Highlights from MarketMix 2011

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Community, Marketing Musings, Social Media

Attending conferences is always a mix of dread and anticipation—what am I going to learn? Who will I meet? Will I be able to get the most out of the sessions I pick?

Last week’s MarketMix 2011 had a nice complement of interesting sessions (everything from group buying to optimizing your LinkedIn for career growth) and its social media presence was formidable—I heard from our PSAMA representative that #MarketMix was the top trending hashtag for Seattle by early afternoon! It was also fun to follow the hashtag during break-out sessions to snag a glimpse of what others were learning.

One particularly powerful point was the value of partnerships. Speakers from PEMCO, Microsoft, and Virgin America each talked about how they embrace partnerships as a way to provide benefit for all brands involved and save money. For instance, during Microsoft’s recent Dynamics CRM 2011 launch, Microsoft encouraged partners to syndicate the launch event on their websites. Porter Gale reminded us that Virgin America still works like a start-up, which means heavily leveraging partnerships with companies like HBO and Entourage. Virgin also recently assisted the City of San Francisco Animal Care and Control (SF ACC) by flying Chihuahuas from San Francisco to New York so the dogs could be adopted into loving new homes (this garnered them a huge amount of free press, as you can imagine!).

Another relevant point for businesses was that you need to give people the opportunity to share. If you make it easy for them to share, they will! This point was driven home by Rod Brooks, VP & CMO of PEMCO Insurance, when he talked about how giving people a place to do something, share something, or get something has helped PEMCO integrate the voice of the customer.

I find that listening to other voices in the business always teaches me something and MarketMix helped me find new voices to follow, including @bcahill, a principal at social media agency Banyan Branch; @BrianSolis, a prominent author on social media and business; and @NW_Mktg_Guy, the CMO of Pemco.

If you made to to MarketMix, what were your favorite insights? Who did you follow? What did you learn?

Social Media Is an Experience

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Marketing Musings, Social Media

Recently, somebody I follow on Twitter lamented that the term “social media” is really just code for Facebook and Twitter. They wanted to know, where’s the innovation?

I can see their point. More often than not, “social media” refers to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. You could probably also lump blogs in there. I agree there is not a ton of innovation happening to the tools of social media, but I’d argue that we are seeing innovation in the experiences created through those tools.

Many times innovation comes out of a need. Right now, the fact is that Facebook and Twitter are doing a really good job of filling the current social media need—providing the technology needed to share information. I think the current push is towards changing how people use social media for business and pleasure by “innovating” the experience.

When you think of social media or a social media strategy, you need to think in terms of experience. How do you want people to interact with your presence? How do you want them to go away feeling after they have communicated with you through social media? If you start asking these kinds of questions, you’ll start to see how you can use the tools to serve your audience and your purpose.

IdeaStorm screenshot

If you look at how Dell is using IdeaStorm to interface with customers and their ideas, you’ll see a company that uses social media techniques (posting, voting, sharing) to create the experience of shaping the direction of the company. They certainly won’t use all of the ideas, but they are providing a constructive space for their customers to comment on how Dell can do things better.

Many companies are revising how they view social media. Here at Projectline, we are creating initiatives to encourage social media use by all our employees. We want our employees to communicate with clients, share their vast marketing knowledge, and be active in online communities. So if you see more Projectliners in the social media world, you’ll know why.

How are you using social media to “innovate” the experience?

Master Data Management for Marketing

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Business Analytics, Marketing Musings

Projectline recently released a white paper on Master Data Management (MDM) for the healthcare industry. Although it’s packed with content, much of it may not seem obviously applicable to our more marketing-based thinking. But it does offer some great ways to think about data, and we’d like to pull out two of those points from the white paper and apply them to the difficult process of measuring return on investment in marketing.

Point 1: People, Process, and Technology:

“The Projectline approach has three core dimensions, which revolve around people, processes, and tools. While many consulting firms focus primarily on tools and processes, Projectline believes the role of people is just as important because they possess the institution’s collective knowledge and are responsible for implementing information tools and processes. These core dimensions are Data Stewardship, Data Governance, and Technology. All of them must be taken into account as an organization undertakes a project to discover its master data and to design, build, and implement a solution.”

As in healthcare, new marketing measurement initiatives often focus on process or tools, but underplay the vital role of people in getting good data that leads to valuable insights. Without full participation from marketers, the data going into the system will always be flawed—and the stories the data tells will always be untrustworthy. People need to trust the technology and understand the process. In turn, the technology needs to be created in a way that honors existing processes. And the processes need to be developed with a full understanding of the technology and how it fits into people’s work.

Point 2: Quick Wins:

“Develop effective implementation plans for ‘quick wins.’ Quick wins are particularly important because they lead functional areas to recognize the importance of MDM and accept it right away.”

When you create a long-term system to optimize marketing by measuring marketing initiatives, it can be easy to get focused on crafting a pure system or shifting ingrained behaviors and taxonomies. But to gain the confidence of teams—and executives—it is vital to define early success and make it achievable. It will be much easier to justify continued investment in a program if you can point to success within the first quarter after implementation, rather than pointing to numbers far into the future.

MDM for Healthcare White Paper: Managing Critical Information in a Dynamic Marketplace

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Business Intelligence, Marketing Musings

Here at Projectline, we write a lot about marketing. We love marketing (as you may have noticed).

But it’s not all we do. We also have a Business Intelligence (BI) team, and they feel as passionate about BI as the customer evidence team does about case studies, good content, and social media. To share some of their expertise and wisdom, we’ve just published an article about Master Data Management (MDM) for the healthcare industry, and we’re thrilled to share it with you. Here’s a brief overview:

Market and regulatory issues in the healthcare industry are driving and increasing the need for accurate and efficient flow of information, with the result that healthcare providers must ensure that their data is relevant, up-to-date, and comprehensive. We see Master Data Management, an approach to creating and maintaining consistent data, as a key IT strategy for achieving this goal.

Our article looks at how you can use Master Data Management as a key strategy for addressing these challenges and discusses the Projectline Services approach to MDM for healthcare. We apply three core dimensions—processes, tools, and especially people—to maximize “data wellness” and help make healthcare organizations more efficient and agile to thrive in a dynamic marketplace.

If this sounds like something that would be helpful to you—or someone you know—download the whole article to learn more.