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e-Xpertise in Industry Issue #30
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June 2007

In this issue...

Quote for Today

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. Bill Gates

Feature Article: To Blog or not to Blog

Today it seems that no self-respecting analyst will be seen without his blog. I presume that us analysts, being self-publicising types who like the sound of our own opinions, see this as a good thing that will improve the world.

Increasingly, software suppliers produce blogs. How effective are these blogs in reaching existing and prospective customers? Are the messages in the blogs believed? Do they influence the audience?

In a very short period, other channels of marketing communication have changed. Today, there are hardly any trade shows where users can go to compare the offer of their current supplier against others. All suppliers hold well attended user conferences - but these are consistently "on-message". The print trade press has shrunk alarmingly. Yes, there are plenty of web information sources, but how often do customers have the time to pro-actively visit these? Bulk emails often find their way blocked by spam filters.

Nearly all suppliers employ real experts in their applications who know the industries they target. Sometimes they are in sales support, sometimes in marketing, sometimes they are called evangelists. They are few in number compared with the whole sales and marketing team and their effectiveness has always been questioned.

In an ideal world, experts encapsulate their know how in literature and presentations. They support and educate sales staff to be more expert themselves. This has limited success - after all, if it takes 10 years to become an expert, reading the PowerPoint the night before a sales call is not going to work.

Historically, the experts would go on a world tour accompanying sales staff to selected prospects and customers as the "specialist warm body" - evidence that the supplier really does want to solve the user's problems. We've been critical of this approach as it tends to stall the sales process until the warm body arrives.

In summary, the utilisation and effectiveness of these experts has been poor. In addition to customer-facing work, they probably did have some input to the development plan but, in my experience, no matter what you say to developers they will do their own thing. The experts often get frustrated and return to doing "a real job in industry".

If suppliers change tack and sponsor these experts to write a blog, this could be a method to deploy them effectively.

The experts could use the blog to communicate directly with the target audience. Another positive effect would be that blogs encourage interaction and discussion - albeit much of it anonymous.

If you examine the blogs about software applications it is easy to get depressed. It is necessary to read, at least briefly, the thoughts of ten introverted scribblers before you get to a worthwhile blog. It does make you wonder who has the time to research, find the good ones, and read them.

I confess that the best independent blogs, often from maverick individuals, do get my attention. Whilst they do contain unreliable gossip and rumour, provided one remains a true sceptic, they are amusing and occasionally revealing. It is important to remember that not every scandal is 'Watergate revealed' and it is easy to be fooled, particularly when you want it to be true. After all, Hugh Trevor-Roper, the pre-eminent historian of Nazism, was fooled by the fake Hitler Diaries.

Supplier sponsored blogs have to compete for attention with these amusing and independent blogs. To do so, they have to build a community where that community can continuously find something new and interesting.

The most obvious community is existing customers. A blog would supplement annual user conferences.

This could work at the user or implementer hints and tips level. Self-improvement is a driver for nearly everyone. However, I can't see how this could carry marketing messages that influence spending.

For a blog to carry marketing messages it would have to tackle the issue of focus. What may be interesting for one group of customers would not be relevant for others. I could see how a blog for users in say the pulp and paper business might work. To address users in other industries implies a lot of separate blogs and therefore high cost.

Blogs could also be a double edged sword as they attract negative comment. A lot of this comment will be uninformed. It may even be malicious, perhaps from competitors' agents! The discussion threads will have to be pro-actively moderated to deal with this problem - again more cost.

We believe that blogs need to supplement and extend some kind of pre-existing human relationship. This may be as light a touch as hearing the VP of Research and Development at the annual user conference. If a user meets a supplier's expert, and understands what he says, he will want to read that expert's blog. The content has to be relevant. For example, reacting to the news agenda, or supplying new information about the direction of research and development.

Despite these problems, we do see a future role for supplier blogs - but it will not be a cheap option. We want to start a discussion about the place of such blogs in the marketing mix. Please, let us know what you think (email Mike Evans with your view and we might even start our own blog!).

Mike Evans

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Hot Topic: The mail must get through - or in our case the message . . .

A few years back I remember reading a report that suggested that the average person was on the receiving end of around 1500 marketing messages every single day. The vast majority of these make no impression whatsoever. If you don't believe me just try to produce a list of adverts that you definitely remember seeing yesterday - if you get to five you'll be doing well. This illustrates the scale of the problem confronting the marketing team that is about to launch a new campaign. Of course, this was before the Internet became ubiquitous, so I hate to think what the number would be today.

But marketing people are smart - they employ a full range of tricks and techniques to ensure that their particular message has impact and is memorable. Undoubtedly, one of the most important of these tools is repetition. These days that doesn't just mean multiple inserts in the same magazine or regular placement. It means achieving consistency and synergy across multiple communications media and has given rise to new service lines from advertising agencies to design campaigns that support multiple, parallel communications threads. This is all very clever stuff.

In an ideal world the message should reach the customer with the clarity and impact of its original conception - at the same time everywhere in the world. This becomes really important if you sell globally. The moment the message becomes public the competition can start to compose their response - so delays carrying the message to the furthest outpost of the business are really bad news. Likewise, the "Chinese Whispers" problem - when the message changes slightly each time it is repeated - is equally destructive. Instead of reinforcing each other, different deliveries to the same customer may even contradict each other.

In addition to all the somewhat abstract measures about brand values and unprompted recall, what you also get at the end of all this effort, and very considerable expenditure, is someone who holds up their hand and says "come and talk to me" - a prospective customer. This is definitely the bit of the whole process that the sales team likes best.

The thrust of this article is to point out that it would be really helpful if the sales person is equipped to have a conversation with the customer that bears some passing relationship to the message that attracted the customer's attention. This is really about ensuring that the company's communications have integrity and consistency. It all seems straightforward enough - even obvious - but it can be remarkably difficult to achieve.

The lesson of Eli Goldratt was that the speed of the scout troop must be set by the slowest person - if they are all to arrive at the same time. Using this analogy, you shouldn't actually launch the campaign until the delivery mechanism has been fully primed to deliver the message. Interesting idea - I'm not sure it will catch on.

Bob Brown

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Book Review:Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown and Company, £8.99, ISBN-10: 0316172324

This book is about the first two seconds of perception of something new - 'rapid cognition'. The intriguing theme is that, in some cases, our instinctive, immediate reactions can deliver better judgements and decisions than days and weeks of rational analysis.

Gladwell uses many examples to illustrate this case, including an art historian who could not explain why, but just 'knew' a statue was a fake, even after detailed expert analysis had confirmed it was genuine. It turned out to be a fake. While this must happen all the time, Gladwell's example from the Cook County Hospital in Chicago gives more substance to the argument. At Cook County, doctors have improved the accuracy of their diagnoses of chest pain by basing conclusions on just a few key observations, not the multitude of parameters they previously tried to interpret. Less information resulted in better results.

Gladwell connects these examples using the term 'thin-slicing'. This describes the way we humans instinctively make conscious sense of our environment by subconsciously selecting a few key points from the available information. If thin-slicing works for chest pain diagnosis, maybe our first impressions will sometimes be our best analysis. Gladwell works through the risk that thin-slicing is a slippery slope to over-simplification, dogma and prejudice, and broadly concludes that thin-slicing and rapid cognition should be taken seriously, with positive as well as negative potential.

I feel this book helps balance the fact that much education and training encourages us all to doubt our immediate impressions, and spend more time on investigation and interpretation. Yet we all know seasoned and successful business people who regard "gut feel", "…it just felt right…", and "…chemistry.." as major reasons for their decisions and success.

The message for IT sales and marketing is a reminder that first impressions count - especially as door-openers and perhaps tipping the balance in a final decision. But between those two, there's a lot of hard graft based on facts and analysis.

Peter Thorne

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Noticeboard

Events

DMS - Design, Engineering, Manufacturing: 27-29 Jun 2007, Tokyo, Japan
MTA: 4-7 Jul 2007, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
SIGGRAPH 2007: 5-9 Aug 2007, San Diego, USA
PLM Road Map 2007: 19-20 Sep 2007, Plymouth, USA
National Manufacturing Week (NDES): 25-27 Sep 2007, Rosemont, Illinois, USA

A full list of industry events can be found at IT industry events on the Cambashi website

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