The influx of social networking into marketing practice has changed how we think about web analytics and business intelligence. For a long time, analytics were concerned primarily with visitors, pageviews, and stickiness (how long a visitor remained on a site). More recently, the focus is on click-throughs and conversion rates—and now behavior-based analytics track influencers and analyze how we interact with people in our social networks. Clearly, web communities allow each of us to influence other people through what we say, what we buy, and what we recommend. Companies are struggling to balance the importance of mining customer and social network data with the risk of jeopardizing the apparently organic experience that spawns the growth of social communities.

Just last week, web analytics giant Omniture (now owned by Adobe) announced an expanded partnership with Facebook that will help companies monitor their marketing return on investment while targeting communities within Facebook (especially notable as we see Google and Salesforce.com edging into social media spaces). It will be interesting to see how this impacts the online marketing space longer term. Does a marketing dollar spent to advertise in social networking have the same impact as a marketing dollar spent on search? I believe both search and social networking will stay important to marketers in the long run.

For my work, this announcement raises a couple of questions: Will it force other networks or platforms to align themselves with analytics tools? I would not be surprised to see an announcement between Twitter and perhaps Webtrends. How will this increased emphasis on advertising and marketing impact the users of Facebook? It will be exciting to see how the new deal plays out, both for web analytics and for Facebook as a network.

What do you think? What does this partnership mean for businesses marketing through social media? What does it mean to you the consumer of social media networks? Are you excited or apprehensive?

Projectline is looking for some extraordinary talent with 6-8 years of business experience to be part of our growing presence in the Silicon Valley and work with one of our newest clients. We are searching for a Marketing Manager who can stand out from the crowd, to work onsite with one of the largest search companies around on a contract assignment for the next 9 months. Because our success hinges on the talents of our fantastic team, we do everything in our power to find only the best people and make sure they are positioned to succeed.

Key Responsibilities/Requirements:

Our clients’ Consumer Marketing team is seeking a creative and experienced contract marketer to shape their global go-to-market strategies. Be part of the team that identifies, attracts, and engages the largest and most valuable audiences around the world by driving consumer behavior through global integrated marketing programs. We have an immediate 9 month contract opening for a results-oriented marketer to develop and execute global marketing initiatives focused on acquisition and engagement for our category-leading products. In addition to close partnership with fellow consumer marketing and product teams, this position works with internal and external groups including agency partners, communications, and brand. This position resides in Sunnyvale, CA.

Job Responsibilities:

The Marketing Manager develops and executes marketing initiatives to drive awareness, activation and usage of online brand products in a manner that reinforces the brand position. Focus areas include awareness, trial, acquisition, engagement, and retention. This position works in close collaboration with internal and external groups.

• Develop and execute global consumer marketing programs to increase consumer awareness, acquisition, engagement, and retention for online brand products in partnership with product marketing, product management, brand, and communications teams.
• Execute communication strategies against defined target audiences.
• Develop marketing plans that reflect market context, competitive landscape, product roadmaps and consumer insights
• Drive acquisition and engagement programs for existing products and work with cross-functional team to bring new products to market. Optimize on an ongoing basis.
• Manage multiple programs including in-product merchandising, advertising, social media and word of mouth, email, events, and promotions.
• Share results and recommendations with team. Establish processes and best practices.

Qualifications and Requirements:

• 6-8 years of business experience; online consumer brand business experience preferred.
• 2-4 years of consumer marketing and marketing programs experience in a central marketing team or agency equivalent (mandatory).
• Ability to execute work plan with minimal to moderate management guidance; familiar with creative briefs and program strategy planning; direct experience in executing and analyzing consumer marketing initiatives.
• Strong analytical skills, data-driven, proven track record of measuring and analyzing results.
• Demonstrated experience in managing projects that have tight deadlines, limited resources and cross-functional dependencies.
• Ability to influence people and process outside immediate work group, and solid relationship-building.
• Ability to track marketing expenses, manage resource requests for projects and initiatives.
• Demonstrated experience managing large-scale programs.
• Experience with large-scale online communities.
• Strong computer skills including Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.

Quite honestly, the fact that our people are enthusiastic, talented and genuine is a benefit in itself. Working side by side with great people is motivating, and you will have the opportunity to grow and develop your career with some of the best in the business.

Directions:

• Submit resume to iwantajob@projectlineinc.com or apply online.
• Attach a cover letter that includes:
  • description of how your experience and interests fit the position requirements above specifically and
  • your salary requirements

Resumes without cover letters will not be considered.

Projectline is looking for a creative and experienced contract marketer with 8-10 years of business experience to be part of our growing presence in the Silicon Valley and work with one of our newest clients. We are searching for a Senior Marketing Manager who can stand out from the crowd to work onsite with one of the largest search companies around on a contract assignment for the next 6 months. Because our success hinges on the talents of our fantastic team, we do everything in our power to find only the best people, and make sure they are positioned to succeed.

Key Responsibilities/Requirements:

The Consumer Marketing team is seeking a creative and experienced contract marketer to shape global go-to-market strategies. Be part of the team that identifies, attracts, and engages the largest and most valuable audiences around the world by driving consumer behavior through global integrated marketing programs. We have an immediate 6 month contract opening for a results-oriented marketer to develop and execute global marketing initiatives focused on acquisition and engagement for our category-leading products. In addition to close partnership with fellow consumer marketing and product teams, this position works with internal and external groups including agency partners, communications, and brand. This position is based in Sunnyvale, CA.

Job Responsibilities:

Develop and execute marketing initiatives to drive awareness, activation and usage of online brand products in a manner that reinforces the brand position. Focus areas include awareness, trial, acquisition, engagement, and retention. This position works in close collaboration with internal and external groups.

• Develop and execute global consumer marketing programs in partnership with product marketing, product management, brand, and communications teams.
• Develop communication strategies against defined target audiences.
• Develop marketing plans that reflect market context, competitive landscape, product roadmaps and consumer insights.
• Collaborate with regional marketing teams to ensure programs are developed and executed globally with local partners.
• Drive acquisition and engagement programs for existing products and working with cross-functional team to bring new products to market. Optimize on an ongoing basis.
• Manage multiple programs including in-product merchandising, advertising, social media and word of mouth, email, events, and promotions.
• Lead consumer co-marketing initiatives, programs and cross-functional teams to leverage reach and strength of partners distribution and reputation.
• Share results and recommendations with team.

Qualifications and Requirements:

• 8-10 years of business experience; online business experience preferred.
• 6-8 years of consumer marketing and marketing programs experience in a central marketing team or agency equivalent (mandatory).
• Demonstrated experience developing online customer loyalty and affinity marketing programs and strategies.
• Ability to execute work plan with minimal to moderate management guidance; familiar with creative briefs and program strategy planning; direct experience in developing, executing and analyzing consumer marketing initiatives.
• Demonstrated experience in managing projects that have tight deadlines, limited resources and cross-functional dependencies.
• Experience managing and coordinating with third-party providers.
• Track record of influencing people and process outside immediate work group; proven history of quickly ramping on projects and adding value after brief on-boarding.
• Ability to track marketing expenses, manage resource requests for projects and initiatives and aid in the analysis of marketing program effectiveness.
• Demonstrated marketing experience with companies that own and market to large scale online communities.
• Strong computer skills including Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.

Quite honestly, the fact that our people are enthusiastic, talented and genuine is a benefit in itself. Working side by side with great people is motivating, and you will have the opportunity to grow and develop your career with some of the best in the business.

Directions:

• Submit resume to iwantajob@projectlineinc.com or apply online.
• Attach a cover letter that includes:
  • description of how your experience and interests fit the position requirements above specifically and
  • your salary requirements

Resumes without cover letters will not be considered.

Julie described how Oracle built an impressive customer reference program by fostering a company-wide customer focus and paying attention to the best interests of their customers. Her presentation really jibed with my experiences in evidence and case study management as a reference professional. Highlighting advocacy, customer centricity, loyalty, and strong relationships as the building blocks of a customer focused culture, Julie spoke specifically about how Oracle expresses its focus. They listen to customers, respond when they have an issue or question, and collaborate with them. It may seem simple, but these small things have made an enormous difference for the company.

In addition to the fundamentals, I’ve found C-level engagement and executive sponsorship are crucial in creating a successful reference program. For Julie, this was also part of the action plan. She and her team specifically targeted executive sponsorship from both parties during customer engagement, along with customer advisory boards and one-to-one issue resolution. Executive sponsorship is important not only because it can mean the reference program gets funding but it can then validate projects and get buy-in from sales and marketing groups around the company. This type of upper-level involvement can also help break silos between teams so they can work together towards a common goal.

At Oracle, the results of creating a company-wide culture of customer focus spoke for themselves. The reference program saw increased participation, a larger pool of customers and communities, open dialog with executives, and an increased ability to fix programs in response to early warnings from customers. In short, customer focus led to happier customers, C-level engagement, and better customer references.

One of the most impressive parts of her program is that her team is able to do all of this successfully while supporting 9,000 Oracle products with 100 reference professionals. Her ideas on how to leverage executive sponsorship to scale her program and meet the demands of the sales team within such a company are remarkable—I’m glad she brought them to the forum.

Of course, we know how we see ourselves as different from our competitors, but that is tied more to market positioning. But in this meeting, I was reminded that it’s healthy to ask your customers how THEY think you’re different. The more you deviate from actual customer feedback, the more you are talking about positioning and less about proven differentiators.

So how can you make sure that your customers’ insights about your product or company are being integrated into your story? How can you use their feedback to tell other possible clients what sets you apart?

• Look for your enthusiasts online. When people tweet that they love you, why is it? Don’t just say thanks—pass those tweets back up to your sales or marketing team or make a note to include their messages (at least in spirit) in your explanation of how you’re different. Bonus: they’re already short and sweet.
• Look to reviews. If bloggers have mentioned you, reviewed your product, or noted new developments in your brand, what have they seen as different? Read between the lines: what made your brand or product worth reviewing?
• As you gather customer evidence, think about using the insights beyond the case study or testimonial. Have sales teams consider what each story teaches them about why the customer succeeded, and consider incorporating those key points into the core story about your brand.
• When advisory boards or customer communities provide feedback for future iterations, use their feedback to inform sales and marketing as well as product development teams. Even if the feedback is critical, look again: customers are often most critical about the features that are most crucial to their business.

Skills needed:

• Strong knowledge of MSFT P&L hierarchies
• Knowledge of MARS (mercury a plus if possible)
• Extremely detail-oriented
• Ability to communicate effectively with the various BG finance groups to discuss possible alternatives to current master data structure

Directions:

• Submit resume to iwantajob@projectlineinc.com or apply online.
• Attach a cover letter that includes
  • description of how your experience and interests fit with the position requirements above and
  • your salary requirements

Resumes without cover letters will not be considered.

Let’s break it down…In my role with Projectline, I am tasked with helping develop new business. Like all business development managers, I have goals for revenue growth, new business development, and the care and feeding of existing business. These goals aren’t mutually exclusive, but my time is limited. At the end of the day, business intelligence, for me, helps analyze the best way to spend my time to accomplish the goals we’ve mutually set forth. How do I measure my success? I can look at the number of sales calls and meetings as one metric.

How often have we heard “sales is a numbers game”? While in its simplest form this may have a lot of truth, it takes on a new (more powerful) meaning if I can determine the areas that will provide the greatest amount of growth relative to sales effort and overall cost of sales. What will provide long term sustainable growth as opposed to short term revenue gains with little or no possibility for future revenue? What changes are going on in my customer’s business that require me to refocus my efforts? In an idealistic sales environment, I would make calls on everyone who is ready to purchase and is biased towards purchasing what my company has to offer. While I most likely will never find this sales utopia, I can refine my focus based on the business intelligence gathered from a combination of my CRM system, outside research, and collaboration with my colleagues and business network.

In order for business intelligence to be meaningful, it must start with the overall goals of the company or organization. From these come divisional goals and ultimately personal goals that map back to the organizational goals. When business intelligence is highly mature in an organization, it encourages collaboration and provides an incentive for positive changes in behavior. Business insight helps to overcome our personal bias and tendency to be overconfident in forecasting or making assumptions about our business. Finally, if you can map compensation back to these personal metrics, you are on your way to the holy grail: having everyone contributing and supporting overall corporate goals.

Questions about BI? Feel free to contact me at brianh@projectlineinc.com.

Mostly, let’s try to answer one crucial question: if you’re an enterprise marketer, do you need to add another social media channel to your plate?

My answer, in several flavors:

• Not yet. Buzz is, like Facebook, set up for most interactions to happen between individuals (it’s linked to Gmail accounts for now) rather than between brands and individuals directly. Unlike Facebook, though, there is no separate entity (‘Pages’) for brands. Building your professional network on Buzz makes sense, but your brand may not need to jump in just yet. In all likelihood, Google intends for brands to participate by buying Google advertising real estate rather than behaving like users.
• No…but you need to pay attention to your other channels. Buzz aggregates RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, and photo sites. Shared Google Reader items will suddenly be easier to converse about and re-tweets by Buzz users may start semi-closed comment threads. Your content will—if it’s worth it—be able to reach your readers’ networks more effectively than before. If you’re going to work on getting up to speed in response to Buzz, focus that energy on your content: make it valuable, worth sharing, and well-done.
• Yes, for some things. By default, Buzz makes it publicly visible who you follow and who follows you. This has some major security and privacy implications (which have been covered elsewhere), but for marketers it means another way to discover circles of influence. Identifying the public profiles of major influencers could provide wonderful insights into who they’re engaging with on a more reciprocal level than Twitter offers.

But at this point, within a week of Buzz’s launch, it’s hard to say how this will affect the social media landscape. What do you think? Will this be an extension of email and RSS, a new way of seeing the old tweets, or a more fundamental shift? What do you hope to see happen as Buzz settles into people’s lives and inboxes?

Projectline is looking for an enthusiastic marketing consultant to help our technology clients run early technology adoption programs, develop marketing communications materials, and manage customer engagement programs. This position is uniquely varied; whoever takes this position will sometimes find themselves working with writers, editors, designers, and developers and sometimes find themselves working with data analytics, event management, SharePoint site management, and formal executive presentations.

Years of experience aren’t as important as innate skill, instinct, and the following qualities: positive, buttoned up, consultative, confident, passionate, strategic, a leader, a great listener, a relationship builder, a great communicator, curious, proactive, accountable, fun, consistent, and genuine. For an even better idea of what we are looking for, watch this:

Key Responsibilities:

• Produce and critique all forms of marketing content (written, presentations, video, audio, etc.) with particular emphasis on customer success stories and case studies.
• Manage customer engagement marketing projects, communities, and programs.
• Work directly with clients to determine marketing programs’ needs and consult on best approaches.
• Establish project goals, milestones, and procedures.
• Track and monitor client results and budgets to ensure that projects are on schedule and meeting fiscal targets.
• Lead v-teams of vendors, case study writers, and editors to produce a quality product for our clients and our clients’ customers.
• Contribute to the health and growth of Projectline through special projects, advisory boards, committee participation, and community involvement.

Qualifications and Requirements:

• 3+ years of communications, product management, or marketing management required.
• 1+ year of client services experience (agency side work).
• Advanced interpersonal, written communication, and public speaking skills (will be asked to demonstrate).
• Knowledge of marketing fundamentals including segmentation, positioning, and market analysis.
• Willingness to work around road blocks and lack of responsiveness with charm and persistence.
• Exceptionally positive attitude, professionalism, and pride in work product.
• Flexible and intuitive personality who can manage complex internal and client relationships.
• Ability to think creatively yet practically when designing and implementing programs.
• 4-year degree with a focus in marketing, business, technology, or communications.
• Demonstrable sense of humor, humility, and confidence.
• Sincere interest in community volunteering and involvement.
• Dedication to self-development, learning, and growing.
• Advanced skills with Microsoft Office PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and Outlook (or equivalent classes taken before starting).
• Experience doing marketing for Microsoft, Intel, HP, Oracle, Dell, Hitachi, NetApp, SAP, IBM, or Cisco a HUGE plus.

Directions:

• Submit resume to iwantajob@projectlineinc.com or submit online
• Attach a cover letter that includes
  • a description of how your experience and interests fit with the specific position requirements above and
  • your salary requirements

Resumes without cover letters will not be considered.

Here’s what we saw on Sunday:

• Pepsi’s withdrawal from the Super Bowl time slot meant an easy monopoly for Coke. Coke ran two ads during the game as well as sponsoring the Hulu.com AdZone 2010 (for those lacking televisions) and running a philanthropy-based promotion on Facebook. As the New York Times’s Stuart Elliott put it, “Coca-Cola is telling Pepsi-Cola that when it comes to Super Bowl advertising, you can walk and chew gum at the same time.”
• Much of the post-game ad-analysis focused on pants (or a lack thereof) and alleged misogyny. In ads for Budweiser, Dockers, GoDaddy, Chrysler, and even Dove, gender stereotypes were trotted out and replayed for laughs or titillation. Unsurprisingly, those ads were also the ones that showed up embedded in critical and defensive blog posts, roundups, and rants. One way to engage people through social media, it seems, is to give them something to be mad about.
• Other companies—like Intel, who we’d discussed in the past—opted for much safer, less potentially offensive material. A cute lunchroom robot and a pair of geeky friends made for amusing, appealing spots that highlighted the passion Intel inspires in nerds.
  But what about Pepsi? Did they miss out by shifting their energy to social media?

Instead of spending on Super Bowl ads, Pepsi invested $20 million ($13 million less than they spent on the 2009 Super Bowl) in the Refresh Project, which will donate that money to social causes nominated and voted on by fans. According to Nielsen Co., Pepsi received over 20% of online chatter about Super Bowl advertisers over the last two months—not a bad percentage for a company without an ad spot.

But to gauge the real impact, we’ll need to watch what Pepsi does with the Refresh Project going forward. Will they give away the $20 million to deserving causes and resume TV ads as usual? Or will they use Refresh Project as a way to transform the way they reach consumers? For instance, what if Pepsi were to film the idea owners and the people they help to show how this $20 million dollar investment changed the world? And what if that inspired others to donate money or create new efforts to help people?