One of the great speakers was Doug Palladini, the VP of Marketing at Vans, who also happens to be a member of the Marketing 2.0 group. He talked about the challenges he faced when taking the company from making marketing decisions based on pure gut to coming up with a somewhat structured strategy.

On the Art-Science continuum of marketing, where the 100% art point on the left side is represented by people who consider regression analysis as some sort a gene therapy, and where the 100% science point on the right side is populated by people who cannot make a decision without having a focus group, he was proud to have moved the company from being at the 100% art extreme to a position just left of center. His quote: “All gut makes you fat and lazy.”

In order to get there he took the company through a 10 step program - many of which are applicable for other companies as well. The 10 steps included:

1. Move from being a marketing department that reacts to sales, product, and retail data to one that provides it.
2. Put an ear to the ground and listen to what they are saying about you.
3. Better understand what moves the dial in marketing spent.
4. Don’t just sporadically clip your editorial coverage, SHARE IT
5. Understand marketing’s contribution to sales
6. Put your content out there and then TRACK IT wherever it goes
7. Challenge current thinking about where to spend your money
8. Learn more about which products consumes are researching and what triggers purchases
9. Focus dollars on key cities nationwide to maximize impact
10. Use marketing science to inform marketing strategies, but only to a POINT

He also had some more common sense recommendations on what marketing science should never replace:

1. Get out of the office
2. Do your own research
3. Taking chances and not be afraid to fail - fail often + learn
4. The intangibles
5. Never deny your gut instincts

The only thing I regret about the whole session is that I did not get a coupon for custom Vans. My son, who is a big fan, both for skateboarding and snowboarding shoes, was so disappointed that I had seen Vans’ VP of Marketing who was distributing coupons and could not bring one home for him… “Daddy - and they were for customs, common…I cannot believe it!”

I guess I am going to have to spring for a custom set of Vans soon.

Within an hour of her launch, Melanie had had site reviews published by none other than TechCrunch and Mashable. Eric Kuhn published the first interview at The Huffington Post.

I asked Melanie is she’s be willing to share a few more thoughts with me for readers and community members of Marketing 2.0.

A former interactive marketing and communications executive for global Fortune 500 companies, including New York Times Digital, American Express and L’Oréal, I met Melanie on Twitter. The great equalizer, if there ever was one. Anyone who still has any doubts about the value of social media should think about this for a moment. Where and when would I have met such a talented professional?

SavvyAuntie includes a social network, and other community-based resources like user blogs, expert blogs, activity guides and gift suggestions. By registering and filling out information about nieces and nephews, users get customized gift and activity suggestions. They also have the option of uploading information about themselves so that they can meet other aunts (and uncles).

I like how you described what you learned as a progression - the interactive world and how to reach and drive people online at NYTD, the value of membership at Amex, what women want at L’Oréal. Why a community and not just a web site? Was that a natural progression? What inspired you?

Melanie: In June of 2007, I dreamed of developing a modern online resource and community for cosmopolitan Aunts, just like me. After doing the research, I realized that there were tens of millions of us across the nation. There already was “community,” only no one had bothered to notice.

I never claim to be the uber-all-knowing Auntie. Most of the information I’ve learned about Aunt-hood over the years has come from my community of amazing New York City girlfriends and their experiences as Savvy Aunties. Over brunch, these Aunts in the City would ask each other: “What can I do with my 12-year-old niece who is visiting me for the day?”; “What should I get my twin nephews for their second birthday?”; “If I’m in a fight with my sister, how do I not see my nieces?” And so much more.

“Savvy Auntie” isn’t me. She’s what every Aunt aspires to be. The only way to get there is to connect with the other Aunts on the site. We are inherently a community. I am just providing a larger platform than a table for four.

Of course, it was important to have expert content on the site as well. We have about two dozen experts who write on topics from kids’ health to pop-culture for kids, all told from the Auntie perspective. But because we know our Savvy Aunties have a lot to add, there is also opportunities for members to comment and rate content, as well as add their own “Savvy” to the Auntiepedia application.. They can also submit their own Activities and share their advice in our Forums

I have already learned so much from other Savvy Aunties in the process of developing and launching this community. I cannot wait to learn more, and become that Savvy Auntie we all yearn to be.

You received reviews of your beta site within an hour after the launch from none other than TechCrunch and Mashable. As well, Eric Kuhn published an interview with you at The Huffington Post. Do you think this level of interest is also based on the fact that you are a very active member of social media? Have you had conversations with these individuals in the course of social networking?

Melanie: There are a number of reasons why we received online reviews of Savvy Auntie immediately after launch. First of all, no matter how much of an impression you make through your social media relationships, if you don’t have a product worth reviewing, it’s probably not going to get reviewed. The fact that it got reviewed is a tribute to the smart people at the outlets you mention above, who see potential in Savvy Auntie. For that, I am grateful on a number of levels.

That aside, I met Adam Hirsch, COO of Mashable, and Brett Petersel, Events Director at Mashable, at the Jeff Pulver Media Breakfasts in New York City. I met Eric Kuhn there on a separate occasion. Each one of them has been a supporter of me and my dreams as an “auntrepreneur” since our first meeting. These guys are men to watch in the social media world; while all only in their 20s, they have managed to carve out immense careers for themselves by being smart and generous with their network and their support.

While I never met founder of TechCrunch, Michael Arrington, in person, we did share a few direct messages via Twitter. And while I would love to say that that relationship helped with my placement in TechCrunch, it was his eagle-eyed blogger Calley Nye, who picked up and ran with the story, interviewing me the day before launch.

What should be known is that while these reviews at launch were a huge boost for the site, so are all the posts by bloggers I have met only through social media outlets, such as Twitter and Facebook. In fact, that’s how you and I met, Valeria. The support for Savvy Auntie on Twitter is so enormous that TwitScoop reported it was the most Tweeted phrase on the day of launch.

There is no doubt in my mind that my social media relationships, developed authentically in Twitter, on Facebook, in the social media industry, have helped make Savvy Auntie a success at launch. Savvy Auntie and me as its founder, were welcomed with open arms in the SM community. And I cannot thank everyone enough.

The site is designed to grow by community, which makes it great for the integration of wish lists and affiliate retail programs. As marketers, we know how powerful peer to peer recommendations are. Conversation is also an important component of shared experiences. Do you envision the site’s growth beyond commercial utility? In your interview with Eric at Huffington Post, you talk about capturing stories. Would there be opportunity for expansion into educational tools, for example teaching languages, or support groups for children with developmental problems?

Melanie: That’s a great question, Valeria. And, certainly, there are numerous ways to take our learning from the Aunt community and develop them into tools and resources that help and support the non-mom offline as well. There are no parenting guides for non-parents and we are hoping that Savvy Auntie becomes the resource for Aunts who not only want to learn from each other, but share as well.

We’ve built opportunities for this within Savvy Auntie from the start. The Aunthology, a section within Community where members can share stories about Aunt-hood, is where we hope to learn about many new perspectives on Aunt-hood from different cultures and points of view. Plus, every member is entitled to her own blog, where she can share her personal journey. Finally, because Community is built organically, we hope to gauge interest in various issues important to Savvy Aunties through our Forums and Groups. And since the site is free to join, there are no barriers for participation.

We’ve already been lauded by some who blog about children with special needs for taking care to include content about developing special needs nieces and nephews in our Expertise and Gifts sections. We’re so happy the word is getting out about that. We hope that Savvy Aunties will add their own experiences and their own tips on the site as well.

Aunt-hood, as a universal story, has really never been told. It’s too early to forecast what will come of it. But if there is a way to capture the stories and translate them into solutions for Aunts everyone, online and offline, we’ll do it.

***

Thanks to you, Melanie, the community is off to a great start. Learn more about SavvyAuntie at Melanie Notkin’s blog.

The findings of the study are quite interesting, and while I have been writing about many of the takeaways in the past couple of months, I will continue to do so as we move forward.

If you would like to get a debrief on the study, let me know and I will arrange for that. If you would like to join us for a webinar on July 30th, just log in here and register.

Please join the more than 200 people who already signed up for the community at http://www.marketingtwo.net.

Look at one of the flagship case studies in Groundswell, the recent blockbuster book on social technologies authored by two well known Forrester analysts. In it Lego is being touted as a smashing success story for communities. They were able to increase sales by $500K with an investment of $200K.

Who cares? Lego is a $1.8B company, so increasing revenue by $500K is not moving the needle - it represents a whopping increase of 0.027% of sales.

And that is one of the better case studies. Let’s take a look at Bank Of America’s community efforts for small businesses. It looks like they have a little over 15,000 members, and I am sure that there are many people within BoA who are patting themselves on the back with the success of this effort. But with millions of small businesses as clients and with millions of transactions every day from those clients, how many millions of people do you think you need in your community to move the needle? I am not sure about the exact number, but I do know that it is a heck of a lot more than 15K members.

And you can keep going on and on with examples. When a commerce site takes in 40,000 orders per day, how many members do they need to make a difference? When you have millions of tax customers, how many people do you need in your community to affect the bottom line?

Until marketers think differently about the scaling issues of their communities and the associated investments, communities will have a hard time going mainstream. And yet, when done properly, they could deliver game-changing results - eBay customers who participate in their customer support communities bring in 50% in increased revenue to the company.

Let’s go back to the Bank of America example. Apparently someone calculated that the value of a new small business customer is $100 - if you refer a small business you get $50 and so does the small business. Let’s assume that BoA has 10M small business customers (they had 59M consumers and small business customers combined in 2007). If a marketing program is to increase the number of small business customer by 0.5% that would mean an increase in 500,000 new customers worth $50M. I am sure that this is not out of the realm of possibilities for them to spend this kind of money on TV advertising, even though $50M in TV ads would probably not deliver 500K new customers. But do you think they spent anywhere near that on their community? And if they would, do you think they could deliver a resource to the small business community that would attract much more than 15K members and that could result in much higher reference sales?

You can argue the numbers, but you cannot argue the scale issue…

Rather than storing data and software applications down the hall in your office or in a big data center – there is a shift towards storing them on the web. And that’s the shift that Nick Carr has built his book upon.

We (America) need to jump on this paradigm shift to reduce costs in this post Sarbanes Oxley and difficult economic environment if we want to gain competitive advantage for ourselves and for our country. No longer is running enterprise CRM or ERP a competitive advantage - its table stakes.

What does this mean for IT departments? What does this mean for your data security? And most importantly - what does the impact of distributed computing have on marketers? Check out what Nick has to say about all this …

About Nick

A former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, Nicholas Carr writes and speaks on technology, business, and culture. His 2004 book Does IT Matter?. published by Harvard Business School Press, set off a worldwide debate about the role of computers in business. His widely acclaimed new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, examines the rise of “cloud computing” and its implications for business, media and society.

Carr writes regularly for the Financial Times, Strategy & Business and The Guardian. His articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Wired, Business 2.0, The Banker, and Advertising Age as well as on his blog Rough Type. He is a member of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s editorial board of advisors.

In 2005, Optimize magazine named Carr one of the leading thinkers on information technology, and in 2007 eWeek named him one of the 100 most influential people in IT. Earlier in his career, he was a principal at Mercer Management Consulting.

Carr has been a speaker at MIT, Harvard, Wharton, the Kennedy School of Government, NASA, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas as well as at many industry, corporate, and professional events throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English literature, from Harvard University.

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One of my goals this year was to do a study on reputation management. As we all factor in the effects of new media on our brands, I felt this was a topic with long-lasting appeal to every marketer.

My hypothesis going into the creation of these questions was that B2B marketers (including yours truly) just aren’t adequately prepared for an online reputation crisis. Dell wasn’t, Wal-Mart wasn’t. If those big B2C brands weren’t ready, I was betting we weren’t ready either. And I was right!

To be totally transparent with you, I wasn’t surprised by many of the responses to my survey. The bulk of you are monitoring your reputation in some way, shape or form. But are you poised to respond in the case of an online reputation crisis? 55% admitted you weren’t.

Perhaps you need stronger guidelines in place, like a blogging policy. Two-thirds of respondents don’t have one!

Many of you are do-it-yourselfers when it comes to monitoring your reputation. Is that perhaps because your company hasn’t made this a strategic priority? 53% admitted it wasn’t a strategic priority for you – yet!

My goal here is to give you the state of the union when it comes to monitoring reputations online. This data is bound to change, so I hope I get you thinking of ways to close the gap with your organization’s reputation!

Click here to download the free research report

Special thanks to my sponsors – Trackur.com, run by the renowned Andy Beal of the blog MarketingPilgrim.com, and Marketing Profs’ equally renowned Ann Handley for their support on this survey.

B2B marketers with highly complex products and services have been given a gift in the last few years in the form of Social Media.

In my opinion, Social Media doesn’t easily equate to Lead Generation for the complex sale. For example a prospect reading a blog entry doesn’t mean they want to buy anything, but it does mean they have engaged with your brand. In fact the stats show that certain forms of Social Media even out perform more traditional ones when it comes to awareness and recall. For example, unaided awareness from podcasts were 68%, compared with 21% for streaming video and 10% for television. Now that’s great recall!

B2B marketers need to set aside collecting metrics like page views, clicks, conversion rates and start nurturing individual leads by using the gift of social media they were given. Social Media is great for consideration so why not use it that way? Don’t measure your teams on page views generated from a campaign. Measure them on how engaged they can get your leads with your content and turn them into sales.

Sales generated from your lead nurturing program are the only real measure of engagement with your campaigns!

I just re-read a post by David Armano on Technorati + Authority, which discussed Technorati’s changes in its rating system.   Related to David’s last year were comments on content in general and its quality.   I’ve mentioned to David that  content “design” and the related experience seems to lag functional and interface components of experience design.  In essence, content is the stepchild of design.
So where is content in your marketing and experience design efforts?  Its been my experience that content design is a continual effort, requiring intensive attention. Your goal?  Getting your content to a level where it becomes a value added part of the customer experience?  I talk to customers weekly. What I hear is that there is always too much, not enough third party or UGC and that the content they tend to come across on on supplier sites is jargon rich.

Content is the cornerstone of a superior customer experience because it provides the context in which the experience takes place.  How do do you ensure that that cornerstone won’t crumble?

1. Dedicate a team to focus solely on the content aspects of the experience.
2. Focus on What you say  - its clear to me that most companies have a lot to say, more than they know what to do with. But what I hear from customers (and this is so obvious) is don’t tell us too much, tell us the right things.  Also, give me two perspectives, one that is role based and personalized to what I do and give me a functional view. In my work at SAP we actually saw clear geographic differences here with NA executives looking more for a role based content experience while stakeholders in EMEA were looking more for a functional perspective.  We don’t have data on APJ yet.
3. How you say it - one thing you need to spend time on is your “Content Tonality.”  Many companies have been accused, and rightly so at times, of taking a rather circuitous route to delivering a message.  To address this issue,  focusing on the source - your content producers.  Train your content producers to align their content with the Voice of the Brand.   Content should be plain spoken - we use blogs in our training as examples of the type of writing we are looking for. We are striving for a conversational tone, honest, impactful, positive etc.
4. Who do you say it to - I referenced this above. The content must align to specific personas based on who you are trying to communicate with.  What is most important is being able to personalize the content during the buying experience so that enables customers to develop an affinity for the brand which in turn will convert into revenues for said brand.

Things like radical transparency, entertainment value, co-creation are all critical elements of a next generation customer experience but without contextual based content, its all just window-dressing.