Marketing Musings

They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, and it can certainly be nice to present data in visual form. But on the IT and analytical side, we are sometimes skeptical of pretty pictures. We worry they can oversimplify data, mislead viewers, or prevent the kind of manipulation (i.e. sorting, filtering, and pivoting) we need to garner real business insights.

So, when should you use your data to create a visual representation of your business intelligence? I thinks it depends on two main factors:

• Who is your audience? Are you talking to other analysts, your marketing team, or executives? How much time will you have? What are their priorities? As with any presentation, this should guide how detailed your visualization is.
• Will the visualization make your data substantially clearer? Can you find a visual format that is easily comprehensible? You want the visualization to illuminate your data, rather than obscuring it. If your charts distract viewers from the important insights, causing them to fixate on red herrings, reconsider your visualization.

Because we have more data, faster processing, and more complex data sources, Business Intelligence now has access to a quantity (and quality) of data that was previously only accessible to enormous research firms—or NASA. Making sense of this data is harder than ever, and design can be a vital part of digesting and presenting data effectively. (A recent TED talk did a great job of showing just how helpful it can be.)

IT’s cultural hesitation about “just” pretty pictures is justified: how many times have we had someone draw up an elegant UI on a wireframe, but neglect to involve the technical team in discussions about feasibility and long term flexibility and support? We know that starting with the picture can run the risk of creating unrealistic expectations or ignoring technical realities. We prefer to start with data and the ability to sort, filter, pivot and manipulate it in whatever ways we need to make our analysis.

On the other hand, if I’m a Chief Marketing Officer and I can quickly illustrate—with hard data—my claim that this year’s campaigns have been more effective than last year’s, my CEO is much more likely to sign off on the budget I’m seeking for next year. A dramatically sloped line, intriguingly weighted pie chart, or clear spatial correlation can be stunningly persuasive. What if I could look at multiple campaigns and channels and overlay the impact one has when used in conjunction with another one? For instance, email and a quick follow up phone call vs. a newsletter sent out after a trade show?

If I’m a business owner, good data visualization can give me a snapshot of how my business is performing as well as helping me spot trends and trouble spots more quickly. For the techie in IT, visualization provides validation for my business intelligence initiatives by increasing understanding of them among those who operate more at the business level.

Recently I attended a Seattle Technical Start Up meeting, where Tableau Software presented their method for visualization of data about FAA accidents with various types of birds. The type of bird was represented by a colored circle which grew in size relative to the total cost of the collision with the airplane. At a glance, you could tell which type of bird caused the greatest damage and filter by time of day or type of aircraft, drilling down to the underlying source and raw data to appease their need to see the numbers.

If we can more quickly and clearly understand the vast amounts of data we all are confronted with on a daily basis and use this information to make changes in our business processes earlier on, we’re one step closer to the promised land of analytical enlightenment.

Contact me at brianh@projectlineinc.com if you would like to learn more.

Online customer communities are all the rage these days. One doesn’t have to look very far to see a Facebook or Twitter page rife with customers chattering back and forth, providing valuable word of mouth advertising without the cost of big media buys. However, for every Comcast and Ford, there’s a graveyard of communities that never get off the ground. The scenario goes something like this:

• Step 1: Enterprise 2.0 savvy marketer gets buy-in from boss on a customer community.
• Step 2: Enterprise 2.0 savvy marketer builds community using the newest, latest cool online tool – something with lots of vowels in its name.
• Step 3: Enterprise 2.0 savvy marketer invites customer community to visit the online site.
• Step 4: and then nothing happens…

Well, the boss complains about a failed project, but that’s likely not the desired result. When it comes to online communities, the argument of nature vs. nurture is irrelevant. If you lock five people in a room for a period of time, those persons have no choice but to interact. In the online world, there’s always something else vying your communities’ eyeballs.

You can do everything right in planning your community, but without ongoing management, marketing, and maintenance, you set yourself up for a lone spike in traffic, and that’s it. As much as organizations want customer feedback, customers also want a reason to come back to the community. You don’t have to create elaborate content to keep users returning, but you will need to maintain an ongoing presence that speaks to the needs of your customer base.

This maintenance should be as much a part of the community plan as setting up the goals and choosing your initial customer targets, and resources should be allocated accordingly. Plan for ongoing content creation, and remember that even if you intend to be the key point of engagement for your community, your time is not free. In most cases, a successful customer community has a dedicated community manager that can focus on community promotion, content creation, community monitoring, and reporting. A dedicated community manager can help you build a stronger relationship between your company and your customers.

At Projectline, we love nothing more than creating spaces for the voice of the customer to ring loud and clear. We can help you build and grow a community where your customers can share their experiences, learn from your leadership, and provide much-needed feedback for strategic planning. When run correctly, these communities can also increase customer loyalty and positive word of mouth.

We’re excited to share a great new article from our Business Intelligence team: 4 Steps to a Better Customer Dimension.

Good business intelligence is invaluable in helping companies decipher the flood of information about their customers. A well-designed, flexible customer dimension is crucial to gathering, filtering, and presenting customer data effectively.

Our article spells out the most important considerations in building or improving a robust customer dimension. We offer recommendations that are relevant for business intelligence challenges shared by startups and Fortune 500 corporations alike. We’ll discuss why you should plan for core business needs, prepare for flexibility, prioritize for swift adoption, and design with the future in mind.

It’s totally free to read and download, so please–take a look, read it through, and let us know if it raises any questions for you. We’d love to answer them in the next installment!

At Projectline we have produced dozens of testimonial videos for our clients all over the world. We have also seen hundreds of videos that are just short of great due to a few common mistakes. Occasionally we are even asked to go against our better judgment and knowledge to create a video that is less of a true customer story. We resist when we can.

Lighting? Good sound? A huge production team? Hiring the right consulting firm to help? No, these aren’t where the most critical mistakes are made.

If you are just embarking on your first customer or partner testimonial videos or you need a refresher, let me share with you the 3 most common mistakes that can render a video significantly less impactful. As helpful as they can be with most content, don’t let your branding manager or your senior executive bully you into changing your true testimonials into marketing mush:

• Don’t narrate the story. Here’s the thing: if YOU are telling the story instead of your customer, you are losing the single most powerful effect of the video. A narrator can and will say anything their client asks of them. A customer will not. Let your customer tell the story, because they’ll be more trustworthy. Ask them questions that bring out the full story from beginning to end. To that same end, do not have your customer memorize a script or specific ways to say things. Let them break your brand rules and be genuine.
• Don’t appear in your video. Your audience isn’t interested in what you have to say about your own products or services. Even if your Account Manager, Technical Consultant, or Customer Service Rep was instrumental in the customer’s satisfaction, don’t interview your internal team about how great they are or how they helped. Let the customer tell the story. Let your customer talk about them if it was important.
• Don’t over-emphasize branding throughout the video or place product logos in every shot. We’ve all seen videos where the company shows the product logo every time the customer says the product name! There is no need to show your product logo over and over – in fact, it disrupts the story and turns a genuine interview and customer testimonial into one more piece of marketing fluff. Include your logo and URL at the end of the video with a call to action.

You can have the tiniest budget video, but as long as you let the customer tell the real story, you have gold in your hands. Don’t let over production and micro-management overshadow a real life story. Go forth. Record. Share.

[The videos above are ones we're proud of. One highlights one of our own happy customers, and the other is a video we produced on behalf of a client.]

I spent the first half of last week at Gartner’s Customer 360 conference, which used to be known as the Gartner CRM conference. As part of my attendance, I was asked to take part in a focus group that provided feedback on the rebranding and conference changes, which led to some interesting perspectives on what “Customer 360” meant and what the conference was all about.

Some participants thought the new title implied too much emphasis on data and metrics, and others were sorry to see the “CRM” moniker go, but I think the change demonstrates the coming of age of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and the convergence of marketing and business intelligence. The new name, to me, shows that the industry has recognized the need to get a full 360 degree view of the customer.

One of my favorite sessions that spoke to this was by Gartner Analyst Bill Gassman. Called “How Marketing Benefits from Data Analysis and Marketing Skills,” it focused on three major areas: how BI can help with marketing strategy, bringing the business and IT closer together, and the importance of data quality. His presentation described some of the ways that a good business intelligence framework can contribute to that 360-view of the customer by avoiding information silos.

The focus on comprehensive customer insight is especially important in the current economic climate, with tightening budgets; the CEO, CFO, and Sr. Marketing management are all being held more accountable for the return on their marketing spend. They need the information to decide which programs are most effective.

At Projectline, we’re helping our customers get the insight they need by helping unlock siloed data, improve data quality, and manage the whole view of the customer. To learn more, contact me at brianh@projectlineinc.com.