Rocket Watcher

Trafcom News Podcast: Product Management and Social Media

2009-11-09T22:17:47-05:00

At ProductCamp Toronto a few weeks back I got a chance to sit down with Donna Papacosta of the Trafcom News Podcast. Donna does a high quality podcast that's a must-listen for communications, PR or Marketing folks.

In our conversation we touched on the subject of how Product Managers should be using social media and talked a bit about how Product Managers should work with PR/Communications to get to "Communications Utopia".

Go ahead, click on the link to have a listen. It's not every day you get to hear my awe-inspiring Canadian accent in all its glory.

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Marketing Lessons from Foursquare

2009-11-05T08:00:00-05:00

Foursquare is a location-based social networking application that's been described "Twitter for locations." It lets users subscribe to each other and the information shared is about where you are rather than what you are doing. It's been rolling out on a city by city basis over the past few months. I finally got a chance to try it and I think there are some interesting things that marketers can learn from foursquare.

Winning is Fun - unlike Twitter, foursquare has been designed as a game. Users earn points for checking in and foursquare publishes a leaderboard for your friends and your city. Users win badges for things like checking in a set number of times in a month or consecutive nights in a week that get displayed on their profiles. Users who have checked into a given location the most number of times in a month become the "Mayor" of that location. Competing for the Mayorship of a given location is another fun aspect of the game and further encourages use. OK, as games go, it isn't the funnest one I've ever played but nonetheless the idea of surprise rewards or bragging rights for desired behavior is one that marketers should think about.

People Like to Show Off - Anyone on FaceBook can tell you that folks like to show off. Foursquare has an element of that (look, I'm the mayor of a hot new restaurant!) without it being the only reason to use the application. Product marketers need to think about how to let users brag about their experience or expertise with their products.

Users Will Work for You (If There's Something in it for Them) - After using foursquare for about a week I received an email congratulating me for becoming a "level 1 Superuser!" which gives me the ability to edit venue information. They also let me know that the more I edited, the more "Superuser power" I could unlock. When I talk about this with non-foursquare users they can't believe that anyone would actually bother to clean up foursquare's data for free. In fact, people do, mainly because bad data is annoying. I fixed a duplicate record for my gym because it bugged me whenever I checked in there. The lesson here for product folks is that users are happy to fix minor annoyances and correct bad data if you give them the tools to do it.

Have Use Cases But Don't Discourage Unexpected Uses - At the time it launched, Twitter treated use cases like a blank sheet of paper and waited for folks to figure out what they wanted to use it for. Any product person can tell the risk in that is that people can't guess a use for your product and don't use it at all. This isn't the case for foursquare and the application clearly shows its assumptions in terms of usage. The points system is heavily biased toward evening activity. Badges with names like "Bender" (checking in 4 nights in a row) and "Crunked" (for checking into 4 different locations in one evening) would indicate that the folks at foursquare don't think I'm at the library in the evenings. At the same time, the foursquare gang aren't making any moves to stop people from doing things like checking into subway stations or their own homes and are open about the fact that the rules and rewards for foursquare change as they get more input from users. My personal favorite use of foursquare is that when I'm attending an event, I can see which of my friends is there- that's an activity there certainly isn't a badge for today. The lesson for product folks here is that some initial assumptions about how people might use a product are helpful to get things started but where possible, don't discourage unintended uses as those might become your future use cases.

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Can B2B Products be "Social Objects"?

2009-11-03T16:26:44-05:00

A couple of weeks back I attended MeshMarketing and Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid was the keynote speaker. In his talk he discussed "social objects". By his definition a "social object" can be a thing a person or an idea that people talk about. Hugh talked about working at an ad agency where customers would ask them to get people talking about products like it was as easy thing to do. His comment was (I'm paraphrasing) "Getting people talking is magic! They were asking us to perform magic but their perception was that we were just pulling a lever." His described how people talk about things they are passionate about and how creating that passion in customers is about more than mere features and functions. "It's not about features or what you build, that's important," he re-iterated "it's about how people talk about what you produce that matters."

This isn't a new concept for traditional marketers. One of the folks on the panel I moderated (Barry Quinn from Juniper Park) gave the example of car companies sponsoring Formula 1 racing as a way to get people socializing around a brand. However, that thinking has historically come after the product is delivered. After it's released, traditionally companies just had to pay the ad agency to pull the "make people talk about it" lever.

I've seen some products coming to market where the social aspects are a key design point, particularly on the B2C side but I haven't seen much evidence of that type of thinking in B2B. Rypple (case study here) is a great example. But frankly, for B2B, those products are few and far between. I personally, have yet to sit in a planning meeting where how we might inspire a customer's passion or the "social-ness" of a given feature was really discussed.

The situation gets worse when we talk about infrastructure. Can companies that sell products as boring as data center hardware inspire passion in a way that translates to sales? My experience as the head of Nortel's Green IT initiative tells me it can. However that experience also taught me that there aren't many folks on the B2B product side out there that are believers today. I suspect it's the reason that so many B2B vendors are being blindsided by technically inferior yet inspirational consumer products pushing their way into the enterprise. Sure there are some features and functions that have to be there in order to win, but a lot of nice to have features go out the window when higher-order issues like social responsibility, bragging rights or sheer user delight come into play. Product folks working on consumer products understand this better than their B2B counterparts.

I'm not saying that it's impossible to have successful products without inspiring people. It's possible and I know it because I've done it. I launched a product that generated $80 million in its first year that was as dull as paint and I couldn't find a single reference to it online outside of our own website. It did useful yet really boring thing very well at a time when no other product did so people paid money for it. I don't think believe that's changed and there will always be some markets where sheer utility works.

However I also believe that in competitive markets, more social products or products that people really love have a distinct advantage, even when they aren't the best product for the job from a feature/function perspective. For B2B product folks increasingly, the magic in our jobs will be figuring out how to inspire our customers and make our products more social.

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Microsoft and the Market for "Everything"

2009-10-19T12:53:41-04:00

The lead story in the Sunday New York Times Business section this week focused on Microsoft's broad business strategy. Titled "Forecast for Microsoft: Partly Cloudy", the piece included interesting quotes from various Microsoft executives discussing how cloud computing fits into their overall strategy and how they differentiate themselves. This paragraph caught my attention:

(Microsoft CEO) Steve Ballmer contends that Microsoft is the only company prepared and positioned to merge computing from both ends - the desktop and the cloud. "We're just investing more broadly than everybody else," he says, adding that when it comes to software, "I want us to invent everything that's important on the planet." (emphasis mine)

How's that for a mandate? What does Microsoft do? Everything.

Microsoft is one of the few vendors out there trying to simultaneously serve both the business and consumer markets. While it's true they have huge resources, even big companies run the risk of being spread too thin. On the surface Microsoft's $10 billion budget for research and development seems large enough to tackle "everything" until you start looking down a list that includes desktop software, data center software, developer tools, health care systems, video game consoles and games, music payers, phones and phone software, Web properties, and office collaboration products.

Offering customers a broad set of products and services is one of its great strengths, according to Microsoft. Being able to offer solutions spaning PC's, browsers and a proliferating set of hand-held devices (part of what Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft calls "the gizmo revolution."), is valuable and part of what sets Microsoft apart from its competitors.

But the strategy isn't without risks. At smaller companies, not being able to clearly answer the question "What do we do?" results in unfocused products that partially solve many customer problems but fail to offer a compelling value proposition in any one particular domain. For a company the size of Microsoft the risk of a "we do everything" strategy is that customers who automatically put Apple on their short list for music players or cell phones, and HP or IBM on their list for data center software, might not know exactly which list Microsoft belongs on anymore.

Then there is the issue of whether or not all of these areas get the focus and freedom needed to innovate. When I started my career working with software startups there was an accepted wisdom that if Microsoft moved into your space, your company was finished. Once Microsoft pointed their arsenal of resources at your market they would easily produce something better and more quickly than any team of folks in a garage could. Today there are startups thriving in markets where Microsoft plays. These startups have the luxury of being able to focus deeply on doing a single thing well without the overhead of worrying about how their products interact with a massive list of other products and services from different divisions. In fact the goal of many of these companies is to eventually be acquired Microsoft.

Perhaps that's just as it should be. Companies like Cisco and even IBM have been using acquisitions as a successful innovation strategy for years and Microsoft has no shortage of money to invest in any market it wants to. In both cases however, I can easily tell you what those companies do. For Microsoft, I think they may need to articulate what customers buy from them more succinctly than "everything."

Photo credit: The CBI

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Collateral Damage: Building a Content Plan

2009-10-14T19:26:14-04:00

I remember when building collateral used to be a large part of a product marketer's job. A lousy part. I remember the last brochure I worked on like it was yesterday. Getting it done was a nightmare of epic arguments over screen shots, customer quotes and whether or not to include the mailing address for the European office we expected to close within a month. The project went on for weeks and once it was done we didn't look at again for a year, mainly because we didn't have the budget to update it but also because we were traumatized.

Old-style collateral was all centered around the product rather than the customer. It was designed to be as generic as possible, making it only mildly relevant to the majority of customers and regardless of what was happening in the market, the brochure only got updated when there was a new version of the product. How backward is that?

Thankfully we've moved into a new era where the barriers to creating and distributing content to customers and prospects are coming down and we marketers can focus on the business of creating and delivering content that is relevant, useful and engaging to the customers and prospects that consume it.

I think every product needs a content plan. The content plan should include delivery of the following:

Web content - I still see a lot of generic web content out there. Different segments and different buyers are looking for different types of information. Informational needs also change as customers progress across the buying cycle. Product marketers need to step into the shoes of each of their customers and create content that is relevant for them. Your content plan needs to include regular updates to this information.
Blog posts - There is so much great information in your company that doesn't belong on the web site and isn't appropriate for a press release. As the product marketer you need to be setting aside some time to plan what themes you want to cover in the blog, and creating content. I often hear younger marketers complain that they don't have time to write blog posts. That's when I get all old lady on them, "When I was your age we spent 10 weeks a year making something called a BROCHURE!!" A structured plan for what you want to write about will make it easier to get the job done.
Video - I'm a huge fan of video and I don't think startups take advantage of it enough. HD cameras are cheap. With an external microphone, a bit of decent lighting some practice, you can make a marketing video that looks professional without breaking the bank. See below for some resources to learn more about how to make a good looking video but my experience is to just get out there a shoot and edit a lot and it gets easy pretty fast.
Presentations - You probably already spend a ton of time building presentations. There are lots of ways to make those available as slides alone or with a narration as a slidecast.
Links - As a good marketer, you are already spending a certain amount of time watching what's happening in the market. You'll find posts and articles that support your view of the market or talk about your products that you can share. I used to use delicious for this but now I think Twitter is the ultimate tool for link sharing with your community.
Screencasting - A screencast lets you capture what's happening on your screen and add a voice over to it. Chances are you've got a killer demo that you use in sales calls and at shows. Screencasting lets you get your demos out to a wider audience. The tools are cheap and easy to use so there's no excuse not to experiment with these.
Custom collateral - At one company I worked with they had 2 major segments - retail and insurance - with separate collateral for each. Brochures were assembled with customer quotes, highlighted features and screen shots swapped in and out depending on the audience. Small print runs for this material are pricier on a per-piece basis but they didn't print often and the sales force and customers loved it. Your company probably doesn't do many trade shows (if you are, seriously, we should talk), so gone are the days of giving out 100's of brochures to clog up convention hall garbage bins. Don't waste money printing where you don't need to.
eBooks and White papers - White papers are still a good medium for a more detailed technical topic. More and more I see these published as eBooks which makes them a bit easier to read on an eBook reader. The format works well for content that's too long for a blog post and too detailed for a web page or powerpoint.

I'm probably missing a couple of other things. The point is that there's never been a better time for marketers to get compelling content out to the market in engaging ways.

Some further reading:

Whitepapers/eBooks: Search Engine People has a great post on how to Write White Papers Like an Expert with These 10 Simple Steps. If you want to publish on the Kindle, everything you need is on Amazon's page here. You can also host your eBook on Scribd (often described as YouTube for eBooks).

Video: Hubspot guest poster Catie Foertsch has 6 tips for making a business marketing video. VideoMaker has a treasure trove of information for shooting better video for YouTube including tips on what to look for when buying cameras, microphones and tripods.

Presentations: I use Slideshare for presentations and screencasts but there are loads of tools out there.

Screencasting: WebResources Depo's 10 free screencasting tools, Mashable's list of screencasting tools. I'd Rather Be Writing gives a couple of examples of Perfect Screencasts and discusses what makes them great.

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Follow. Forget. Fail. Why 3 Word Taglines Suck

2009-10-08T12:08:41-04:00

I am all for simplicity in marketing messaging. Attention just might be the world's scarcest commodity and bloated, complicated marketing messages lose the attention game to clear, simple messages every time. However, as much as I'm a big fan of simple messages, occasionally I think people take it so far that the end result is just as meaningless as pages and pages of technical specifications.

What's up with all the 3 word taglines? People are in love with these! And when I say "people" I mean folks that aren't in marketing. The impression I get is that these folks think that a tagline can be a substitution for a proper value proposition or well-formulated messaging. It isn't. In fact you have to work through creating a value proposition and messaging first before you could possibly make a tagline that works. Once you have clearly defined who your target market is, what value you bring to that market and how you differentiate from alternatives, then you can go about the hard work of distilling that down into a set of messages. From those messages you might decide to have a tagline that is a short, memorable slogan that describes what you do.

If you decide you absolutely need to have a tagline, here are some things to consider:

Relevant for Your Customers - think about who it's for and make sure that your message is relevant for them.
Differentiated - Many taglines will pass the test of being relevant for their customer base but are so un-differentiated that they could apply to any competitor. Words like innovation, collaborate, superior, advanced, etc., may well describe what your product/company does but your competitors can probably claim to be just as innovative or advanced as you are.
Memorable - This is where the magic happens in taglines. The whole point of a tagline is that you want people to remember it. If you can create something that is relevant for your customers, highlights how you are distinct from your competitors AND does that in a memorable way, you've got a winner.

A bit of surfing around got me this list of crummy taglines. These taglines could be applied to just about any product or company I have ever worked at:

Transform your Business
Tomorrows Solutions Today
Discover, Interact, Optimize
Ensuring Customer Success
Grow Your Business
Forward Faster
Superior by Design

Do some hard thinking about your messaging before you attempt to create a tagline. Or better yet - if it isn't adding anything to your messaging, how about leaving it out altogether? White space is your friend! Embrace it and stop clogging up your messaging with a bunch of empty, meaningless, forgettable (superior, advanced, innovative) taglines.

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I'll Take a Bold: The Starbucks Via Launch

2009-10-01T16:40:32-04:00

I normally cover startup technology on this blog but occasionally I think it's good to look at what's happening in the wider world of marketing to see if there are lessons we can learn and apply to our little corner of the world.

This week Starbucks launched Starbucks Via, a product they describe as a "breakthrough in instant coffee". The company says they have worked for 20 years to develop a process of making instant coffee that preserves the coffee's taste, quality and freshness to the point where a cup of Via tastes just like a fresh brewed cup of Starbucks coffee.

My first reaction when I heard about Via was "Are they nuts!?" What happened to the "third place" coffee house experience? Do Sanka drinkers dream of coffee made from "the highest-quality, ethically sourced 100% arabica beans?" What happens to their "premium" brand when customers see it in the grocery store next to Folger's? If this stuff really tastes as good as brewed Starbucks, aren't they encouraging customers to stay at home drinking $1 cups of Via rather than visiting their nearest Starbucks for a non-fat, extra-hot Mocha Frappuchino for $4?

Positioning: Us vs. Us not Us vs. Them

Starbucks hasn't gone so far as to claim that Via isn't instant coffee (a common tactic when re-defining a category) but they are careful not to compare themselves directly to Sanka or Nescafe. The reference point is their own brewed coffee. Via is described in their marketing as instant coffee that "tastes as delicious as our brewed. Almost was not an option." This is a bold (sorry I couldn't resist) move for Starbucks. Their positioning sets customer expectations for taste sky-high. Decades of experience has taught us that instant coffee tastes nothing like brewed coffee. The challenge for Starbucks is not just to make it taste good, but to make us believe it tastes good.

Starbucks is taking this challenge head-on by staging the Starbucks Via Taste Challenge. Participants can sample Starbucks VIA next to the brewed coffee and see if they can taste the difference. This tactic shows that Starbucks is confident in the quality of the product, and allows consumers to experience it in the coffee house context, driving home the message that this is not instant coffee as you currently know it.

It's important for Starbucks to establish brewed coffee as the reference point for pricing as well. Starbucks Via sells for around $1 a serving which is significantly higher than other brands of instant coffee.

Use Cases - Drink Premium Coffee Not Swill!

Some folks have worried that positioning Via against Starbucks brewed coffee will cannibalize in-store sales. I believe the bigger risk for Starbucks is that people (Americans in particular who don't drink much instant coffee) won't know when it makes sense to drink it. Here Starbucks takes a page out of he product marketing handbook and makes sure their marketing includes a litany of what Starbucks refers to as "usage occasions." These show that Via isn't just for folks that drink instant coffee, it's for people in situations where they would normally drink lousy coffee or no coffee at all. Airline coffee stinks. The free coffee in your office is disgusting. The website, the Facebook group, the YouTube videos and the Twitter account are all as focused on educating people about where Via could be used as much as the taste. For example, the video documenting the Starbucks Via Roadtrip stop in Vancouver didn't include a single quote from a Canadian about the taste but did show a host drinking Via on the Capilano suspension bridge.

Sales Channels - Keep my Starbucks Away from that Sanka

In addition to its own cafes, Starbucks Via will be sold in REI, Office Depot, United Airlines, Barnes & Noble, and Marriott and Omni Hotels. Distributing the product this way drives home the use cases and keeps Via away from being directly compared to other instant coffees. You won't see Via in a grocery store until sometime in 2010. My guess is that's a deliberate move to ensure Starbucks has had a chance to get customers talking about the taste and "usage occasions" for the product. I won't be surprised if when Via does show up in grocery stores it's sitting closer to the regular Starbucks ground coffee than it is to Sanka.

But isn't the Starbucks brand all about the in-store experience? The answer is not really. Starbucks has been selling Frapucchino drinks, ice cream and ground coffee in grocery stores for years. According to Starbucks, instant coffee makes up 40% of the $21 billion global market for coffee. Starbucks has been hit hard by the recession and forced to close nearly 1,000 stores. They are under pressure from McDonald's. Expanding the brand outside of the retail outlets makes sense for them in this climate.

Can Starbucks Via be Successful?

I took a break while writing this and walked over to my Starbucks and bought a 3-pack of Via. Honestly, I thought it tasted pretty good. A co-worker saw the package and commented, "Instant coffee, gross." Can Starbucks convince us that great tasting instant coffee is not only possible but worth paying a premium for? Only time will tell.

Photo credit: Kevin Lim

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Upcoming: MeshMarketing and ProductCamp

2009-09-28T21:59:07-04:00

There are a couple of interesting events coming up in Toronto that I'll be participating in.

MeshMarketing

The folks that organize the excellent Mesh Conference have added a new conference this year focused on online marketing called MeshMarketing happening on Oct 22nd in Toronto. I've been asked to moderate a panel discussion around the topic of how Digital, Advertising, and PR agencies differ in their approach to social media. I've got my own set of opinions on this topic but I'm interested in yours - give me some quick (and anonymous) feedback on your thoughts by clicking here. No seriously, I'm only asking for 200 measly characters - DO IT NOW! Also this conference will sell out so if you are planning on going, I would buy a ticket quickly.

ProductCamp

The second ProductCamp Toronto is happening on Sunday and I'm looking forward to it.

What I love the most about ProductCamp is it's probably the only time you get to mix with a large group of product management people. While there seems to be a marketing event every week (particularly with a PR/advertising/social media focus), events for product folks are few and far between.

There's still space so if you're interested you can register here. You can follow the Twitter stream related to this event by watching #pct2.

**Update**

I'm getting some pretty interesting feedback about the MeshMarketing panel. Here are some of the comments:

They differ and that's good. The integration of all disciplines/agencies makes the most sense because all have strengths that intersect the social media space:insights, strategy, creative, relationships.
PR firms "get it" more because social media is aligned with their approach (i.e. contact influencers, get them to re-tell stories, etc.). As agencies don't get it because they are trying to "push" social media.
PR and Ad Agencies each offer different value adds. By collaborating, clients get best of breed recommendations as to how best to embrace/leverage social media.
PR tried to buy bloggers and fake ratings/postings that endorse products on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc. Advertising agencies see social media sites as just another place to display advertising.
PR has a bias toward dialogue with their audience. While both types of agencies seek to entice and engage, PR seems more pre-disposed to two-way conversations.
In my opinion, Ad agencies are not integrating, it's still a price-based short sighted approach. PR is much more practical and sensitive to social media realities. PR agencies have a longer term approach and are more customer-focused
Companies need to stop outsourcing social media! This needs to be done on the client side and companies that are expecting their PR agency to do this stuff are not taking it seriously enough. Customer relationships cannot be outsourced.
Key messages (branding) are (should) be the same - how each execute the messages traditionally different. If now they both use the same "social" media, then there is no difference (except for skill).
I've heard - and strongly agree with - the belief that PR practitioners are best suited to excel in the space because uncontrolled communication is our expertise. Looking forward to the debate!
Many PR agencies seem overly-focused on the buzz they generate from using social media (1,000 followers: whoopee we're like Obama!), and less so on integrated strategy that drives outcomes.

Whew, seems like people have some opinions here. Looking forward to the panel!

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Enterprise Software Pilots in a Social Age

2009-09-22T12:06:19-04:00

I've been thinking about sales processes and specifically how they should change as the types of solutions we are selling into enterprises change. For example, the traditional first step to an enterprise software deployment (and the near to last step in the sales process) would be to do a controlled customer pilot. Sometimes these are free and sometimes they are paid for but almost always they involve rolling the product out to a small set of users and tracking a set of pre-defined success metrics. If the pilot meets the goals, the next stage is to move the product into broad production use.

Should enterprise software pilots change or stay the same as enterprise software makes use of more social or collaborative technologies? Michael Idinopulos has a great post on the Social Text Blog that makes a very good argument that for Enterprise 2.0 applications, it makes sense to skip the pilot. In that post he makes the point that the business tasks enabled by traditional enterprise software (transfer funds, purchase products, track inventory were his examples) do not vary with the number of users on the system. He then makes the argument that Enterprise 2.0 applications are very different because they are more "interaction" based rather than "transaction" based. He states:

Interactions and transactions have completely different scale economics. When we use Enterprise 2.0, we're not transacting with a system; we're interacting with other people. An interaction is a connection between two or more nodes in a network. And as Metcalf's Law famously states, the more people there are in that network, the more interactions each individual can have with his or her peers, and the more value that individual derives from participation in the network.

Regardless of how you define an "Enterprise 2.0" application, I believe we are now moving into an age of collaboration and communications-enhanced business processes. As our customer management and supply chain processes become more connected and start to really support collaboration, it would seem to me that our traditional model of doing a pilot has to change too.

I don't believe that enterprises are ready to do major deployments without a pilot stage but maybe what we need is a new type of pilot that allows enterprises to contain the risks associated with a broad deployment while letting the user-base form organically enough to expose the range of ways that people will collaborate within a broad population. Ultimately this may result in doing pilots where the restriction is more around advanced functionaility and less around restrictions on numbers of users.

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Spam is not Marketing

2009-09-17T17:48:12-04:00

Yesterday I attended a marketing conference and the keynote speaker was Jason Scott, the man behind the famous Twitter account @sockington. @sockington is an account where Jason Twitters in the voice of his cat. He has well over 1 million followers (to give you an idea that's more than Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake or TechCrunch). It's an entertaining Twitter feed to follow if you are looking for a laugh and sort of has to be seen to be fully understood. Here's a sample:

The title of his talk was "Building a Cult Brand on Twitter" which he's certainly done. The talk started out fine but at about the 5 minute mark Jason described how much he hates marketing. He later qualified that statement by saying he didn't hate all marketing, marketers and aspects of marketing, only "evil marketing, marketers and aspects of marketing." however, it was clear that he viewed the vast majority of marketing as in the evil category. He showed several examples of "marketing" on Twitter, all of which were basically spam. The rest of his talk (which was pretty funny I might add) focused on demonstrating to a room full of marketers the various forms of evil marketing and imploring us to stop doing this because it's really annoying.

I can understand why Jason thinks that marketing is the same as spam and therefore evil. He isn't a marketer and probably doesn't interact with marketers on a day to day basis with the exception of Twitter spammers who are understandably driving him crazy. He likely doesn't know any marketers that understand segmentation and positioning and know that spam is not only "evil" but a pretty lousy way to get folks to take action.

What surprised me though was the reaction from the crowd. A room filled with hundreds of marketers seemed to agree with him. The Twitter stream was full of positive feedback. Funny as he was, he was basically calling us evil spammers, and the crowd was accepting of that. Perhaps they were all like me and held back from Twittering their disapproval because of how difficult it would be to do that in 140 characters without insulting Jason personally or the conference organizers who chose to have him speak. Maybe folks were just happy to hear him be entertaining and basically ignored his message. Maybe.

Here's what I know. Spam is what happens when there is an absence of marketing. It's what happens when you don't think about what customers want and don't care about building offerings for them. It's what happens when you don't care about market segments and you believe a cat, a CEO and a teenager are equally likely to click on your link. I've worked with literally hundreds of marketers in my career and not a single one of them fits Jason's profile of what he believes marketers are.

I don't expect Jason to understand the profession of marketing but I do expect a room full of marketers to understand it and anyone in that room that thought it was OK to characterize us the way he did should be offended and working to change that perception. My message for Jason is this - you don't hate marketing, you actually wish there was more of it.

Finally I want to point out to the folks looking for speakers on marketing topics that there are thousands of great marketers out there doing amazing things that I for one would love to hear and learn from. We all like to be entertained but I'm tired of seeing celebrities and humorists being held up as authorities on marketing.

What do you think? I know a lot of you were at the same conference I was. Do you agree that most marketers are spammers? Let me know in the comments.

**Update** Jason Scott responds in the comments so please read that too....

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