Me a blogger? Two years ago I would never have thought so. I’m not a journalist or a pundit. Writing isn’t my easiest activity. Some things come naturally to me, but putting words on paper is not one of them.

My team encouraged me to start this blog last summer as a way to share my insights about marketing. As I’ve learned more about the process there have been a few surprises along the way.

Blogging is a great discipline to clarify your thoughts. If you are like me you have a lot rolling around in your head. By periodically pausing amidst the chaos of the day to express an idea, you’d be amazed at how clear you become about what you believe. I expressed this benefit a while ago in a post called “Why do I blog?”

Blogging is also a terrific way to share who you are and how you think. People want to do business with other people whom they trust. Authentically expressing yourself is a great way for others with a common interest to get to know you. The practice of transparent expression developed while writing posts can also carry over into other forms of expression. I have been accused by members of my team in the past of being guarded in how I share what I’m thinking. It is not an intentional desire to hold back information but an approach that developed over the years of wanting to clarify ideas in my own mind before expressing my thoughts to others. New habits formed while blogging have made it easier for me to be more transparent in my day-to-day communications. I have been surprised by this side benefit in a good way.

Blogging has been a terrific way for me to meet new people who share my passion for marketing. Whether by reading others’ blogs, interviewing executives for their insights or getting input on future posts and receiving comments regarding published posts, I’ve been surprised by the openness of others to connect around a common interest and by the willingness of readers of this blog to share my thoughts with their various networks.

Finally, my blog has become an extension of my personal “brand.” I never gave much thought to what my brand is or should be until I started the blog. Nor did I really consider how my personal brand connects with my company’s brand. But defining the mission of this blog has also brought clarity to my personal mission. This has helped me be more intentional about what I focus on, how I communicate and where I prioritize my finite energy. I’d encourage you to embark on a similar process, which, for me, has been extremely valuable.

If you aren’t blogging today or if you want to improve the one you’ve already started, I’d recommend reading 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net fame. It is a good one-day-at-a-time guide that I’ve found very useful.

Good luck with your blogging future. I hope you will be pleasantly surprised by the experience as well.

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

A boomer CEO’s journey through social media, part 2

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The French have a unique way of cheering for participants in a race. I experienced this a couple of years ago while doing a triathlon in Monaco. I was eight hours into the race and struggling to finish, but the words of encouragement from the supporters kept me going: “Courage, John! Courage!” (In French, it sounds similar to “garage.”) I persevered and was the last person to finish, but I did finish to achieve my primary goal. Those words still resonate with me today.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines courage as “the state or quality of mind or spirit that enables one to face danger, fear, or vicissitudes with self-possession, confidence, and resolution; bravery.” Effective marketing leaders need strong doses of courage if they are going to implement the changes needed to bring about their visions.

There are several dimensions of courage in the marketing context:

• Determination: When the inertia, bureaucracy and politics of a company start to wear on you, have courage
• Perseverance: Change takes time and you will be presented with many obstacles, so you must remain persistent
• Resolution: Be resolved to succeed; confidence is contagious and is needed to inspire those you are leading
• Tenacity: Chutzpah, guts, spunk; tenacious leaders inspire faith that the mission will be achieved
• Audacity: Have the courage to think big, to set lofty goals and to aspire to be great

When you are “all in,” decision making becomes much simpler. The mission is clear. You are focused. You cut through the noise. You don’t really care what the nay-sayers think about you. You have the courage of your convictions. And, in a world of uncertainty and negativity, that will make you someone people will follow. Know anyone like that?

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

Attributes of an effective marketing leader, part 3: courage

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I’ve always learned a lot about people by the questions they ask. It gives me insight into how they think and what they view as meaningful. This critical skill of asking the right questions was echoed by Tim Brown, the chief executive and president of IDEO in a recent interview published in the New York Times.

“One of the things that I’ve tried to do more and more — and I obviously have the opportunity to do as a leader — is to take ownership of the question. And so I’m much more interested these days in having debates about what the questions should be than I necessarily am about the solutions,” said Mr. Brown.

Too often I see marketers stressing about finding the right answer to the wrong question. Optimizing their plans to the wrong KPIs. Refining their messages to the wrong markets. Trying to tweak obsolete organizational structures. Good marketers have a knack for asking insightful questions that break them out of the status quo.

What are the best questions you’ve heard effective marketers ask?

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

Are you asking the right questions?

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I’ll admit it. I’m not a digital native. While I had a hand in the PC revolution and am fairly technically savvy, the explosion of social media options outstripped my capacity to understand them all. Fortunately, I’m surrounded by many digital natives and social media experts who have coached me through the fog. This is the first in a series of posts that retraces my journey from having limited “social skills” to becoming a socially adept executive.

My journey started with LinkedIn in the spring of 2007. I had been getting requests to update my contacts on Plaxo for a while, but I never saw a big reason to do so. After reading the book Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time, by Keith Ferrazzi, I realized how negligent I was at staying connected with and expanding my network of business associates. So when I saw the potential of LinkedIn to help me improve in this area, I signed up. Over the past two years, LinkedIn’s functionality has increased significantly as has my use of it. Here are some of the things I use it for:

• Researching the background of someone I will be meeting soon (this was hard to do before)
  
• Following up and connecting with someone I had just met for the first time (my follow-up discipline had been marginal at best)
• Reconnecting with former associates (I was even worse at this)
  
• Sending brief updates about things that I’m working on (I never did this before)
• Querying my expanded network for insights and opinions (my posts on Attributes of an Effective Marketing Leader came from this process)
• Planning outreach activities with people in cities to which I’ll be traveling (Tripit reminds me who else is in the neighborhood)
• Sharing my perspective with others who have posed a question (a good way to make new business introductions in a highly relevant way)
• Asking for candidate referrals for positions we are trying to fill (many of our best candidates are those sent to us by our friends and colleagues)
  
• Reminding me that it has been a while since I connected with someone (it is amazing how time passes so quickly)

As you can tell, all of these activities are business related. LinkedIn is my social networking platform for my professional side. About a year ago I decided to jump into Facebook to share my personal side. While many of my Facebook friends are family members, former colleagues or college buddies, some are clients or past clients with whom I have a close personal connection. We exchange photos of our kids, share the excitement of a big event or commiserate about qualifying for an AARP card. I can stay connected with their lives in ways I never did before.

Facebook has also become a place to share the personal side of nFusion (www.facebook.com/nfusion). Part of what makes our organization such a wonderful place to work is the people on our team. We  share things that are offbeat, quirky and fun with our friends who follow us. We hope that other talented individuals and potential clients might want to get to know us better after they get to know us a little differently.

While there are other social networking venues (MySpace, Ning, Orkut to name a few), I’ve found LinkedIn and Facebook to be a great one-two combination for keeping me more connected. I imagine they are or will be for you, too.

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

A boomer CEO’s journey through social media, part 1

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Attribute number one was vision, the ability to use discernment and foresight to develop a strategic direction that an organization wants to follow. Attribute number two relates to realizing that vision: focus.

Too often visionary leaders are so broad with their vision statements that teams are not sure what they need to do. Great marketing leaders bring a broad vision into focus. They help simplify complexity. They clarify vagueness. They distill options into a clear and aligning forward course.

A technique that I’ve found useful in clarifying a strategy — bringing it into focus — is the two-column contrast list. It can take several forms, but here are a few of my favorites:

1. From/To: List the current and future state implications (e.g., from product focused to solution focused)
2. In/Out: List what you include and exclude in your strategy (e.g., focus on the young adult market, do not focus on boomers)
3. More/Less: List the activities that you plan to do more of by doing less of something else (e.g., more search marketing, less broadcast advertising)
4. Now/Later: List the activities that need everyone’s urgent attention and those valid ideas that will have to wait (e.g., revamp our website now, upgrade our CRM system later)
5. Stop/Start: List the things you will stop doing so that you can start doing new things (e.g., stop selling desktop PCs, start selling netbooks)

As I was writing this I read a Harvard Business Publishing post, To Change Effectively, Change Just One Thing, written by Peter Bregman. It is a short and illustrative story on the power of simplifying and focusing. And worth a read.

Please send me your story on how you have accomplished a goal by being focused. It’s not as easy as it sounds, is it?

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

Attributes of an effective marketing leader, part 2: focus

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AdAge reported today on a study due out soon from Forrester Research that recommends companies change the title and orientation of what today is called a brand manager. Based on the coverage so far there are aspects of the report that I’ll probably agree with and other parts that I will contest.

Much of the findings as reported can be summed up in one term: agility. The problem with many companies today is they are stuck in planning and execution systems built around yesterday’s mass marketing model. Today’s brand managers must be more agile on many fronts:

• Adjusting annual plans to seize opportunities or address issues not envisioned six to nine months previously
• Optimizing programs by testing and refining digital marketing options with daily or weekly fine-tuning versus quarterly reviews
• Embracing customers in a real-time manner through social media
• Refining the product offering based on the continuous gathering of customer insights using new digital and social options

Many marketing managers spend way too much time focused on internal issues and reporting and too little time connecting with customers. Is brand advocate the right term for the evolved marketer? I’m not sure, but anything that helps improve individual and organization agility is sorely needed.

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Brand manager or brand advocate?

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Recently I sent out a poll asking the question,“What are the top three attributes of an effective marketing leader?” The response was overwhelming and indicated to me that the issue of marketing and leadership is one for which there is a great deal of interest and passion. Over the next several weeks I will share my summary of the findings. Today we’ll start with the most mentioned attribute: vision.

What is “vision?” According to The American Heritage Dictionary, vision is “unusual competence in discernment or perception; intelligent foresight.” This jibes well with what we heard from respondents. Why is it so important for a marketing leader?

Let’s start with the context within which marketing leaders operate. Author Bob Johansen asserts in his highly acclaimed book, Get There Early: Sensing the Future to Compete in the Present, that we live in a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Members of an organization can get overwhelmed in this world and are not sure how to act. A good leader has the ability to discern what is important from what is noise, to find clarity in the complex and to derive understanding from the uncertain. People will follow a leader who can describe a clear path forward, who can articulate a winning game plan and who provides the confidence that their efforts are well directed.

In a marketing context, a leader’s power to discern has a specific purpose when it comes to answering key questions such as:

• Which market segments can we serve effectively ?
• What are the customer needs that we can solve in unique ways?
• On which of our company’s capabilities should we stake our future?
• Of all the things we can do, which ones should we do?

Foresight also has specific meaning for marketers:

• How will technology change buyer behavior?
• What new methods of solving problems will be possible tomorrow that do not exist today?
• What future competitive threat will disrupt our industry?

For any organization to succeed in the short- and long-term, these questions must be answered. Marketing leaders are well positioned to offer discernment and foresight to their companies, whether they realize it or not. Providing vision that leads to effective strategy may not be a marketer’s official charter, but it should be. And if you are not empowered to be a visionary in your current situation, what should you do? I’d suggest taking a lesson from the new ABC television show FlashForward. The story line of the show is based on a simultaneous worldwide blackout during which people have a vision of what they will be doing during a specific time six months into the future. The lead character is an FBI agent whose flash forward vision shows him leading the charge to solve the mystery of the blackout. As he begins to take action and assert himself in leading a case beyond his specific charter, others ask the question, “Who put you in charge?” They wonder if a vision is enough of a reason to follow his lead. It turns out that it is.

In a volatile world full of uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, a leader with a powerful vision based on discernment and foresight will attract eager followers. Do you know anyone like that? If so, please send me their names. I’d like to talk with them and then share their insights.

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

Attributes of an effective marketing leader, part 1: vision

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I just finished reading an interesting article in the British publication, Prospect: “Left Brain, Right Brain.” It was a summary of the latest research on how the brain works and how it influences decision making.

Here is an excerpt from the closing paragraph. “Altruism makes us happy. Supportive communities create better people. Inequality and stigma rob us of potential. Good guidance helps us make wise decisions for the long term. All these seem commonsense conclusions, all are now based on evidence.”

While the focus of the article is more on social and political implications, it is also thought-provoking for a marketer. Here are three questions that I took away that are worth pondering:

1. If humans are willing to make sub-optimal long-term decisions for the benefit of immediate gratification, how do marketers of products or services with delayed or long-term benefits compete effectively?
2. If the subconscious brain makes decisions before the conscious brain does, how do marketers with rational value propositions also connect at the intuitive and emotional level?
3. If we “are susceptible to undue optimism and risk-taking when things are going well, and excessive pessimism and caution when they are not,” how should marketing messages change (or not) during the the emotional roller coaster periods such as the one we are in now?

For those of you who enjoy learning about brain science and decision making, what other articles or books are worth reading?

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How the brain really works

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Now that we are about to enter calendar Q4, many marketers will begin thinking about their plans and budgets for next year. Fortunately, the economic outlook is improving and many companies will be plotting their courses for competing under slightly different conditions. Here are five key trends that I would encourage marketing leaders to consider at the outset of their planning processes.

1. Change will be imperative: Whether it is economic conditions, competitive position or media mix, the status quo won’t be acceptable. Successful CMOs will be the change agents for their companies. There will be winners in the recovery period, but they won’t be companies married to their pre-recession or survival period strategies. So trend #1 will be an increase in structured change initiatives led by marketers.
2. Being ordinary won’t cut it: Businesses and consumers are beginning to buy things again after this period of fear-based belt tightening. However, integrated marketing campaigns that promote average products will fail to connect. Customers will be looking for remarkable products from remarkable companies that deliver remarkable experiences. Customers have options and don’t need to settle. Trend #2 will be integrated campaigns that promise something extraordinary from companies that will deliver on the promise.
3. Engaging customers will be essential: While this is not new, the forms of engagement are changing rapidly. And preferences of customers will vary widely. Some like e-mail. Others like Twitter. Some want mobile access to a website. Others prefer dialing the call center. So trend #3 will be more comprehensive, preference-based customer communications systems.
4. Engaging employees will be just as critical: Retaining employees in a period of high unemployment isn’t difficult. But having them highly engaged and motivated to attract new customers and deliver an experience that delights them is. A renewed focus on connecting with and enabling the employee base will be facilitated with tools like internal blogs, wikis, webcasts and Web-based information portals. Trend #4 will be the active development of integrated programs that engage employees.
5. Spending wisely will be a mandate: Again, nothing new here. But without systems to measure effectively what really works to drive the acquisition and retention of profitable customers, this mandate will go unmet. This is hard, unglamorous work that involves linkages with the IT and sales organization. It takes discipline to discern not just what can be measured but what should be measured. New techniques are evolving to assess the impact of multi-faceted campaigns that are beyond the simplistic one-dimensional “last click” attribution. So trend #5 will be improved analytics systems that support wiser resource allocation.

Which of these do you believe will be the most challenging for your organization to address?

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

Five trends that will shape marketing plans in 2010

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A week ago I had the opportunity to kayak on the rapids of the Snake River in Wyoming. It was an exhilarating experience I was fortunate enough to share with my sons. We hired a guide, Libby, who provided us with the equipment and basic instruction we needed and then she led us down the river and through the rapids.

Upon reflection there were five things that Libby did that day that marketing leaders could emulate when guiding their teams through the turbulent waters of this economy.

1. She had a plan that she clearly communicated to us: Before any difficult stretch of water she would would call for a huddle in a calm part of the river and reiterate the plan. We never proceeded until everyone was clear about what was expected of each of us.
2. She was realistic about what we should expect: There were some rapids where she warned us there would less than a 50% chance of making it through without get tossed out of the boat. We willingly entered those sections with a full understanding of the difficulty. When we did get overturned, and we frequently did, there was no complaining or finger pointing, merely an acceptance of our fate and a determination to try harder next time.
3. She helped us back into our boats when we got dumped: There was no chastising or criticism. But there was an outstretched arm, a word of encouragement and a simple tip that would help us improve.
4. She only asked us to do what we could reasonably do, yet challenged us: There were some parts of the river that simply were not safe for adventurers with our limited capabilities. She didn’t expect us to do what we were not capable of doing. In the extremely dangerous rapids she would show us a safe route that we could navigate. Some risks simply were not worth taking. But she was good at assessing which ones were reasonable and encouraged us to try things that challenged us.
5. She took time out to help us recover and celebrate: Paddling through rough water can be exhausting. So she had us pause for a few minutes occasionally to watch an eagle chase a hawk or to have a snack on a sandy beach. We would high-five each other when we successfully made it through a rapid or kindly harass the one who didn’t. Most of all, our guide made the challenging journey fun.

If your team is feeling a bit jostled from the turbulent waters of today’s economy, try a few of Libby’s approaches for guiding kayakers through the rapids. She got us through successfully, and that is what your team is looking for you to do for them. Paddle on!

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

Five leadership lessons from the whitewater rapids of Snake River

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