Greeting Earthlings– Happy Earth Day!

Today, worldwide events demonstrate support for environmental awareness and protection. Projectline endeavors to make every day Earth Day by creating an eco-friendly environment. This includes purchasing products from companies that monitor their environmental impact, serving organic and locally sourced foods, encouraging green commuting, leasing office space that is energy efficient, and sponsoring a Green Team.

Every year, in honor of Earth Day, we also join the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance’s Lake Washington Kayak Cleanup.

In addition to the support of my Projectline family, as a Senior Marketing and Communications Project Manager at Microsoft Research, I have the privilege to work on different projects that help address some of the world’s most urgent challenges. Microsoft Research collaborates with the world’s top academic researchers and institutions to develop technologies that fuel data-intensive scientific research. One area of focus is earth, energy and environment.

Some Microsoft Research projects that help accelerate insight in the environmental and earth sciences include eco-testing a building before it’s built and using technology to help fight forest fires. That’s just a few examples of technology doing good (green) work.

In light of Earth Day, I wanted to share my excitement about a new tool that’s intended to better understand Latin America’s ecology and help protect threatened species. That new tool is LiveANDES (Advanced Network for the Distribution of Endangered Species). It’s developed by a partnership among researchers at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, the LACCIR (Latin American and Caribbean Collaborative ICT Research) Virtual Institute, and Microsoft Research.

LiveANDES is designed to collect, house, and analyze data about Latin America’s wildlife—data that could prove vital to the preservation of the region’s rich but increasingly threatened biodiversity, which has suffered grievously from loss of habitat and climate change. The platform is designed to store and parse data points about Latin America’s wildlife, including photographs, audio and video recordings, and location and sighting data. Researchers use the data stored in the tool to identify species living in Latin America, where they live today, and elements that may be threatening their future.

Ignacio Casas, Executive Director of LACCIR, explains that LiveANDES integrates with the fourth paradigm, a foundational concept of eScience, in which data-intensive computing facilitates scientific discovery. LiveANDES is designed to make parsing the huge volumes of data recorded manageable for researchers. In addition, LiveANDES can help red-list assessment for endangered species and improve information for illegal trafficking of wildlife species. LiveANDES can be developed for every ecological region or country around the world in a bottom up way.

For more information, check out the LiveANDES project page or visit the Microsoft Research Connections Blog. And to get involved with Projectline’s support of the Lake Washington clean-up or other volunteer events, email ivolunteer@projectlineinc.com.

Good content travels well. That’s one way to sum up the conversation from a recent Content Strategy Seattle meetup, which Projectline hosted at its offices in Smith Tower.

In her book titled Content Everywhere, which fed our group’s discussion, author Sara Wachter-Boettcher lays out a methodology for shaping and paring down content so that it is more modular and flexible.

More flexible content is the starting point for a better user experience, regardless of how it’s viewed. Your readers expect to be able to enjoy your content on their tablet, their smartphone, their PC—whatever’s in reach when you catch their attention. Taking a flexible approach to content means you don’t have to anticipate every device your content may acquire in its travels. Instead, it’s built from the ground up to respond to the device it lands on.

Wachter-Boettcher asserts that content modeling is an essential first step in this process. Its purpose is to unpack the core elements of any piece of content, analyze them, and make decisions about their relative importance in delivering the intended message. The output of this exercise is what Wachter-Boettcher calls modular content, “chunks” that are ready to travel.

It turns out that converting blocks of text and images built for a single medium into intelligible bits ready for display on any device is no small task. Immediately, it raises all sorts of challenging questions about what to save and what to scrap. And then, of course, there’s the task of getting this appropriately designated content into a software system where it can be searched, sorted, coded, and sent off to wherever it needs to go.

If all of this sounds like work—it is. So it seems perfectly valid to pose the question, as several people in our discussion group did: what is the return on this investment? Is it really worth the effort to prepare content for every conceivable format?

During our discussion, someone offered the example of a mobile application built for a fairly narrow use-case. The app was intended to help attendees view real-time availability of various conference sessions—while helping them navigate the sprawling venue where the conference was being held. The features were limited and the content was designed primarily with smartphone screens in mind. Relatively little consideration was given to how this information might be friendlier to other screen resolutions and more useful to a broader user population long after the conference was over.

In fact, one member of the group pointed out that this approach to design flouted a bedrock principle of content strategy: that good content is designed to be flexible and future-proof. Still, the person familiar with the conference app defended its practical value. “The UI and the content met the needs of the target audience. It was developed quickly. It was a success, right?”

These two viewpoints seem to be diametrically opposed. But they are actually aligned on one of the most important principles of content strategy. Not every organization has the resources to retool their entire content production infrastructure. Fewer still have an information architect available to lend a hand. But every organization can start by taking a more deliberate approach to content design, one that puts the audience at the center. While the scope and architecture of the conference app precluded engagement with a wider audience, it reflected a clear focus on the immediate needs of end users. Achieving this goal requires the kind of attentive filtering and prioritizing that Wachter-Boettcher discusses in Content Everywhere.

After all, the first step in readying content to be more fluid and transportable is to spend more time considering how it will be used and shared. Practices like content auditing, modeling, and tagging derive from an acceptance that people outside of your organization (your readers, your customers, etc.) are the true owners of the information you distribute. You define the message and the format, but they decide the journey it will take. So prepare your content to travel well. And remember that the time and effort you invest now in making your content more adaptable and responsive is a worthy investment in the future.

You have probably heard the term crowdsourcing, but maybe you’re still not sure of what it is or who is using it. At this year’s PSAMA MarketMix, we got a tour of the crowdsourcing landscape from Mike Reeder, VP of Account Planning & Strategy at Possible, Seattle, and Jennifer Chiu, the author of Roll with Jen, voted 2011 Best Food Blog of Western Washington by Evening Magazine.

If you’re not familiar with crowdsourcing, think of it as a way to invite customers to participate in your company, whether it be providing feedback, ideas, or straight-up cash funding.

Now you’d probably think crowdsourcing is a great resource for individuals or small companies looking for funding or just a little extra support. But big and small companies alike are using crowdsourcing. Companies as traditional as an electrical supply company in Ohio and as innovative as the X Prize Foundation, for example, have used crowdsourcing to fuel product development.

Think about it—if you are instrumental in shaping a company or influencing a company’s product, you feel connected and invested in their success. Why? Because you helped make it happen.

Reeder shared the Lay’s Do Us a Flavor crowdsourced campaign. Lay’s challenged consumers to create new potato chip flavors using three ingredients. Contest winners got their flavors produced and then were tasked with helping promote their product. The chip creators pushed out their products through their social networks and participated in Lay’s promotional spots. The winning flavors include Chicken & Waffles, Cheesy Garlic Bread, and Sriracha. Lay’s not only gained a deeper engagement with their customers, but they also gained insight on what their customers like.

On the smaller business side, Chiu shared her own story on how she used crowdsourcing to take Roll with Jen to the next level. Chiu wanted to expand her blog to TV and had her sights set on Japan as the perfect place to shoot her pilot. She decided to use Kickstarter, a crowdsourcing funding platform for creative projects, to finance her food tour of Japan.

Chiu created a fun video that asked her community if, like her, they ever wished “Anthony Bourdain or Samantha Brown were a small Asian woman.” Her video was humorous, engaging, and spoke to her audience, hip 30-somethings who enjoy discovering the latest haunts, travel, and style. Jen met her funding goal and now she’s on her way to becoming the next Anthony Bourdain—all thanks to the power of crowdsourcing.

How do you position customer reference programs with key reference targets? This question was posed to a panel of reference professionals from organizations including Intel, Citrix, Oracle, and Responsys at the recent Summit on Customer Engagement in Redwood City, California.

Their answer was simple. You don’t pose them as “programs” or something they have to “join.” When the panelists asked if anyone in the audience was still doing this, 99% of the audience did not raise their hands. However, in several sessions I attended over two days, it was evident that many reference professionals in fact were still inviting customers to join their customer reference programs.

If you’re unfamiliar with customer reference programs, they work to cultivate customers who are excited to promote your business through engagement in content and activities that support sales and marketing initiatives. This year’s summit focused on “Customer References and the New Marketing.” Sessions and discussions explored new trends in marketing and the ever-important role of reference programs.

Keynote presenters Chuck Ball, SVP of Health Systems, AmerisourceBergen, and Sean Geehan, author of The B2B Executive Playbook, clearly demonstrated this. Marketers are increasingly focused on the customer experience as customers control brands. The more involvement a customer has with your company the more loyal he or she will be.

Yet, as many professionals at the summit shared, it can be incredibly challenging to get customers to agree to participate in reference activities, especially if they haven’t in the past.

Customer reference programs offer customers various avenues to get involved with brands and in turn have become a key component in driving the customer experience. At the end of the day smart programs are a key ingredient in driving marketing, sales, and organizational success. According to Jeff Garrity, CFO, Services, NCR, “Executive customer programs have proven to be the most effective way to positively impact top and bottom line results.”

The need for strong strategic customer partnerships and relationships is more important than ever. But in practice it can be easier just to approach customers as opportunities arise, then move to the next. As presenters like Ball and Geehan demonstrated, if you’re looking to support the customer experience through your reference program and grow your reference relationships and advocate pool, one-off opportunities are not be the best approach, especially for key reference targets.

And, if you struggle to get customers to “join” your “program,” perhaps consider the words of wisdom from the panelists and welcome new references in the least intimidating way possible while positioning reference programs, not as a “program” per se, but as an avenue to build a stronger relationship and partnership with your organization.

Every year, Projectline sends a notable contingent of marketers to the Puget Sound American Marketing Association’s annual conference. And every year, we come back loaded with ideas and enthusiasm, as this post from last year’s event attests.

This year is no exception—if you’re going to MarketMix 2013, keep an eye out for these and other Projectliners. Here’s what we’re looking forward to this year:

Molly Dee Anderson, Senior Writer: As I worked on Big Data week for Microsoft, I’m eager to hear what the marketing world is saying about big data. I’m interested in the meta-issues related to harnessing big data—and the meta-results that can be realized.

Heather Belliveau, Senior Manager: I hope to hear about the new trends toward modern storytelling as part of our content strategy.

Lisa Sullivan, Marketing Manager: This will be my fifth consecutive year attending MarketMix and I always leave feeling so inspired to bring what I have learned back to my work as a consultant and project manager. My passion lies in advertising and creative so I plan to attend some breakout sessions on related topics and take some key learnings back to Projectline’s creative team.

Sandra Sullivan, Marketing Consultant: I am most looking forward to the keynotes—it can often be the most catalyzing to hear what thought leaders in the marketing industry have to say and it often inspires “ahead of the curve” thinking (at least for the next week). I’m especially anxious to hear Ekaterina Walter’s keynote. It’s not about convincing people that social is a relevant tool anymore; it’s about how to keep agile and be sure you are applying [the right kind of] strategy to your social media tactics.

Are you planning to go to MarketMix 2013? If so, what do you hope to bring back?

If one word sums up Projectline, I would say it is “collaboration”—with our clients, community, and colleagues. Great examples of the latter come from our internal social network (I will let you guess which platform we use…). Here’s a recent example of a thread:

Norm Bowler: In the age of social media, are press releases obsolete? I’d like to hear your opinions. My label is mostly B2C marketing, but soliciting feature coverage and album reviews from web and print outlets is B2B, and my primary approach has been press releases delivered via email. What should I be doing in addition / instead?

Sandra Sullivan: Hi Norm! My client talks about how “the press release is not dead” quite a bit. Here’s an article she shared recently that might give you more food for thought… it’s still one tool in the arsenal, and we have to decide if it’s the *right* one given our goals.

Ish Fuseini: Add elbo.ws to your WP site. Release your music on your website first then follow up with SoundCloud, Bandcamp, etc… You could create a separate page for each artist, follow the same formula and have the links circulating between all artists and the label page. An interesting way to generate more buzz is to invite other artists/producers to do renditions of different songs from your labels by providing stems. You can also try MusicMoz. Here’s another blog post on the elbo.ws site that I found to be informative: http://blog.elbo.ws/about/getting-started-artists-labels-pro.

Norm Bowler: Sandra, thanks for the link. I look forward to reading it soon. Ish, thank you for the suggestions. I have a WordPress-based website that is orphaned. With limited time available, I have decided to concentrate my efforts on Soundcloud for music content and Facebook for blogging (Twitter, too). Both offer distinct advantages over hosting content on a private site: Soundcloud supports tagging and posting to themed groups, which aids in music discovery. It has also undergone a revamp to be more social, basically allowing users to “retweet” tracks they like on their own feed. The big advantage to Facebook is that even with the revised Edgerank behavior limiting reception, it is push rather than pull, and tens (hundreds?) of millions of people connect to it every day. It’s also more suited to micromessaging. I tend to be more essay-length (450 words and up) in blog posts, but Facebook lends itself to a compact stream-of-consciousness conversation. Our artists are already on both Bandcamp and iTunes/Amazon/Emusic/Spotify. I don’t know a thing about elbo.ws—will read up.

Ish Fuseini in reply to Norm Bowler: I definitely love the new Soundcloud. I’ve been playing with the UI since beta and I love how easy it is to share everything. I do think a website presence is key for the overall collection. If you’re strapped for time, you can use a service like IFTT to disperse your content to all the channels necessary. Tumblr might be a good way to go instead of WordPress. I haven’t kept up with Facebook pages as of late but I think fewer and fewer of your fans actually see posts anymore. I might need to catch up on the Edgerank Formula, though. I used to use http://edgerankchecker.com/ for this. You can tweet @chadwittman he’s great at getting back in touch quickly. This way you could buffer your long form messages along with your short messages to fuel the content machine. Elbo.ws is a music crawler that lists all music blogs/artists and labels. It’s how I used to pick up alot of ‘trending’ new music and how I primarily got viewership on my old music blog.

David Dorrian: Hey guys, great discussion! I feel smarter for having read this! Norm, we should add this to our blog post that is currently on hold. I’ll noodle on it. I read Sandra’s PR article, and the comments are very enlightening. What I took away was: the key is to build relationships with journalists in your space—a press release is just a comms vehicle, still valid, but like comms vehicles for all time, much more effective if you develop relationships first/concurrently.

What makes this exchange even better is that Norm is a Database Lead in a BI team in Seattle, Ish is a Campaign Desk Coordinator in a Marketing Ops team in Philadelphia, Sandra works in Customer Engagement out of Seattle, and I have a focus on Research and Strategy, also now in Seattle, though I am from the UK. What unites us is our common passion for B2B marketing!

This collaborative, connected modern workplace, leads to inspiration and enables new perspectives by engagement with colleagues with different backgrounds from across the globe.

If you’re into B2B marketing and this sounds like the kind of workplace you could get on board with—check out the jobs section on our website!

And if you are looking for a B2B marketing consultancy that will provide you with this sort of engaged and connected resource, get in touch via our contact page.

Finally, if this discussion has piqued your interest, Norm and I love to go deep down the rabbit hole in this area. Enjoy (or not—the choice is yours!).

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!

Business Intelligence
Augmenting the Data Warehouse—This quick article presents five common cases of big data usage at companies. They are outlined as data exploration, customer analysis, data expansion, security, and operational analysis. I have a feeling that most big data projects fall into at least one of these buckets if not more.

Mobility and Real-Time Dashboards Will Make Business Intelligence More Pervasive in 2013—Mobile isn’t just how people are doing business, but also where business intelligence is headed. The ability to process data on a tablet while on the go will soon be very common. The author also makes the argument for real-time dashboards and the impact they will have on businesses.

Gartner: Business Intelligence Spending Has a Steady Outlook—Business intelligence is an area that will see continued growth, according to Gartner. With the production of data moving at record paces, the BI over top of it will give smart businesses insight into exactly what’s happening.

Marketing
SlideShare: The Quiet Giant Of Content Marketing—SlideShare has been around for a number of years, but it seems to continually gain steam. These days when I’m doing research I almost always visit SlideShare and do a quick search. Is it a part of your content strategy?

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!

Marketing
Content Marketing Best Practices: 5 Tips for the Modern CMO—What I like most about this article is that fact that as a CMO, he realizes the importance of getting down and dirty with current marketing technologies. As a CMO, you’ve got enough on your plate, but if you don’t use the tools at all, you won’t understand how they can help your business.

In Marketing, People Are Not Numbers—This article is kind of abstract, but I think it brings up an issue that marketers need to be aware of. You can’t just push anymore.

Infographic: B2B Tech Buyers Leverage Video to Advance Purchase Behavior—I like this because it shows the role of video in the B2B technology buying process. Video is a very important communication vehicle and if your company doesn’t have a solid video marketing plan, you need to start thinking about getting one.

Social Media
Vine Tips for B2B Marketing—Vine is a very new video service that lets people share six second videos on social networks like Twitter. I think there is a lot of potential in the video space, so take a look at these tips for using Vine in a business context and try it out.

Harlem Shake—This hot video meme rose fast over the last week. Everybody is doing it. Dip your toe into the world of online video and make your own. (I know this isn’t business related, but sometimes you have to loosen up a bit.)

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!

Marketing
Don’t Anesthetize Your Colleagues with Bad Writing—While this article addresses the colleague to colleague communication channel, it also applies to writing marketing materials. It’s very easy in B2B technology marketing to throw your hands up and say, “what am I supposed to do with this product?” I say keep at it and write engaging content.

How to Transform Yourself Into an Agile Business Blogger—This is a good article on blogging for a business. This type of blogging is certainly different than writing a blog for fun and there are some things you can do to make the process easier. Have a quick read, see if anything feels right to you, and then work it into your process.

Transitional Marketing and the Connected Interface—Though this piece could benefit from a few specific business examples, they’re not included. Instead it’s a good discussion of the movement between marketing channels that are a result of different technology. A topic that certainly warrants some thought.

Social Media
Putting Social to Work for Your Business—I like this post because it’s all about empowering your employees to be brand advocates on behalf of your company. One point this article makes is that your employees should be able to accurately represent your company on social media.

Over the last several years, companies have gradually invested more in social media to amplify their brands, launch new campaigns, and deliver customer service. Some have done it well (Coca-Cola, Disney); others have floundered (FedEx, Netflix). But many companies still view social media as a marginal business function not worthy of executives’ time or serious budget consideration. When, if ever, will senior marketing leaders, including CMOs, fully embrace emerging media? Do they need to in order for their companies to succeed? An interesting article recently published on Forbes online digs into these important questions. Check out the article and let me know what you think.