PR Communications

Marketing Resource Management Book Review

During my Presidency of the Boston Chapter of the American Marketing Association in 2005-6 we developed some great events. Most of the events were related to promotional activities, some brand building and others, about client case studies. One topic we never touched on was how marketing people organize their work.

A book I’ve just finished reading “Marketing Resource Management” by Romek Jansen & Frans Riemersma addresses the issue of how marketing departments are behind the curve when it comes to creating and publishing marketing content. The reason, there’s no standardization of content templates; every new piece is a unique rather than new content that fits into an existing template, which can be reused by fitting new content into the content template. Because of the efficiencies in marketing departments content is produced that sales people don’t use because the content is past due on arrival.

The big idea I came away with from the book is that if you develop any content it should fit into an existing template. 

Many Chief Marketing Officers at large companies have only been in their jobs for less than 12 months, while the tenure of most Chief Marketing Officers is only 35 months. Companies focus on the short term and don’t enable CMOs the longevity to build the sort of marketing resource management system to enable them to produce efficiencies. Using statistics to illustrate their point, Jansen & Riemersma describe how most large marketing departments have marketing resource management problems partly because of the problems with marketing leadership longevity and strategy.

I remember that when I worked at Portent Interactive, Amazon.com went completely gaga over a simple content assets management system Ian Lurie threw together for them in 2000. The content assets system allowed their marketing department and Amazon.com’s agencies to manage all of their content assets.

Jansen & Riemersma provided a roadmap for Marketing Resource Management:

1.    Publish an easily accessible online brand manual (Knowledge.)
2.    Migrate content to a central content repository (Content.)
3.    Prepare a subset of publications for automated publishing (Publishing.)
4.    Implement a central ordering platform for all channel partners (Ordering.)
5.    Implement a central campaign calendar and add workflow elements (Planning.)
6.    Add financial information to the planning tool (Budget.)
7.    Top it off with a balanced scorecard creating transparency for all the above (Reporting.)

While I think the big idea in the Marketing Resource Management book is important for any marketer to consider, I don’t give the book high marks for readability. The real meat of the book came at the end, I think you could flip to the last few chapters read those and get the most value from the book.

More Hotels For West Point, NE

In April, I traveled to West Point, Nebraska to give a keynote on Generation Y for the West Point Economic Summit. The town had recently built the Nielson Center, a multi-million dollar conference center. I was inspired with the drive and determination of several people who helped build the center. All of the funding for the center was raised privately, in this town of 4,000 people.

However, West Point only has hotel beds for 129 people. To grow the conference center business the town will have to attract hoteliers to area.

In a recent blog post on the ideaLaunch blog I wrote:

"West Point might host a Twitter session on the topic, “how to attract more hotels to West Point, NE.” The chamber would invite hoteliers from outside the area to the discussion as speakers, or economic development officers of similar towns who have succeeded in attracting more hoteliers to their area. The purpose of the event would be to develop ideas and a plan, yet the discussion itself may increase the number of opportunities."

In preparing to attract more hoteliers I decided to reach out to Deirdre Reid, an association management professional, to ask her opinion on how West Point should attract more hotels to their city. Here's what Deirdre had to say:

Deirdre Reid makes the following suggestions to West Point in order to make a case to hoteliers to come into the town.

1) Demonstrate there is an existing market, show current traffic levels in the town.

2) Give the reasons why people visit and stay in West Point.

3) Determine how often the one hotel is sold out.

4) How far do people travel to stay in the hotel?

5) Who puts on events at the center?

6) Publish testimonials about the need for beds from event planners and the Nielson visitors center.

7) Are there incentives for building? – tax credits, matches by city/county govt?

8) Is a hotel workforce available?

9) Hotels need to host meetings too – is there enough business for them to do that given the Center is the main host now.

NE XPO Social Media Panel Live Blogging

Here's the CoverITLive reader for the Social Media panel for the NE XPO tomorrow.

Measure Time In Social Media To Determine Engagement Results

As social media and social networking becomes ubiquitous and automated sign ups for subscribing to friends increases, social media technologies face the danger of becoming less relevant to participants.

Not because of motivation, but merely because of time. If you have 10,000 twitter followers how likely is it that you will have the time to read every tweet; increasingly low.

In my book, Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging I wrote about the right approach to conducting engagement using blogs. Rather than pitching people, I suggested that companies should have their employees actually engage community members through blogs. Read other people's blogs, and write content that speaks to the person who wrote a post, rather than just try to prove a point on a blog post, or sell their own ideas or products. I’d advise an attempt should be made to build a real relationship, rather than advertising wares.

I am beginning to think that as business people and marketers get caught up in the volume of social media they will forget about an effective strategy of engagement.

Measurement in social media is helpful, but if social media measurement is a high number of followers, is there value in that statistic? If you don’t achieve any sales or provide customer support through social media, signing up 10,000 followers really does not matter. But if you receive 10 customers for every 100 followers, then there's a value in measuring social media the number of friend subscriptions.

To get social media measurement right, first set your goals, and then determine what it will take to produce a result from your level of engagement. How many followers do you need to achieve your result is a question you do need to answer, but it is not just a matter of increasing your number of follower. Rather it is important to determine the amount of time it takes to engage each community member, and what results do you receive from that engagement. Time is the critical factor in social media, the more time you spend on reading, commenting and building a relationship with a colleague the greater the chances that something will happen. You can measure the time it takes to interact with a community member and the results.

Community Building In Nonprofits: Big Brothers Big Sisters & AMA Boston

B&W Big Brothers Big Sisters Brochure
Originally uploaded by sreffler.

Summary: Facilitate the process of your community elders advising your newbies & novices.

Tonight I attended the Social Media Club in Boston, the topic was "Integrating Social Media Across the Big Brand," I thought the panel did a good job of covering all the bases. For me my most interesting conversation of the evening was with Bob Collins as we traveled back to Arlington & Lexington.

We were chatting about my post concerning Big Brothers Big Sisters and how that organization is formulating its strategy for social media between children, parents, mentors, and alumni mentors.

Both Bob and I thought it was not a good idea for a current mentor or Big as they are called to write about their mentoring of a child or Little in social media. 1) because of privacy concerns and 2) because even if the Little was kept anonymous if the child saw the social media commentary by their mentor and he was not comfortable with what is written then that might ruin the relationship and harm the child.

There's always the possibility that the Big could ask the Little's permission to post something about their relationship by running their post by them. That's a standard practice in most corporate social media guidelines. Check in with your colleagues, partners and customers if you write about private information that you would not have known if you did not have a relationship with those contacts.

One issue for Big Brothers Big Sisters is that the organization would like Big's to write about their experiences with mentoring because it would promote the organization and encourage more people to become mentors.

Big's would also be able to use social media to learn from other mentors. Big Brothers Big Sisters of Mass Bay is thinking about developing a social network where some sections of the site are private for users depending on their role, Little's would be the most restrictive role, and other sections of the site might be open to the public.

I was comparing the situation with Big Brothers Big Sisters with the Boston Chapter of the American Marketing Association. I'm a Past President with the chapter, and we've developed an active social network over the last year using Ning technology. We opened up the site to both members and non-members, and as a result we've seen membership increase, and events sell out at AMA Boston.

The connect site at the AMA has about 20 groups, but three of them were closed to non-members; volunteers, mentors and AMA Members. We recently decided to open them up to non-members to demonstrate the value of membership. But I'm wondering if we actually made a wrong move with that strategy. I'm thinking we should have done more work to support our existing members, perhaps by building a section on the site that gave people the ability to ask a question of an old timer in the AMA.

I could be wrong here, but I was also thinking there's a parallel with the situation at Big Brothers Big Sisters. Mentors need help and support in mentoring Little’s. There are Alumni Big’s around who are happy to answer questions about their mentoring experience. Perhaps the way to support the Big’s and illustrate the benefits of mentoring is to ask Alumni Big’s to answer questions from current Big’s in a public section of the social network.

Alumni Big’s have a better understanding of what it takes to be a successful Big, plus Alumni are probably a little more media savvy in handling questions about working as a Big because they have a few years experience. Lastly, there’s no current Big/Little relationship to be affected.

If BBBS encouraged current mentors to use social media to write about their current relationships you might have more misunderstandings occur because of the Big's lack of experience with the mentoring process.

These ideas are not really new, for instance Amy Jo Kim wrote about the process of encouraging elders in a community supporting novices in her book "Community Building On The Web".

Gmail & Google Docs

I’ve been using Google Docs a lot lately with colleagues when collaborating on articles and task management.

However, several colleagues have told me that they had trouble accessing the Google Doc's I've invited them to join.  Apparently, the issue is that Gmail may have cached an existing Gmail email account in a browser, and Google defaults to the Gmail email account for access rather than the email I invited to the document. You have to use the email sent by the person inviting you to the Google Doc in order to access the document.

Mike Dunn On The Future Of Journalism

Mike Dunn writes a comprehensive post on the future of journalism. He mentions one of my earlier posts and touches on the subject of using semantic technologies for story development.

"simply stated semantic technologies provide a way for information and services on the web to be defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines desiring to utilize web content systemically - for future journalists it can give them the ability to leverage social media mining tools to determine which stories are of most interest to a community, giving the journalist the information and metrics to incentivize investigating in greater detail as well as enter the conversation proactively."

Mike also provides a great overview of some of the leading thinkers in Journalism and some new technologies for people to check out if you are in the profession.

Mike Dunn is the VP/CTO of Hearst Interactive Media at Hearst.

Still curious to know if any media companies are using semantic technologies in the way I describe in my article on using semantic technologies for story development?

Twitter Is Sustainable

Rebecca Churt asks whether the growth rate of Twitter is sustainable in her post, “Twitter and the Biggest Loser Effect.” Lots of Twitter users join but then quit or don’t do anything with the account.

This reminds me of the buzz around SecondLife? That social media technology flared up and died down again after a while. I think people tried out the technology, and for most the technology required too steep a learning curve to be usable.

Like any technology, you have to know some of the secrets of twitter to get the most out of the technology, here are a few:

1) Use a client. Set up a client like Twirl or Tweetdeck to make it easier to use Twitter, group friends or find topics through search.

2) Engage people. Like most social media technologies, it’s not all about you, but all about the community. Follow people's content, reply to them directly, and retweet their tweets.

3) The basics. Reply is open to the world. Direct message is private chat. Post a picture and a bio to give some color to your account.

4) Search.twitter.com. You can look at the public lifestream (everyone's tweets) or your followers, but for pinpoint those conversations and communities you most want to follow use the twitter search engine.

5) Hashtags. #amaB, #journchat, #prsadi: These are all hashtags used by people when tweeting to pinpoint conversations on twitter around a community or theme: #amaB American Marketing Association in Boston, #journochat conversation about and between journalists; #prsadi, the Public Relations Society of America's Digital Impact show.

I think it takes some time to understand how to use twitter, for example without Search.twitter.com it’s tough to find conversations and community members.

Unlike SecondLife the ramp-up time for Twitter is a lot less, while Twitter will not be for everyone. I think the social media technology really is here to stay.

I’m convinced that Twitter usage will become sustainable. Once you pass the hurdle of the basics, and start using the technology its utility is just too great. 

I also think the technology is a real competitor to Google, why? Well I currently look at search.twitter.com more on a daily basis than Google.com, my search engine of choice; I have a number of searches set up in my Twirl client popping up all day long.

FaceBook and other social media technologies are all adapting their designs to become more twitter-like. Current stats suggest millions more users, an amazing growth rate.

Twitter is revolutionizing social media usage; I think peer use is really what encourages people to learn a new technology.  And the learning curve on Twitter is definitely a lot less than SecondLife .

How Many Community Managers Does It Take To Screw In A Light Bulb?

In preparation for my presentation at the PRSA's Digital Impact conference here in New York I asked the Twitter community the question: How many community managers does it take to screw in a light bulb?

I received several great answers, my personal favorite was this one from Singularity Design:

@SingularityDsgn  An infinite number. They don't screw in light bulbs. They try to create an environment that allows other people to screw in bulbs.