Weekly Roundup: 3/30/12

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Marketing Musings

Welcome to the Projectline Weekly Roundup. We know that the week can move pretty fast. Since Fridays sometimes offer a chance for a breather, we wanted to share links to some of the articles we liked this week. As always, we’d love to get your take, so feel free to leave a comment or chat us up on Twitter. Happy reading and have a great weekend!

Weekly Roundup

Content Strategy
Video Marketing, The Future?—Videos are powerful vehicles for content. This article, from the Marketing Donut site, talks about some of the discrete benefits of videos. I don’t agree with everything, but differences of opinion are good.

Content Strategy on a Budget—This post gives some great tips for implementing a content strategy initiative on a tight budget. I think most companies are in this boat.

Marketing
B2B Sales and Marketing Tools—This is an interesting look at some of the challenges with B2B selling and marketing in today’s internet world. If this is your domain, take a look at this.

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MarketMix 2012: Keeping the Conversation Going

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Marketing Musings

This year marked my fourth consecutive year at MarketMix, and I have to say: it just keeps getting better! For readers who might not be aware, MarketMix is an annual event sponsored the Puget Sound chapter of the American Marketing Association (PSAMA). I arrived this year confident that I would leave at the end of the day with renewed eagerness to pursue what we as marketers all strive to accomplish—making a difference for our clients. And I wasn’t disappointed.

It’s amazing to see our community of local marketers sharing in, and yes, amplifying the enthusiasm year after year. For the second consecutive year, PSAMA representatives said that #MarketMix was the top-trending hashtag for Seattle that day. It was great to see fellow Projectliners joining the conversation online, including @projectline (thanks @CaptainChunk) and @SandraSullivan.

This year’s theme—“Thriving in a Conversation Economy”—was sprinkled throughout the keynote speeches and breakout sessions. But I thought that Ted Rubin, who gave the opening keynote, best articulated this idea. Rubin is the Chief Social Marketing Officer at Collective Bias and Social Media Strategist for MARS Advertising. Among other notable accomplishments, he’s known for popularizing the phrase “Return on Relationships” (ROR). And he had the audience riveted, not only by his approach (including the fancy socks and vest he was wearing, which he said are part of his personal brand!) but by what he had to say on this topic. He asserted that, although customer relationships have long been the currency of business, social media tools provide dynamic new ways for building and strengthening these relationships—if we use them well.

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Target in Trouble for Targeting?

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Marketing Musings

Recently, I read a fascinating (at least, to me) article about how Target is using data analysis to, well, target their marketing efforts. I won’t recap the entire story, but the gist is that Target used sophisticated data mining techniques in order to predict which women were most likely to be pregnant—based on their purchasing history. Target then sent coupons for pregnancy-related products to these customers.

One father got upset when his teenaged daughter received these coupons in the mail. Turns out, she had yet to tell her parents the news. Enter current brouhaha.

I found out about this story via Twitter (nearly my only source for news these days), and the commentary that accompanied it used a variety of inflammatory words, including: “creepy marketing,” “gross,” or―my personal favorite—“creeptastic.” Meanwhile, I found myself feeling a bit awestruck by how ingenious Target’s approach was.

I understand that the pregnancy thing is what makes this example stand out and seem a bit “creepy” to some readers. But, it seems to me, the real story here is just how powerful data has become for marketers. This story highlights the fact that you can learn a lot about a customer with the large amounts of data at your disposal, and marketers are going to do everything they can with it. Do marketers have a responsibility to use the data appropriately?

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Picture of the Week: A Bit O’ Luck and Cheer to Last the Year

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Pic of the Week

Here at Projectline, we’ve recently started a project to capture all the places we work and bring together our team around the world. Every weekday morning at 10:42 am, our team is invited to send in a picture of where they are, what they’re doing, or who they’re with. Each Monday, we’ll choose our favorite picture of the previous week and share its story here.

10:42 March 16, 2012 - Happy Saint Patty's Day, O'Projectliners!

Though the Guinness has vanished from our ‘fridge, the next celebration with colleagues and clients is never far at hand. As March winds down and Spring unfolds, may the spirit of St. Paddy’s live on throughout the year.

Which Early Adopter Program to Use―and When

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Customer Engagement, Marketing Musings, Technology Adoption Programs

This piece brings our series on early adopter programs to a close. So far, we’ve covered the following topics:

Finally, the Projectline team will turn its attention to guiding you through which program(s) to consider using, and under which circumstances. This information will help you to decide how to meet your program goals, and obtain maximum benefit from your early adopter (or pre-release) product cycles.

We can approach this in one of two ways: chronologically or by objective. Either way, we’ll need to look at the technology adoption lifecycle (click on the image below to enlarge):


Now that we’ve got a visual reference, let’s consider the different programs we’re talking about, and align them to the graphic:

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In Praise of Editors

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Marketing Musings

I’ve heard stories about famous writers who refused to have their work edited. Anne Rice, who wrote Interview with the Vampire, is known for a rant on Amazon.com (the original post has been removed, but is preserved on the Internet), in which she writes:

“And no, I have no intention of allowing any editor ever to distort, cut, or otherwise mutilate sentences that I have edited and re-edited, and organized and polished myself. I fought a great battle to achieve a status where I did not have to put up with editors making demands on me, and I will never relinquish that status.”

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