After spending a few months marketing to enterprises with both a field and inside sales team, I have some thoughts on marketing to Enterprise vs SMB and what it means for a CMO. (Don't read anything into this. I am very happy at Cybereason and things are going extremely well.)
If you boil down to the essence, there are really only two business models.
I hit the point where I was really sick of Twitter. I got hundreds of spammy direct messages. My feed was useless. I was spending tons of time managing lists to filter out crap I did not want. Twitter was no longer enjoyable to me, and it meant a lot of my posting was becoming automated and my personal engagement was getting lower and lower.
Here is an internal email that I just sent to all of our "segment marketers" (also called "mini-CMOs") who are the marketing leads for each segment (a teams of sales and marketing folks that target a specific customer profile such as small business, SMB or enterprise). This is a newly created position, and organizationally, we're still figuring it out. Some of the marketing folks in this job are having the typical challenges of a new CMO / Director / VP of marketing where sales is running over them to other folks int he organization if they are not happy with some small thing.
Check out these 101 Marketing Quotes compiled by the awesome team I work with.
I was browsing the web and after following a series of links I ended up on an article on Jeff Chausse's blog, which has the following paragraph:
I had the pleasure of presenting a session at Dreamforce this year, and I thought I would share it with you. My portion of the presentation is about 25 minutes, and there are a variety of formats below for your viewing pleasure.
This is a guest post from Cd Vann, who runs the UnGEEKed events. I have been impressed with the passion that she brings to promoting the unGEEKed events, and asked her to share some of her event marketing tips with folks on this blog. (I am speaking at UnGEEKed San Francisco, December 2-4.)
To catch up, read the article Why Pampers Diaper Fail is a Lesson in Marketing Transparency to get the back story and the updates in the article Pampers Steps up Digital, Social Media Efforts. Here are my thoughts...
I am a guest speaker on a webinar (right NOW) with InsideView and Customer Think and "Customer 2.0" and the role of inbound marketing with customer 2.0.
This is a guest post by Nick Gundry, who is a co-founder of Smartagious.com, co-founder of Social Media Club Fresno, web strategist and social media enthusiast. He has been working professionally in the web industry for over 12 years in various positions round the world and is currently residing in Fresno, CA.
Today I had the pleasure of delivering the keynote address at W00t! Con in Bakersfield, California. I used my new iPhone 3Gs to stream the presentation live on Qik (my old phone was just an iPhone 3G and did not do video). You can watch the presentation in full (until my battery died during th Q&A) or just see the slides.
This is a guest post by Jeff Ogden is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, a lead generation company, which helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers.
This is a guest post by Marijo Tinlin, who is the principal at Sunrise Business Consulting (@SunriseBusiness) which helps small and emerging businesses and entrepreneurs get traction in business, sales and marketing. Her specialities include all facets of marketing including inbound marketing, content marketing, database marketing and search engine optimization.
I found this post "The Marketing Hipster Dictionary" by Craig Rosenberg (aka The Funnelholic) and enjoyed it. (Yes, I found it through a vanity search since he mentioned me... but Craig is a good guy, already in my RSS reader and I've done a webinar with him before.)
Recently an industry guru who is compiling a study/book on transparency emailed me and asked "What are the practices that you think an agency should follow when it comes to transparency in writing content for a client's social media channels?" This is what I emailed back:
I've gotten a bunch of questions recently about etiquette on Twitter. There really are no formal rules, because lots of people use Twitter differently. I know lots of people who have rules that are different from me, and that is fine. Their personal style may be different or maybe they use Twitter "better". You can use twitter however you want (and don't let one of those "social media experts" tell you differently).
While I do not think there are any formally established etiquette for Twittter, I thought I would share how I use it. Let everyone know in the comments if you agree, disagree or have other ideas for what twitter etiquette should be.
My etiquette for reading tweets - You cannot and should not read all tweets. There is just too much volume on Twitter. Twitter is not your email. I snack on Twitter a couple times a day for 10-15 minutes at a time. I read all of the @mvolpe messages and I try to read all my direct messages (DMs). I do not have any messages or DMs sent as text messages because I don't like to let Twitter interrupt my day.
My etiquette for following other people - I follow people that say something interesting to me, seem to have a high value to tweet volume ratio, talk about me or my content or retweet me, or people I have met in person. None of these rules are set in stone, but the more of these things that apply to you, the more likely it is that I will follow you. If you feel like you are left out, just ask me by sending a message like "hey @mvolpe - I love your tweets! Would you mind following me back?"
My etiquette for following people back - I do not automatically follow people back because the follow me. I used to, and I found that I got even more DM spam than I do now, and a lot of the following was coming from robots, so I stopped. I figure that if you followed me and I should follow you back, one of the conditions above will eventually apply to you and you'll get followed that way.
My etiquette for direct messages (DMs) - People who have a lot of followers and follow a lot of people (more than 2,000 of each) get a lot of direct message spam - do not assume they receive or read all of your DMs. I can't and don't. I do my best to read them all, but honestly many good messages get buried in there. Sorry.
My etiquette for retweeting - If I know you well (in person or virtually) and you ask me to retweet something, if it is good I probably will do it. If you say something remarkable, I might retweet it without you asking.
A new question: What are the marketing goals of blogging? I think some of the goals for launching a blog are:
When a free service stops working, what do you do? What if you rely on it for personal or business purposes? Who do you turn to for support on a free service?
Yesterday I have had real problems with a couple free services. First, something is messed up between Blip.tv and Feedburner and iTunes for the www.HubSpot.tv podcast. Somewhere along the way, the feed is broken, so iTunes does not have the most recent episodes. Second, my Twitter account got "suspended" for some reason. No more Twitter. Goodbye 9,000+ friends and lots of conversations... boo. Lucky for me, it got mysteriously reinstated about an hour later.
The problem is not that things break. That happens. The problem is what do you do to fix it. With all of them, you can submit a request and wait (Twitter can take up to 30 days!) or search for answers other people have posted in forums or on blogs. but there is no way to solve your problem now with a back and forth with a live human. You need to use email (slow) or find your own answer (hard).
All I want is an 800# where I can call and someone will fix my problem, live with me on the line. I would even pay for it. Maybe $25 or $50... just for this one problem.
What do you think? Have you had challenges with free services?
Often people ask me which is more effective, Twitter or a blog. As you can see in the video, a blog is much more effective because it has a lot of benefits over Twitter.
I'm participating in a new webinar series with Eloqua, OneSource and On24 targeted at marketing executives at medium and large sized companies that are trying to understand the new marketing landscape. This is a different audience and topic from my usual webinars. We expect a smaller audience, and the topics will be more "thought and theory" than "how to".
"Join marketing executives from HubSpot, Eloqua, OneSource and ON24 for one or more events in the "Insight2Action" webinar series. These focused 45 minute sessions will offer practical insights on gathering, analyzing and using marketing data to drive decisions about your marketing programs--optimizing ROI and lead generation. At the end of each session there will be a question & answer/discussion period where you can share thoughts with the panelists and your peers"
If you have heard me speak before, you know I believe that content is an important part of inbound marketing. Not the only part, but an essential part of it. Here are a couple case study slides from a presentation I am doing this morning.
I was asked to contribute to an article about authenticy vs. authority along with other marketing folks like Seth Godin, David Meerman Scott, Chris Brogan, and Brian Solis.
Part of my contribution is here:
"Marketers need to be authentic, but the primary focus for marketing should be on building authority. Authority is a marketing asset - you can use it to drive more people to your events, content, thought leadership, and products."
Read the whole article and see what others had to say at Mark Olson's article on Authenticity vs. Authority.