Don’t Hire People from Industry for Industry Marketing Roles

I always tell people that you shouldn’t hire industry marketing people from industry. I usually get a confused look because this seems to conflict with the conventional wisdom for hiring these types of roles. I’ve heard many a technology CEO state that the answer to all the company’s sales challenges would be solved if they just had someone from industry who could speak the customer’s language. Then without fail twelve months later there is boardroom discussion about how the $300K/year “industry expert” that was hired isn’t making an impact. Most executives assume that the recruiting process was mismanaged and the wrong person was hired. However, the true root cause is that the wrong profile candidate was hired into the wrong role.

Optimize Image and File Names for Search Engines

Corporate marketing organizations are missing a significant opportunity to improve search engine placement by not thinking more strategically about image and file naming strategies. Search is continuing to evolve. End-users are no longer restricted to web search. Yahoo!, Bing and Google are each offering users more ways to search for specific types of content – news, blogs, books, images, videos and shopping catalogs, which means you need to think beyond HTML in content optimization. By taking a few simple steps in file and image names you can improve placement on these alternative search mechanisms easily.

Make Your Events and Conferences less Boring

One of the key challenges that marketing leaders facing in planning events/conferences is how to generate dynamic and compelling content that will engage the audience. The de facto approach to conferences remains a back-to-back series of PowerPoint presentations which are interrupted only for lunch and vendor exhibits. While formal presentations remain the best way to educate a large audience about a topic, too much repetition in this format will lead to declining audience interest. I recommend mixing up the format of conference sessions with four alternative session approaches to keep the audience better engaged.

Ten Guidelines for Panel Moderators

A panel can be a very effective technique for sharing information on a particular topic at a conference or tradeshow. The panel format is becoming increasing popular alternative to formal PowerPoint presentation sessions. Many have found that the multi-speaker, informal nature of the discussion tends to lead to more audience attention. However, there are several best practices that should be employed to ensure that the panel does not fall into the pitfalls commonly associated with formal PowerPoint presentations.

Extending Your Customer Profile Library

In my last post I described a best practice that marketing professionals can employ to track, trend and analyze customer profiles. If you are agreeable to the concept you may want consider extending the profile data you track to a broader set of information such as investor filings, press releases, executive biographies and 3rd party vendor case studies.

Building a Library of Customer Profiles for Your Major Accounts

A key factor in any marketing organization’s success is the ability to understand customer needs. Having a repository of customer data both quantitative and qualitative will greatly simplify your ability to analyze market trends. For example, if you need to trend requests for a particular product capability or feature, it is useful to have a repository of all recent RFPs from which to start the analysis. If you need to build a case study for a particular customer, the process can be greatly accelerated if you can quickly assemble everything that you know about the account.

Twitter Widget on Verizon’s FiOS

This past weekend I configured my FiOS TV service to access my Twitter account. There are lots of cool aspects of the FiOS Twitter widget. Not only can you monitor the Tweets of people you are following, but you can also monitor all of the Tweets about the program you are watching. Imagine watching the season finale of LOST, while also monitoring a stream of insights and predictions from other devoted fans. With these types of widgets the nature of news reporting and analysis could change. Instead of waiting until after President Obama’s newscast to get expert opinions from CNN reporters, you can see viewer’s reactions to proposed health care reforms in real time.

Five Things I Would Like to Change the Most about Squidoo

In my last post I described the experience of creating two Squidoo lenses. While there were a number aspects to Squidoo that I enjoyed, there were a few annoying limitations that I struggled with during lens development. I have outlined the five changes I would most like to make to Squidoo’s advertising, content and formatting features.

My Experience Building a Squidoo Lens

Over the past six months I have been developing two lenses on Squidoo. Both of these lenses were corporate in nature, evangelizing the mission of my current employer. I found the experience of creating a lens to be very cool. There are an infinite number of ways that you can group content together in various ways to educate readers on a particular subject area. Squidoo makes it easy to link in content from YouTube, SlideShare, Delicious, Yelp, Twitter, Flickr and Amazon.com. However, I significantly underestimated the amount of time and effort required to develop a lens.

Review of Groundswell

I received a copy of Groundswell in March of 2008, while attending Forrester’s marketing conference in Los Angeles. I finally got a chance to read it last week. Chapter 1 was my favorite of the whole book. E It provides nearly irrefutable arguments about why any company cannot afford to ignore the transformational, groundswell effect that social computing is having on the world. The authors offer great examples of how attempts to remove HD-DVD encryption codes and pictures of Barbara Streisand’s house from the Internet resulted in considerable backlash. “You can’t take something off the Internet. That’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.”