Marketing Musings

Weekly Roundup!

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Marketing Musings

Welcome to the Weekly Roundup, a new feature of the Projectline blog. 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!

2012 Summit on Customer Engagement—Bill Lee talked about adding a new customer panel for this event. Projectline will be at the event and this year is shaping up to be fantastic.

Forrester’s Take on Google’s Search—Google placed more emphasis on their social network, Google+, to help with search results. Forrester wrote a blog post that looks at the impact on marketers.

Improve Work Performance—A Projectliner shared her keen insights on this topic after reading Peter Bregman’s book 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done.

Got Writer’s Block?—So much of marketing is about content. If you’re having trouble with writer’s block, check out this quick blog post.

2012 Summit on Customer Engagement

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Customer Engagement, Marketing Musings

Calling all customer engagement managers, customer reference professionals, customer success managers, customer advocates, and anyone who wants to tell their customers’ stories: You need to attend the 2012 Summit on Customer Engagement!

Every year, the customer engagement community gathers in Northern California for a two-day conference and workshop, where companies like Salesforce.com, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, Adobe, and Riverbed Technology share best practices for building and strengthening customer reference programs. Whether you’re starting a customer community or have a mature program with thousands of customers, this is the event for you. In addition, you’ll get to meet and mingle with leaders in the industry from around the world! This year, some of the presenters include:

  • Rhett Livengood, Director, WW B2B Customer Engagement, Intel Corporation
  • Scott Olrich, Chief Marketing and Sales Officer, Responsys
  • Sean O’Driscoll, Co-Founder, CEO, and Ant Advocate, Ant’s Eye View
  • Erica Kuhl, Community and Social Media Manager, Salesforce.com
  • Emilie Kopp, Customer Advocacy Program Manager, National Instruments

Oh, and possibly me: Karin Zabel, Senior Manager of Customer Programs at Projectline!

Dates: February 28 and 29, 2012

Location: Marriott San Mateo, San Mateo, CA

Cost: $1395 (or save $200 with Early Bird Registration, open through 1/31/12)

For more information, visit: www.customerreferenceforum.com

How to Improve Work Performance in Just 18 Minutes a Day

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Careers, Marketing Musings

TIME, sweet, precious, glorious time. I would argue that time is the highest sought commodity on Earth. We are each given 24 hours a day regardless of our age, race, or profession. Between Facebook, the latest TV show, and catching up with friends, we all wish we could have more of it.

A couple of months ago, while browsing the airport bookstore, I came across Peter Bregman’s book 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done. Like most people, I often yearn for more hours in the day, so the title alone immediately pulled me to select it for my long flight. By leveraging his engaging and thought-provoking talent for storytelling (as exhibited regularly in his HBR blog posts), Bregman provides a variety of tools, tips, and techniques intended to help us enhance our productivity and maximize our potential.

Reading this book is like having a personal and professional life coach standing right beside you—providing success tips, keeping you focused, and cheering you on along the way. Here are four of my favorite tips from his book that address how we can achieve our goals and use our time more efficiently:

To accomplish the right things, choosing what to ignore is as important as choosing where to focus. There is an endless supply of information at the touch of our smartphones and computers. The world is moving very fast and will only continue to move faster. How do you keep up with the pace of the action around us? If you are like most of us, you stay awake until 4:00am responding to the 400 email messages in your inbox. “Trying to catch it all is counterproductive. The faster the waves come, the more deliberately we need to navigate,” Bregman describes. Arguably, there hasn’t been a time when it has been more important to choose how to spend your time wisely. For instance, consider declining a meeting if it isn’t aligned with your goals and focus. The other tip Bregman suggests is to create an ignore list. We have to-do lists, but how many of us take the time to decide what should be ignored?

Limit your focus to five areas that will make the most difference in your life. Bregman describes his usual experience with buffets: “A few hours later, I was completely stuffed and couldn’t possibly have fit another thing in me.” Since there are so many choices in life, the secret to surviving is to be strategic about how to spend your time. In his instructions, he directs readers to “focus your year on the five areas that will make the most difference in your life. One way to medicate is to decrease your scope and focus on five areas that you deem the most vital.” What are your five?

Plan ahead so that you can fly through your days, successfully maneuvering and moving toward your intended destination. There are times when we have huge obstacles in our way. They may seem daunting, even insurmountable. Bregman describes a time when he was mountain biking and was attempting to ride over a large rock. His approach to riding over this large obstacle was to focus on the hill itself. After many attempts, he kept hitting the launch and falling off his bike. Then finally, “I decided to focus ahead of me—10 feet in front of where I was at any point of time,” Bregman says. He was able to make it over the rock by planning ahead. What could you accomplish if you were to determine your goals, plan the route, and then follow through?

Spend a few minutes at the end of each day thinking about what you learned and with whom you should connect. These minutes are key to making tomorrow even better than today. The “18 Minutes” in the title refers to Bregman’s suggestion of planning out your day, analyzing throughout, and wrapping up with a review of that day’s events. We often are so entrenched in our world and what we need to get done that we don’t always pay attention to our own development—what are we learning, what is working for us. Bregman suggests taking a few minutes for self-analysis before you leave the office. How valuable could it be to pull out your calendar and compare what you set out to accomplish with what was actually produced?

Ask yourself:
1. How did the day go? What success did I experience? What challenges did I endure?
2. What did I learn today? About myself? About others? What do I plan to do differently or the same tomorrow?
3. With whom did I interact? Anyone I need to update? Thank? Ask a question of? Share feedback with?

By tweaking a few of our actions, routines, and focus points, we can accomplish more than we ever imagined. The author Ted W. Engstrom said it well: “Anything that is wasted effort represents wasted time. The best management of our time thus becomes linked inseparably with the best utilization of our efforts.”

I’ve just begun implementing some of Bregman’s techniques, such as focusing on five areas that will make the biggest difference in my life, and I’ve already seen positive results! So, after reading Bregman’s excellent tips, how will you define your focus, remove distractions, and conquer your goals?

Volunteer Pride

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Community, Marketing Musings

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 Jan 13, 2011 - Projectline Volunteer Hoodie Day

Today is Martin Luther King Day, and a national Day of Service. This is a picture of some of the amazing volunteers in our Bellevue office showing off their Projectline hoodies. You can only get one of these sweatshirts if you volunteer with Projectline more than twice. You don’t have to be an employee, but you do have to volunteer. Yep, that’s right, not even clients can get this coveted apparel just by asking. Wouldn’t you be proud to wear one, too?

Join us anytime! Email carolem@projectlineinc.com to receive an invitation to our monthly volunteer outings or join the Projectline Group on Facebook.

What is the Next Step in Early Adoption Programs?

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Marketing Musings, Technology Adoption Programs

This is the third piece in Projectline’s series on early adoption programs. In this post, Derek Mathis explains why product evaluation programs are an important step in the release readiness management process and highlights the benefits that these programs offer.

In a previous post, we defined TAPs (technology adoption programs) as one type of pre-release readiness program that allows you to validate the features and functionality of your products. Once this type of program is in place and the feedback is streaming in, you will want to start thinking about the next stage in early adoption. There are a number of programs in this area, such as rapid deployment programs (RDPs), which present a great way to move from product validation to the generation and capture of customer evidence, such as case studies, customer quotes, customer references, and testimonials. This collateral will be invaluable for product launch and post-launch promotion.

While product validation programs typically run early in the product life cycle and aim to gather customer feedback on new products and/or features, product evaluation programs generally begin a bit later and aim to build a pipeline of customer references and marketing materials.

As the product launch date approaches, a number of PR requests will need to be fulfilled, and this is where product evaluation programs can really pay off. Having a strong pipeline of customers willing to provide references and participate in the creation of marketing materials that cover your key messaging and positioning points will not only ensure that these requests can be filled, but also that there is ample support for any and all launch and post-launch events.

Key reasons to implement a product evaluation program:

  • To continue to gather feedback from product validation customers who have moved out of the testing phase and deployed into a live or production environment

  • To build trust and strengthen customer relationships through the program engagement, facilitating product buy-in and overall brand loyalty

  • To develop a range of marketing materials critical to supporting the product launch and post-launch, including but not limited to case studies, solution briefs, customer videos, and business value studies

  • To build a pipeline of references for launch and post-launch related events, such as customer quotes, press releases, customer-to-customer referrals, analyst references, and keynote speakers

It’s now probably obvious that there are benefits to the company implementing a product evaluation program, but what about the participating customers? What’s in it for them?

Benefits for participants:

  • As with product validation programs, customers get to test-drive a product prior to the public release

  • Customers are typically provided with dedicated technical assistance in the form of consultants and also given access to a team of developers and testers to facilitate their rapid deployment

  • The marketing materials created, such as case studies, press releases, blog posts, white papers, and business value studies, can also be leveraged by participating customers to promote their own companies, showcase innovation, and drive sales

  • Participation in launch events provides great publicity for participating companies

Have you run a product evaluation program? We would love to hear about your experience, how it impacted your business, what worked well, and what didn’t work so well. We realize that the ways these programs are run can vary depending on the size of a company, available budget and resources, coverage of the product launch, and many other factors.

Interested in this topic? Find me on Twitter and let’s chat.

Being a Visionary, Extending Your Time Orientation – You Can DO It!

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Careers, Marketing Musings

A new year has just begun, and with it came the many predictions for the future that we’ve come to expect – everything from Brian Johnson’s insightful bit on social media to The Daily Beast’s 2012 News Quiz: Before It Happens.

Every time I see these predictions, I think to myself: how do they do it? I tend to think ahead to my next meal or roller derby practice, and that’s about it. But the work I’ve been doing recently in a leadership program at Projectline has shown me that my short-term thinking tendency needs to change.

We don’t all have to be Steve Jobs – but we do all need to think ahead to some degree.
Who do you think of when you hear the word “visionary”? Probably someone like Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, or the creative genius Steve Jobs? Or, if you’re lucky enough to work at a place you love with leadership you admire, you might think of someone at your company’s C-level (holla, Anika Lehde!). That’s who I think of, anyway—creative geniuses who are paving the way and striving to change the world. In other words, not me. But, as it turns out, even I need to be visionary to some degree. Kouzes and Posner say that there is “no hard and fast rule as to how far into the future a leader should look, for those on the front lines of supervision, the future might be a year from now. For those in middle levels it might be three to five years. At the more senior levels it should be at least ten, and executive leaders responsible for entire organizations in the national and international arenas have to look out twenty years and beyond”. In other words, different time orientations are appropriate for different roles, and it’s up to us to figure out what time orientation best suits our work.

As a marketing consultant, much of my work is task-oriented and driven by monthly or quarterly deadlines. It can be pretty easy to just put my head down and focus on what’s at hand. But if I’m not thinking beyond the bounds of my current contract, or the end of my client’s fiscal year, how valuable am I really? How much can my work evolve? I have so much more to offer than high-quality delivery on assigned tasks—I can be insightful and help my clients and my company get a jump on opportunities.

Altering your time orientation just takes exercise—or so I hope.
Extending my time orientation will take practice, practice, practice. Here is what Kouzes and Posner suggest in “The Leadership Challenge”:

First, reflect on the past. Dr. Omar El Sawy’s “Janus Effect” demonstrates that looking into the past first is proven to elongate our view into the future.

Next, make time to pay attention to what’s going on around your work, and make connections. For me, this means reserving the time of day at which I’m most creative for reading industry news and internal newsletters, and reflecting on my projects. It also means actively seeking information from my clients about their overarching goals.

Think big. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras introduced us to the Big Hairy Audacious Goal in Built to Last—you need to keep a few of these in front of you. Nothing like “big and hairy ” to get the inspiration going.

Feel your passion. You have to tune in to the things that excite you most, not only in general but also in the work you’re doing—and then let that passion drive you!

See? It’s possible. All I have to do is try…and maybe this time next year I’ll be the one looking into the crystal ball and telling you what’s next.

What’s waiting around the corner for you?

Picture of the Week: San Francisco Bound

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Company, Marketing Musings

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 Jan 3, 2012 - Karin Moves to San Francisco

On January 4, 2012 I moved to California in order to nurture Projectline’s client relationships in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area. This picture captures the memorable image of the one-way flight which was the start to my new journey. Here’s to a fantastic 2012 and much success in California!