A little while back, I was standing in the airport security line at SFO. It’s an unfortunate fact of life for business travelers these days.

While I was waiting, I noticed a sign I had never seen before. And though I’m not a photo blogger, I whipped out my BlackBerry and snapped a picture. Here it is:

What a great idea. Not only is it a captive audience - and with DHS standing by to punish any transgression, it’s about as captive as you get in this country - but Glad is able to market its products and provide a convenience. A great example of opportunistic marketing.

Shortly after I took the picture, I moved forward in line, took off my shoes, reached for a bin to put them in, and saw this:

I pulled out my BlackBerry and quickly snapped another pic before my fellow travelers started scowling at me. Advertising shoes in the shoe bin. What a great idea, esp. for an online shoe vendor like Zappos (which is apparently doing quite well). I came to find out there there’s a company behind the ads in bins called Security Point Media. A whole company dedicated to using security lines to market products:

SecurityPoint Media’s innovation improves efficiency for Airports and creates a new medium for Marketers.

SecurityPoint Media works with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and Airports to provide an end to end security checkpoint solution in return for the right to utilize the divesting tray for promotional campaigns.

Their marketing copy may be a bit klunky, but I can’t take the idea away from them. And while I can’t wait for more efficient airport lines, I have to give these guys credit for a really innovative marketing idea.

Most good marketing VPs know how much they spend. But I did an informal poll at a recent gathering of CMOs, and I found very few really knew how much their marketing programs generated in revenue for the company.

Most took the easy approach and told me how much their company earned overall. Since marketing generated 100% the leads (sorry Sales…), then that was how much Marketing did. Two million marketing budget, ten million in sales, a tidy 5x ROI. Another round, barkeep.

Well, I hope your CEO doesn’t let you get away with that. Because if he does, then you really have no idea what’s working and what’s not. And when whatever it was that was working stops, you just won’t have any idea.

And when I say something like that to a VP Marketing, they usually launch into some variant of one of the following: “Our CRM system sucks,” “Sales doesn’t fill in the ‘lead source’ field in Salesforce.com,” “We can’t track it through the channel,” or all of the above.

All of these are real problems. Some of them are hard to fix, especially when you are moving fast. So, what to do?

Well, if you really can’t get the data, or if it’s going to take IT a year or more to fix all the systems, then I suggest making some estimates. Since you know your spend by program, and the number of conversions, and you can back out maintenance and renewals from the total revenue number, you can probably make a decent first cut. Discussing it with your team and with Sales, and piecing in the hard deal data you do have will help clarify the picture.

And if you can’t make it match up exactly because of missing or incomplete data, is that really so bad? Not really. It would be great to know exactly, but knowing approximately is helpful. You can spot areas where what you did seemed to have no impact (cut that sock puppet giveaway program), seemed strongly linked to sales (more of that, and maybe get IT to fix that data capture problem first), and areas that were a surprise (renewals were down - maybe time to work on a loyalty program or a customer conference).

So, ask yourself how much your programs made for the company. If you can’t, maybe your not earning your keep.

Yesterday, I was sitting with a few of my guys in San Diego, having a post-meeting recap beer, looking at the sun set over the bay, killing time before our return flight. The conversation moved on and we started talking about trade shows and whether they are worth the money anymore.

Funny, then, that Bloglines had Tom Teynor’s Are Trade Shows a Waste of Time and Resources? waiting for me to read this morning. I highly recommend reading it. If you’re like me, I constantly wrestle with how much money I should spend on trade shows and conferences, and how much on direct/online marketing.

My general opinion is that trade shows are not as important as they used to be; conferences are good if your people are speaking and you can leverage meetings; always make sure your salespeople have pre-set meetings; never rely on trade show floor traffic alone; smaller professional group meetings (of CFOs, CSOs, DBAs, etc.) are cheap and good for salespeople to meet actual buyers; and that there are certain industry events in your sector (e.g. the RSA Conference in security) that you just need to be at.

That said, if you want to do more shows or make sure you are spending wisely, I like Tom’s approach. Make it into a spreadsheet and show your VP of Sales how much shows really cost. Better yet, ask him or her to step up and agree to a revenue number from the show. Most won’t - you’ll make your point.

I’d love to hear what others have to say. At some point I’d like to dig into the Web 2.0 style pre-conference meeting setters that get like minded people together. I think that could really change the equation.

Seems like every CMO in Silicon Valley wants to know how they can leverage social networking in their marketing. Actually, what every CMO really wants to know is how they can start a social networking company and get so rich on paper they get interviewed on 60 Minutes. But let’s stick with the plausible, shall we?

For the sake of explanation, and at the risk of oversimplifying, let me make a few distinctions. First, you have public social networks. These are sites like Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, and Friendster. These sites are for “socializing” and are generally aimed at 18-25 year olds. Bracketing these are Club Penguin for pre-teens and Eons.com for those over 50.

Then you have what I like to call business networking sites, the best known of which is LinkedIn. These sites are really for finding people and making connections. They help salespeople find prospects, business development folks find partners, and job seekers get warm intros into companies seeking workers. Again, I’m grossly oversimplifying, but I’d say 80% of the people I know use LinkedIn this way.

Lastly you have private social sites/platforms. Companies like Ning and Leverage Software. These companies let you set up your own communities around your company or organization.

So, that’s basically the landscape. For the moment I’m excluding social bookmarking and submission sites like del.icio.us and Digg. That’s a whole other kettle of fish.

How can you use social networking sites for marketing? Here’s the crash course, broken down by type:

Public Social Networks - Buy advertising on the site that hits your demographic; create affinity for your (consumer) product; conduct guerrilla/stealth marketing (but be careful). What you are really doing here is taking advantage of their numbers.

Business Networks - Buy advertising; show your salespeople and business development team how to network to find leads. You are taking advantage of their connections, basically.

Private Social Networks - Create a new one because it doesn’t exist; replace your tired old developer or partner site with a cool Web 2.0 one to make your company look more with it and have better interactions. Some event organizers are using these to connect vendors with prospects at conferences, which I think is a much more enlightened way of connecting than “Can I scan your badge if I give you a pen?”

There’s a whole lot we didn’t cover, but there are some looming questions. Will 18-25 year olds use MySpace when they are 35, or will they graduate to LinkedIn? Are social networks durable, or will they be replaced by cooler/newer ones every five years? In ten years, will the whole Web be social, obviating the need for these sites over time?

So give it a whirl. Dip your toe in and experiment a bit with advertising on the public social sites.

Oh, and one last idea on how to use these sites in your marketing plans - hiring. We all went to college, but would you hire someone whose interests are “smokin’ blunts (cigars hollowed out and stuffed with marijuana), shooting people and obsessive sex.” Uh, references available on request?

I came across an interesting post in Jeremy Levine’s Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained blog. I don’t normally go to venture blogs to look for marketing advice - and in fact was looking for something else - but this entry gave me pause.

In what Levine calls his multiple choice test for consumer Internet startups:

Does your company attract users with any of these things?

1. an inherently viral idea
2. search engine optimized content that grows naturally with usage
3. the ability to spend money to acquire users with a very fast payback
4. none of the above

He rightly points out that if your answer is “None of the above,” then you have a big problem.

I found this interesting from a marketing standpoint. Even if you are not looking to start a consumer Internet company, how would your marketing efforts do on this test? How many times have you heard marketers talk about “viral marketing”? And do they practice it at all? Typically not. Most SEO work is done exactly once by marketing departments - when the site is built - and never touched again. Many, many ads are purchased with no heed to the cost of sale or the lifetime value of a customer.

So take a read of the post and think about your marketing programs. Imagine your company depended on their success (Sadly, most companies do depend on marketing programs for their success, but there is so much distance, lack of visibility/metrics, or finger pointing that people can’t figure out how effective the programs really are.). Could you set up something really viral in your offering? Could you set up a community that grew itself and rose to the top in Google? Could you nail your customer profile so you knew just how to advertise to them and make a profit?

What if it were just you and your product, looking for traction to self-fund or get funding? Would you make it? Hypothetical or not, if the answer is no, then I think you’ve got some work to do.

If you have worked in high tech for any number of years, you have probably witnessed at least one scene where a CEO blows his stack because he can’t get a straight answer to his simple question. This is not limited to high tech, but it is an industry where the meat of discussions centers around complex and fast-changing technologies.

A few years ago, after witnessing another CEO get frustrated, I had a very important insight. I have since passed on to all my technical folks who will be presenting to a CEO. I call it the ‘CEO Triangle.’ You can see it here.

Having worked closely with mathematicians, researchers, scientists and developers, I noticed that they typically like bottom-up presentations that reach a conclusion after laying a solid technical foundation. So when they present themselves, they typically present in this fashion.

CEOs, on the other hand, prefer that you get to the point first, then allow them to drill down as they require. They want the option of getting into the details. So when you have an untrained technical type presenting to a CEO, it’s frustration waiting to happen.

So, try showing the CEO Triangle any of your technical folks who will be presenting to a CEO. It also works wonders in Board and exec staff meetings.

Of course, there are exceptions. Silicon Valley has any number of CEOs who were once esteemed engineers. But I still find that getting to the point first works with these types; they might just dig a little deeper into the details than most.

And if your Chief Architect still goes on and on, heedless of an exec’s growing frustration, try this other tried and true method I’ve applied successfully over the years: a size 10 1/2 Rockport to the shin.

You’ve optimized your Web site. Got a cool new logo. RSS and Blogs are engaging thousands of prospects. Sales guys trained. Gartner just named you a Cool Vendor. And yet…somehow nothing is moving the needle in Sales. What’s wrong?

I thought to write this entry after having a quick “sideline chat” with a CEO friend of mine as we watched our kids romp around the soccer field. He was asking my advice on advertising and PR for his company to help jumpstart sales. “We just need to get some buzz out there,” was the last thing he said before our team scored and euphoric pandemonium broke loose.

When I hear comments like this, the first thing I think is that people truly don’t understand marketing. If you have a fundamental sales problem and decide to try and fix it with PR and advertising, you will likely end up much poorer, with only an outside chance of improving sales. Because while PR and advertising are tactics that can be used in marketing programs, they are not a marketing strategy. It’s the strategy part that I think many CMO’s don’t push hard enough on.

I typically resist citing Ted Levitt, after working at a company where people would shout “We’re not in the railroad business, we’re in the transportation business” in just about any strategy meeting where our CEO was present. They would smile confidently after invoking the great Harvard guru, sure that the citation would earn them their next promotion. But Marketing Myopia was a landmark article, and many companies today should take a refresher read. Because sometimes it’s the corporate strategy, the product definition and value proposition that are the problems. It’s often not Marketing’s strategy; it’s marketing strategy that’s the problem. It’s something the whole company needs to agree on and move forward with.

This is why you often see startup companies change strategy, because as smart as we all are here in Silicon Valley, you can’t always predict how the markets will change. During my tenure here at Ipedo, we had the dot-com bust, 9-11 induced market caution, and a huge rise in the acceptance of open source. None of these were in our business plan, and yet they significantly affected the buying behavior and technology adoption of our desired customers, so we needed to adapt our product and our message.

In my previous company RSA Security, after many years of being a great but not urgent technology, suddenly the Web (read Netscape) made ours a must have. The fact that the government was fighting to dilute the strength of encryption got us a volume of PR we never would have been able to generate otherwise.  Who knew?

So sometimes you can move to a market. Sometimes it comes to you. Actually moving a market is something I’m not sure anyone can do, certainly not on a startup’s budget.

So what are you to do as a marketer? I came across a great entry on the marketing function in David Hornik’s Venture Blog, where he nets out why marketing is so hard:

“What has become clear to me over the years is that great marketing is not purely about science. It is not purely about art. It is not purely about intuition. It is a powerful combination of art, science and a little bit of luck (perhaps driven by intuition).”

As a CMO or VP Marketing, you must step up to help form the right corporate strategy. This means working with the CEO and exec team to pick the right market with customers who have a problem.

But still, picking the right market, getting the timing right, and then building the right product and programs to capitalize on it: this is all very hard stuff. Is it time to hit the gas, or time to switch course? Is it the marketing or the market? This is the CMO’s conundrum.

Sometimes ads just make me mad. It’s an occupational hazard I suppose. When you work in marketing and you see bad marketing, it just gets to you.

Normally I would just get over it. The problem is that there’s a new billboard from the California Milk Advisory Board that I see every day driving home on 101. Today the print ad version covered the back of the Sports section in the Merc. So I need to vent.

The new ad is part of their “Real California Milk” campaign. The San Francisco Chronicle has the whole story, but it’s basically an attempt to block imports of “out of state milk.”

My problem with the ad is in the execution, not the idea of California branding. Here’s what the billboard copy says: “Make Sure it’s Certified Local.” That’s it. Not that it’s fresher. Not that California has higher standards. Basically that California milk producers are protectionist. Boy, that really makes me want to go out and buy California milk. And 20%? Even a consumer inclined to buy local would find that a low number.

The thing is, why even mention this 20% bit? Why not just start promoting fresh California milk? And where is this rogue milk coming from, anyway? Oregon? I have no idea, but I’d think the folks up in Eureka and Redding would find that preferable. It’s a head scratcher that this campaign came from the same people who brought us the Real California Cheese campaign (which I’m okay with) and the Happy Cows campaign (which I found amusing, if a bit disingenuous).

Also, from a strategy standpoint, Buy Local (think Starbucks vs. the local coffee shop) and Buy American (think Ford/GM/Chrysler vs. Honda/Nissan/Toyota) campaigns don’t have a history of success in California.

The Chronicle story mentions that the Board found 7 out of 10 people prefer to purchase locally produced milk. I am always suspicious of these types of findings from market research. So much of it depends on how you ask the question. I’m sure most people would by default say they would prefer local milk, absent any knowledge of potential advantages from out of state milk. But if milk from Oregon or Wisconsin were cheaper, had higher standards, or came from cows who were treated more humanely , I think most consumers would be interested.

And, of course, it’s just plain sad when compared to one of the greatest ad campaigns ever, Got Milk? It was created by the California Milk Processor Board (no idea about the relationship between the “Advisors” and “Processors”) and has an astounding 90% awareness rating. And I even learned a bit of history from the first one (Quick: Who shot Alexander Hamilton?). Check out the fascinating Wikipedia entry.

I buy a lot of milk (two small kids), but I just don’t get this new campaign. The thinking behind it seems, at best, calcified…

In this installment of Experts in Five, we chat with Janine Popick, president and CEO of Vertical Response, one of the better known hosted e-mail marketing providers. We wanted to find out how e-mail marketing is working these days, and how it has changed. Disclaimer: We use Vertical Response for some of our marketing, but this is not why we chose Janine. We asked her because she has been a pioneer in e-mail marketing and blogging on the topic for some years now.

CMO 2.0: Sorry to have to ask you this up front, but with all the spam these days, people are overloaded with e-mail. Does e-mail marketing still work?

Janine: Yes, done correctly email marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing today. Smaller businesses have an advantage: they generally tend to know and have great relationships with their customers, so their customers look forward to receiving email communications from them. Their data tends to be in one place so managing and cleaning lists is simple. Larger businesses tend to have more of an issue. These businesses are spending a lot to acquire customers fast, but with quantity doesn’t always come quality. With so many potential places a larger business keeps their data, they have to be extra careful how they obtain email addresses, manage and clean their lists in a timely fashion. We’ve seen it work but it takes a lot of resources and care.

CMO 2.0: I’m sure you could talk all day on this, but can you give us the top three do’s and don’ts for e-mail marketing and explain why these are important?

Janine: First of all you want to have your list of recipients be as “opt-in” as it can be. In other words, ask for permission to email them and get permission. In the long run you’ll have some really impressive response rates. Secondly you should follow the rules, that said, follow the law. Make sure your subject line relates to the content of the email, make sure that you include your postal address and make sure you have an unsubscribe mechanism that works. This is why we tell most businesses they should choose an Email Service Provider that will cover them in this area. And lastly stick to the promise you made your list members when they joined. If you told them you would send them a weekly communication and you start sending them daily, you’ve broken a trust. You’re more likely to have them unsubscribe than to have them be excited to get your emails.

CMO 2.0: Buying lists and managing e-mail campaigns costs real money. What kind of percentage returns are you seeing these days, and what kind of cost per lead? How should a CMO position e-mail marketing costs to a CEO who’s writing the checks?

Janine: VerticalResponse is strictly a customer retention tool, so we don’t allow our users to email to purchased lists through our system. However, there are many ways to get a lead through advertising means. A cost per lead really depends on what you’re selling and how long it takes for you to make back the marketing dollars you spent. A CMO should know the lifetime value of a customer and when the cost per lead will pay back.

CMO 2.0: Talk a little bit about trends you see in e-mail marketing. What’s hot right now? What can a marketer do to stand out or get better results than his competitor?

Janine: We see a lot of people using email in so many ways; driving people to events and webinars, selling products or services, sending out monthly birthday wishes, driving traffic to blogs, videocasts and podcasts, appointment reminders, transactional emails and even awareness around social media. We even see businesses trying to convert their paper newsletters and postal mailings into emails to save on costs and for environmental purposes.

What we are seeing as a trend, although not a great one, are more and more businesses creating their emails using either one large image or a series of images put together to make a really beautiful graphic. We are constantly telling our users this is a really bad practice. Why? When this type of email reaches a recipient’s Inbox and the recipients has a default of their images “turned off”, the first and in many cases only thing the recipient will see is the unsubscribe link.

A good practice is to have a mix of both images and text, we recommend 30/70 to be on the safe side.

Caveat: If your recipients have accepted you into their Inbox, you’re email will fly though with all images shown, so it’s really up to you and your relationship with the recipient.

Other trends we are seeing are that businesses are doing less of the “spray and pray” method of email marketing and doing more segmentation and targeting of offers and content. This is driving up response rates overall.

We’re also seeing more and more businesses using tracking mechanisms like Google Analytics to see their overall ROI for their campaign metrics. It’s not only about opens and clicks anymore, it’s where the recipients go on the sites in aggregate.

I always think that to stand out from your competitor you really have to hype your advantage. If you’ve got better customer service but the same exact product, hype that you pick up the phones and talk to people in this day of bits and bytes. Do it in all of your materials, make a campaign out of it.

CMO 2.0: Predict the future for us. Where is e-mail marketing going? Will it still be around in five years, or will it be replaced by something else?

Janine: The future sure seems to be changing right before our eyes! RSS was said to replace email, but it hasn’t. Email is still a huge part of the way we communicate with the availability of email through handhelds, not just at the desktop level. According to Jupiter by 2010 email marketing will grow from 885 million in ‘05 to 1.1 billion and those are just US figures. ISPs will get smarter about blocking spam which means that more and more legitimate emails get through increasing delivery rates.

Experts in Five interviews are CMO 2.0’s way of bringing you insight and advice from marketing experts. Five questions for an expert, a five minute read for you.

Here’s something simple you can do to improve your marketing. It’s really nothing new, but a great way to make sure your marketing is on message and ‘with it.’

To make your marketing better, you should go and read a magazine. Specifically, you should go read the magazine that you think your prospect reads. I don’t mean eWeek or InfoWorld (which is no longer printed anyway). I mean go read a business magazine like Fortune or Business Week. Better yet, go read a targeted pub like CFO or Compliance Week.

The reason is quite simple. If you want to convincingly sell business solutions, then you should think like a business person. And there’s no easier way than to read the business publications your customer reads when he/she thinks about their business.

Here are a few things that you will learn:

• Topics - Probably the most obvious. What’s on their mind? Is what you sell one of those topics?
• Vocabulary - Find some new words. Stop saying things like “massively scalable” and “we give you improved flexibility and availability.” Do your business customers care about those words? Probably not.  Saying things like “prepare your databases for eDiscovery” and “improve your risk management visibility” will get to the point faster and are what customers want.
• Style - If you want to sell to the CEO, then how about writing a business justification like he might read in the Wall Street Journal? It will hit home and make you stand apart from your competitors. For extra credit, have your PR person get you in touch with a business reporter. Take them to lunch and ask them for a few pointers on writing a solid business story.
• Graphics - Want to express a new idea or concept? See how Time explains science and technology to the masses. One of my favorites is Popular Science. If they can explain to the layman how a mind-controlled bionic arm works in a diagram, surely you can explain how your database backup compression software works.
• Graphs and Charts - Show me the money! Face it, great graphs and charts help seal the deal. They make it concrete. The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Business Section, McKinsey Quarterly - all great sources of ways to express numbers (and better than generic PowerPoint graphs).

So go out and take a look. Whether you are selling to bankers, brokers, research scientists, military contractors or manufacturers, you will find a journal or magazine that they read. And don’t think that the IT folks at these companies, especially the senior ones, don’t read them, too. They are trying to know the business just like you are.

If you don’t know what they read, just ask them, or look around their lobby or break room next time you visit.