. Google AdWords word planning tool is also useful to see how many impressions, clicks and cost (which shows competitiveness in the search market).

My perspective comes both from personal experience and seeing others over the years. Some have given up quickly. Some kept at it and went through a roller-coaster ride of peaks and valleys. Some have risen slowly in their skills and were rewarded accordingly. The same goes for companies which have struggled. Eventually they find their way and are able to tell a compelling story to the right group of people. They enjoy the fruit of their work. So don’t give up quickly, keep on trying. Everything we do today in technology communication is new. The world of digital mobile communication is wonderful. But getting good at a professional specialty is a wonderful way to work today. If you are still with me, come back… there is more to come (and it gets better).

In the article about missed opportunities in internet communication, the first point is not enough effort or investment. In some market sectors it seems like we are in the “Trough of Disillusionment” phase (see figure above). The Gartner Hype Cycle is one way of explaining the very low adoption of initial hype in blogging (i.e. Google SEO), social media (i.e. Facebook, Twitter) and even in technical support (i.e. Red Hat Linux). What the Gardner Hype Cycle eludes indirectly is the abandonment of efforts by 95% of the first try efforts (they note: “less than 5% of the potential audience has adopted fully”). My view is not “audience has adopted” as much as abandonment of the effort by technical communicators. For most technology communicators, traditional marketers and support specialists trying until you find the right combination to succeed takes more than one try. Unfortunately managers are not willing to keep investing in “trials”. They usually assume if you see an example, you can simply do the same, and it will work. But as Yogi Berra once said:

“If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.”

Does this mean you should also give up if the first few times don’t work? Not at all. It means you need to figure out how to try again and again. It may mean trying another channel or format. It may mean changing the blogging approach (writing style, audience focus, topics covered, material promotion). Any product which is abstract and complex will need explaining (features, advantages, uses). Any new product which brings new features or capabilities will need support (how to use it). This is simply what today’s technical communication achieves using the available formats. New technical communicators to the internet world need not only to understand the landscape, but they also need to effectively mold their material and make it useful. This is true for support information such as Google (Webmaster SEO) and Red Hat (Linux servers), but also for product sales information such as Amazon (product features and comparison) and Microsoft Azure (capabilities, prices, licensing).

One key point to notice in trying to estimate cost: until you try, maybe a few times, and get some results, you may not know how much it will cost. Results are also very hard to estimate. One of the most frustrating management concerns is knowing what others are really doing and what is their results (success rate). Comparison tools such as Similar Web, Alexa Web, and comScore are helpful in terms of traffic, but they do not help in terms of efficiency. It’s very hard to estimate actual leads and sales of competitor sites. It’s even harder to estimate social media and mobile apps effectiveness.

Obviously the issue of adopting a new technical communication method is not simple. It is as frustrating to management as it is for the specialists. First time attempts usually don’t work as expected. Yet examples from successes are a good indication of what can be done. The use of digital communication by technology users is one of the best opportunities today. If you do not invest in getting your product in front of people, you are missing out. If you don’t invest enough and try different techniques, you may also miss out.

Traditional technology managers face a modernizing challenge. They continuously push products with new technology, that’s business as usual. But modernizing their technical communication to fit today’s new formats and user preferences is sometimes difficult. If you look at companies such as Microsoft, without massive writing and promotion in technical blogs, shifting to new technologies would be difficult. Some say even impossible. In Microsoft’s case, the shift from networked client-server to cloud architecture needed technical evangelical and support writing. Then massive social media promotion. Yet the way Microsoft trained and supported developer communities in the past was not with blogging and social media. This is an example which will help IT enterprise marketers get their products adopted. 

In most companies, management usually decides what will be written, the format and sometimes even the writing style. Management in most organizations today also wants to control, or at least approve, social media messages and replies on blog posts. This type of policy control comes from traditionally trained executives. Ones who worked with print and sometimes email campaign channels. I have met countless senior managers, some with responsibility over hundreds of people and millions of dollars in sales. Many expressed desire to “modernize” their marketing with blogging (my experience goes back ten years). Today most want to “update or promote” their blogging with social media promotions. What they could not do with blogging (essentially create a community with informative and attractive writing which leads to engagement) they want to do now with LInkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

To this I respond with “this is a great start”. The realization which you need to communicate directly with prospects and customers usually has a compelling event. This could be a change in the market (people are not buying the way they did), or an entry of a strong competitor using the new channels (usually social media). Sometimes it’s simply a desire to “keep up with the Joneses“. Whatever the reason, management which wants to create, control or approve marketing work needs to understand how blogging and social media really works.

Retraining Traditional Marketers – Sometimes Hard

When a company’s management comes from traditional marketing fields (I worked for an old advertising account manger), modernization shift may be difficult. When someone comes with expertise and success, they tend to think in a way things worked in the past. Shifting the perspective is not easy. In the case of print advertising, there is a desire to make things “beautiful” (almost perfect, many editing iterations). Art, or at least professional graphic design, is a seductive throwback to the print world. The same applies to old newsletter, white paper and event marketing professionals. If the gap between what an old marketer wants and the reality of today’s world is too big, breaking down the shift into smaller elements can work. Sooner you realize the need to train someone to change, better off you are going to be.

Realizing The Big Change – Not The Small Shift

Realization of how much marketing has changed and how blogging has become one of the standard method to communicate is a crucial first step. This is a step which most people see superficially. You can look at an industry blog (see Tim O’Reilly’s RADAR or Google Blog) and get a great deal of information. But it takes experience in the field to fully understand how to inform and attract readers. It takes a whole other level of understanding to actually influence someone’s thinking. While anyone can see a blog, realizing how it’s constructed and the elements on the screen, understanding the actual written material and the discussion enough to even emulate the process is the first step.

]]> https://butterflyimage.wordpress.com/2018/03/27/modernizing-technical-communication-blogging-and-social-media/feed/ 0 1168 amiv2 Traditional communication, especially in the latest formats, comes from traditional management https://butterflyimage.wordpress.com/2018/03/25/the-google-seo-blog-strategy-part-2/ https://butterflyimage.wordpress.com/2018/03/25/the-google-seo-blog-strategy-part-2/#respond Sun, 25 Mar 2018 10:37:56 +0000 http://butterflyimage.wordpress.com/?p=1139

The last post covered the Google webmaster blog as a marketing strategy (for technical products). The Google blog is a good example of informative content targeting a narrow market segment (there are many more good examples). Google’s products are both familiar as strong brands and are the preferred by most people in the west. This is the reason I use it first. The webmaster blog is not useful to the casual internet user. But for technical marketers it’s an example of driving a product’s adoption by influencing the early adopters. Google trends for “SEO” (see figure above) gives the search trends starting in 2004 (this is relevant to Google’s blog). Notice how from the beginning in 2004 to April 2010 (6+ years) search for SEO was growing steadily. Then the interest flattened out until January 2016 (5+ years). Google trend changed their data collection system, which created the artificial breakout. My assumption is flat steady interest continues.

Is trend in search interest a useful measure to analyze the Google webmaster blog’s influence? In our case it’s probably the best indicator over time. There are other factors, such as competitiveness in the market and maturity of the SEO specialist as a profession (which influenced the trend curve). These probably account for slowing down of interest growth after six years. Less competition among webmasters for SEO services drives the need for specialists (which goes down) and therefor their interest goes down. If webmasters (essentially site owners) are competing less in search results, interest will not grow. SEO specialty professional maturity, six years into Google’s blog start, is also a contributing factor to flattening of the growth trend. It’s a long enough time to develop skills and experience. How a blog can promote a product to a defined audience is probably the most useful marketing strategy. This is the key point to take away from the curve.

The second observation is related to positioning and differentiation. Positioning is a traditional marketing term which differentiate a brand from other products in the market. Essentially how to stand out from the crowd:

#2 << POSITIONING>> Google differentiated search with unique information. They entered a competitive market segment. Yet they uniquely explained their use to a focused target audience (webmasters). They did not target average search users. But influencing the top of the food chain which turned out to be a strategic move. The webmasters passed on Google’s message to the end users (average internet search user).

Google’s audience was probably not selected by marketers. The initial work was probably simply support tips written by their developers (and support people). Yet it solved the problem all new complex technical products have: how to get users to a high level of proficiency quickly. This is something every marketer needs to solve quickly. Once a product is introduced (even in the beta phase with limited user base), management wants to see results in the field. The positioning of Google search engine as the one you can “guide” and “direct” towards specific users (it’s not only search words) put the competitors at a disadvantage. There is another element here when it comes to competitiveness: once Google’s blog gathered momentum and had methods to optimize search results, it would have been very difficult for others catch up. The early bird catches the worm. Once you got webmaster’s attention, and the optimization works, and you have a source to commune with like minded people (the blog), you will not search for other alternatives. Essentially very few people had the incentive to optimize for Bing if they did not get “more” from Microsoft. This is a wonderful classic story of how a company beats another with less resources and “simply by marketing”. This is another aspect which makes a blog into a communal area and adds to the format’s usefulness. That aspect of the blog will be treated in a future post.

We keep on hearing about the need for more content, better content, attractive content, informative content… just about any adjective which applies to “content”. We also hear a complaints on how slow content “converts”. The need to get results quickly is a business driven requirement. This requirement is heard today more and more in the social media world. As Ronald Reagan use to say: “wweeeeellll… before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement“. I wish I could have used that Ronald Reagan line a few times (but I didn’t). It’s not always how long it takes to “write, edit and publish”. The writing process by itself is short. In the media world, it’s equivalent to sending a reporter to the scene of a crime. Getting the picture printed and editing a copy. It’s also not the amount of time it takes to build a network of followers (messages go viral faster than ever before). Networks expand at an amazing rate with attractive content. So what makes a company’s message so slow to “filter” and then “influence”? It’s getting the right message, to the right audience at the right time. Messages go viral if they are useful right now. This is the nature of the mobile internet’s immediate life: essentially the behavior of Twitter (text messages) and Instagram (pictures and videos) (as of 2018). 

It comes down to a few basic factors: Messages, Audience, Format, Style & Promotion. There are plenty of references on how to develop and style these content factors. These factors are hot topics on blogs and social media discussions as well. But it takes work to master each element and make it your own. It takes effort to apply knowledge to a market segment: audience, competitors, affiliates and the overall landscape. This takes time since specialists need to master their craft in a your field. My experience in B2B and B2C shows how SEO skills and experience is different even between two financial products (portfolio management and security trading). This is even more prominent in technology sectors where products and their uses are different (satellite equipment is not sold as VoIP telephony equipment).

In many niche markets, good work takes time to master. Finding messages, recruiting audiences (building groups and networks), developing a unique form and style and eventually promoting the content takes experience. There is a misconception among executive management on how message delivery works. The misconception comes from the speed of publishing and feedback. Publishing an article takes essentially no time. Getting feedback, both analytics and comments is also fast. So what can take time? Once a few articles with different messages are tested, a writer, editor or promoter should be off to the races. Yet most executives do not see the actual work it takes to “bait and hook” a prospect. Writing is not simply typing and proofreading, the material has to be useful, informative, even controversial. Posting in different locations (different groups on LinkedIn or accounts on Twitter), sometimes slightly different text version also takes time. Monitoring analytics, even in real-time, is not just a few clicks and then analyzing reports. As the amount of content grows everything takes longer.

Inpatient specialists and managers need to understand the process and gain patience as the work progresses. It may seem like results should come quickly (after all this is the mobile internet, we are in the immediate access era): first write and draw (photograph), then corrective actions and optimization, then better results – and the cycle continues. Yet only a few companies actually achieve quick results. This sadly leads managers to give up. Usually after a few months or a year, you see blogs abandoned, social media stream stop. A few continue and eventually find their effective message, audience and style. To figure out who is effective in your field, take a look at companies which publish their newsletters, mail campaigns or offers (contests, demos and case studies, white papers) on a regular basis. Also look for company blogs, straight content and social media activities. Is the activity steady? Is their audience numbers growing? Is the audience concentrated in specific geographic location? Is the audience participating in the discussions? Is the material shared? The internet and content marketing is an open book. You can see what and how people publish and promote. Search for text quoted and shared. But it takes effort, more than ever before. This may be news to most executives. So us specialists need to clearly explain. We also need to show the work, results and eventually return value on the effort.

[EDITOR: the post was refreshed and moved from the original 2015 publishing date]

Many companies blog to generate leads, promote their brand, influence sales and essentially market (a product or idea). This idea of making money for a company is what makes the older bloggers run to corporate blogging jobs. The older bloggers started about 19 years ago in 1999 with blogger, some migrated quickly to WordPress. But the blog, as a humble “you don’t need to write HTML and know about JavaScript” started simply as a way to publish stories and information. It was usually associated with individuals. What started as mere simple publishing platform turned into the most popular format for personal and corporate writers-publishers. What did not happen with straight sites (there were many simple “frameworks” to design sites), Wikis (also very simple site publishing method) did happen with blogging. Essentially the writing, commenting, linking and guest blogging (writing on other blogs) combined to make an unbeatable combination. Today blogs are estimated to hold 50% of the internet’s content. 

This trend of content-focused sites with simple design is crucial to marketers today. Blogs give marketers the ability to write and publish quickly. Readers are not lost with difficult navigation or unfamiliar information location. Product descriptions, features, benefits and uses can be written linearly in a steady stream. In the case of the Google blog, everything worth writing about when it comes to search was streamed out one post at a time. Over many years, the blog was the main outlet explaining how to use Google webmaster tools. Essentially the field of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was officially supported by the company through the blog. Ten years ago, the idea of free and open publishing was an attractive proposition. Also, the idea of not needing anything except for an internet connection to publish was even more attractive. When Google acquired Blogger (Feb 2003, Wikipedia) the platform a seal of approval. But life moves forward fast and Blogger lost some of it’s cutting edge popularity. Some was lost to WordPress and other blogging platforms, some to social media (Twitter was called a “micro-blogging” platform) and other popular sites. Now blogs are losing popularity to mobile use which is not strong in the blogging domain but offers simple access to news and social networking.

Back to the title and blogging for marketing. Besides technical fields, blogging seem to have found marketing fans in many fields. What blogging gives marketers besides ease of use and standard, simple to understand format (i.e. design), is the ability to “mimic” a customer experience. Customer experience is an old method to give a personal perspective to people who don’t know you. In complex and abstract product features (i.e. software or technology driven products) the use of blogs is extremely effective. In fields such as consumer goods, we have seen it in clothes (i.e. Manolo’s Shoe Blog) the linear simple design is a good way to write a steady flow of articles. There was a time when the blog was compared to syndicated writers and cartoonists. People who enjoy a certain columnist or cartoonists read the entry every day. Once you got a steady captured audience, you inform, influence and SELL to them.

If you are marketing a complex product such as enterprise software or a technologically complex consumer product (from a digital camera to a video streamer) you may want to use a great example. Google has been facing the problem of “explaining and supporting” their tools for a long time. They solved the problem with a blog. At first it may seem difficult to write a technical blog, you need to actually explain features, operation and even a little about the product’s technology (architecture). Take a look at their blog and let’s get started.

The Google Webmaster blog first started on blogger at about 2004. It is a great strategy example for marketers (I rarely see anything written or discussed about this strategy). It slowly and methodically explained how to “do” SEO (search engine optimization). By slowly I mean one post at a time and with a focus on one topic at a time. By methodically I mean covering features and operation to incredibly small detail. This seemed to be written by the actual developers, but before you tell me your developers only write in Google Translate from Serbian, hold on to that thought (we will cover issues at a later date). This is not a place to learn SEO from scratch. It will not replace a good book (see O’Reilly The Art of SEO or Search Engine Optimization and Hour a Day). But it’s the original source of information. If you need help today, if you need to keep up with what Google officially says about their tools for webmasters, this is the place to go. My first strategy observation:

#1 << STRATEGY >> Google gives you one place to go for unofficial technical information and support. This is like a support group with more detail and organization. At the time, this was unique and extremely useful. To date it’s not done by most companies with digital cameras (and their software) or enterprise software.

Over the years I heard many marketers resist this strategy. There are always logical excuses, the most prominent is ROI (for my small top user group, it’s too much work and money). For most product marketers the complaint about addressing a small audience of users does not convince me. We can debate the return on investment here (ROI) if your target market is made up of few thousand software administrators or architectural photographers (comments please). You don’t have to use the Google webmaster blog as a template. You don’t have to explain as much as Google did in their early days. You don’t have to use the actual developers (in consumer products you need early consumers and product evangelists). You don’t have to reveal anything that is proprietary (internal workings, algorithms, trade secrets). Yet if you don’t tell anyone how to use your product’s features, how are they going to know? You simply can’t rely on popular personal blogs (as most digital photography companies tend to do) or on reviews from product portals and E-commerce sites). Most marketers are aware of this situation, yet they do not see a product feature and use blog as strategic. It was for Google and it can be for you. Stay tuned, there are more lessons to learn from the Google webmaster blog.

]]> https://butterflyimage.wordpress.com/2018/03/22/the-google-seo-blog-strategy/feed/ 2 1120 amiv2 https://butterflyimage.wordpress.com/2018/03/21/three-opportunities-not-to-miss/ https://butterflyimage.wordpress.com/2018/03/21/three-opportunities-not-to-miss/#comments Wed, 21 Mar 2018 10:57:35 +0000 http://butterflyimage.wordpress.com/?p=1096

Tracking Twitter statistics with a few tools let you see response to your work. Here a personal Twitter account is brought back to life in a few days © D-A Vider 2018

One of the most frustrating part of marketing and sales specialists is seeing opportunities missed. This goes especially when a hands-on writer-publisher or a social media specialist, can jump in and get a message formulated or an audience engaged. The days of extensive isolated market research and expert strategic development are gone. Today’s product owners want to do things quickly, see results then decide what’s next. From what I see, the opportunities missed fall into the categories:

• Not having enough sales and marketing resources. Overall business communication is not effective as it could be.
• Not doing what you want to do with your business communication. Not aligning the communication operations with business goals.
• Following blindly what seems to be market trends. Missing opportunities focused on specific market, competitive and product needs in your situation.

By looking at these top-level topics, both strategic and operational: “what is actually being done now”, we can tell what is missing (or needs improvement). Opportunities to improve and take advantage are everywhere. Keeping an evaluation process ongoing all the time to see what needs improvement is a good way to keep a pulse on your work. It gives immediate feedback on what is going on (checking analytics daily, writing reports). Internet sales and marketing work flows are iterative today. A writer publishes an offer or an informational post, the material is promoted (today using social media), results and analytics give feedback. This loop takes a few minutes to hours and changes are done to improve results. Sounds a bit simplistic and generic, so examples will give you a better feel of things.

Is There a Strategy?

So where is the strategy? Where do we gain an unfair advantage? How do we start the elusive Google SEO Blog? or Tim O’Reilly’s RADAR blog? or Seth Godin’s daily blurb? or Red Hat’s Linux support forum? Essentially: making our mark on the world while doing “business as usual” and getting things done? Strategy today is less in analyzing standard (traditional) business parameters as in developing presence and skills in new formats, message focus and sometimes technology specific topics. Strategy in content focuses on a narrow topic delivered to a targeted group (see Google and Red Hat examples). Strategy in business segment focuses on specific business issues or segment (Microsoft blogs and Oracle segments). Strategy in messages (or what some call branding) is explaining capabilities and showing how to use a technology (Google, Red Hat, LinkedIn). Strategy was a high level management task with research and analysis, and then synthesis. Today the cycle of creating a message, presenting an offer (trial, reduced price) or simply helping someone get started takes more effort than the research and analysis. The ability to see results immediately, to try different approaches (A/B testing) and then to actually continue the work, is more accessible than ever before. So what’s next???  stay tuned and come back [NEXT: what did the Google SEO blog really do?]