Matthew T Grant

Caught Pat Martino’s first set at Scullers last night. He was playing with organist Tony Monaco and drummer Jason Brown and confirmed note-by-sinewy-note  his well-deserved status as a living master still very much in possession of his prodigious gifts.

Martino’s patented “horn-like” lines were in full display, as was his aptly groovy and well nigh gut-bucket comping, while his dynamic phrasing added a sublimely meta-rhythmic layer to all the serpentine spideriness of his “concept.”

One thing that separates Martino from the be-boppers and modernists who preceded him (the Jimmy Raneys and Jim Halls of the world) and the post-modern post-fusionists of today (from Scofield to Rosenwinkel) is that he’s got a healthy dose of the Sixties on him. This shines through in his come-by-it-honestly nativist approach to the funky organ trio setting as well as in his trance-inducing, raga-esque vorticism (which reminded me, at times, of my longtime idol, Gabor Szabo).

In other words, Martino was great.

Nevertheless, for me, the true star of the evening was Tony Monaco. A highly animated and expressive guy (his protean facial expressions were themselves worth the price of admission), he played astoundingly well, moving fluidly from vintage Jimmy Smithery to an ELP-like psychedelia. The neck-deep in the reverb, quasi-soap-opera tone he chose during “Alone Together,” which he rode deep into an obscure, supersonic well, was emblematic of his adventurous, effervescent, and endlessly captivating style. We haven’t heard the last from Mr. Monaco.

The evening’s one moment of strangeness was when Pat temporarily dismissed the band and invited his wife, Ayako, to play a couple numbers with him. I couldn’t get my head around that move until I thought, “This guy has basically been on the road for 45 years and, at this point, the stage is more or less his living room. Why shouldn’t he just sit down with his wife and play a couple tunes for friends?”

Except, of course, the stage is not a living room and we are not his friends, which made this portion of the show either eccentric, endearing, or irritating, depending on where you were at mentally.

Image Credit: tom.beetz

Bob Knorpp of the Cool Beans Group kicked things off with “pay attention to the keywords you are using in social status updates.” If you are looking for additional SEO power and buzz, focusing on these status updates can have an impact based on the way these things are indexed (with an emphasis on the first six words).

Dave Thomas of SAS focused on the power of content and especially the importance of re-purposing the content you produce. He referred to Kirsten Watson’s (Kinaxis) practice of producing a white paper, first, then using that to produce blog posts, then creating a deck from that for Slideshare, and finally, interviewing the author to create a podcast. An audience member then told people not to forget about images which are, of course, indexed as well.

Stephanie Miller of Return Path recalled the advice that you should never test just to test, but always to use testing to prove out particular points.

Bob Knorpp shared the lesson that you should listen to your sales force to find out what kinds of content bring the best leads, then optimize for that content. It might sound obvious, he said, but it bears repeating because it gives you something very concrete to work with. (I found “improving the relationship between sales and marketing” one of the sub-themes of the entire forum.)

Dave Thomas echoed several speakers saying that it’s ok to take a hybrid approach and integrate your “traditional” marketing techniques with all the emerging tactics now available.

Stephanie Miller, finally, recalled an exercise used in one session where the speaker took the marketing messages of several competitors and showed that you could not tell the companies apart solely based on these messages, which were essentially the same. Compare your messaging to that of your competitors and prepare to have your eyes opened!

As part of a discussion about getting more people in your organization involved in social media, Bob Knorpp cautioned first that it may not be the case that everyone is actually going to be good at it (blogging, for example). So you should take people’s strengths into considerations before asking them to do something. He wanted people to remember that, frankly, if your organization is listening, then that is already a win.

There followed a discussion about the loss of control brought about my social media. It was acknowledged that this loss of control can certainly make some people nervous, and that this is a natural response in some cases, but that our role needs to be one of educating people on how to use these tools. In fact, we can create whole plans around it so that we have a framework within which to judge and evaluate our efforts.

The conversation then returned to the publishing metaphor especially in the context of Kipp Bodnar’s suggestion that your goal should be to produce the best-read magazine in your industry. Bob Knorpp took issue with the publishing metaphor and suggested that we use, instead, the “theme park” metaphor. “When people go to Disneyland, they don’t rave about the brochure, they rave about the experience,” as he put it.

Finally, I said that my big takeaway was that all this isn’t about the technology; it’s about the “soft stuff.” Marketing automation, lead management, social media engagement all boil down to human interactions. It’s these interactions that produce the processes that you automate, build trust between marketing and sales, and, ultimately, determine the role you play in the lives of your customers.

The question central to this session was, “How can marketing automation help produce higher quality leads and foster a better relationship with sales?”

The format involved Laura Ramos asking each panel member, all of whom represented marketing automation vendors, to respond to a specific scenario that she had cooked up. As the panelists responded to the challenges, here’s some general insights and thoughts that surfaced.

• Lead automation tends to be primarily about new customer acquisition but good marketers use these systems to manage the entire customer life-cycle and look for up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. (Jon Miller, Marketo)
• It’s not about automation per se. It’s about automating good process. (Kristen Hambelton, Neolane)
• Along the same lines, creating a lead scoring system is an iterative process. Additionally, the automation system itself has to be easy to use. (Parker Terwin, Genius.com)
• Testing and optimization (of subject lines, landing pages, etc.) is key to effective marketing and your automation system should help you do that. (Jon)
• On the ROI front, the emergence of the SaaS model has really changed how marketers need to think about the investment (cap ex vs. op ex), but it is also changing the conversation from one focused on ROI and one focused on TCO. (Jon and Kristen).
• This led to a broader discussion of ROI in which Brian Kardon of Eloqua pointed out that, for a marketing automation implementation to work, a lot of marketing processes have to change and, therefore, the conversation shouldn’t necessarily focus on the investment. Instead, you really need to uncover whether or not the organizational will is there to see this process through.
• It’s not hard to accumulate a lot of data, the question is, what do you do with it? Ideally your systems will talk to each other so that you can see the data and act on it all from one place. (Kristen)
• On that point, Jon talked about the power of integrating the insights from your analytics and automation tools actually show up where your sales people are looking.
• When integrating the various tools with salesforce.com, you need to make sure that changes to your implementation don’t break the connection with the marketing tool and that you aren’t asking your sales people to learn how to use a new tool.

An audience member (from Daxko) asked each panel member to say something positive about the other panelists’ products. Kristen said that Marketo has helped increase adoption of automation. Jon said that Genius.com has pioneered automated response. Parker said that Eloqua is the Cadillac of solutions. Brian said that Neolane is a good product with a lot of happy customers.

Of all the things I heard in this session, the one that really stuck with me was this one made by Brian Kardon: It’s not the technology that’s the problem, it’s the soft things.

Ron Casalotti of Bloomberg Businessweek kicked things off talking about their Business Exchange social media platform: a people-filtered resource for business people. In order to encourage users to participate, he instituted a rating system for submissions, among other things. With over 40K registered users, BX serves as a folksonomy of topics that are of interest to Bloomberg Businessweek readers and gets used as a source of stories for print publication. It also helps direct content focus for the marketing department since they now know what readers actually care about.

Top Tip: Don’t get caught up in the numbers. 200 active participants are more meaningful than thousands of passive followers on Twitter, for example. What really counts is building engaged relationships.

Deirdre Walsh, self-proclaimed “geek matchmaker” and Community & Social Media Manager for National Instruments was up next. The cornerstone of National Instruments’ community strategy are their support forums which have over 140,000 participants and 50% of all questions posted are answered by community members. The community is used extensively by the organization for product feedback, R&D insight, etc. National Instruments also puts a big emphasis on recognizing and engaging with community “rock stars.” One interesting point of measurement for Deirdre are “actionable conversations.” She also measures community growth and number of posts per community member.

Top Tip: Don’t get overwhelmed by the technical options (Facebook vs. Twitter, etc.) but utilize something like the P.O.S.T. method to develop your plan. In other words, treat social media as any other marketing communication function.

Next up was Mike Travis of Equat!on Research who spoke about the process involved in producing their “2009 Marketing Industry Trends Report,” a research study “by marketers and for marketers” which relied on crowdsourcing to determine survey questions. The strategy was to use the survey methodology itself to engage a community where Equat!on wanted to be better known. These efforts resulted in greater exposure, site traffic, and a five-fold increase in leads generated.

Top Tip: Crowdsourcing is a good way to get in touch with a community and actually become part of it, as long as you have something of value to add to the conversation.

Kirsten Watson, Director of Corporate Marketing at Kinaxis, then spoke about her efforts to create a supply chain expert community. One key element of their strategy was to build a highly engaging, content-rich “home” for supply chain experts to learn, laugh (yes, there is comedy in supply chain management), share, and connect. Another key element was to leverage content to achieve SEO goals and beat out much larger competitors like SAP and Oracle. These SEO efforts pulled people primarily to the community and the Kinaxis blog, and only secondarily to the Kinaxis website. [Quotable quote: “You can always buy traffic.”] Note: 20% of community members are customers and 80% are prospects.

Top Tip: Repurpose and reuse content whenever possible (“Create 10 things out of 1 thing”) while always thinking about SEO.

What followed was a Q&A session. Here are some insights and tactics that came out of that:

• Keep communities open, even to competitors.
• Post content to relevant LinkedIn groups (but don’t play where you’re not welcome).
• Link editorial content to keyword strategy.
• Involvement in social media sometimes means “listen and don’t say anything.”
• Use the many conversations happening around your brand as a driver of internal collaboration. (Deirdre called this part of her “Social Media Pangaea” vision.)
• If you have people in your organization interested in blogging, send them to “Blog College” like the folks at National Instruments do. Give people guidelines and frameworks and let them go.
• “Social media” is not a campaign or a program; it’s a tool.

Christina “CK” Kerley moderated this session extremely well keeping things focused and the whole thing highly information-rich.

Quick Take:

The strongest part of this session was John Mueting’s very detailed and insightful tale of what they did at Allstate to improve marketing effectiveness.

Big Idea: Marketing and sales need to work closely together. Metrics can play an important, even critical role, in cementing that relationship.

Dennis Chapman comes to the field of marketing measurement from sales where he learned how to work according to a very simple dashboard: Revenue. If he brought in enough, he was rewarded; if he didn’t, he lost his job.

“You can measure anything,” Dennis says. The problem is that it can be very difficult to measure some things like marketing, in part due to lack of data. That problem is compounded by the increased pressure on marketers to produce facts to defend their actions and decisions.

The solution, according to Chapman, is predictive analytics. “Analytics that tell us the future,” as he put it.

The big questions being asked of marketers today are:

• How much revenue and profits are coming from our marketing efforts?
• How can we optimize results from our marketing investment?
• How can you prove your positive financial impact to the organization? Read the rest of this entry »

Ann Handley has taken the podium and is right now running down the many sponsors of the event. There are quite a few and the emphasis seems to be on marketing automation and related disciplines. That’s just at first blush.

Ann’s main message to the assembled conventioners (or forumites): Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid of talking to strangers. Don’t be afraid of attending a session where you don’t know the speakers. Don’t be afraid to learn, stretch, and grow.

She has also reminded everyone to “follow the back channel” (Twitter hashtag “#mpb2b”). Always a word to the wise.

More later as I try my best to live blog the heck out of this thing.

The way I see it, there are three paths to social media success.

1. Invent a Popular Social Media Platform

Marshall McLuhan once said something like, “Media owners don’t care what’s on TV, as long as everyone is watching.” To put it another way, the people who own what everyone uses, are the big winners. Unfortunately, becoming an owner is easier said than done and it just gets harder over time.

Facebook, for example, may have displaced MySpace – as MySpace displaced Friendster – as the center of the social media universe, but it’s hard to imagine what will displace Facebook. It’s user base just keeps growing and it really has become part of everyday life for millions. Same goes for Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn,  and YouTube, among others.

One possibility, I guess, is creating a meta-tool that allows people to aggregate their disparate online personalities and communities, but that didn’t exactly work for FriendFeed (and plus Facebook is kind of headed in that direction already) though it is kind of working for Apple (if you know what I mean).

2. Become a Social Media Celebrity

Mass media like television and radio have always been platforms for celebrity and the social media are no different, to a degree. Certainly people you have never heard of, such as Fred, have become “famous” by launching programs on YouTube, but that’s because YouTube is basically an open, explorable space.

You can explore Twitter but, generally speaking you are only paying attention to the folks you’ve chosen to follow and only really get noticed by them what follow you. In any event, it’s a lot easier to be a famous person. such as Oprah, Ashton, or Conan, who chooses to use Twitter than it is to become “famous on Twitter” (not sure who counts in the latter category aside from maybe Brogan and Vaynerchuk).

Finally, the rules of engagement on Facebook make it so utterly closed that, at best, it may allow you to become “better known” to your friends and acquaintances. You will never, however, become “well known” via Facebook.

3. Use Social Media to Do Something

Aside from being the easiest way to achieve “social media success,” this is the only way that the words “success” and “social media” ever make sense together in a sentence, as far as I’m concerned. The social media are tools and tools are only meaningful in their application to this or that situation.

This is one reason that I don’t believe it makes sense to have a “social media plan” for your business or one person there who is “responsible for social media.” Social media will only help you achieve your objectives – that’s what “success” means, right? – if it is integrated into the plans and programs you’ve undertaken to achieve them.

So incorporate social media channels in your PR strategy or figure out how to leverage social media in support of a product launch or make social media an important component of customer service. That way leads to success and, specifically, success via social media.

Everything else is just pipe dreams and pyramid schemes.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/33142058@N06/ / CC BY 2.0