A few months ago I read a nice post by Adam Cohen on when social media is right for your business and when not; it was entertaining and conversational as well as quite truthful. So, based on my own experiences in social media marketing, I wanted to post a few notions that I think are still largely misrepresented in a number of organizations.

Any other ideas?

It’s been quite a while since I last wrote. The reason was a potentially forgiving one: too much time with customers. Actually, way too much time with customers. Is that always good?

Anyone with even the slightest hint of business sense will say it’s always good. But in today’s economic climate, it’s not just good, it’s purely essential. And not just for Covisio, for our customers too. We see them reach to us to sit down together as partners. They share their goals, needs, and challenges (budgetary or otherwise) and they ask us to work hand-in-hand with them on their marketing plan. So, I hope I don’t betray their trust by sharing a few of the trends we see repeating in our interactions with many of them in the last few months.

First and foremost, technology marketing budgets for ‘09 are indeed scrutinized. Our B2B customers are experiencing sales cycles that are getting longer because of the market inertia that’s settling in their own verticals due to recession fears. So, they carefully look back into their organizations cutting costs, limiting investments, and trimming budgets – marketing budgets included.

This in turn forces marketing teams to urgently seek programs that can generate demonstratable ROI. And this is then manifesting itself in three well-identified decision plans:

• Focus on direct field marketing vs. branding and corporate marcom. Direct marketing initiatives have a more immediate effect on sales and this is what most companies need to survive these hard times.
• Focus on online vs. traditional marketing channels. Campaigns involving email marketing, search engine marketing, and online events such as webinars or podcasts can be launched even with moderate budgets and have well-measured ROIs.
• Focus on buying vs. building. Although not a true marketing analogy, leveraging and integrating outside resources to get things done is a way to keep up with ambitious marketing goals, given that hiring in most marketing organizations is currently frozen.

However, what we are also seeing in this marketing downturn – arguably a bit unexpectedly – is an ongoing strong focus on Web 2.0 and social media marketing that doesn’t seem to slow down. And I say this can be considered to be a somehow unexpected trend, because social media is not directly linked to lead generation objectives that companies strive for today. But then, these companies seem to now clearly see the strategic value of social media for relationship and network marketing in the long term and they choose to consciously keep pursing such efforts even in the face of a difficult environment.

In closing, one final word. Given the tough economic conditions worldwide, companies face hardships but also opportunities. This is something not to be overlooked. Now is a great time to jump on your competitors and hit on their weaknesses. It’s a time to prove your strategy and see to excel in your execution. It’s a time to inspire and energize your employees to work towards a common goal. And to do that you need marketing strong on your side. And I would say not necessarily quantity marketing, but certainly quality marketing. Now is the time for it more than ever!

We marketers like to think that we’ve evolved our function into a finely tuned discipline. We have expertly crafted marketing plans, we relentlessly measure results, and we hold ourselves accountable for sales goals. All well and good, but Anne Holland puts it nicely when she says that while marketers have raised their reputations as tacticians, we are still not seen as mission-critical strategic leaders.

So despite all of our efforts, marketing is still the low hanging fruit when it comes to budget cuts.

I think HBS professor Gail McGovern nails this problem on the head. She calls it the Marketing-CEO disconnect:

• CEO’s don’t perceive the same pressing need to master the marketing discipline as they do, for example, finance to meet compliance issues.
• Unlike other functions that have establish techniques (e.g. inventory management, reengineering), there are no obvious and permanent cost-cutting results to be gained through marketing.
• CEOs expect their CMO’s to drive marketing decision, but no one is singularly accountable for the results. This makes it difficult to track financial impact of marketing investments.

My opinion is marketers get so caught up in details, that we can’t see the strategic big picture. In high tech marketing, we relentlessly measure but fail to correlate our metrics with overall revenue goals. This makes us unaccountable.

Marketing understand customers and their changing needs better than the rest of the organization, yet we can’t translate this into the language of business: ROI, margins, stockholders equity and cash flow. This disconnects us from the power strings.

Finally, we marketers like to showcase our results by highlighting our cool creative campaigns and the leads and brand awareness they generate. However, unless we can also demonstrate systematic processes that provide repeatable results, we will continue to be thought of simply as cost center.

When I initially decided to work in marketing (coming from R&D technology management), the first words our VP of Marketing told me were: “That’s great news! Only you do understand that you just lost 50% of your brainpower simply by joining the marketing team!” Really? In marketing? With all this left-brain / right-brain activity you do here?

I hate to say he made a good point. Marketing is definitely not what is meant (and paid for) to be. You see that in every industry sector and especially in technology.

Consider the following points.

• Marketing is the first division to downsize when things are getting tough and a company is looking to stick to its vital functions. On the other hand, everyone is turning to marketing to generate buzz and cheer when things are going well. What’s really the message here?
• Marketing is less and less a factor for innovation and new product development. Product strategy in technology companies is mostly driven by the R&D department and new technology products are shaped to map to customer requirements by the sales teams directly in the field.
• Marketing is considered more of a “necessary-evil” intermediary between R&D and sales. According to engineers, marketers do not understand technology and according to salesmen, marketers do not really share the pain of having to close deals and meet quota numbers.
• Marketing’s performance at the corporate strategic level is rarely defined, quantified, understood or rewarded. Marketing executives are now under more pressure than ever from CEOs and Boards to increase marketing budget’s ROI. But how can they improve it if they don’t even measure it? There’s no surprise then that, according to recent research, the average tenure of a CMO today is just above 2 years (and actually less in tech companies), the lowest for any C-level executive.
• New marketing technologies (including but not limited to mobile advertising, search engine optimization, webcasts, blogs, social networking and others) are spreading fast and, when applied rigorously, can have a real impact on technology marketing goals. Very few CMOs are on top of these new technologies and therefore fail to apply them to their firms’ benefit leaving tremendous opportunities to potential competitors and new entrants.

Why is that? Is everyone missing the point what the value of marketing is? Or does marketing bring that upon itself? And if so, how can we fix it?

Northwestern University’s Prof. Don Schultz wrote a powerful article in Marketing News back in 2001 identifying the need to change marketing as we know it. He suggested to focus on value creation and management instead of what is today known as marketing. He was right. Marketing needs to change. Change role. Change scope. Change expertise. Change faces. Change mindset.