It’s the most wonderful time of the year!  No, not the holiday season, it’s time for the 5th (almost) annual “You Might Be a Product Manager If…” list!  Favorite entries from past years include:

• You might be a product manager if your wedding included a PowerPoint presentation.
• You might be a product manager if you stack rank your children.
• You might be a product manager if you ask your kids “what problem are you trying to solve?” when they ask for a new toy.

Last month, we ran a quick survey about how you are using social media in product marketing and management.  The goal was not to develop a comprehensive picture of this broad topic, but to recognize some trends and validate some areas that we have heard out in the field.  Over 130 of you responded to the quick, nine question survey, and the results are now in.  Keep in mind that this isn’t scientific!

How often are you using social media?  Not surprisingly, product professionals who answered this survey are prolific users.  Nearly 90% said that they use social media “Daily” or “Often” to keep current on issues.  Interestingly, non-work related usage scores lower on all counts.

How often do you use social media for the following...

Since we know that product professionals are making use of social media, the natural follow-up question is: which ones are they using?

Which social media do you personally consume?

This is a really interesting chart.  As usual, there are the Big 3: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  But amongst product professionals, LinkedIn edges out even Facebook!  This correlates with the finding above that product professionals are using it more for work-related items; they probably aren’t going to friend their customers or competitors on Facebook.  Even at a fraction of the size and reach of Facebook, LinkedIn’s focused ability to reach into professionals and customers drives the highest usage.  Google+ also rated highly, considering its relative reach compared to the other networks.

Do you use social media for the following activities?

How do product professionals actually put social media to use?  Obviously, Thought Leadership activities came out on top: driving traffic to your blogs, websites, whitepapers, and landing pages is a huge priority.  Live event support was a little surprising as number two – product pros are tweeting to connect with customers and partners and keep up the engagement at tradeshows and events.  Competitive research also scored highly.

How do you rate the quality of information you get from social media?

Most product professionals still take what they get from social channels with some skepticism.  About 30% said that they rated the information they receive from these channels as “Mediocre” or “Poor.”

Does your company have a social media policy?

With social media becoming ubiquitious, you might think that all companies have a defined social media policy.  You’d be wrong!  25% of respondants indicated that they don’t have any kind of defined policy for how to use (or not use) social media.  About half have a policy in place that is liberal enough that they feel free to post whatever they want.

Who owns social media efforts at your company?

When it comes to having a clear owner of social media efforts in the company, Marketing has taken on this role.  In fact, Marketing outsourced all the other options combined.

Scenario: Someone is actively complaining about your product on social media. How do you react to this situation?

One of the biggest challenges of social media is interacting with a customer who is upset and complaining about your product or service online.  With Twitter, Facebook and other channels, these customers have a huge bullhorn to create brand damage if they aren’t handled appropriately.  On the other hand, companies that have mastered how to use these channels effectively are creating loyal customers who reinforce their brand and spread stories about how good the company was to them.

For this question, we posed a scenario: what would you do if someone was actively complianing about your product on social media?  Almost 40% said that in this case, they’d follow a set policy.  35% would respond directly, indicating that there is still a lot of personal ownership of social media efforts at most companies.  What would happen if your “social person” leaves tomorrow?

Scenario: Someone is actively praising your product on social media. How do you react to this situation?

Next, we flipped it around – how would you react if someone was actively praising your product?  More people ignore these, but do we risk appearing tone deaf if our customers tell us we’re doing a great job and we react with silence?

How do you measure the impact of social media?

Last, we were interested in how product professionals measure their social media efforts.  At Pragmatic Marketing, we are big believers in the mantra that everything needs to be measured, especially in Marketing.  Unfortunately, over half of respondents are not measuring their social efforts today.  15% are still trying to figure out what their measurements need to be, and 9% measure by number of generated leads.  Social media is reaching an inflection point: very soon it will cross the chasm from the shiny-object stage of “ohmygosh we’ve got to do this social media thing!” to “What’s my ROI” stage.  Social efforts that can’t demonstrate positive ROI will be the first things to be cut.

We hope that you found this information interesting and helpful.  If you’d like to help us construct a more complete profile of product professionals, please fill out our 2012 Annual Product Management and Marketing survey.

If you are interested in attending a Pragmatic Marketing seminar that I will be teaching, you will find me in Orlando from Dec 7-9 and Vancouver, BC from Dec 13-15 teaching Practical Product Management and Requirements that Work.  I hope to see you there!

Every year for the past decade, we at Pragmatic Marketing run a State-of-the-Union survey for product management and marketing.  The survey goes out to the 75,000 alumni who have been to one of our seminars and is also open to the general public.  The annual survey seeks to help us define how the role of product management and marketing is changing, with regard to titles, level of education and background, roles and responsibilities, compensation, and how you work with others.

The 2012 version of the survey is now open!  If you are a product professional, go take it and let us know what your work life looks like.  The survey typically runs from mid-November through mid-December and we crunch the numbers and do analysis and post the results on our website early in the new year.  If you think that your team might be under resourced, you can use the survey to compare against other companies.  If you think that you might not be compensated correctly, or want to get a leg up on your compensation discussions for next year, you can use the survey to see how you stack up against your peers in similar industries, education levels, and other vectors.

Thanks for participating, and watch this space for analysis of the survey in December and January!

If you are interested in attending a Pragmatic Marketing seminar that I will be teaching, you will find me in Orlando from Dec 7-9 and Vancouver, BC from Dec 13-15 teaching Practical Product Management and Requirements that Work.  I hope to see you there!

In an effort to learn more about how you use social media in product marketing and management, we’ve created a 9-question survey that we’d love for you to take. We’ll share the results of this survey next month on this blog and the others you see listed on the right hand sidebar.

Thanks in advance! Here is the link: Social Media Survey

If you are in Austin tonight and want to come out and get your networking on, check out ProductParty Austin, from the team that brings you ProductCamp Austin.  ProductParty is a networking event with drinks, followed tonight by a 1-hour session that I will be MCing called PowerPoint Karaoke, or PPTK.

For the uninitiated, PPTK is like Karaoke, with slides.  You get up in from of the room and have 2 minutes to present from a slide deck that you’ve never seen before.  The slides are totally random, pulled from various presentations from the Internet.  Your job is to create a story to go along with the slides.  The session is fast paced, fun, and a great ice breaker.  It is also good skill building for your presentation skills and ability to think on your feet, in front of a friendly supportive audience.

I will be there tonight, as well as John Milburn of Pragmatic Marketing – we hope to see you there!

Register for ProductParty Austin.

Amazing design speaks to us on an unconscious level.  We appreciate it without knowing all of the pain and suffering that the designer went through to get to the final product.  We appreciate it because of its utility or simplicity and its ability to add value to our lives through beauty, or helping us solve a problem in our daily lives.  This is why Apple products resonate: they solve problems we all have (technology is confusing and hard to understand) and do it in a way that is beautiful.

This evening, as I sit in the Admiral’s Club lounge in LAX, I was browsing through the beautifully designed products on Dwell.  Some of these products are high art, and are priced as such.  Some are crafty reboots of timeless classics, with added details of beauty or utility.  One such product is the Tip Ton Chair, a take on a chair a school child would use.

The Tip Ton is a beautiful, useful product, but what caught my eye wasn’t the chair, it was the quote from the chair’s designer, Edward Barber:

“We knew what the problems were but weren’t yet aware of the solutions”

This quote perfectly captures the process of design.  Wonderful designs aren’t created, they are out there, waiting to be discovered.  Only in order to discover them, you first have to understand the problem that needs to be solved.

A student in my class last week in San Francisco sent me a great article from the Stanford Knowledge Base about how a products’ price impacts the value that a customer sees in the product.

We’ve long known that products that carry a higher price are generally perceived by the market to be higher quality.  Researchers from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and CalTech have taken this hypothesis to the next level.  They ran an experiment where they asked participants to consume wine at different price points from $5 to $45, while undergoing a fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging).  fMRI is used to detect blood flow in the brain and see how much the “pleasure centers” of the brain are engaged by different activities or products.

The hypothesis: that the higher priced wine would engage those pleasure centers of the brain more than the lower priced wine.  Which is exactly what happened…except unknown to the participants they were tasting the same wine each time, and being told that it was at different price points.  Wow!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Baba Shiv, one of the researchers, recommends that we pay less attention to the price and weigh the opinions of experts more heavily when evaluating wines.  If we just look at the price, we may unduly enjoy a wine that actually isn’t as good as the price it commands.  Even more fascinating – our expectations tied to price extend to medicine.  Researchers have shown that when we perceive a medicine to be more expensive, it can have a positive impact on how well it works.

Remember, when it comes to the value that someone sees for your product in the market, their perception is truly their reality.

If you are in the product management and marketing community and live in or around Central Texas, there is only one place that you need to be next Saturday: ProductCamp Austin.  ProductCamp is the largest, most important networking event for product management professionals for the entire year, and it is a fantastic learning opportunity as well.  You will have an opportunity to learn about everything from Innovation, to Strategy, to Media Relations and Segmentation.  It’s like a mini-MBA in a day!  Go register now, the deadline is Wednesday (today)!

As always, my company Pragmatic Marketing is a sponsor, and I will be there.    I’ll be offering up two sessions.  The first is part of a new experimental track that the ProductCamp Austin team is playing with this year, called the “game room.”  Game room sessions, as you might expect, are lighthearted, fun, and you might just learn something!  I will be MC-ing the PowerPoint Karaoke session.  Here is the description:

How well can you think (and present) on your feet? Have you ever been handed a PowerPoint deck created by someone else and asked to present it on very short notice? If it hasn’t happened yet, it probably will!

You can be okay at feature prioritization, writing business cases, and win-loss analysis, but if you can speak effectively on a moment’s notice, you will excel where others stumble. Join this session to become a true “pitch artist”!

We’ll have a room full of people, and one by one participants will come up and have two minutes and thirty seconds to present as many slides as they want to get through…only they’ve never seen these slides before in their life!  Their job will be to craft a story to go along with the slides, challenging both your presentation and quick thinking skills.  It’s not a matter of if you will laugh – it’s how hard!  The great thing is that everyone will be laughing with you, not at you, because everyone will have an equal opportunity to try!

The second session I’m offering at this ProductCamp is as part of a panel entitled “The Future of Product Management.“  Here is a description:

You’ve heard the traditional challenges product managers face (basing product decisions on market problems, leadership without formal authority, getting buried in tactical tasks). But product management has grown up, and there new challenges to overcome. What is the future of product management, and how will it address these new challenges?

Austin’s “Gang of Four” product managers (Roger L. Cauvin, John Milburn, Scott Sehlhorst, Paul Young) will lead an interactive conversation on such topics as:

1. We’ve gone agile. Do we still need product management?
2. Will product managers join the executive ranks? (CPO = Chief Product Officer)
3. Will product managers embrace cutting edge “lean startup” and “customer development” processes?

What do YOU think the future of product management holds?

We believe that the next decade of product management contains some very interesting challenges, that will be very different from what we have faced over the last decade.  Vote for this panel if you are interested in hearing what those challenges are and how to deal with them.

If you’re coming to ProductCamp Austin for the first time, or we just haven’t met yet, please come introduce yourself on Saturday.  I’m pumped, and can’t wait to see you there!

As summer draws to a close, ProductCamp season is upon us again.  There are a dozen ProductCamps scheduled between August 1st and the end of the year, starting with ProductCamp Austin this weekend on August 6th.  It’s been a big year for ProductCamps around the world: the global product management community has created camps in dozens of cities, at least seven countries, and three continents!  We should all be proud of what we’ve created, and how much better connected the product management world is today than it was just a few years ago.  If you’ve been a ProductCamp participant, bravo.

Yet, for as far as we’ve come, we still have a long way to go.  I see the next hurdle for the community as sustaining the initial spark that got everyone excited.  In Austin, as I’ve transitioned out of leadership of the team, we’ve put in place a non-profit organization with an elected board of directors.  That team is doing an excellent job.  In other locales, such as Silicon Valley and Atlanta, I know the original organizers have also or are in the process of stepping aside for the next generation of leaders.  ProductCamp is too important to become a cult-of-personality around a few people in any given city.  For it to take the next step, it must become a movement, one that everyone in the product management and marketing community feels a part of and vested in its success.

Beyond the organizing aspect, other aspects of sustainability include thought leaders and content capture.   Sometimes it takes a lot of effort to coax new presenters out of the woodwork.  Presenting in front of your peers is daunting, and as someone who makes his living from presenting I understand the stress involved.  But we can’t let it become an excuse, because everyone is stressed and everyone is busy.  The danger is that ProductCamp will start to stratify into the “presenters” and the “watchers.”  One of the core tennants of ProductCamp is that there are no passive attendees, only active participants.  There are lots of ways to participate beyond presenting, however getting new presenters is always a challenge.  I challenge you, the reader: make it a goal to present at your next local ProductCamp.  It doesn’t have to be a high stress event, it can be fun – it can even be a game!  Ping me if you want some ideas.

ProductCamps are also creating a wealth of knowledge.  Unfortunately, that knowledge dissipates at the end of each camp.  Most camp are capturing presenter’s slides for SlideShare, but slides without the voice-over is a poor substitute.  We need a video archive.  What’s more, we need a unified video archive across all camps that makes it easy to search and reference topics.  How great would it be to find a presentation by an expert in another city on a topic that you need to know about.  Call it a Kahn Academy for product management.  I am sure that if we had enough interested parties to set it up, that we could find a way to make it happen.  Who is with me?

ProductCamp as a concept has done remarkably well at defining a brand for itself, by staying simple.  I am often asked by potential camp organizers about what make a ProductCamp “work.”  On the other hand, I’ve been contacted by companies wanting to put on for-profit “ProductCamps” in the past, which is all wrong.  For this reason, I believe it is important to lay down some markers about what ProductCamp is and is not.  To my knowledge, nearly every ProductCamp sticks to these guidelines:

1. ProductCamp is free for participants (or as close to free as possible), the only cost is your participation.
2. ProductCamp is by and for its participants, the product marketing and management community and is open to all.
3. ProductCamp has no passive attendees, only active participants.
4. ProductCamp is a no-pitch zone.
5. ProductCamp participants drive the schedule of the day, and determine through their votes what they want to hear.
6. ProductCamp does not censor or edit presenters’ presentations (other than to enforce no-pitch rules).
7. ProductCamp does not claim intellectual property rights on its presenters’ presentations or sessions.
8. ProductCamp is an all volunteer organization and not run for profit.
9. ProductCamp is independent of any vendor and is neutral with regard to processes and methodologies.
10. ProductCamp protects its participants privacy and does not sell, rent, or give away personally identifiable information to 3rd parties.

These 10 guidelines seem like common sense to me and follow what we’ve already been doing.  Of course, if you are planning a ProductCamp, what makes it great is that you can mix things up for your locale.  No one can force anyone to do something one way or the other, and experimentation is a good thing.  Let’s just strive to keep the ProductCamp brand strong and simple, so that when participants come to a camp, they know what they are in for!

You can always see the full list of upcoming ProductCamps at productcamp.org.  If you are a ProductCamp organizer (or want to be one), email me and we will get your camp listed.

I can’t tell you how many times I hear variations on that quote.  Apple is great, they make great products and they are innovative in the design of their hardware and user interfaces.  On the other hand, you can’t innovate like Apple unless you are willing to throw away 90% of your work.  Or alienate large portions of your customer base in the name of moving the design of your product (and industry?) forward.  Apple has tons of momentum and mystique around them these days, but let’s all remember that they are not perfect.  No one is; although I would love to be a fly on the wall listening to the discussions that their product management team is having right now with regard to Final Cut Pro X.