Prof. Dutta and Dr. Fraser characterize traditional business networks as vertical (e.g. based on an individual’s position within a corporation) and social networks as horizontal (e.g. based on an individual’s contribution to a dialogue or project at hand). They then go ahead to describe how these new virtual networks are driving change not only within business environments but also in individual lives and across societies at large. The authors agree that the current economic climate is creating a widespread insecurity amongst professionals and this further leads to record membership growth in social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and others.
The numbers certainly support their arguments. Facebook is closing 2008 reporting stunning numbers:

• More than 140 million users worldwide.
• Each user has an average of 100 friends.
• Each user spends an average of 20 mins per day on Facebook.
• More than 70% of users are outside the US.
• More than 52,000 applications and widgets are available on the Facebook platform.

LinkedIn also experienced record growth in 2008 and it currently counts more than 30 million users worldwide. In October 2008, Nielsen Online reported a year-over-year growth of 193% for LinkedIn and of 116% for Facebook. Expect these numbers to go up in 2009.

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 marketing vs. branding and traditional 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!

However, aside from opinion blog postings (that most corporate blogs do generate in abundance), there’s a set of other, less well-known blog tactics that contribute to the success of a corporate blog … tactics that encourage two-sided communication by demonstrating the ability to both listen to and talk through the company’s blog:

• Digest-style posts: These posts provide a valuable service to readers by giving them a snapshot of a particular space and supplying links to information they might be interested in. By pointing readers to smart stimulating content, their enjoyment of it is transferable to the site that sent them to it, building goodwill that results in more bookmarks and incoming links.
• News aggregation posts: Given the plethora of industry news in the technology space, these posts serve as a guide to the latest happenings. They are a useful service for technologists - even if they’re competitors - and will raise the site’s online profile over time.
• Dialogue contributions: These are essay-style posts about implementing a product, a new industry report or trend, or a long response to a thought-provoking post on another blog. They are critical for adding to the conversation in the blogosphere. These posts are often written by subject matter experts and hit on the industry’s most relevant topics.
• Comments / questions: Social media is a two-way street and a key element here is strong contributions to well chosen, relevant blogs. These are not leading questions or comments written to target search engine keywords. Rather, they are questions or comments of general interest and engagement to provide feedback that is of high value to other authors in the space.
• Blogrolls: A strong blogroll (list of favorite and relevant blogs) serves as a valuable information referral service. Therefore, careful consideration should be applied when building a corporate blogroll. In the technology space, blogrolls usually include a mix of technology, industry and educational (how-to) blogs.

Firms using blogging in their marketing arsenal need to understand the opportunities – and potential pitfalls – of welcoming interaction with readers. Web 2.0 isn’t simply tossing your opinion or casual posts into the blogosphere. Rather, social media requires careful consideration, planning and execution if these strategies are to successfully enhance more traditional – and proven – marketing initiatives.

On the professional side, one of the ways we use del.icio.us for our clients is to consolidate relevant news articles from our RSS feed readers, manual searches and other bookmarking sites; tag them with search terms; and provide notes about why we think the information is valuable. Like my recipes, I thought this was a truly spectacular service. I thought our clients would shower us with praise and gratitude for saving so much of their time and arming them with such powerful information. Actually, they barely glance at it.

I was disappointed, but I couldn’t give up my del.icio.us habit. As it turns out, I was recently writing a white paper for one of our clients. For me, the thing that takes the biggest chunk of time is not the writing, it’s the external research to complement and validate our client’s internal knowledge. Unforeseen by me, my daily 10-15 minutes of bookmarking created a complete gold mine when it came time to churn out compelling sales material. Sure, I had the paid research from Gartner, Forrester, IDC, etc. But what del.icio.us provided me was the ability to find the needles in the haystack - those golden nuggets of information that can make a great white paper a truly spectacular one. At my fingertips, I suddenly had references to facts, figures and stats that are hard to come by. I found compelling and quirky quotes. I had a plethora of real world examples. I had links to free research I didn’t know was available. I even had a couple or really terrific sound bites to leverage. The best part – I got to watch our client bicker over which one of them was going to get the authoring credit.

Yeah, I love del.icio.us. Anything that’s free and makes me – and ultimately my clients - look this good is a winner.

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.

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.