This year Covisio had the opportunity to run a number of social media listening campaigns for our clients worldwide (please note that our clients are primarily in the high technology sector). As we are rapidly approaching the end of the year, I wanted to share a few real-world cases that we came across and I think are quite useful to show what can happen (or not happen) in social media monitoring programs.

So here are our most telling stories:

Disgruntled user group on Facebook. One of our clients was operating under the not-so-uncommon assumption that: “Our firm is not yet doing anything on social media, so there shouldn’t be anything on us out there, right?” Unfortunately, wrong! For this particular client, there were a number of LinkedIn groups of current and ex- employees, a few product and promotional videos (that our client did not know they even existed) on YouTube, and at least two groups (with memberships at the thousands) dedicated to complaints about the client’s product on Facebook. A very basic listening campaign picked all that up and helped direct and prioritize our client’s social media efforts to remedy the developing bad reputation.

PR agency miss. One of our clients was very proud of one particular feature of their product that differentiated themselves from their competitors in the marketplace. A leading US newspaper published an article on the impact this particular feature had on the market and invited our client’s top competitor to comment on it (without even mentioning our client in the article). Our client’s PR agency completely missed this opportunity both before and after it was published. Now, the newspaper also published a post on their technology blog about their article, which our listening campaign picked up. Based on this information, our client had to revisit their relationship with their PR agency, but, more importantly, they were able to post a comment on the newspaper’s blog with their own view on the particular feature, which it turn generated some excellent traffic on their own blog where they discuss in detail their differentiating functionality.

New sales opportunity. Our listening campaign picked up a blog post of a CxO that was explaining in detail their immediate need for a specific product that one of our clients provides. The blog post included a thorough analysis of requirements and a good qualification of the opportunity in terms of influencers, competitors, and timeframes. Our client was able to jump in the opportunity and they are now in the final shortlist.

Sensitive material on YouTube. Actually, something that’s very common. Our listening campaign revealed a couple of product demo videos on YouTube with sensitive information about the technology of one of our clients. The videos were posted by an implementation consultant with the best of intentions, but our client was uncomfortable with the information disclosed, so the videos were quickly taken down in agreement with the consultant.

Competitive intelligence. A wealth of information here:

• Figuring out what blogs from our client’s competitors are working and what not. Examples: We came across a competitor blog with tremendous engagement level and we learned a lot from it. But we also came across a competitor blog that does not allow commenting (which, in general, is against what we consider best practices) and we learned a few things from it as well.
• Uncovering “black-hat” SEO techniques our client’s competitors were using by publishing duplicate content in multiple social media outlets just to build links to their site.
• Discovering aggressive and unsolicited tweets from our client’s competitors to infiltrate conversations on Twitter and blatantly promote their product.
• Identifying new competitors in our client’s field based on their activity on social media.

PR pickup on Twitter. How many followers did our client’s press release reach via tweets and re-tweets? Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands? A useful number we have been able to benchmark against on behalf of our clients.

SEO hints. One of our clients is providing a technology solution in an emerging market. Despite a well-coordinated SEO effort, our listening campaign found out that some of their keywords were not used in the context that was initially assumed, so they had to be reevaluated.

Positive mentions. This is an important one. Our listening campaign for a specific marketing program of one of our clients found out a number of ongoing positive mentions on blogs, Twitter accounts, forums, wikis, social networks. It made a huge difference for our client to be able to identify these mentions and thank people for their feedback.

Conversations spanning multiple media. A very influential blog post generated a tremendous amount of discussion in the form of comments, additional posts on other blogs, new topics in forums, and opinionated conversations on social networks. The ability to consolidate all this information and get a global understanding of the issue at hand and all the different stakeholders involved was very valuable for our client to decide on how and when to engage in the conversation.

Inside information on industry events. Before, during, and after major industry events there is a lot of activity on blogs, social networks, and Twitter. Although part of this activity is mainly for event attendees to connect to each other and socialize at the event, we have found some great insights about the topics covered in the event for one of our clients that was not able to attend.

These are actually true cases we came along throughout year and not theoretical scenarios. Feel free to share your own social media monitoring stories from 2009.

Following up to my discussion on the value (or lack thereof) of email marketing in today’s environment from an earlier blog posting, here are the six things you definitely need to have thought through before launching an email campaign.

1. Goal. “What is it in for ALL?” Don’t forget that email is a touch point for potential and existing customers. You are actually reaching people out there, who may actually take time out of their busy schedule to read what you wrote to them. Never bug these people without a clear goal in mind for you but also for them. So, make sure you are prepared to bring real and tangible value to your recipients to make it worth their time and interest. Having a goal is also key to being able to measure the performance of your campaign afterwards.

2. List. Send your email message to a list that is both opted-in and highly-targeted to what you are offering. Interrupting via email without having the recipient’s permission is one of the quickest ways to alienate prospects and customers, says email marketing consultant Simms Jenkins, author of The Truth about Email Marketing (FT Press, 2008) in a recent Marketing Profs article. Same applies when your message is not in line with the needs and profiles of your list members.

3. Content. You need to be able to convey value that makes an important and immediate difference to your recipients. And you need to do that in a clear and concise manner with actual proof points that what you are talking about is tangible and not marketing fluff. Also, make it easy for your recipients to engage with you via clear calls to action, specific landing pages, and options to interact online.

4. Tactics. There is a tremendous amount of empirical research and best practices on the web covering subject lines, “from” lines, optimal sizes of messages, message formats and layouts, availability of text versions of messages, best days/times to send emails, and detailed ways to test your email campaign to name a few. These do make a difference, so please follow them.

5. Metrics. Unless you measure it, you cannot improve on it. Marketing needs to be able to justify its ROI, so measuring the performance of email campaigns is not a nice-to-have, but a must-have. You should track bounce rates, open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and costs per conversion, and then optimize accordingly. And you should track these metrics for each target audience or emailing list you are going after.

6. Respect. Make sure you are honest and clear in your email message, you leave no room in the language you use to potentially trick or deceive your recipients, you support Sender Policy Framework (SPF) in your DNS, and you adhere to all types of compliance defined in the CAN-SPAM act. This is not a detail, it is as important as respect is for successful business relationships.

Malcolm Gladwell in the afterword of “The Tipping Point” wrote that email communication is showing “symptoms of immunity” with its growing overuse by communicators and marketers. This should come as no surprise.

Email marketing is clearly a cost-effective way to reach target audiences and is already a mainstream channel for internet marketing especially in today’s economic climate that calls for restricted marketing budgets. But are the returns there? Do recipients respond effectively to marketing messages mass-delivered via email along with tens or hundreds or even thousands of other messages that flood their Inboxes on a daily basis? How often and under what circumstances do marketing leads convert via the reception of an email? That’s where things are hazy. Just look in your Inbox and see what messages are really important to read and respond to, what messages are just informative to browse through, what messages are rather indifferent and a waste of time to read, and what messages are merely spam (whether caught as such by the spam filters or not).

There is no shortage of reports, analyses, best practices, and case studies on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of email marketing. There is value in most of them, no question, but I just think it’s a matter of marketing strategy as well. So, I would like to share a strategic plan of success – in its simplified form – that we have used over and over with our clients (all in the technology sector) in a variety of email programs to target a multitude of different industries. It’s nothing outside what common sense and basic marketing principles dictate, but, in our experience, email marketing campaigns are carried out without proper strategic planning way too often. And if the plan is missing, in today’s landscape where professionals (including decision makers and influencers for marketing purposes) are actually turning more and more “immune” to email, these campaigns are the most likely ones to fail.

In my next blog posting I will go over 6 things you definitely need to have thought about before launching an email campaign.

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.